The Gray and the Green Together

Inspirational song: It Ain't That Pretty At All (Warren Zevon)

I should have known my day was going to be awful when the very first word out of my mouth was my favorite old Anglo-Saxon epithet. I opened my phone after I dismissed my alarm, and saw a lovely photo of Alan Rickman, with no explanation. I didn't think anything of it. Two posts farther down the page, and Eddie Izzard was the first to announce to me that yet another of my untouchable crushes has now departed this plane of existence. It's so hard to lose another one, so soon after the first this week. No other actor played villains with such finesse, turning them into complex, interesting characters. No matter what his characters did on film, I never stopped wanting to burrow inside their brains, to pick them apart, and find the thread of redemptive value. Or at least I wanted to be Marianne Dashwood just for a little while, to give Colonel Brandon the attention he deserved. Today I wore silver, green, and black. Today we were all Slytherin, just for a moment.

I was nearly run off the road today on my way home from work. Or rather, I was successfully pushed out of my lane and I was very fortunate that there was a center turn lane before I met oncoming traffic at 65 miles an hour. And the person who decided to pass a truck towing a trailer on a hill never seemed to realize that I had previously been occupying the spot he moved into. The more I'm in my car, which I will be now that I've taken the job I have, the more chances I have for close calls. One of these days, it might be even closer. Like close enough to swap paint, or worse. So I didn't win the Powerball last night, but I still used up a lot of my luck for the week.

We tried to run an important errand in the fickle pickup truck today. We left the house at 2:30, thinking we'd be done in an hour, tops. Instead, the truck decided not to restart when we needed to move it, and it proved persistently crappy for the next five and a half hours, stranding us on the opposite side of town, requiring a rescue by one of our daughter's friends and three--count 'em, three--trips to AutoZone for parts. The cam shaft position sensor that the truck's brain claimed was the problem was actually a red herring. It came down to a simple distributor rotor that had its necessary bit of metal ripped off of it, and we didn't know this until it was full dark and dreadfully cold and windy. I had wanted to get a lot of things accomplished today. Instead, I sat in a truck and listened to every curse in the book, including the one I started my day with, over and over and over.