Yesterday one of my Woodford nieces posted an arresting image to Facebook: a photo of a woman wearing a hoop earring from which was suspended a severed human ear. Fake, I hoped, but it looked real. The way my mind works, I immediately thought of a passage from Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars, a post-apocalyptic novel I’d read a few months ago. In one scene the good guy has his gun on a bandit. He’s decided to put the fear of god into him and then allow him to run, though he knows the smart thing to do would be to shoot him dead. The bandit’s wearing a necklace made of unidentifiable objects. The good guy asks what they are. “Dried cunts,” answers the bandit. The good guy shoots him dead.
It seemed like the perfect response to the earring photo, so I looked up the passage, copied it, and pasted it into the comment box. Then I thought better of it. “Dried cunts.” No, that isn’t me. So I deleted it.
Ten minutes later I got a private message from another niece, this one on my wife’s side. She wanted to tell me I’d been hacked … unless that was really me calling Girl Scouts a bunch of cunts.
With a sinking feeling I went back to the earring post. Right below it was a post about Girl Scout cookies from the other niece. Apparently I pasted that quote into the wrong comment box, then clicked the wrong key and sent it. Now I feel like one of those “reply all” email idiots. Except this was probably way worse than spam. My niece deleted my reply before too many of her friends (and all the relatives on my wife’s side of the family) saw it. But my embarrassment will live forever.
Let this be a lesson to you, children.
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The orthopedic surgeon’s scheduler called yesterday. A package of info is on its way, and the surgery will be on the 6th of February. I’m thinking it’ll just be one knee, with surgery on the second knee to follow a month or two later. But maybe they’re planning to do both at once. I’ll know more soon. I’m almost ready to embrace the idea of getting it all over with at once. I led two walking tours at the air museum yesterday, and after two hours on hard concrete hangar floors was lurching around like Festus. There’s a bicycle hash this Sunday that I’ll probably only be able to partially complete. I want to be firing on all cylinders again. Well, who wouldn’t?
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Couple of weeks ago I mentioned the possibility of getting another car. Since then Donna has said nothing. In the meantime we’ve had a long stretch of cold weather and Polly’s been driving Donna’s car. Donna and I have getting along with just one. Just one car! Talk about your first world problems!
As long as we’re on first world problems, here’s another one for you: shitty high speed internet service. I don’t notice too many problems when I’m using my computer, unless I’m looking at YouTube videos or something (those Russian dash cam car crash videos are strangely addictive), and then I’ll notice frequent stops and starts. But now that we have streaming TV we really notice it. Ten minutes into Downton Abbey it freezes, goes black, and starts reloading. Half the time it reloads with abysmal quality, coming up fuzzy like an old kinescope from the 1950s. I’ve been running back to the home office to reset the cable modem, which sometimes fixes the problem for an hour or so, but should I have to be doing that? I keep hearing how people in other countries have great high speed internet. Why don’t we?
But now I’m just bitching. Time to wrap it up for today. I’ll leave you with a sweet photo I snagged from the Dachshund group on Flickr:
Awww. C’mon, admit it … you needed a break from all the crazy gun talk. I know I did!
© 2013, Paul Woodford. All rights reserved.
