A random lottery of meaningless tragedies, and one bright moment.

It's been a week of stupid.

My car decided it was time to die, for one. Jude is a 13 year-old Corolla, and I've driven her hard for three years now. I know it's technically not her fault, but I swear she breaks down on purpose just when it's the least convenient. I'm not sure why she hates me; I've kept her fairly well oiled and take her lots of places. Yet, I know that if I  mention any sort of surplus of money in her presence, she will immediately break down and cost me that exact amount of money. She *hears* me. It's creepy.

Anyway, Jude is actually going to just stop working sometime very soon. My mechanic stopped adding up parts and estimates around $1200 and suggested it was simply time to get a new car. So dad and I started looking, but the reality is, I just want an exact replica of Jude--except working, and maybe a little younger. And that, for the pittance I'm able to pay right now, seems virtually impossible.

 

This is what I sing to Jude when I'm trying to keep her appeased.

Then, in the midst of this futile car search, my house starts to fall apart.

I mean, it kind of already was; some of you are familiar with the leak that seems to be coming from the tub, ruining the dining room ceiling, even though we have had a plumber and various other experts investigate the hole. At this point I'm thinking of just putting some crown moulding around the damn thing and calling it an architectural feature. I'd call it a skylight, but it looks up into the underside of my tub, so it's more of a tublight.

Aside from the tublight, I just got a notice that the condo board is sending someone to examine for potential basement problems. And yes, that same night, I noticed a serious crack running from stem to stern of the basement floor, with a bump in the middle heaving upwards. No one tells you to watch for these things, just like no one tells you that your furnace humidifier can malfunction and start pouring water onto your roommates' boxes of comics (this also happen this week). So I guess the good news is that the basement guy happens to be coming just as the floor starts to heave up, revealing what will undoubtedly be a haunted pet cemetary or a very large, very angry groundhog that got lost and refuses to ask for direction.

Adding to the 'spring has sprung' joy I'm feeling, I had a run-in with my new animal foe. Readers of my old blog will recall that my old apartment had a bat infestation--surely four bats counts as an infestation--and that I discovered I'm afraid, not so much of bats, as bats flying into my face. Well the other day I was headed outside on a break at work and as I exited the building, what should I espy mere inches from my head, but a bat. He was mysteriously scaling the wall, one brick at a time, his scaly black winged arms finding shaky purchase in the mortar in between. After an initial bout of panic and fleeing, I returned to watch him and took this footage:

 

 

Remind you of anything? Here, let me help:

 

 

So I've surmised that the bat is obviously an Adam West fan, and was mimicking something he'd seen on TV. Which we've all tried to do at some point, but this little monster was actually managing it pretty well.

Anyway, all of this was offset by one incredibly cool and wondrous event:

The Bloggess followed me.

(On twitter, not on the street. But that would have been just as cool, if not cooler.)

I wrote a post not long ago about the upcoming Ottawa Comiccon, and how I was hoping to get a picture with Wil Wheaton because if Wheaton and I were friends, then by proxy I was basically also friends with The Bloggess. (If you don't know who the Bloggess is, good. Don't go read her blog, because she is way funnier than I am and you'll never come back.) Anyway, Wheaton hasn't responded to the pictures or links to the blog post I've tweeted out--I'm pretty sure he's straight-up ignoring me at this point--but out of the blue, my Twitter pinged and said, 'The Bloggess is now following you'. 

I happen to be on the phone with my best friend MJ at the time, which was a good thing because I never would have calmed down enough to manage dialing her number and I would have melted in a sticky pile of goo from sheer excitement. 

Yes, Jenny Lawson follows lots of people. Yes, it's maybe not such a big deal, and about 20,000 people in the world could read this post and comment that they, too, are followed by the Bloggess. But it's a thrill for me, one I can't explain exactly. It's better than getting a nod from a movie star in a restaurant, slightly less cool than getting chatted up by one in a coffee shop--which happened to me once, but how was I supposed to know it was Daniel Alfredsson? Anyway, I went straight from checking my twitter to having a really torturous chiro appointment, and the whole time the doctor was whacking away at my funhouse-style vertebrae, I just kept thinking, "The Bloggess is following me..."

It was a good week, in a way.