I have nothing resembling a coherent story for you today. Obviously I’ve had very little in the last few days as well. Various things are going on and I’m thinking about stuff but none of it is story-worthy on its own.

I almost got t-boned turning into my parking lot when I went home for lunch today. It was weird, because I was waiting to turn left off the main road and a woman was waiting to turn left out of the lot, and when the road cleared I started to go and so did she. I was right in front of her, and I have no idea how she didn’t see me unless she was just completely not paying attention, which I guess is possible. I stomped the brake to the floor and hit the horn and kind of maybe screamed at her, and she just sat there in the middle of the road looking at me like WTF is your problem? So that kind of sucked. Especially since someone I was acquainted with through my job was killed in a car accident last week. She was making a left turn across a highway and got broadsided. Even though my near-miss wouldn’t have been nearly so severe, I couldn’t help but think about it as I tried to calm my shaking.

In other news, Marco has evidently voted “no” on Proposition Please Wear Your Collar. I put it back on him once every few days or so, and about an hour later I find it on the floor somewhere. He doesn’t throw a fit when I put it on, but he pretty much immediately makes plans to get out of it. That’s the problem with the safety-release collars for cats – they work exactly as they’re supposed to, which means that under enough pressure, they’ll release. Abby, on the other hand, freaks out when I take her collar off for five minutes to brush her neck. She actually seems to like wearing it.

A few weeks ago, I found myself in a very serious funk and decided to make some plans and do something about it. One of the programs in Operation Get My Shit Together was to start working out regularly again. I made a schedule and planned out the workouts and I have stuck to it religiously for three weeks now, with the help of my iTunes Incentive Plan where I get to download a song every time I do a workout as scheduled. Today’s going to be a real test, though, because I’m in Menstrual Hell and I feel absolutely awful and I’m supposed to do kickboxing for 30-45 minutes tonight. This is not an attractive prospect. But if I do it, I’ll get to download “Cachete a Cachete” by Los Amigos Invisibles, which is the next song on my list and a great song with a really kickass beat.

Another program in Operation Get My Shit Together involves normalizing my sleep schedule, which is something I’ve struggled with for pretty much my whole life. I am naturally nocturnal and without a tight rein on my sleep schedule, I drift until I am staying up way too late and having trouble getting up in the morning. I’ve been working pretty hard at this and have determined that I function best on nine hours of sleep, which apparently makes me the equivalent of a newborn baby. But if I get in bed by 10:30 at night, I have no trouble getting up at 7:30 in the morning and staying up. I even did it one day this weekend. Any less than nine hours and I’m groggy.

I am snacking on Harmony Trail Mix as I write this, which always reminds me of NUMB and football games. I’m also digging on Aquafina’s Wild Berry FlavorSplash water. I think I heard about that from someone else’s blog, so if the person who wrote about it is reading now, thanks a ton! I am trying to cut back on the Vitamin Water because it’s more expensive and has more calories.

That’s it. That’s all. I’m pretty busy right now but not in a terribly interesting way.

I’m not entirely positive about this, as the dust is still settling, but I think I’ve been written out of the will.

It all started on Friday when I called Family HQ in a snit about something and my dad told my sister to tell me that I had $42 in library fines outstanding at the Roanoke County Public Library – Vinton Branch. I changed my snit to be about the library fines, as follows:

1. Whatever, man, I’m not paying those.
2. And anyway, I probably didn’t even check out most of the books on that list.
3. And also, I’m going to sue the library for releasing my private personal delinquent library fine information to you without my permission.
4. And you know what else? I don’t even live there anymore. I don’t even know where my library card IS. I have much better things to spend $42 on, and isn’t there a statute of limitations on library fines? Because I’m nearly positive that I haven’t even BEEN to that library since like 2000 or earlier, like that’s a different CENTURY, so whatever, screw that, I’m not paying them.

And so on.

Dad’s all, “If you snap your underwear at me* one more time, I’m writing you out of the will.”

I’m like, “BUMMER. Because you guys are going to leave us SO MUCH MONEY.”

Dad says I’m at the bottom of the list, then amends it to say that I’m second to last, because Sammi’s the black sheep since she went away to college and started hanging out with Bad Influences and so she’s actually last in line. But I’m third.

