"Pretty Much Sums it Up for Me."

Struggling, folks.

Don't exactly know why. Job is going well. Kids seem to be doing fine. And I've got a great suit and terrific henchmen.

I'd like to chalk it up to the typical Sunday blahs, but they've been dragging on and on and on and on and on.

I need to get out more. But Saturday was spent getting ready for a Scout fundraiser and doing the fundraiser. Friday was spent getting classes ready for next semester.

I don't know what I need. But I feel exhausted.

Part of it might be anxiety about an unusual work week coming this week: Two days at the actual RWMC to get trained up for a new drill position and then a drill. I'm wondering if it's not too late to tell them that I'm going to opt to work from home full-time and to forget about having me on the drill team. But working from home full-time presents a lot of other challenges that I'm not sure I'm ready to face.

I guess I'm tired of my rut but I don't want it to change.

We could have gone to Yellowstone National Park this weekend, Free entry. But we had obligations. Which is fine.

But I'm tired, boss.

At the Sign of the Spoon and Carrot, Again . . .

There are a few things I have to grapple with:

1. I am a crap writer.

2. No one is interested in anthropomorphized animals anymore.

3. This might be yet one of the other thousand things I have written that "might go somewhere." or it might not.

They say you don’t own a inn, a inn owns you.

And, for a certain value of true, that statement is as true as saying “You don’t smell a pair of socks, you smell the pair of feet that wears them.”

I guess what I’m saying is that things as may be are true or not true, but most of what most people say is bollocks.

Take that inn, for example.

It may own me in a way in that the damn thing keeps trying to return to nature, what with mushrooms growing in the thatch and the wood rotting as soon as you look at it and the guests sleeping in beds they don’t intend to pay for and pissing in them when they get caught leaving.

But I own it in that when the latest bodge job is done and what was sprouting or rotted or skipped out is gathered up and tossed on a bonfire next to the pig sty as a warning to all the rest, everything sort of behaves for a while. And the non-paying guests, while only singed and not really burned too badly, they try to bring the local constabulary in, what remembers where the best ale comes from and makes them pay up and I promises not to start any more fires and things go as well as can be at a inn just off the track of adventurers can.

Those of you know the stories, allow me to tap the side o’ me nose knowingly and I’ll try not to splat any matter in your tea. We knows what goes on at a inn just off the track of adventurers.

And let me say that this inn, it may own me a trice, but things that lie therein, I own them. And them in power, be they good or bad or naïve or indifferent, they knows it. And like a singed debtor working in the pig sty next to the burn pile to work off the damage done, they know toeing the line is the only way the inn At the Sign of the Spoon and Carrot will ever do business with them.

MATTRESS SALE!

Storytime with Brian:

Spent a good portion of our day Friday mattress shopping. Shopping for me is akin to a surgical strike: Reconnaissance followed by a quick stab that has me leaving the store with the item I wanted along with something sweet for later, all in less than fifteen minutes.

That is not, apparently, how one shops for a mattress. Mattress shopping involves testing out mattresses while having awkward conversations with masked people standing there watching as you lie in a bed with your wife in a comically open and public space. Every time we went into a mattress store - and there are many mattress stores - we were asked "what can we do for you?" Apparently saying "sell us a mattress" is too obvious a thing to say.

I found myself wishing there were a Dairy Queen nearby so I could shop for mattresses the way Dave Barry shops for cars - namely, ambling around the lot with a chocolate-dipped cone and looking at stickers until a salesman appears and ambling away fast enough to cause sonic booms. But that, alas, is also not how one shops for a mattress.

Today involved simply buying the mattress we shopped for yesterday. That took an hour. And proved once again that my well of small talk, historically never very deep, was shallowed to comic proportions by the previous day's activities.

And I will have to dip into the well again, as I will be "in charge" the day the new mattress is delivered.

That's my courageous story.