see sean’s heart stop…
…no, seriously.
sunday was a bad day. bad days happen. you know the nice thing about bad days? no matter what, eventually they end. it might feel like that twenty-four hours took 2,467 hours to end, but eventually they DO end. i just had no idea it would make me think, for a brief moment, that the worst part of the shit day would come at the end.
the hours of midnight to two were fairly pleasant – but at 2:01am i got an email forwarded to me that created all kinds of work drama and bullshit that was, uncharacteristically, my fault. this kind of shit is NEVER my fault, but i guess now i have to say “ALMOST never”. this caused me to not sleep worth a shit, so i on two hours of sleep i was up at 6:45am and playing with the puppies. this, i guess, was a third pleasant hour as i had time with them. then i jumped in the shower only to realize all my razors were worn (and cost about $30 i don’t have to replace) but i had to shave head and face, which kinda stung a little.
then i go to bring the dogs in and budnik just wasn’t having it. kept running from me. here i’m TRYING to get into work, get my day going, and he keeps tearing away from me – which was stressful as hell ’cause i don’t like to leave them out when i’m away (pitbulls tend to get dognapped in this town). but i eventually wrangled him into the house, only to get in my car and have the “low coolant” light come on (which is still a problem, i should add – it appears i have a small leak somewhere…i’m thinking the water pump for some reason). i topped it off with some water from the kitchen sink (NOT the recommended way to do it, but when you’re broke and there…) and went to the shop.
and business was slow as all hell. like creeping death kinda slow. but i still ended up there late, so by the time i was out i wasn’t feeling the gym (long day coupled with only two hours of sleep will do that to a guy) so i just went home. and that’s when it happened:
it timed out like something out of a movie. i got home with a sense of relief – no more customer stress (which is rare in my world these days, so when it happens it seems unusual as well as stressful, which actually seems to add to the stress level), car was running fine, the sun had set, time to enjoy the dark and drift off to sleep in a bit. i put the dogs out in the newly cool fall air, walked out with them for a second or two, then about faced to walk back into the house, but as soon as my back turned “crack…crack…crack…CRASH!”
i spun around in the dark to see the ends of a branch that moments before had been twenty-something feet in the air now only four feet from my feet. i turned on the porch light and saw budnik staring at me, then the fallen tree, then me, like “what the fuck just happened, dad?”.
but i didn’t see copper – and i knew she had headed off to the yard to go to the restroom and would have been right under that tree. i called for her. no response – not even the jingle of a collar. the tree was in such shadow and darkness i could barely see under or around it, so i grabbed a flashlight and frantically started looking through the wooden carnage (all this took only a minute or two, i should add – typing it is almost taking longer than the actions itself as i keep a light handy when they go out at night to find dude’s toys in the dark) and when i went around the last side of the tree, there was miss copper, midway through…um…her “business”, as it were, looking up at me through the flashlight beam with a look that said, “do you mind? give a girl a second, would you?”
branches from the fallen tree were less than three feet from her as she did this. she walked up to me and sad in her classic “crouch down and kiss me” pose. i complied and then looked her in the eye and said, “did that scare the shit out of you, miss copper?”. she looked at me with that look i get from women all the time that says, “i can’t even find that funny” and got up and walked in the house.
and finally the bad parts of the day were over.
this is being written on tuesday morning – time for a chainsaw party!