typical
I am almost too sick to move today, though I'm not as bad as I was last night. It started on my way over to Korean Movie Night after work, just something suddenly wrong with my stomach that doubled me over in the street and left me choking into the gutter at Broadway and Commercial. Surprised and thinking I was far closer to Christopher's than I was to my own home, and knowing that if I went home, I would be alone, I decided the best thing would be to continue to movie night. If nothing else, if I was going to be a little out of it, there would be people to make sure I was safe. This proved to be the best idea, as eventually my illness surpassed all expectations and left me doing my best impression of wretchedly dying in the bathroom. Today I can keep water down and hobble around with some semblance of remaining upright, but my fever is still ridiculously bake-breakfast-on-my-forehead high.
I'm trying to get a ride home somehow, because otherwise I'm stuck here, is anyone available?
Course, this seems to fit my week fairly well, the pattern of a nice day ending in misery. Like, as if to off-set the fact that I was attacked by police dogs after SinCity, the nice mild hero who came in to mend the internet last week, (name of Robin), kept me company at work yesterday and bought me a darling little cactus from the florist next door to replace the one I accidentally neglected to death. I don't think this one flowers, nor are the spikes soft like my last one, but it has sharp prickly little spikes, which is pretty neat. I'm rather pleased about it, actually. My new little cactus. It never would have occurred to me to buy one for myself, I felt a little too wretched over the death of my windowsill garden to replace any, so it's good to have a second chance. No longer shall I feel a drifting pang of guilt when I walk into the neighboring florist.
Canadian content: Evelyn, The cutest little dead girl.
Kitsilano is an uninhabited kingdom at three in the morning. There are no cars and certainly no pedestrians, so when I walked into a pitch dark alley and heard someone running up the street I'd just turned off of, I turned around to mark how they passed, figuring it's only safe to keep tabs on one's surroundings. A jogger, I thought, running their dogs. Wrong. A large serious man with large black dogs burst into the alley mouth with an unexpected ricochet of violent barking and ran at me. Stunned, I stood my ground and braced myself. One of the dogs jumped at me, the one not on a leash, and grabbed onto my arm, trying to pull me down, which is perhaps the only thing that saved it's eyes. Police, it had to be police. Sure enough, as I was dragged down to one knee, the man pulled out a flashlight and shone it directly into my eyes and tried to shout over the barking, "VPD! What are you doing in this alley?!" In a flash of anti-clever, I yelled, "What?!?" because what else could I do? Miss Manners doesn't talk about these things. Half wrestling with what I think was a Doberman, I was not very capable of wit.
He called the dogs off, though they continued barking loud enough that house lights were clicking on up and down the lane, and asked me again.
"I'm going home!"
"Are you sure?"
"What, yes! Of course I'm sure!"
"Why are you in the alley?"
I shook the dog off and stood up, incredulous, resisting the urge to kick it.
"I'm going home. I go in the back door. What are you doing here?"
"Strangely enough, there was a report of a woman in someone's back yard."
"What? Strangely enough!? You attacked me with dogs because someone was in a back yard?"
At this, he had the decency to begin pulling the dogs back, though he wouldn't take the flashlight off my face.
"Just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, ma'am. I would recommend in future that you only walk on designated pathways."
Then he took off, leaving me blinking blindly in the alley, wondering what the hell just happened. My immediate urge was to drag poor Sam out of bed and go cop hunting. It was just too outrageous to parse on my own. Instead, as I woke him quietly blathering about big black dogs and barking, "It was all BARK BARK BARK, you don't understand," unable to understand how he'd managed to sleep through the noise, he calmed me down and put me to bed. I was still incredulous the next day, but it was easier to feel less persecuted in the morning.