Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Calgone, take me away


So here's been my day:

Abby's drama class had a performance tonight, so Johanna and I dropped her and a friend off at the middle school at 6 p.m., then came back JUST IN TIME at 7 for the curtain call.  Abby's group went first, and it was actually pretty good (you know, for a middle school play.  And before you get all up in arms about not being invited, Public, Abby was just on makeup and costume duty.  Plus: Have you already forgotten the Spring music program?).  

Then the second group was up, after a lengthy intermission.  The kids were unprepared, it took forever for them to change sets between acts, and the looooong pauses as they tried to remember their lines were unbearable.

But that's not even the worst part.  This play was "scary."  Johanna made it about ten minutes before announcing, with great alarm, that she was going to have nightmares.  

Well, what happened next was a no brainer: We went into the lobby, where I thought Abby was.  We'd just go home.

Except Abby was NOT in the lobby, she was in her classroom cleaning up.  Probably a good detail to know ahead of time.  So I spent eight minutes waiting for my oldest while my youngest whined ON AND ON AND ON about how she wasn't scared anymore and could we PLEASE GO BACK IN.

Um, no.  Dude, you have dreams about wars and zombies.  We don't need dreams about spirits possessing people, too.

So that?  Was a really fun eight minutes, plus the additional four it took to drive home once Abby finally wandered in.

We got home, and I looked at Eric,* and I was all, I'm going to go wash my hair now, which was code for I'm gonna lose my shit, and Eric was like, GO!  The boy knows a crisis when he sees one.

But the joke was on me because Johanna kept coming in to complain some more about not getting to see the end of the play ("But Abby said it ends happily!"**), and then to put a bandage on her elbow, and then again to put on another bandage because the first one fell off.

Deep breath.

And then there was the call I fielded at work this afternoon.

A lady called up to say that like ten years ago she and her husband went on this camping trip in the area and she had a dream about a six year old boy sitting by a fire, and then this other guy who was probably from the 1960s by the looks of him--who was very sullen to boot--called to the kid and they disappeared into the woods together.  And the dream was so real that she's pretty sure they were murder victims haunting the woods, and did I know of anything like that happening in the area?  She'd already done computer searches.  She didn't want to sound crazy, but sometimes she sees things like this.

Um...

I go back to editorial and I'm all, so, who wants to field this one?  Finally we call the editor over and he announces that she needs to call the sheriff's office if she really believes there was a murder and let them handle it.  

So she'd been on hold for like five minutes by this point, but she was still there and took down the sheriff department number and thanked me profusely for my help.

I'm not really sure what else to say about that, except maybe this is like that story my cousin Clara told this past weekend, about the crazy guy who called 911 to say that ninjas were attacking his mailbox, which ended up getting him arrested, which eventually led to him being tasered.  And then later someone else called to say there were kids dressed as ninjas vandalizing mailboxes.

See where I'm going with this?  Yeah, me neither...

*Eric had a meeting tonight, so he was off the hook.
**Liar.  But it's all for the greater good of the family--in that maybe we'll all get to sleep tonight--so all is forgiven.

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