Day in the Life of an Idiot

Image: A to-go coffee cup with a sticker of a dog and the handwritten words, "to ward off cats."

I'm not sure if it's the saint himself that dislikes me or if I'm just on some Irish fey sh*t list, but I have had an interesting run of Saint Patrick's Days over the past couple of years. I was hoping that I'd written about and tagged these events in my DW, but I can't easily find a reference to them. One year, Mason walked into school, tripped on his own feet, and face planted so hard he broke his glasses and gave himself a roughed up face. I turned around (I'd been starting to pull out of the school lot,) and took him home. Another year, our breaks failed in the car just as we were dropping Shawn off at her work. I tried to get my mechanics to take my car, but they refused saying that there was so much rust in the undercarriage that they were afraid the car would drop out of its frame if they put it up on their lift, so Mason (who had not yet made it to school) and I left the car where it lay (to collect later) and walked to get some breakfast and then take the light rail home.

Both times we attributed our troubles to a lack of wearing green.

I warned my family this morning that they must wear green on pain of death today! 

YET, things still went... awry. 

I will say, on the scale of face plant to break failure, what happened today wasn't actually all that bad... it was just, as the kids say, a LOT.

First, I came home from the coffee shop with my coffees. I buy myself and Mason a latte and Shawn gets an iced chai.  I take mine out of the container, Shawn takes hers, and I usually leave Mason's on the dresser for himself to pick up when he's up and ready to start classes for the day. Well, for SOME REASON, our cat Willow decided that she wasn't able to reach the treats in the drawer of the dresser, so she would take it upon herself to knock things off until someone got them for her. 

Yep. Down went Mason's coffee.  ALL OVER THE FLOOR.

So, I cleaned that up. There may have been some gross sobbing because I was just frustrated because last night my usual computer decided to go belly up and I was just kind of generally mad at the universe. But, I didn't want Mason to be without coffee, so I went back. Hence the cup with the dog sticker and the magic words, "To ward off cats." My coffee shop has an online form where you can leave notes--presumably this is mostly used by people who want to dictate the temperature of their lattes or how soy their soy milk needs to be. I have always, instead, used it to pre-chat with my barista--from wishing them a happy day to "OMG, AM COMING BACK BECAUSE MY STUPID CAT JUST KILLED MY COFFEE."  So they had time to prep the cup before I came. Why they had doggo stickers at the ready, I am uncertain, but it was Very Nice of them.

Later this afternoon, Shawn and I decided to go for a drive to get out of the house. We have four bullets in our possession, which had been living in our safe deposit box. Why did we have bullets in our safe deposit box? Neither of us could remember. We know they came from a collection of Shawn's dad's things and we never entirely realized we had them because the were in a plastic box with some of Shawn's mom's jewelry.  Now, why Shawn's dad decided these four bullets were precious enough to hide among the family jewels, I have NO IDEA. The point is, we want to get rid of them, finally. We recently had to clean out our safe deposit box because the bank we used to have a box in is scheduled for demolition. I called the Ramsey County sheriff's office and was told I could bring them there to be safely disposed of... only when we took off today, I forgot the exact address. No problem, we thought, and plugged in Ramsey County Sheriffs office into GPS.

First off, I have to tell you that our GPS took us around downtown St. Paul, got us off on Mounds Boulevard and said, "Your destination is on the left" and turned itself off. To the left of us at that moment? A homeless camp. Since this wasn't even the right street name for the sheriff's office, we turned the GPS on again and she eventually led us to the one in downtown St. Paul.

When I went in there, however, they told me, no, only police stations take bullets.

Okay, so where is one?

Just down at the end of this collection of buildings, I was told. Great, so I walked over to the police station at the end of all the correctional facilities (surrounded by razor wire, by the way, presumably to ward off protesters as the murderer of George Floyd will be on trail soon,) and I get to the police station. They are not letting people in so there were two buttons, one to call the front desk marked with a bell and the other marked with a speaker. There were signs explaining that to get someone's attention you must first ring the bell and then use the speaker button while talking. I rang the bell. An officer then told me what I'd just read about having to press the button to speak.

Our conversation goes like this, and I could not make this up if I tried.

Me: "Hello! I was told I could dispose of some bullets here, is that true?"
Him: "Sorry, you want to do what?"
Me: "Dispose of some bullets."
Him: (long pause) "Food?"
Me: ????
Me: "No.... bullets. I want to dispose of bullets. Can I do that here?"
Him: "You want to bring in food?"
Me: ????? (thinking: how is this word even like the other???)

