Wednesday, July 22, 2009

All In All It's Just Ay...Nother Kick In The Balls

So, another click on the odometer of life, another digit rolling down to replace the one there for the last 365 days and Azathoth knows how many now out-of-warranty parts silently going nails-up in what is laughingly referred to as my body.

The Stevieling departed Chateau Stevie sometime around the middle of the bloody night, bound for the airport, thence to New Orleans in the company of a host of Lutherans who yearn to "fellowship" and repair houses washed away when the city re-enacted the classic Led Zeppelin song, and stuff like that.

Before she left she woke me in accordance with the instructions I had left the night before, which I had written in a state of mild post-beer euphoria and therefore hadn't fully thought through the timing involved, to wish me Many Happy Returns and let me wish her luck. It is my fervent hope that the child heard the word I shouted when she poked me awake as "luck". I came awake enough to accept tribute1 and to offer her my best wishes for her term of duty in the Lutheran Expeditionary Force, then I fell back into a deep sleep in just the right position to trap a nerve in my right arm.

I awoke at 7 am with the three useful fingers and the thumb of my right hand numb. I shook them to wake them up, which in retrospect was a bad idea since the nerves, once awakened, decided to run a simulation of what it's like to get your hand caught in a rat-trap. As I type this, some two and a half hours later, the tip of my index finger is still very painful. I guess I just found one of those newly out-of-warranty parts then.

Things I did not get for my birthday:

  • Flying Car
  • Paid weekend on the Space Wheel
  • Rocket Shoes with an altimeter in the heel
  • My 401K investment capital for the last eight years returned2

But at least I have job satisfaction, an idyllic home life and my health.

Oh, wait. No I don't.

  1. A rather nice copy of the movie "The Colour of Magic"
  2. I know investments are never guaranteed but Cthulhu on a bike! It comes to something if the money would have been better off if had been stuffed in a mattress, then the mattress had been set on fire. And people are still saying nice things about the Bush-Cheney years in which the government fiddled (in every sense of the word) while the economy went down the pan. But thank Azathoth we got that Saddam Hussein bloke, totallyun-implicated with the 911 attacks while hoarding absolutely no Weapons of Mass Destruction, even though the point of the whole affair was to get Osama Bin Laden (still at large). At least Operation Straw Man was a complete success (if you don't count the whole "quagmire" aspect of it)