Little Miss Muffet

Little Miss Muffet, sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider, who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.

We have all heard that nursery rhyme before…well that ladies and gentlemen was Happy Dance a few weeks ago. 

I had just left work and was at the first stop light before my turn to get on the interstate to go home.  I was jamming out to one of my favorite songs and then that’s when I saw it! This green little creature was slowly falling down from the roof of my car and then it hovered right next to the steering wheel.  I screamed, I waved my arms, I did what most girls do, I tried to get away.  But the thing is, I was in my car, I was buckled in (PSA announcement from Happy Dance, “Always wear your seatbelts!”), and there was nowhere for me to run. 

I took my lunch pale up and brought it up to try and hit the spider out my window, that I was quickly trying to open.  The little bugger climbed up his stringy backside mess to the roof, and then the light turned green and I had to turn onto the interstate.  The whole time I was thinking, it won’t bother me, it will stay right up there.  That’s when it came down again.  Mind you I’m driving, on the interstate, in crazy traffic.  Also I don’t like to kill anything, not even spiders, I always ask Bebe or someone near by to kill it for me.  I feel bad, it might have a family or something, and my killing it might cause huge issues for them financially (just go with it people!). 

I finally decide to take off my shoe and try and hit it.  I hit it with my shoe, and it falls to the floor.  I put my shoe back on and start stomping at the ground (I have no idea where it hit).  I call Kat up and tell her about it and ask her to keep my mind off of it and to see if she thought the spider forgave me for killing it, because I felt bad.  The whole time I felt like it was on my legs, or biting me out of revenge.  I have no idea if it was killed by my shoe or not.  The next morning on my way to work I remembered the whole incident and kept my eye out for it. 

I haven’t seen it since, I think it is lurking under my driver side seat, growing, and waiting for the right time to come out and try to step on me.  Just wait, you’ll hear about it on the front page of a newspaper or the internet, “Woman on way to work killed in car accident after huge spider tried to squish her to death”

My Not Good, Very Bad Evening

Yesterday I got off of work at 7 and had to be at Bebes and my last marriage preparation session at 7:30.  I got near enough to go and grab a bite to eat at a drive thru.  I hit a place that I could get a hot dog and just go.  I ordered it and said, twice, that I just wanted ketchup on it, nothing else.  I go through the line, pay for it, get my food, and park in a parking spot so I can gobble the food down in about 3 minutes.  This was my plan, and this is where it all goes wrong. 

I open up my food and on the hotdog there is mustard and relish.  WHAT?!?! I go inside the restaurant and tell the manager that this was suppose to be just ketchup.  Now at this point I am a little overwhelmed with my timing and not in the best of moods.  The manager tells me it will take 10 minutes and I told him that I am very busy and am in a hurry so I don’t have that long.  So he told me it would take 5. 

So I sit there and eat my french fries while I watched them cook it.  During all this a cop is watching me, and kind of intently…I think I looked like I was on the edge of breaking, and I sort of was.  I finally get my hot dog, and rush out of the place, back to my car, and hurry to eat my ketchup only hotdog. 

Two bites down I turn to grab my drink and the hot dog slips out of it’s bun and lands on my tan pants and a little on the car seat. SERIOUSLY!?!? At that moment Bebe calls to see where I am, it’s now 7:30, I’m late.  I tell him ketchup got on my pants and I have to rush home to change, tell them I am SO sorry and I will be there as soon as I can.  I then close up my hot dog case throw it in the bag and get out of the parking lot as fast as I can.  I get to the first stop light, and it just turns red. NO!!!! I wait and sit and patiently think it isn’t so bad, I will be like 5 minutes late or so, it’s not that bad, they won’t mind.  I rush through the light, once it turns green, and head towards our subdivision. 

I get through most of the community ok, not speeding and feeling like I am going to be able to do this and not be too late.  Then I get to the stop sign at the turn to our house, I can actually see our house from the stop sign.  In front of me there is a white van.  The guy in the van sticks his head out the door to yell at one of our neighbors and turns his van diagonally at the stop sign.  On one side of the van is vehicles parked on the street, so I can’t get past that way, and on the other side he is to close to the stop sign for me to get through without hitting him or the stop sign.  So I shout, “Excuse me! Hello!”  He doesn’t notice and gets out of his truck and walks up to the sidewalk to talk to this guy.  At this point I am just furious!  REALLY!?!? Today, of all days you do this? WHY!?!?! So I yell “Hey, MAN! I’ve gotta go!” and point to the direction that I would like to go and at his van blocking the whole intersection.  He says sorry and runs to his van and pulls up to the other side of the street. 

