a few crapE days

Thursday when I locked up and trudged out to the car to head for work, I had a flat tire. It had just enough air for me to drive 4 miles at 30 mph with my hazards on to air it up at the gas station, then I immediately visited the place where I've been buying tires/getting repairs for the past 12 years. I had a giant nail in my tire, had to buy a new one (finally maxing out my credit card in the process), then high-tailed it in to work only 30 minutes late.

My weekend was very Peter Gibbons-ish, in that I did absolutely nothing and it was everything I knew it could be :) Sunday night I did have dinner with my friend Elizabeth then we went to see Cloverfield; a third viewing for me, the first for her. She, sadly, is not a Cloverhead so I just have the one convert on my record...thanks KT!

Yesterday on the way in, while on the last CD of Scott Smith's The Ruins, the CD skips a time or two then the whole damn player died. It won't eject the CD, won't play the CD and when I press the button to play it, it displays "No CD" right next to the words "CD in". The same thing happened about a year and a half (and the end of the audio warranty) ago so I'll have to shell out to have it replaced. Meanwhile, the gd CD is stuck in the player and I had to pray all the way to work that the book wouldn't be checked out so I could find out in what horrible ways the rest of the tortured would die. It was there and I shirked my duties and snuck off in the corner for about 20 minutes to finish the book. I won't be seeing that movie on the big screen, I assure you, but I might watch it when it comes out on DVD. I just don't enjoy torture porn. I've never watched Saw, Captivity, or Hostel (or any of the sequels) and don't plan to. I don't even have that much curiosity to see what they change from the book...I just can deal with the cutting, ya know? Ick.

Here's what Stephen King (via Amazon) had to say about it:
"...what's waiting in the jungle isn't just bad, it's horrible. Most of The Ruins's 300-plus pages is one long, screaming close-up of that horror. There's no let-up, not so much as a chapter-break where you can catch your breath. I felt that The Ruins did draw on a trifle, but I found Scott Smith's refusal to look away heroic, just as I did in A Simple Plan. It's the trappings of horror and suspense that will make the book a best seller, but its claim to literature lies in its unflinching naturalism. It's no Heart of Darkness, but at its suffocating, terrifying, claustrophobic best, it made me think of Frank Norris. Not a bad comparison, at that."

What a red letter day yesterday was! The GrOsSeSt thing happened to me, the grossest thing since the incidences when I worked at a vet clinic for 8 months.

We are in the middle of a big weeding push at the library, getting rid of some moldy old tomes, and I had a stack of pockets deleting barcodes (we just cut the back page with the pocket and barcode out so the books can be put in the Friend's of the Library booksale, SOP for most public libraries I think) when I felt dampness on my palm. I said under my breath, "why are these wet?" and looked down. To my absolute HORROR, there was something there that could be identified as one of only 2 things, a)a wad of phlem or b)the world's biggest, hugest, most ginormous bugger!

Our volunteer is an elderly gentleman with a chronic cough and I WAS THE UNLUCKLY RECIPIENT OF HIS SPUTUM OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD!

Well, I began to sob teared up and began to whimper as I ran for the industrial sized container of hand sanitizer present at all times at the reference desk. I was scrubbing with Lady Macbeth-like fervor at the invisible bugger cooties on my hand when co-worker Daxx the Magnificent naturally wanted to know what was wrong. I managed to tell him in a muffled scream, "Look at the top pocket, bottom left hand corner." Daxx strolled over, took a peek, and said, "Yep, that's what that is...." He's so droll sometimes I swear.

I wrapped a tissue all over the scene of the crime and just about that time, Mrs. D came out for her shift on the desk and asked if I'd like her to finish the deletes. I said yes but further warned her that there was a pocket in the stack with a tissue on the bottom and that for her own good she should not remove OR move the tissue in any way. I fled for my office and a thorough hand washing followed by more hand sanitizer.

It was COLD when it touched my hand people! EWWWWW!

Reader's Advisory Roundtable went pretty well this morning but most of the other books presented didn't capture my imagination like the two that I picked for myself. One lady did read one that sounded awesome, Terri Blackstock's Last Light, so I may add that to my gargantuan, never-to-be-caught-up-on-much-less-finished reading list.

All right, I'm headed off to sleep right after I finish off this giant butterschnapps hot chocolate. It's 20 something freakin' degrees outside right now so I had to have a hot cocoa while the electric blanket gets toasty :)

night ya'll!
htw