One bad week

The seven days spanning from September 29 to Sunday, October 6 were something remarkable: a series of crises and nightmares, one for almost every day. I've blogged most of it (including some of it retroactively, I no longer know exactly what), but I'm going to try putting it into perspective and connecting all the dots to wrap this up and continue writing the things I was intending to.

• Friday, 9/28-Saturday, 9/29: Went out to dinner with A. (which merits a retroactive post tonight, if only for the sake of filling out "one good meal," because it was a good meal.) Played part of a game of LOTR Risk, and watched Looper (which I'm still trying to write a review of.) The first sign of the coming week of fail was after midnight, when I got home and realized that I'd left my umbrella in the car.
• Saturday, 9/29: Alarm clock was set to go off at 8:00, 8:15, and a few other times to wake me up. There was a further alarm set to remind me to get out the door for my car inspection at 10:30. When did I actually wake up? 11:15. Oops.I rushed my ass down to Holyoke to drop the car off, and managed to reschedule for Tuesday - at which point I realized that because of my scheduling I'd be driving two days after my inspection sticker had expired. That meant super-cautious driving, because the cops would be out in force, and if you're pulled over for a bad inspection sticker you're going to be pulled over forever. And so I drove home, super-cautiously, noticing a vibration in the steering column that I hadn't felt before.
  
  On the way back, I stopped and checked at all the places I'd been with A. the night before. None of them had my umbrella. Fuck. 
• Sunday, 9/30: Woke up in time to miss church, and as planned drove up to Sunderland to meet Mom en route from Vermont. Fuck "vibration." By that point, I was driving my own private earthquake. We got out of the car and walked a bit (before it started pissing down rain), and I rumbled my car back to its parking lot to get my first good meal of the day - my first mediocre meal at the little Korean restaurant. (And, after that, some delicious caramel apples.)
• Monday, 10/1: I honestly have no recollection of this day at all.
• Tuesday, 10/2: Accounted for here.
• Wednesday, 10/3: A thankless day, a dreamless night. I ate some breakfast at the Route 9 Diner, which improved things a bit, but then got stuck in front of a computer monitor until dawn, at which point I trekked back to my house, took a Concerta, showered, shaved, lay down, got up, and had...
• Thursday, 10/4: Which was spent walking in the rain, without the umbrella that I'd lost on Saturday. (Isn't it fascinating how these things keep recursively connecting?)
• Friday, 10/5: I drag my ass out of bed and sprint my ass up the street. Late to appointments. Fuck.
• Saturday, 10/6: Accounted for here. Fuck.
• The last Fuck of the week was Sunday, when I slept through church again.

It's not pleasant to write, but it is cathartic at least; now that I've got this off my chest, I can get back to active writing. So yeah.

I had to say no

Saturday came. And with Saturday, the completion of the car work. So the time came to deal with the last logistical headache: "How do I get there from here?"

So I asked H. She was at work, but she'd swing by as soon as she was able. That gave me time to pick up a new umbrella, and wait in the rain for a bit, and such...

"As soon as she was able" turned out to be later than I thought. The bus route wasn't running the right way, and so she had to take a windy one home that ran around the campus once. Okay, no problem. I had time to wait. So I waited, and walked back to the library and such...

...and then got the call that she was in her car and would be on her way, and where did I want to get picked up. "Haigis," I said, and she was okay with that, and F. would be coming with her, and maybe ten minutes later, lo! she was there.

She took the back route to Holyoke. Why I honestly don't remember at this point, although there was a reason for it. F. was gushing about Pokémon number-crunching, and to be honest I wasn't paying anybody any mind. And at 6:00, we made it down there.

And that's when I discovered that the lights were out.

"Maybe they parked it in front?" F. said, and so we carefully backed up and drove over to the cars parked in front of the dealership, gingerly, to see if one of them had the license plate that was mine. Nope. Not a blessed one. My car was parked securely behind the chain-link fence.

At which point, F. asked me directly: "Did you even call to see how late they were open?"

Walking in the rain

I rolled over, on Thursday... oh, who the hell am I kidding. I was on the Internet the entire night, because I got dropped off here, ostensibly to pick up the bus schedules, but really to get away from my life because my sleep had been so unremittingly awful that I didn't want to miss the last appointment of the week that was contingent on waking up early enough to be there.

