this is not a story, ok?

I should have known better than to set my alarm for 6:30 because the next morning, when it sounded, I was rather put out and promptly slithered out of my tall, tall bed, down the ladder and fumbled to reset it for 8:00 before reverse slithering back up into bed. In case you were wondering, slithering is actually a fairly accurate description of what I must do to get in and out of what I like to think of as my tiny indoor tree house. It is the loftiest of beds and only ever so slightly inconvenient when it comes to getting in, getting out, putting sheets on, and taking them off. In all other respects it is a remarkably wonderful bed. It is missing an important support bar, but nothing that cannot be overcome with a some rope and a little ingenuity (sometimes referred to as Matt MacAdam).
Anyway, enough about the bed… eventually I got out of bed.

Not quite by eight since my alarm-setting skills seem to have been impaired by early morning grog. Besides, I was having some interesting dreams, apparently too good to interrupt… dreams about giant trucks with strobe lights and sirens screaming through a medieval-looking city in a mountainous canyon landscape. Please, don’t ask any of this to make sense. I was on a journey, an epic journey… except I had no idea what. The trucks were carrying massive quantities of , basically, otter pops. Even in my dream, this seemed strange to me… why otter pops? I wanted to know, and I made it my mission. Eventually I discovered that these were no ordinary otter pops. They were medicinal, and they were on their way to stop an epidemic. I don’t know who was sick, but the otter pops were going to save the day. So mundane, but so tasty. I tried one and wondered if it was bad to eat them if you didn’t really need their special medicinal qualities. It seemed magical, like I should be a hobbit (no, I’m too tall… Gandalf, or an elf maybe…). You get my gist. It was LOTResque (ahem…that’s Lord of the Rings, in case you don’t care to admit that you are nerdy enough to know that). The clarity of the rest of the dream drops off significantly after this, but I do remember hiking up into the hills and finding some castle ruins and a little white goat that was not so very goat-like, but more like a puppy. I don’t know what the goat was doing there but it was one of the most vivid parts of the dream (and seemingly least relevant). It was so very the-dentist-bleached-my-teeth white, unnaturally white. And very cute.

I was still puzzling over my slumberous adventures when I slid down from my loft again. If only my last name were Robinson… I made some toast and was staring out of the kitchen window eating it, thinking that if I hurried I could still get my homework done before class, when I heard an enormous crash and saw some chunks of tree fly by. They landed on the neighbor’s porch directly across the way. Interesting. Seems odd. Maybe a tree fell. Hopefully not an ent… Ashley appeared from her lair. If my room is a forest, hers is definitely a lair. Big, open, and home to a creature of hibernation. Yes, well, we decided to investigate. We ventured outside and climbed up the hill and sure enough, there was a tree, and the tree was on the roof. Yup, we solved it. On second thought, maybe my last name should be Holmes… So fun, so satisfying, but not so good for getting my Spanish done. But then again, when your assignment is to watch a soap opera and then speculate about the characters’ lives, you don’t feel too guilty about letting it slide for the sake of the clearly more important study of, um trees. Or physics, yes, and earth science. Environmental studies perhaps.

Not to worry now. My case for forsaking español to observe the effects of gravity on a poor old tree may not be much sounder than the soggy soil that swept it away in the first place, but hear me out. The day’s academic pursuits were not all lost. Spanish may have suffered slightly, but not all academia was abandoned. I attended a modern Europe lecture by Denis, who is most likely the most overqualified TA known to man. I do not exaggerate. It’s even more ridiculous than my bed, but also just as good. He’s practically a PHD, knows seven or eight languages (that I know of), has numerous personal connections with significant historical figures or their families, and flat out knows nearly everything about nearly everything. And yet somehow he manages all of this without being pretentious. It’s very curious, a scholar who is still in touch with the non-academic world and willing to stoop to TAhood. So he, being from former Yugoslavia, gave the lecture about Yugoslavia. In a mere fifty minutes we covered the Balkans from medieval times to the present. That’s a lot of wars and peacetime to cover, and a lot of intricacies to overlook, but I managed to glean at least a general understanding of the rise and fall of Yugoslavia and its relationship to everywhere else in under an hour. Tall order for one lecture, but one well done. And certainly most interesting.

Work, unfortunately, was not as stimulating as Denis’ lecture. There are slow days when the customers just don’t come into the store, and there are really slow days when business is not good and there’s not a lot to do. And then there are dead days like this particular Monday, when its pouring out, and no one comes in and there is absolutely nothing to work on. You can generally at least look busy, if necessary, by walking around and straightening anything that has been touched or looked at. But that was the problem. Nothing was getting touched or looked at and, short of intentionally dismantling the displays and putting them back together, there was no faking productivity. So I got bold. I dared to ask to build a bike. I’d been promised to be able to go back “there”, the shop, the mechanics’ haven. We sales folk are discouraged from mixing with that crowd, lest we deviate from the straight and narrow path of customer servitude, er service. But here was my chance, there were no customers to satisfy. A glimmer of freedom, followed by a reluctant yes from the general manager himself. Glory be.

So I went and asked bike-builder Derek if we could build some bikes together. There was a cruiser with a build order… Um, not my first choice, but whatever. Fortunately Derek, also less than thrilled with the idea of building up “that creature”, steered clear and grabbed some real bikes to get us started on. Long story short, we built a couple of bikes. And I will retain, hopefully, maybe, a third of what I learned during my crash course on the assemblage of bikes. It was my second whirl wind learning experience of the day. So I’m neither an expert on Yugoslav history nor on building bikes, but at least a little bit of all that knowledge rubbed off on me and some of it is bound to stick.

So yup, all in all, it was a fairly uneventful day. My life is not dramatically altered. But a good day it definitely was, spiced with some things new and unexpected. I even finished it off in like manner by taking Sayers for a jog. It doesn’t sound too noteworthy, but, well, with this dog it definitely is. There is nothing worth writing home about, but I got sort of antsy and decided to write about all of it anyway. So there you go. Consider it cheap entertainment (for me).