I zoom past him, while doing so wave at him in thanks for moving, run into my house quickly change into blue jeans and a different top, leap over Bella because she just wants me to pet her but I don’t have time, out the door, lock it, and then I am back in my car, pulling out of the drive way and zooming past the guy was in my way and waved again.  I get stopped at one more stop light and then I make it to the marriage prep house.  I am only 20 minutes late, but it feels like it took forever to get there.  The couple was fine with me being late and it didn’t seem like it was a big deal, but it took awhile for my nervous and heart to slow down.  I feel bad about being mad about a hot dog, and then mad about the guy in front of me at the stop sign.  But why is it when you are in a rush does something bad happen, and then once one bad thing happens a few more happens right along with it?

Flutterby experience

I have this horrible fear of killing things.  Like if I see a rabbit, I swear my car so I don’t hit it.  I won’t kill a bug because it makes me sad, instead I will call someone else to kill it, all the while yelling at the bug to run, flee, leave, but usually they don’t hear my plea and they get killed by Bebe or my mom or a friend.  So this experience is about me not killing things. 

Kat and I were in high school and I was in my old blue hatchback car that liked to eat people.  We were in the country, cruising around, on a gravel road.  The road was really curvy and, since I was a teenager, I didn’t feel the need to slow down much while on the gravel.  The time of year was after all the rolley polley caterpillars had baked in their cocoons enough to emerge and become beautiful butterflies.  I had just started going around a curve when all of a sudden a butterfly came out of no where and I was on the verge of hitting it with my car, so I swerved to miss it.  Kat starts to scream and I move the car back to going straight and she asks me if I have lost my mind.  So I told her, while making “the sad face” that it I couldn’t kill it, it might have had a family.  She told me it was just a butterfly, but I told her that if I killed it, then it’s babies would be without a father (because you know the butterfly had to have been male right?) and it would be all my fault, and what if he was the breadwinner and if he didn’t come home tonight they would all die! I would be in charge of multiple deaths, not just one.  She looked at me with the face of not believing what she was hearing and laughed.  This image is her rendition of the, what we now call, the flutterby! 

Now whenever I hit things people tell me the animal or bug was suicidal and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it.  That has seemed to stop most of my swerving around the road, but still it makes me very sad…what if they had a family!

It’s as Easy as Riding a Bike

We’ve all heard that saying “It’s as easy as riding a bike,” everyone says it about everything.  Well whoever came up with that saying is WRONG!  If anyone uses that in a sentence, those of us who have relearned how to ride a bike, should go up and yell “WRONG!” in that persons face.  Relearning how to ride a bike is not easy, not simple, and not something that I care to do again.  Now that I know how to ride a bike again, well still getting the hang of it, I plan on keeping at it and really riding it almost everyday.  Learning again would just be a pain. 

I wanted to ride my bike again because I am trying to live a healthier lifestyle.  Riding your bike is great cardio and plus it uses muscles that a lot of exercises don’t, and personally those muscles need a lot of workouts from me. 

I went home to visit my parents and while I was there I asked my dad to go and get my bike out of our shed so I could bring it home with me.  He sat it out on the back patio and told me to try it.  I got on and I was SO wobbly.  I asked him to hold on to the seat while I peddled, like he did when he was teaching me to ride with no training wheels.  My dad didn’t go for that idea and just watched me as I tried to ride it up and down the sidewalk next to our house. 

At first I just kind of scooted up and down the sidewalk with my feet on the ground.

Then I pushed off with one foot and put both feet on the peddles and tried to keep it going without falling over. 

Next I tried to break…which was extremely scary the first time.  My bike didn’t slow down like a car, and I quickly put my feet on the ground to catch myself before I fell over because I didn’t feel like I would stop before reaching the sidewalk in front of the house and I didn’t want people to watch me riding (well trying to ride) my bike. 

After that little experience I was done for the evening and I asked my dad to help put the bike in my car so I could take it home with me.  The bike was a tight squeeze but we got it in. 

The first stop we made was to the bike store so my bike could get new tubes and tires, the old ones were dry rotted. This took about a week.  This gave me a week to get my courage back up to ride it again, this time in front of Bebes and my house. 

