Imitation- the finest form of flattening:P

Our friend firynze posted late yesterday about a serious Up and Down type of day. That clearly defined the path that I have been on since getting Up close to 5 a.m.

Down: Not me, that's for sure. Tasha wouldn't stop barking and whining until fed, then one of the cats kept me from getting back to sleep until, finally, Tasha started in again with the barky-barky close enough to 7 for me to say, Gheh:P and just stayed....

Up: Did decent amounts of stuff once I was. Was reasonably productive in that early-morning hour, more so than I was able to be at any point yesterday. The day was bright and clear, I saw a hawk in transit, and got into court at the moment they were beginning the call of the cases, the first of which was mine.

Down: My new orifice, right next to the old one. I'd tried resolving this matter informally, over a month ago, and hadn't heard boo from my opponent or the court since trying to do so, but the former turned out to be sandbagging me and the latter was quite upset that I hadn't responded with a Ton Of Formal Opposition. And this is not someone you want upset at you.

Up: In the end (heh), did no worse than I likely would've done with the T.O.F.O., and headed to a friend's office in those parts for tea and sympathy, coffee in place of the tea, and to pick up stuff for them. Included there was an unexpectedly prompt delivery of paperwork and payment from a client who'd been there late yesterday. So yay.

Down: As in Fall Down. I stopped for gas at the first place for such before returning downtown and eventually back home, got a free pump at the first and closest spot, got out to grab the nozzle,.... and totally faceplanted in an ocean of anti-freeze that had been left behind by the last car that had been there. I got soaked in green goo down to my undershirt, and there was more than a bit of gasoline that had also seeped into that mixture, too, so I got to spend the next two hours and 80 miles looking and smelling like Johnny The Human Torch. 

Up, for Now: The rest of errands went fine; nobody apparently wants to make you wait or piss you off when you smell that flammable.

I've showered, but I can still smell chemical stuff on me. So it's off to run some wash, take the suit in for dry cleaning, air out the car (bad) and even this room (better, but still noticeable from the suit and shirt being so close to my bag and such in the car), and, quite probably, write a Nastygram to the owner of the gas station.

Now usually, I make fun of people who knee-jerk their way to a personal injury lawyer when they slip and fall, but really now. Is it a reasonable expectation, on a perfectly clear and sunny day (for once), that you should look down and inspect the ground around your vehicle for slippery ethylene glycol before crossing over to the pump? A guy did come out, and as I was finishing getting the ill-fated tankful, a girl came over with paper towels and a mop, but I didn't get a single "are you okay?" or any expression of concern. I don't want to ask for more than payment of my dry cleaning bill and possibly an interior cleaning if the smell stays bad (which would be nice anyway after we paint the car from the LAST disaster if we choose to), but I hope I don't come across as a greedy ambulance chaser in doing so.

Or I could seize the opportunity, completely douse myself in the stuff, and apply to the Vancouver Canucks to be one of their Green Guys.

Adden-duhs

* Eleanor worked until 7 tonight, and she'd asked (or leastways I thought she'd asked) for me to get pizza from Great Northern, a WNY chain of some note. While waiting to pick it up, a guy was ordering his dinner with his wife and kids, and he was wearing a golf shirt with the name of the landscape business owned by the nephew of our now nursing homebound neighbor who's had her house on the market for months.  He didn't look familiar, so I asked if he worked with anyone from Vinnie's family. "Never heard of him," he said (or her, either); turns out he founded the original "Curb Appeal" landscrape company in these parts and these other folks just stole the name from him.

Awk-warrrrrd.

----

* Said pizza was delicious, although I'm pretty sure a dog managed to scarf one of my slices in record time.

----

* Passed some of the pizza-eating time out in the greenhouse; after it got a bit too cold out there for Eleanor, I hung out a bit longer reading our alt-weekly, featuring a letter to the editor kindasorta banging on Wegmans for their overly wingnut choices of featured hardcovers in their (probably contracted-out) book department. All the same, the author asserted he'd still be shopping there, given the lack of any meaningful competition around here from Joe's or Whole Paycheck, and certainly not that of the actual competing supermarket chain:
As a Catskill mountain boy, I first heard of Wegmans in college after I made a bunch of friends from Rochester. The glowing words they used to describe it had me convinced that Wegmans was a very special place. They also talked about Tops, and sang the truly Western New York tune “Tops never mops.”

----

* When we eat out in the greenhouse, if not jonesing for a particular CD, we'll usually listen to Jazz.FM from Toronto. The signal itself doesn't pick up on the boom-boxy-sized rack system we have out there, but we can still listen by running the Jazz.FM app on my phone and plugging a pickup cord into its headphone jack. That-all went fine tonight, except that when I came in here just now, my phone emailed me from the app to say "Check out the JAZZ.FM91 iPhone app at www.jazz.fm/listen."

There was no human interaction involved in the sending of this message, but I do suspect a particular cat's ass seen in the general vicinity of the app icon on the phone desktop. Hey- at least she didn't scarf one of my gorram slices:P

----

* After four straight days of court appearances and client appointments, I have a whole day of blissful nothingness tomorrow. My messy desk looks forward to this.