I haven’t been the greatest blogger of late and it is mainly because I’ve developed a new and bizarre (and hopefully temporary) disorder called ocular migraines. If you’ve had these, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, it is like there are little splotches of light in my field of vision. It’s like when you watch fireworks and then look away and you still see little squigglies, except that it’s pretty much all of the time. It’s somewhat entertaining to have little squigglies to look at but also pretty annoying and leads to headaches and less time on my computer. V. sad. I plan on this dissapating any moment now.
In other news, there have been big fireworks here, but I haven’t been properly healthy to fully celebrate and share them — I signed with a super awesome literary agent. Woo hoo! I am excited and thrilled and think that this agent is the most perfect and wonderful agent quite possibly in the universe. As soon as I am ship-shape there will be cake and streamers etc. In the meantime, going to go try some herbal tea to cook out the squigglies.
I hope I am not having a Woody Allen incident and going blind from stress.
So last week, after celebrating St. Bridget’s day with some lovely mashed potatoes and a hot bath, I went to bed feeling better than fine. Then I had this total action dream which was going along pretty good — I like some drama in my dreams and I always appreciate a nice plot twist or two.
BUT THEN I got stabbed in the head with a sword and woke up with the worst headache of my life. A horrible pulsating migraine that no painkiller could touch causing extreme nausea and vomiting and making my very-happy-outlook-on-life turn to please-put-me-in-front-of-a-moving-bus. Anything to make it stop.
Went to sleep that night STILL with the headache. Had more of a situation comedy type dream with people sitting around chatting.
In walks Neil Gaiman and he calmly goes about curing my headache. I woke up and Voila! the headache was gone. I know this sounds crazy, but I can’t argue with the power the Newbery bestows on authors. THEY CAN CURE HEADACHES IN YOUR DREAMS!
Unfortunately, it turns out that the headache was just a side effect of the stomach flu and not vice versa so the rest of the week was not fun. But the headache never came back.
So that was the most crazy part of last week, but then on Sunday, the start of this week and me starting to feel 100% healthy, crazy went to a whole new level.
It was laundry day (see previous post to find out all about my new relationship with laundromats). We loaded up the car, headed over to the laundromat, and got going. We are now old pros at this and have a system down. We got everything going, waited for it to finish washing, popped it in the dryer. Then we had some time on our hands and up comes the dilemma. Do we just leave our stuff and grab the two essential elements at the grocery store down the street so that we can make mock lamb curry when we get home or do we watch over the laundry JUST IN CASE? The level of crazy to normal people in the place was pretty decent. There was only one obviously crazy laundry guy and he appeared to just enjoy shouting and growling loudly. Who can blame him? And really, who would want to steal our laundry? We aren’t washing anything all that spectacular at the laundromat.
So we left. It took us a good ten minutes to pick up the seitan and fresh ginger root at Food Front.
Then we headed back to the laundromat. As we got closer, we noticed something odd. Fire trucks were wizzzing by, but they didn’t keep going. They stopped RIGHT ABOUT WHERE THE LAUNDROMAT WAS. Where there were already several fire engines.
I thought, well, maybe it’s the church next door. Someone probably snuck in and started smoking and “foom!” the bibles started on fire.
We got closer. It wasn’t the church.
It was our laundromat. Everyone who had previously been in the laundromat with us was now out on the street. We went up to someone to find out what was going on. It turned out that one of the girls had reached into the dryer to get her clothes and they had started on fire. With billowing flames etc.
Ergo the fire trucks. Meanwhile our laundry is still in there tumbling around in a different dryer and absorbing a bit of a smoky flavor.
I hope no one notices.
Need to get back to making soup and reading Graceling. I’m so happy to be eating again! I’d forgotten how fun it was.