Here is the thing about our house…I think the neighbors think I am weird.  I don’t get out of the house much other then to go to work or leave to go to a friends house or home to my parents.  I don’t like being outside usually, there are bugs outside and dirt which means there are germs!  I don’t like germs and bugs and dirt, so the easiest solution to not dealing with them is staying inside as much as possible.  From this I am really pale, like Twilight Books vampire pale.

 (I promise I’m not a vampire, but if I was this is what I would look like)

So my neighbors rarely see me and when they do I wave (if I notice them) and hurry off, not much time to talk.  When I am outside, to be outside, I am usually talking to Bella.  So I am that crazy women on the street who talks to her dog.  So riding a bike, and not riding it well, and possibly injuring myself on said bike in front of these neighbors who probably already think I am weird, not at the top of my priority list. 

I had a week to talk myself into it.  I got the bike the next Tuesday and decided that day was as good as any other and took off.  That’s when I realized the other issue with the house, it’s built on a hill on both sides.  Being a beginner biker, again, it is probably not a good idea to ride the bike up and down hills the second time around.  The only place I could ride the bike without speeding down a hill was directly in front of our house.  So I did that for ten minutes in 99 degree weather, started to sweat, which I also don’t like, and decided to call it a day.  Oh, what fun my neighbors probably had that day.  “Crazy dog lady is trying to ride a bike, putting feet down every few feet, screaming when she goes to fast, and she can’t even turn on the bike without stopping completely, while almost falling over, and turning the bike around with her arms, quick take a video and put it on youtube!” – probably what neighbors were saying to each other.

The next day I decided I wasn’t going to ride my bike again, some teenage kids across the street were outside and that’s all I needed to build my confidence of riding a bike without really knowing how to ride a bike.  So I waited to see if they would go inside, they didn’t.

Well I then thought of all the hard work I had put in yesterday, and since they probably already think I am crazy, I might as well try it again.  So I got the bike out, while Bebe was watering our plants, and rode up and down the little area in front of our house.  Bebe asked me if I was going to take the hill, and I told him he must be joking.  The kids next door watched the whole time and it started bothering me. What if I fell, what if I flew over my handle bars and hit a tree (no helmet), what if I actually make a turn without stopping the bike and get excited and then fall over due to not being balanced…they would laugh. 

So I decided to take the bike to the school near by, where no one was at, and ride it in the parking lot.  I did this for awhile and really got the hang of it.  I forgot how exhilarating it was to feel the wind in my hair and how peaceful the sound of the wheels were while riding.  I felt alive and free. 

I enjoyed this for awhile and then decided to go home.  I decided to bike home…oh yes over the gravel in the entry way to the school, through a stop sign on a road, and up a slight hill to our house.  I had ridden for a least 10 minutes at the park, I felt confident and I had this.  Everything was going well, until I felt a piece of my hair move up my cheek and close to my eye.  It was bugging me so I reached my hand up to flick it away and I lost my balance violently going to one side.  I slammed my feet on the ground, and although I didn’t fall off the bike or injure myself I was pretty torn up about it.  How could a little piece of hair get me down like that?  What if people saw? What if I would have fallen over like I was about too?

Once I got up the slight hill, I saw the two kids that were out earlier watching me ride.  Thinking they were thinking all sorts of odd things about me I was kind of confused when I saw what they were doing.  These two teenage high school aged kids were outside riding their bikes up and down the road having fun and laughing with each other. 

Had I inspired them to get out and be healthy and enjoy the day with their bikes? 

I don’t know why they were riding their bikes, but it made me feel good.  I rode my bike home (both hands on the bike – hair or no hair I wasn’t going to fall in front of those kids) and put it away. 

I plan on riding again tonight; we will see how that goes.  I will still probably be wobbly and, though I haven’t fallen yet, I might fall.  But I have gotten this far and I really am enjoying it.  My muscles in my legs are being worked like they haven’t been since I stopped riding my bike in 8^th grade.  My hands have some calluses being built up from holding the handles bars, probably too tight.  My pants have grease on them from the fresh grease the shop put on it.  How can I put all of this to waste just because I might look weird/crazy.  I am going to learn to completely ride my bike and be an expert in it again. 

Bebe and I are planning a bike ride sometime in the future.  I am hoping that we will both be better riders then and will be able to fully enjoy our time on the bikes.  For now though I am going to just pray I don’t fall off, or that a chain doesn’t break…I don’t like the grease.