I am tired.

It was a very long day. It started very early, because Kevin lost his license yesterday, although not in the way that normal people lose their licenses. Instead, he was a passenger in a car that was in a minor accident,* and when the nice police officer came and ran everybody’s IDs, she dropped his between her seat and the center island in her car and couldn’t get it out again. She was very, very apologetic, and wrote him out a receipt for it, but the long and the short of it was that he was now devoid of ID, and we spent the morning locating the one DMV in North America where you can still get a picture ID while you wait, rather than a piece of paper, because we had kinda hoped to go to a club this weekend, and they weren’t going to take a no-really-I-promise-I-have-an-ID piece of paper at the door.

I can’t help but feel a little responsible for this. I have a friend who got a bizarre form of pneumonia awhile back–something about fungal spores in reptile droppings, very obscure–and she blamed me for it. When I protested that my droppings were (probably) free of reptile-related fungus, she pointed out with ruthless logic that a year prior, she would have simply gotten normal human bronchitis, and it was because of our friendship and the influence of my personal Weirdness Vortex that she had suffered this fascinating ailment. Fair enough. So now I must wonder whether Kevin would, prior to our relationship, have lived a life where the police could drop his ID into an unretreivable crack in the seat, or whether he’s suffering Vortex Effect.

I like to think it’s worth it, but some day, when he’s mauled by a rogue elephant seal at Sea World…well, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Musing on this, I drove home from random errands, whereupon my car alarm, which has been a little hair-triggered lately, finally broke completely and proceeded to go off ten times in two hours. The last four times were in the parking lot of the local mechanic, who are awesome people and probably would have worked me in anyway, but let me tell you, they get you on the lift pretty damn quick when a grim-faced woman is retrieving her keys from the desk, stalking outside, deactivating the alarm and returning in silence once every ten minutes.

I would have been happy if they’d just cut a wire somewhere–it’s a ’97 Altima, it’s a great car for ME, but as my buddy Otter says, "When you step on the gas, the tiny snails on treadmills do their very best, but it’s just not enough. And you drive on highways."–and theft is not high on my list of concerns, but they pointed out that the car alarm circuit was undoubtedly closelyinvolved with things like my ignition, as part of that whole preventing-theft thing, and so a very nice mechanic spent quite awhile playing musical circuits with the main electrical relays until he found the combination that left me without a car alarm, but with exciting tidbits like "brakes" and "air conditioning." But now it’s home, and not going off, and all is right with the world.

At least until the elephant seals attack.

ETA: Also, I am reminded that just to put the final fillip on our quest, as we were driving down the road, we saw feral (?) chickens on the side of the road. I stopped. We nearly got out to go rescue them, if they indeed needed rescue, but Kevin needed to get to work sometime today, and I didn’t really want feral chickens loose in the back of the car while we were at the DMV, and anyway, we were near Bynum, and they can be expected to have feral chickens.

They were white leghorns. I still feel a little guilty.

*He was fine, thank god, and I had a few minutes of deep horror when I discovered that the other car had, in fact, hit the passenger side door. Fortunately they were turning from a dead stop and thus damage was limited, but jesus christ. 

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