Something funny happened on the way...

... to the back corner under the bed with the vacuum cleaner extension arm thingy.

Our vacuum is an upright, purple, airplane-sounding supposedly allergen-destroying Hoover. There is a stretchy plastic arm thing that hooks into the bottom, for reaching into dark corners and vacuuming couches and such. There is also a regular beater-bar setup. So I had this arm thingy attached, the vacuum running, and I was laying on the floor and reaching way in underneath the bed to eliminate the farthest, most menacing dust bunnies.

Allow me to explain that if I were the maker of vacuum cleaners, I would ensure that when the arm thingy is engaged, the beater bar would stop. Wouldn't that make all the sense in the world? Continuing on with my story...

I was wearing a hoodie, complete with strings around the neck. As I lay on the floor, next to the engaged beater bar, my neck was suddenly jerked over to the vacuum cleaner bottom and the strings tightened around my neck. I started yelling (I was the only one home, save for the poor cat who is terrified of the vacuum at the best of times) but to no avail. Because my neck was sucked right up to the bottom of the vacuum cleaner, I couldn't reach the on-off switch, which is toward the top of the machine. After much yelling and a few unpleasant visions of Adam coming home to find me strangled to death by the vacuum cleaner, I somehow reached the switch and turned the machine off. I pulled my strings out from around the beater bar and watched, horrified, as puffs of smoke oozed out from the bottom of the machine. The smell was actually so strong and awful that I had to open the window.

Suffice it to say that I tucked in my strings for the rest of the vacuuming experience. The vacuum seems to have recovered from its trauma, as have I.

The epitome of elegance - learning what not to say

You probably read the title of this post as "ee-pit-oh-mee".

When I was in my second year of an English degree, of all things, I was enrolled in a class called "Aging in Canadian Fiction". Great class, with a terrific prof named Stan Atherton. As part of the course, we would have weekly short presentations to do based on certain texts. One fine day, I was scheduled to do my presentation, and part of my written script was a paragraph including the phrase "the epitome of elegance". I can't remember what book or story it was from, but I most certainly remember what happened during the presentation. I had used the word "epitome" in speech for several years, but for whatever reason had never experienced it in print. I read it aloud to the class as "eh-pit-ohme". The prof very gently told me it's correct pronunciation after the presentation. I was mortified.

When I was in grade seven, I really wanted to be good friends with a certain girl (we'll call her Jane - not her real name) in my class. She was also friends with another girl from her community, and I thought that by saying something mean about the other girl, it would make her like me more. So I said "Leanne (not her real name) really is pretty ugly, isn't she?" I don't remember what Jane said to me, but I understood very clearly that that was the wrong thing to have said. I admire Jane for telling me so clearly and being loyal to her other friend. We did wind up friends - I'm not sure why she forgave me for being so cruel. I suppose I might have asked her to.

I was walking with some new-ish friends down the street not too long ago, and one of them asked me if I knew someone who lived in a house that we passed. "Yeah, she's kind of psycho," was my immediate, stupid, insensitive and unthought response. "Yeah, I was friends with her in school," the new friend responded. I could have shrunk into my shoes never to be seen again. I decided in that case to simply shut up and never mention it again.

Oddities

Well, perhaps not so much oddities as gross things.

I had a wonderful day at work today (I say "at work" like I'm in one place, but that is most definitely not the case) and it started out in a hallway of an elementary school watching a kid throw up all over the floor. Poor kid - throwing up seems like something that should always be a very private kind of thing. I don't do well with vomit (maybe when we have our own kids this will change?) so I quickly scurried my student down another hallway.

Adam went for a run this morning and on the track there was a pair of pigeon wings. Just the wings. He also smelled something kind of like cooking, looked over toward the funeral home on that block, and saw the smoke pumping out of their stack. Hmmm.

Wood smoke

I was taking some pumpkin chocolate chip cookies out of the oven today, when I got a whiff of something else entirely that transported me back to being about 9 years old and in back of my cabin at summer camp, hanging my bathing suit on the clothesline to dry.

This has nothing to do with the cookies or camp. My supervisor was here for a couple of days this week; we went for a drive after we were done work last night so she could see the Sara Gamp. She wasn't quite up to climbing over the beach rocks to examine it closely, but we saw it from the road. Seeing as how it is so close to my parent's house, I asked if she wanted to swing by there and see where I grew up. So we stopped in, and my mom and dad were wonderful and friendly and genuinely pleasant, not with any undertones of "why did you bring someone from the city to our house to see the mess without any warning?". It smells wonderful like wood smoke and friendly dog at their house. And then there was the awkwardness when my supervisor is telling them how well I'm doing, and they beam because it was them, after all, who brought me up, and I'm just sitting there feeling awkward and feeling as though I'm supposed to be smiling. My hair still smelled like their house when I went to bed.