Spitball Army

Woke up at 6:00 am with a stiffness in my back.  I had slept in the guest bedroom, as there were piles of clean laundry stacked on my usual bed, and I was too lazy or (more charitably) otherwise occupied to finish the task yesterday.

Showered, shaved, and tended to my face, which is finally getting a reprieve from the Carac treatment it has been baraged by for the past three weeks.  Yesterday was the last of the daily treatments.  This is the second round of this treatment that I have endured: it leaves my face looking like that of a deranged raccoon and the medication is very expensive.  But, given the choice of a $250 pharmacy bill accompanied by some discomfort and ugliness, or a possible case of operable skin cancer…well, let’s just say it’s a no-brainer.

Dressed, fed the cats, and jumped in the truck to head down to my polling place to vote at 7:00 am.  I was voter number 7 in line, so I was able to cast my “gender” vote quickly.  There were two ballot boxes at the school where I vote, and one of them was down (it was sitting there like an abandoned R2D2, emitting a sad electronic beeping sound every few seconds).  If they don’t get that baby fixed, they are going to have one hellish day come lunchtime or after work.

Drove to Homewood, got a cuppa joe at O’Henry’s, loaded a bookshelf from the empty store space into the back of the truck, and proceeded back home very slowly so as not to not bump the shelves out of the back of the truck.  People in this town – it’s probably the same in every town, I guess – just do not know how to react when stuck in traffic behind a vehicle that is driving slowly.  I was honked at, yelled at, had lights flashed at me, and was flipped the bird.  What’s the freakin’ rush, folks?  Just get started a little earlier!

Dumped the bookshelves at home, then headed back out to get a few needed things for the house.  Went to Wal-Mart and bought a shower liner, bar soap, and the new Jack Johnson CD ($9.72, and I just happen to know that the base cost on this bad boy is at least $10.35).  Then went to Home Depot and got new paint (Behr’s “White Corn” – it is a lot lighter in tone than the website page sample) for the bookshelves, and brushes.  I then rolled on home.

So, it seems that the Jack Johnson CD was priced as a “loss leader.”  I have to question the effectiveness of that as a sales model when there are only 10 copies of the item (I saw them all, as the clerk – if you want to call her that…she was really no more than an employee – had to open a box to find them for me), and the item is not out on the shelves, and thus obviously not even positioned.

And let me add one more thing about driving.  As I was pulling out of my driveway on my way to shop at the corporate megalith retail outlets (and did I mention that, being in Birmingham, they both charge the cursed 10% sales tax?), a car came barrelling around the corner and was  behind me as I started up the street.  I noticed in my rear-view mirror that this guy was weaving back and forth between the lane and a position where he was straddling the line down the middle of the street.  Now, I wasn’t hauling a 100-pound wooden bookcase, so I was driving at or slightly above the speed limit – besides, this is a residential neighborhood with plenty of small children, and as a neighborhood, we try to keep it safe and look out for one another.  The fellow behind me was having none of that, and after enduring one block of my driving, he accelerated and passed me doing about 50 mph in a 25 mph zone.  He passed a woman on her morning run, jogging toward us, and she actually stopped dead in her tracks and made a large “slow down” gesture at him, with both palms down, pushing them toward the ground.  He just kept gunning it down the street.  His Alabama plate number is AT25102.

10:36 am.  The house phone rings, and the caller ID says HEALTHSOUTH COR (meaning Healthsouth Corporate center, south of town).  I have a friend who works there, but knowing he would most likely be calling me on my cellular, I let the call go to voice mail.  When I check the message, it is from a woman identifying herself as “Ella, a volunteer for Barack Obama.”  She told me where my polling place is, the address, and encouraged me to go vote today and, especially, to vote for Barack Obama.  I turned off the phone and then I got to thinking.  Since this call came from Healthsouth, does that mean that Healthsouth is paying this person to do political canvassing?  Well, they are paying her, but she is a “volunteer,” so she is allowing Healthsouth to finance her “free” work for Barack Obama.  Having been a business owner for nearly the last 17 years of my life, I would have been mortified upon notification, yet appreciative to the source, to find out that this nonsense was occurring at my company, and that I was paying for it (incidentally, this reaction has absolutely nothing to do with my candidate preference, which today is approximately 40% Clinton + 29% Obama + 31% Huckabee).  So, I called back the phone number on my caller ID, which turned out to be the main switchboard number at Healthsouth, and asked for the Human Resources department.  Then I passed the content of the call on to the astonished woman on the other end of the line, who was not Ella.  I did not feel smug or self-righteous.

3:15 pm.  I spent the last 2-3 hours painting the bookshelf sections under cover of my front porch – they’re too heavy to lug around to the garage, and the weatherman has been beating the drum on this election day with warnings of storms a-comin’.  After the second coat, the original grey-blue paint has vanished under the white corn, and I think these will very nicely complement the earthy tones that are throughout my home.  I can’t wait to see them inside.  Ziggy, my male cat, was really frustrated that he couldn’t be out on the porch where I was – if he didn’t track all over the wet paint, he would have tried to eat it – and sat inside behind the front door howling like a dog.  Because he is a puppycat.

I will be watching the election returns tonight, like many of you, and hoping that Judge Scott Vowell, in his infinite and balanced wisdom, will not rule against the validity of the Jefferson County  Commission election results.  See?  Weird election shit happens EVERYWHERE, not just in Florida.