The Seversons

Two years ago, I went to Miami to teach for a weekend.  At the time I was still working as a PD and needed to be back Monday morning for court.  So I was up around 3 a.m., went to the airport, got ready to hop on a plane and head straight to work.  But then I got bumped.  I was at the airport until noon, when they finally told the little band of us who’d been wandering from gate to gate that we wouldn’t make it on any flights that day.  So instead, I got sent over to a hotel in the middle of nowhere, without a car, and without my cell phone charger.  (I hadn’t thought to bring it for such a short trip.)  Frantic calls from my coworkers went all day, while I laid sullenly in my hotel room with nothing to do.  And then it was up the next morning pre-dawn again, to try and get another flight.

This week I made my second trip to Miami.  It was great for a while, but it seems Miami has something against me.  To pass the time on Thursday, I decided to go to a movie.  I hopped in my rental car, got about 100 feet from my hotel, and then got rear-ended.

I’ve been in rental car car accidents before.  And this time it was my company who got the rental car, and they don’t take the full insurance out.  So that meant it was all on me if they found damage.  I decided not to take a chance and go ahead and report it.  The girl who hit me freaked, she doesn’t have a license, and so I had to sit there and feel guilty about ratting her out.  Had it been my car, I wouldn’t have cared, we would have traded information and been done with it.  But my dealings with car rental agencies have convinced me that they are actually secretly out to destroy the world and I put nothing past them.

It could have been a relatively painless affair.  Instead, the cop who showed up decided to lecture me.  There are times when being able to pass for 18 even though I’m nearly 30 is a blessing and times when it’s a curse.  This was the curse.  The cop tried to tell me that in Miami it doesn’t work this way.  That I shouldn’t have called the cops.  That I shouldn’t have moved the cars out of the intersection.  That I didn’t have to call the rental company.  He even started to lecture me on rental car contracts.  I had to pull out the, “It’s okay, I’m an attorney, I understand how this works” line, which I only use when absolutely necessary.  His response?  “Oh, really?  You know?  Tell me what you know.”  All with a big fat smile on his face like he thought I was an idiot.  Had it not been for my previous work with cops as a public defender I would have told him that I’ve rented cars several hundred times in the last few years for work, that I probably know significantly more about it than he does, and that my knowledge of the law tells me that when I’m in an unfamiliar jurisdiction the best thing to do is play it safe.

He kept it up for the whole encounter as we filled out paperwork.  He said not more than two words to the girl who was freaking out about her license.  I was glad she wouldn’t get in trouble.  But I still didn’t understand why the guy was going after me so hard when I didn’t do anything.  Mostly, I hate people who say things like “I’m not lecturing you” when they are in fact lecturing you.  And men who think that they should talk to me like I’m a poor lost little girl.  Fortunately I knew better than to get into it with him so I just sat there and stewed and was angry for the rest of the day. I really hope he has no teenage daughters… though I suspect he does.

Plus I missed my movie.  So it was back to my hotel (which I could see from the spot where I waited for an hour for the cop to show) and more hours of sitting there waiting with nothing to do.  Stupid cop.

Happily, I’m back today just in time for a long weekend.  Now I can sit around and do nothing with my movies and my couch and my oh-so-wonderful bed which I missed terribly.  Plus, you know, there’s a nice boy for me to talk to and cuddle with instead of sitting in that sterile room by myself.  We’ve had a lovely reunion, complete with all our constant political analysis.  Ah, happiness and home.

I am sick.  So basically the world has come to a screeching halt.  I even called in to work on Tuesday, something I haven’t done in…  um, ever?  I remember teaching during my 3L year when I was so sick I could barely get out of bed.  I still blame that illness for losing two prime weeks of pre-final studying and the resulting grade in my Fed Courts class, which I should have aced.  (Speaking of Fed Courts, my strongest memory of that class is being asked by Carolina if the hornbook, which I’d purchased, was any good.  It was, it was awesome, and I considered for a moment telling her it wasn’t, because I knew she’d probably do better in the class than me and giving her the info on the hornbook would seal my fate.  But if you ever doubted my sense of ethics, I did tell her that it was indeed awesome.  Also, just for the record, I did not in any respect bomb Fed Courts.  I just did not achieve the lofty heights I would have had I been able to study for two weeks instead of staring blankly at the wall from my bed.)

Unfortunately, I cannot call in this weekend.  I already have my sub subbing for me in my normal Saturday morning class.  I will be doing the hardcore 2-day crash course this weekend.  Hopefully I will be alive come Monday.

The kind of sick I am is potentially the most annoying kind of sick.  I would actually prefer strep.  Because with strep you feel so terrible that you go to the doctor, he gives you a shot of penicillin, and magically you are better the next day.  Or at least that’s what happened to me when I had strep a couple years ago.  Now I am the kind of sick that isn’t bad enough to go to the doctor.  The kind of sick where you say every day, if I’m worse tomorrow, I’ll go to the doctor.  But you’re never exactly worse the next day.

Tuesday was definitely the worst day.  I had a fever around 102, I felt all achy, sore throat, and what Eric says is “lethargy.”  This means that not only did I lay in bed and not actually sleep, but I didn’t really have any desire to get out of my bed.  This is not my norm.  My sick norm is to camp out on the couch and amuse myself with a book or television.  Laying there thinking the kind of thoughts that I’d imagine accompany some kind of hallucinogen is not my norm.  Wednesday was better.  My throat was fine, my fever was down, I even went to work.  But that night I started a little cough and runny nose.  So I went to the grocery store at 2 a.m. to get something to take.  The weirdest thing about my illness is that I haven’t been tired.  I like to sleep it off whenever possible.  But Wednesday night I didn’t even get tired enough to sleep until after 3, and that was with the assistance of my drowsiness-inducing meds.