Ginny wants to know where she stands. Dad says she’s second, because Jamie’s the only one who hasn’t actively annoyed him this week. Jamie’s all, WOO HOOOOOOOOOO, I GET THE ESTATE! and we’re like yeah, that’ll last right up until you mouth off and/or get grounded again. Ginny’s offended because she’s second in line instead of first. I’m making plans to sue the library for $42 for releasing my private personal delinquent library fine information to someone else without my consent, and then using my $42 judgment to pay off my library fines. I consider adding a request for $8 worth of pain and suffering so that it’ll be an even $50, and then I can buy lunch with the $8.

Later on, we meet up with Sammi, and tell her that she’s last in line for the inheritance, and she gets all upset, but then Ginny remembers that my parents last amended their will shortly after I was born, so actually I’m going to get everything no matter what. I’m all, I WIN. YOU SUCK. BOW DOWN TO ME.

*Family in-joke: “Don’t snap your underwear at me” basically means, “quit being pissy.” We say it a lot.

So my mom has her bag back from Delta. I asked her what, if anything, was left in it.

She said she got everything back except for three of her bras.

I’m all, but Mom, your bras aren’t even NICE!

She says they were brand-new, not the “old ratty stabby ones with the wires poking out.”

Still, my mom wears the most basic white cotton Playtex bras in the entire world. They aren’t, like, old-lady bras with the cone boobs or anything, but they’re seriously just absolutely plain unadorned white cotton underwire bras.

And three of them didn’t make it home.

Tangential memory which I might have shared in the past or maybe not: Shortly after Mom had Sammi, Ginny was caught riding up and down the street on her beloved Huffy Thunder Road bike with one of my mom’s ENORMOUS nursing bras attached to the back like a flag.

A couple of weeks ago, my mother traveled to Atlanta for a conference. The first night she was there, she called me all excited and proceeded to tell me about the seventeen metric tons of junk she’d snagged at the vendor fair. I asked her how she was going to get it all home, and suggested she get another bag for it or something.

She ended up moving 95% of her clothes (basically, everything but her shoes) to her hanging garment bag and packed her suitcase with her haul of foam stress relievers shaped like animals and tote bags and pencils and jump drives and whatever other trinkets were handed out.

You know how this ends. Delta lost her hanging garment bag. So my mom arrived in Roanoke with nothing but her shoes and a suitcase full of flea market shit.

She has called the airline like a hundred and seventy-four times over the past couple of weeks, where they helpfully told her that most bags get lost at curbside check-in, which she used, and that they had no idea where her bag could possibly be, even though she’d watched them put a barcode tag on it.

When my luggage was lost on the way to New Hampshire a few years ago, US Airways knew within minutes that our bags were still sitting in Philadelphia, and two phone calls later I’d gotten authorization for reimbursement of $75 per day our luggage was lost so I could go out and replace some of the stuff. Two days later our bags showed up, so I got some free clothes out of the deal.

I don’t know if my mom is just not as crafty as I am, or if Delta just sucks, or if it made a difference that she was stranded without her bags in her home city rather than away, but so far she’s had to file some incredibly complicated six page claim form, and they haven’t offered to reimburse her for a thing.

Meanwhile my mom had packed pretty much every piece of spring work clothing she owned, including bras and underwear, and has had to go around looking like a hobo for the last two weeks. I’m like this too – I don’t have a lot of clothes and I tend to pack all of them when I travel, so if my suitcase were lost I’d be going to work in my Christmas tree flannel pajamas or something.

Last week sometime, Delta told her that they’d found a bag at Hartsfield with a 50% match to something or other, and that they were pretty sure it was her bag and they were going to fly it to Roanoke so she could make sure. I don’t understand the 50% match thing, because how can a barcoded bag have a 50% match? I don’t get that. But in any case, they were going to fly this orphaned bag up to us yesterday, and then Hartsfield basically shut down.

She is convinced that the world is out to get her.

So now, she may or may not get a bag that may or may not be hers this week, and we’re all wondering: where has it been? What has it been up to? What kind of condition will it be in? What will be left inside? My mom has some pretty cute clothes, so someone might have taken them all. And we’ve all heard horror stories about bags going missing for weeks at a time and then showing up all mangled and destroyed.

But at least her shoes and her vendor junk are intact.

Also, if you were interested in seeing the version of my sisters’ Queen performance that included pseudo-costumes, a kitten cameo, chicken-leg dancing, and a groin injury, you can go here to watch that.