...yesterday was interesting.

It started out at 6 AM as a really beautiful morning. I knew I was going to want to get up & out and go for a walk, but I was really comfortable and not in a huge hurry to get out of bed. The cats were already down in the kitchen meowing by the pantry door, waiting for the gal with the opposable thumbs to get the heck out of bed already , get the big bag of food out of the pantry and feed them...

So I was just luxuriating, as it were, in the big comfy bed, with all that space and non-cat aloneness... when I noticed a brownish-black sort of fuzzy piece of something on my blankie. Of course I didn't have my glasses on because I'd just woken up, but my first instinct was to just brush it off the bed until -- ick -- I realized in was not only a spider but one of those crazy jumping spiders. I have them all over my house, mostly outside, and they are usually tiny babies. But this was sort of the Mac Daddy of jumping spiders. And I was instantly totally freaked out.  Crap. If you aren't familiar with jumping spiders, they really, really jump -- very fast and very high and usually straight at your face and they freak you out and then they disappear and you don't know where they are. Well, I didn't want it jumping away and then getting back in my bed in the middle of the night, right?  So I didn't want to startle it. I carefully grabbed a Kleenex, hoping to maybe grab it up and throw it out the front door, but I knew it would never let me get close enough to it to actually grab it up into a Kleenex, let alone go all the way out into the hall in one, down the stairs and out the front door. They are really frisky little fellows. So I thought, shit, what am I going to do? I eased out of bed and was just standing there looking at it, in all its hairy creepiness, and by now it had woken up, too, and knew I was looking at it. It was cleary getting antsy.

So in a sort of panic, I threw open the attic door, which is in my bedroom next to my bed, and then just really quickly smacked it up into the attic and slammed the door. The attic is already Spider-ville, what's one more, right?



[Below: Stairway to Spider-Ville]



So, out of sight, out of mind. At least, for now.

I did then go on my walk, did my yoga, worked a little in the yard. And then decided to go see a movie with my $50 AMC gift card! I really, really seriously considered seeing Public Enemies again, but I also really want to see the new Harry Potter movie. But then I noticed that Up was still showing and since that wasn't going to stay around much longer and Harry Potter would be around for the rest of the summer, I opted to go see Up.

Right away, things went badly. I was one of the few people in the theatre lobby at that early hour. I bought popcorn, which I don't usually do because it's just a bunch a stale chemicals and really, really expensive. But I had that darn gift card and I was going to see a cartoon, basically. So I thought, what the heck? I'll pay $9 for a bag of popcorn and a bottle of Pepsi Tap Water. I turned around from the concession stand and almost immediately dropped my bag of popcorn and more than half of it scattered out all over the nice clean early morning floor, totally pissing off the people that worked there. And I said, kind of loud, really, "Oh shit!" And they all looked at me, and I said, "Do I have to clean this up?"

And really unhappily, they said, "We'll get it."

I apologized, picked up what was left of my bag of popcorn and off I went. And it turned out that I didn't like the movie at all. How weird, right? I usually love Pixar movies. And it started out really cute, but after about 10 minutes or so it changed into a boys adventure story and I just didn't like it. And I was stewing because I really would have rather been watching Public Enemies if I was going to watch a sort of boys adventure story anyway, right? So I walked out on Up. And I decided to try to sneak into the theater that was showing Public Enemies instead. But I couldn't find it! There are, like, 17 theaters in that place but they're all in confusing little quadrants. I even cut through the endlessly long ladies' bathroom that has an exit at both ends, thinking that maybe Public Enemies would be showing over at the other end of it -- but it wasn't. Then suddenly I was out in the lobby where everyone recalled vividly how I had made them clean up after me so early in the morning and then had gone off in the other direction to see a movie, so no way were they not going to notice me half an hour later, traipsing across the huge lobby, looking for a different theater to go into.

So then I got really grumpy and left. And it was only twelve noon.

But the day got lots better after that, and in fact, was really rather splendid. My lone girlfriend here in town had lent me Inkheart and August Rush, so I wound up watching those in shifts through the day/evening/night and I really loved both of those films (the vodka martinis probably aided in the degree to which I liked them, but so what!) And I also spent a lot of time out in my yard, just writing in my journal and sitting and looking at how lovely the world is and remembering last Friday when my friend was still here, visiting me from Denver. So it all ended on a great note.

And on that note, I'm going to get Saturday underway over here, gang. Hope you're having a groovy weekend, wherever you are! Thanks for visiting! See ya.