Thursday I assumed I’d be better.  I wasn’t.  And now today I’m still no good.  Although today my stomach has jumped back in after only a little bit of nausea on Tuesday.  I am eating low-sodium crackers and drinking mint tea.  And that sounds perfect.  (Speaking of mint tea, it always makes me think of your mom, Erika.  I remember her trying to get me to drink peppermint tea on more than one occasion and I always insisted it was disgusting.  I have learned the error of my ways.)  Eating anything else sounds gross.  Obviously something is wrong, right?  Except, again, it’s not quite wrong enough.  No fever.  Kind of headache.  Overall weirdness.  And a lack of appetite.  I just went to the grocery store to pick up the aforementioned crackers and tea, and I felt like I was in one of those scenes in a movie where the character’s taken LSD and things move all weird.  My reactions are off.  My class tomorrow could be really interesting.

Eric has done pretty well.  Although I am already anticipating some day many years in the future when I leave our house and children in his care and come back to find that chaos has taken hold.  When you’re the one who does things around the house, it’s weird when someone else doesn’t do them just so.  We will not die because the dishwasher was run on the heat dry cycle, which causes the hard water spots which I spent all of the last entry getting off.  I just need to remember that.  And there’s no way I’m doing dishes right now.

The worst thing of all, though, is that this week of all weeks, Netflix has decided to go down.  There is no time when I am more in need of stuff to watch than a week of being sick.  They say they will give us a credit, but by then I will be better and won’t have time to watch stuff again.  I think they are doing it just to spite me.

As you would probably expect, the Wii was not pleased when we returned from vacation a couple pounds heavier.  WiiFit asks you questions but doesn’t really give you an opportunity to explain.  We couldn’t tell it we were on vacation and that it should be happy there was only a very slight weight gain.  Since then I haven’t been quite as diligent in using it in the morning.  I don’t want to deal with its wrath.

My uneven sunburn has turned into an uneven tan, which I’m hoping will fade.  My scoop-neck shirts will be staying in the drawer.

As for things on the homefront since our return, I have taken a seriously domestic turn.  It all started when our dishwasher started acting weird a month or so ago.  My glasses in particular would come out covered in crud, much of it tiny little particles that I could see but that didn’t come out during a rinse.  We live in an apartment and our dishwasher is kind of old, so we don’t have a manual.  But, handy tip, I found it at this awesome website where they have pretty much every manual scanned in.  Following its request, I changed our detergent.  That helped a little.  I called in the maintenance guy.  He replaced one of the spinny arms.  I tried using the heat dry instead of air dry, but this only added to my problems.  My clear glasses turned cloudy.

I decided to see what I could do by pulling out a book Mom sent me.  She’s kept a stack of them in closets and given as gifts whenever she’s invited to a wedding.  So I sat down with a book about cleaning, which has chapter titles such as “Neatening” and “Common Laundry Mishaps and Problems.”  But I really can’t knock it because I sat there for a good hour taking notes, and not just on fixing my problem.  I went through the entire section on shopping and food.  I skipped to the section on doing dishes and got to work.

The glasses were dealt with after I let the glasses sit overnight, filled with a mix of white vinegar and water.  (One is still cloudy, but I have decided it’s a lost cause.)  I have learned that I should not use the heat dry setting since it makes the water stains set.  Good to know.

I bought a number of cleaning supplies I realized I lacked, and was way too excited when I found kitchen cleaning cloths that did not look brand spanking new.  (If I lived in the kind of household where we had a bunch of rags, I would use them.  But we don’t.  There wasn’t even a single old towel I could cut up, which was her recommended approach.)  Over the course of two days, I went to town on the kitchen.  I even cleaned the floor on my hands and knees.  I still have to find the time for a thorough refrigerator scrub down, but I’ll save that for a day when I have assistance.

And the weird thing is how much enjoyment I got out of the whole thing.  I have started reading Hints from Heloise.  If you have not ever seen this column before, it is full of household tips.  A recent column suggested you put an address label on your cane in case you misplace it, another reminded you to make the address very big on your garage sale signs.

I delighted just moments ago when I was able to use a toothbrush to clean crystal flutes.  And it was my own brilliant idea!  (And not even in the way you would guess.  They’d been rinsed and I was drying them but couldn’t get the cloth all the way down into the bottom.  I used the bottom end of a toothbrush with the cloth wrapped around it to get down there and scrub it dry.)  Something strange must be going on when I’m finding new and exciting uses for toothbrushes.

This week I am planning to delve back into my book and learn more than I ever could have imagined about laundry.  It seems like a good idea.  My idea of laundry is to put the clothes in the washer with what I judge is the proper amount of detergent.  I don’t even sort.  I just run it all on cold.  I haven’t actually ever tried to get a stain out or anything.  I don’t even have a Tide Stick.  Even Nancy Botwin has a Tide Stick!  (Funny tangent story.  I went to the Weeds website to see if they had video of the Tide Stick line.  Sadly, the scene cuts off about 10 seconds too early.  But I did notice that the machine gun fire sounded more like someone clapping their hands.  Guess they don’t put the sound effects in the online videos.  Comes about 1:06…  There is mumbled cursing, for the faint of heart.)  The most complicated I’ve ever been is washing my delicates with Woolite by hand.  And I’ve done that maybe twice.

As far as consistency goes, I can’t promise the kind of weekly cleaning I have been admonished to do.  But I have felt very guilty about not vacuuming the past couple days.  That’s something, right?