We do this one more time and he finally asks me to take my mask off, and I am shouting into the speaker that I have BULL-ETS and I want to GET RID of them. He finally tells me that I can't do that here and I have to have a cop come to my house if I want to hand over bullets. WHICH IS NOT WHAT I WAS EVER TOLD, BUT FINE. I left with the four stupid bullets still in my pocket.

Shawn and I laughed about this for the longest time after I recounted it to her and the ONLY THING I can imagine that the cop thought I said instead of bullets was possibly "donuts." And that... could not be more of a stereotype.

Especially on St. Patrick's Day.

Saturday was a busy day and not just because it was Saint Patrick's Day in Saint Paul, MN. Mason, as I have been reporting, had his History Day project due on Saturday, as he had a 10 am showing as part of the documentary exhibit/competition. He worked on that until 2 am on Friday night. It's kind of a learning curve in terms of technology, for one, though I think the thing he ended up fussing with a lot was syncing the photographs/movies with his voice over. I got to see it when it was completed at 2am because I'm easy to wake up and Mason needed a little help figuring out how to get our printer to do the things he needed. He was pretty wired and punchy when I dropped him off at Johnson High School at 8 am on Saturday.

Despite being super-tired, things went well. In fact....



Mason's project is advancing to State! Woohooo! Go, Mason. Sorry about the quality of this image. I had to take a screen shot from Washington Technical's FB page. The next step is going to be registering for State, which is going to be held at the University of Minnesota, April 28th. Mason will probably tweak his project a little, but the judges did not have significant critique, which is wonderful. Mason, I think, is ready NOT to look at this for a while, and go back to his robotics team, which he's had to miss while focusing on this.

For myself, I had a Saint Patrick's Day house party at naomikritzer's place. Since I had interrupted sleep, I was fairly tired and therefor, not entirely, energized enough to go into full-on party persona. I had a lovely time, however, getting to hang out with Peg Kerr, Haddayr, Dave Schwartz, and L. M. Kate Johnston. The food, as always, was amazing. I could have eaten the Burke-Kritzers out of house and home.

 Sunday, was pretty low-key. Shawn and I had planned to stay in our pajamas all day until Shawn suddenly remembered that we'd agreed to meet an out-of-town work colleague of hers that night at 5:00 for dinner. It was definitely one of those "OMG, I don't wanna!" that turned into a great time once we actually dragged our butts out there. Shawn's colleague is from Washington, DC, and is the event coordinator for NAGARA (The National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators).  NAGARA is having their conference in Minneapolis/St. Paul in 2019, so he was scouting locations, venues, etc.  He was an interesting guy--has travelled all over the world, grew up as a conservative Mormon until he came out (even worked for Mitt Romney for a while!), and so he had some amazing stories to share.  We had a good time hanging out with him.

Probably some other things of note happened, but I've completely forgotten them.  How was your weekend?



 

St. Patrick's Day Observed was for us, as it was for a lot of people I suspect, Saturday.

We took Mason to his usual swimming lessons in the morning -- alas he didn't pass to level 5, but, tbf, "stroke improvement," which is where he's at is very hard. This is also a Red Cross program so they don't just automatically pass anyone who shows up enough. There are serious standards.

Our big social event was the party at naomikritzer's house, where we were looking forward to ingesting the traditional corned beef and cabbage. We were not disappointed. I had a great time talking to pegkerr and her daughter and seeing haddayr and family again. The only lampshade/dim shablows moment was that I think I may have actually gotten a bit buzzed on the trifle (which is pretty sad. But, yes, I'm that much of a light weight.)

Mason kept us there quite late because he joined a game of "Clue." But I think good times were had by all.

Sunday was a complete pajama day, so I was an utter slug and did nothing useful. We tried to watch "Branded" last night--a science fiction film about advertising (in Russia.) It was... surreal. There was a burning of a red heifer and attack logo muppets. And those are the easily accessable parts. YEAH. If I were feeling more coherent I'd summarize the movie better and maybe even offer a review, but I'm not sure my brain is up to trying to explain the "space cow"/voiceover.

Unlike Shawn, I watched it through to the bitter end. I should have recorded the recap I gave her in the bathroom while she was brushing her teeth, but all you would have heard was a lot of 'what?' and 'are you serious?' and laughter.

Yeah, so it was called "Branded," and you could give it a miss, I think.

Today, I'm trying to work on Elite Forces, but I keep getting distracted by research into the Red Planet. Shawn found me a copy of THE CASE FOR MARS: THE PLAN TO SETTLE THE RED PLANET AND WHY WE MUST by Robert Zubrin, which I've started to read. I also listened to a couple of podcasts on Mars, and discovered a lovely site called "Universe Today", and their Guide to Space (not, alas, the Hitchhiker's Guide, but close enough.)

So total word count ON PAGE was pretty sad. I did a good amount of research, though.