Thank effin’ Og it’s Friday.
Yesterday was one of those days. You know the sort; you feel sluggish, detached, and you’re not much interested in doing anything more than the bare minimum required by law to exist. That was me yesterday. I started a post in the MMP, but then my brain and my fingers said, “Y’know what dude? You’re harshing the mellow. Just work and read stuff and chill. No need to disturb the digits or do things like think any more than you have to.”
I’m still tired this morning, but I’m feeling more mentally active. Plus, it’s Friday, and I know I can sleep this all off tomorrow morning. 
So this morning I was getting my coffee when I came across the strangest individual I’ve seen in a good while. She wasn’t acting strange – actually, in asking for a bag for whatever it was she bought for breakfast she sounded really quite normal. “Would you have a bag for this, dear?” she asked the cashier in a perfectly reasonable and ordinary manner. Still, there were at least a few misfiring neurons somewhere, because her appearance was anything but. Let me see if I can give this the Bob Ross treatment:
Her shoes were normal, but the cuffs of her pants were gathered close to the ankle and held in place by safety pins. Really big safety pins. The sort of comically oversized safety pins you see holding an adult-sized diaper together around a fully-grown man dressed up as a baby – bonnet, pacifier, rattle and all – for humorous effect. The pants themselves were otherwise relatively normal, if well-traveled. What appeared to be a T-shirt of no particular note was concealed beneath a long-sleeved, baby blue cable-knit sweater. It’s summer, but having come off a day of spotty rain yesterday, the morning was pleasantly cool – a temperature some of more delicate skin may have found chill. Although her age was difficult to nail down definitively (for reasons presently to be explored), her husband, seated at a table in the cafe’s seating area, looked to be in his sixties, so I would guess she was in the same general area, so the sweater wasn’t at all out of place, all things considered. Her hair was past shoulder-length, but disheveled and unkempt, despite the seeming evidence that a passing attempt had been made to keep it all within the same radius as her body; there were two metal hair clips inserted at positions that follow some law of fashion I am not familiar with.
This is all being described more or less in the reverse order in which it was noticed, because it is the face that attracted – nay, demanded, viscerally – the attention first. There was eye shadow. Peacock blue. It extended from the top lids, around the circumference of the eye socket, and terminated at the bottom of the lower lids. She had a mole on her right cheek. It probably wasn’t that large nor would it have attracted much notice were it not for the fact that it, too, was peacock blue, and made larger for the fact that the shade extended some few millimeters beyond its base diameter. It was like a dermatological blemish turned into a Christmas ornament. And lipstick. Oh yes. There was lipstick. Bright, gleaming red lipstick which was almost, but not quite entirely unlike the colour of strawberries, if indeed strawberries could be made bright enough to read by. Perhaps artificial lava might be a better simile, for, like a really small model of Mount St. Helens, it fountained across her lips and spilled over the ridges, careening down the slopes of her mouth and laying waste to whatever fine hairs stood in its way, finally coming to rest when it was absolutely, positively sure that there was no more mouth to be found in any direction. Well, that was the story for her upper lip, anyway; I can only assume the lower suffered the same fate, because it was covered by a sweat band that surrounded her face and angled around her cheeks up towards about the middle of the back of her head, looking little nothing so much as a headband that had tried but failed just short of successfully gagging its wearer.
Now, I’d seen bizarre makeup jobs on women before, but almost universally, these same women were also, at the time, in the process of either giving the three feet of empty space in front of them a stern talking-to, or furiously scribbling endless spirals on blank sheets of lined paper. This particular woman seemed otherwise possessed of an ordinary sense of self-awareness (or at least environmental awareness) and spoke normally. It’s just that she seemed to choose to decorate herself in a manner that, for those that do not consider them to be inherently evil of scary to begin with, puts her squarely in the middle of the Uncanny Valley of clowndom.
Well, anyway, it made for an interesting start to my Friday.
I was also asked yesterday if I could move my vacation time (currently scheduled for the week of September 17th) back or forward because apparently, nobody checked the scheduling for other people, and now my vacation conflicts with two other key personnel. This sucks. I scheduled that week (as I did last year) because that week falls on MindWife’s birthday (which is the 20th, six days before mine), and it also happens to be the week following payday. I could take the first week in September – 4th to the 10th, which would give me a slightly longer vacation due to the Labour Day holiday, or I could wait 'til the first week of October, but that’s a bit far off. sigh
I discussed it with TPTB, and I’ve decided on Sept. 4th to the 10th. It’s a nice extra-long vacation and it’s a pay week – plus, it’s only 3 weeks away. I’ll just have to do the birthday celebrations a couple of weeks early. I’m going to make sure my second vacation next year is where it should be, though.
Rosie - I should write a small program in Visual BASIC or something that effectively allows you to “paint” with ANSI characters. That would make the process much easier. I’ll called SDMP - The Straight Dope Message Painter.
Jack - Ugh. House Centipedes. On the one hand, they eat other bugs common to households, so they’re quite beneficial. On the other hand, they’re mind-humpingly hideous. And fast. And they bite. Did I mention how hideous they are? I’m not ashamed to admit that they give me not merely a case of the willies, but an entire overseas transport container full of the entire Willy family. Non-sequiturs are cool. I like yogurt.
LOUNE - Wouldn’t the alliteration of “Bumpy Bob” roll off the tongue better? And by “roll off the tongue” I mean “that sounds extremely dirty.” Now, “Ribbed Roy” sounds … well, it still sounds dirty, but it’s historically punny.