Namely, the appointment with my therapist.

I got back home at 8:00, as the sun was up, and showered, and shaved, and took another Concerta to keep me moving until I passed out that night. I changed my pants, changed my socks, changed my shirts, and got ready to trek back to the last place I was certain the bus would stop en route to Northampton.

And that's when I discovered that all of my ID was missing.

Car work

On Saturday, I slept through my scheduled mirror repair in Holyoke.

On Tuesday, I drove my car back down there, arriving at the dealership almost exactly 59 seconds late. They didn't care. I handed them the keys and asked them to take care of the side-view mirror (driver's side), and one of the tail lights whose bulb had burned out, and to winterize it a bit. I also asked them to check the engine mounting, because the car was starting to rattle a bit at high speeds, and the steering column would tangibly twitch a bit.

They said it'd be a few hours, and so I sat down, made myself a cup of coffee, and started writing the newest letter to my beloved.

A few hours later, they came back with the bad news.

The reason it was twitching wasn't the engine mounting (as Bennie had suggested.) It was because both struts were worn, much more than they ought to have been, and the rear tire rims had slightly warped (possibly as a result?) This, in turn, had caused uneven wear on the tires, which would've been enough to automatically fail the inspection even if the superficial stuff had been bad.

The total bill comes out to a hair less than $3,000. FML.

This week in Andalusada: 9/29/2012

It's been an incredibly bad day for me in a lot of respects, but at least I can save the work on this a bit: not only have I been awesomely productive with it, but I've also Pretty much immediately after I was done posting the last weekly review on Saturday, I started writing for this week, which is unusual - usually I try to take at least one day off.

• The first post was for Oskar Sansinger. I don't know much about him, but I do know his name; it's enough to start writing with.
• The second, also on Saturday, was the first post on the Scrapbook to have no tags at all: "Best Practices: tagging and titling." It's more of a note to myself (and an introduction to the insane mess of labels over there), setting some guidelines down for better writing in the future.
• Because I'd been furiously editing everything related to the House of Sansinger on Monday, and because the details of the war were scattered throughout several pages, I created a master page for the Axamallan Revolt that evening.
• After a discussion with Rob (in which he mentioned the role of the nebulous "Grand Princess [who?]"), I wrote a biography for her, settling on a name for the lady: Grand Princess Teresa.
• And because it was one of the few names that I'm aware of, and I'd mentioned the Cordoveros before, I wrote up a stubby biography for Don Musa as well, raising the population of named Andalusians to three.
• I skipped out on a social event Wednesday. Instead, I wrote some of the details into Teresa Maria's life, and in particular into one specific part of her life: the Christianization of Mexico.
• The last post this week was on Thursday, when (in keeping with other things) I posted the Greater Japanese Empire, allowing me to hyperlink everything else to it.

That's what I have to show for my week, and if that was all I did it'd be enough. It wasn't.

More below the cut:

Dinner, 9/27/2012

I lied. My hair wasn't remotely cut, the way I said that it was on the phone. And when I went to get it cut, the first thing I did was to drive home to see if I'd just left my debit card there or bothered to lose it properly. (I'd just left it there.)

I pulled $60 out of the bank today. $20 went straight into the gas tank, $16 went into the haircut, and the rest went into a vegetable platter, a large lemon, and $8.99 worth of fiery chrysanthemums. And then it was off to the party.

Orders were very strict: I was to be there no later than 5:15 if I wanted to remain in good standing. I was fifteen minutes late. The traffic across the bridge to Northampton was awful, stop and go every minute of the way.

Dinner was superb. Crudités, a quiche and a half, a bottle of champagne, caviar (which was meh), a random scattering of pastries for dessert... the single richest meal that I've had in months.

And then, driving home, there was "Gangnam Style" on the radio. I nearly drove off the road.

The logic of Andalusada and GURPS

On Monday, I started writing about the reasoning that guides and shapes the formation of the Andalusada universe. Last night, the first identifiable force in Andalusada was sloth. Tonight, it's something that I've touched on before but never seriously discussed: GURPS.