There Goes the Neighborhood, Ann Arbor edition

I had a long day yesterday. NB left town for the week so our morning departure was even more chaotic than usual, and coming back to work on Mondays is especially hard after being on call all weekend. I was inefficient and grumpy and not any better off for having forgotten to leave the house with my usual vat of iced coffee. I'll save for a another day the wonders of cold-drip iced coffee, and my musings about how in the world I forgot to drink it on a Monday morning. After work I decided to make my first solo trip the gym - inconveniently located all the way across town (which is a whopping 7 miles from my house, but by my new A2 standards quite remote), and then stopped at Target to by a record low FOUR ITEMS. I got on the phone with my mother on the way home (probably a bad idea for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that I failed to notice that NB's headlights don't magically come on when it's dark outside). You can imagine that I made a loud, bumbling entrance into my house, what with talking on the phone while bringing in the mail, while hauling all my stuff back inside. It was hot, so I had the front door open, and, thank goodness, the screen door latched.
I wrapped up with my mother after (in retrospect) loudly announcing to the entire street that NB would be gone all week and that I would be all alone, amenable to receiving phone calls. I got all settled with reheated pizza and the second half of the"You don't mess with the Zohan" (we checked out from the library...) when the doorbell rang. I hadn't heard anyone coming up onto the porch, but it seemed like the only person who could possibly be at the door was our nice neighbor S or her nice son T. I was dismayed to discover that it was neither S, nor T. In fact, it was a middle aged straggly-haired toothless woman, who tried to tell me a very incomprehensible story about needing help because someone was following her. She seemed very interested in seeing what was inside of my house, so while a more charitable person might have taken the time to figure out whether she was in real trouble, my priority was getting her off my porch. As she left, an idling car in front of the house reared to life and drove alongside her down the street. "Excellent," I thought, "malicious burglers are sending out their crazy meth-head decoy to case my house. Good thing I just announced to the entire world that I'm here all alone." I called NB, hoping he would talk me off my paranoid ledge. The advice about what kind of makeshift weapon I could keep under my pillow didn't do much to advance the cause, but we agreed that I would call the non-emergent police number to see if this person or at least this strategy were known entities, or, if not, if a car would come drive down the street to make sure I wasn't in mortal danger. *note: in the A2 phone book, the number for the police station comes after the diagram of the University of Michigan stadium*
Confirming that I have, in fact, moved to a small town, I didn't get a full sentence into my story when the dispatcher at the police station asked me, "Did a blond lady with a striped shirt just come to your door?" The story goes that the woman was not a panhandling meth head so much as she was an ESCAPED PATIENT FROM A MENTAL FACILITY who, mental illness notwithstanding, was, in fact, being followed. It seems the car was not driven by her accomplice, so much as by someone from her institution who was trying to keep track of her while coordinating with the police to safely collect her.
I'm really not sure what lesson to take away from this story. Any suggestions?

it's not worth it - trust me.

ok. i just don't understand those women at the gym who practically hang themselves from the rafters in the locker room, masochistically contorting their hair into the perfect, every-strand-in-place pony tail. it's true, those random strays can drive you crazy when you're trying to get away with pony-tail-instead-of-shower on one of those mornings that you just can't get your act together, but that's a totally different situation. it's the gym, ladies. it's all going to fall down and get all messy as soon as you get up on the treadmill anyway and i PROMISE, nobody cares. give yourself and your follices a break and succomb to the chaos.

getting older

since when does consumption of two reasonably sized alcoholic beverages cause me to wake up miserably hung over?

this sucks.

vocabulary

a few weeks ago i heard a story on NPR about some lexicon society's nomination for word of the year: bailout. i liked it, and also enjoyed the various runners up, like all the permuations of obama, and of course maverick.

inspired by my good blogmate's favorite pastime of keeping a little list of words said in class that she likes, i've been keeping tabs on my own favorites (reigning champ: collusion), and humbly offer up my election inspired word of the year:

jumbotron.

right where we left off...

my good blogmate and i have both found ourselves back in school this quarter, and as such we're back to making our usual snide observations about the maladaptive behavior of u of c undergrads.

i submit the following question: how can anyone think that it's a good idea to walk and read a book at the same time?

discuss.