*blinks in confusion*

[errantember]

I generally manage to cruise smoothly through life without really taking any action. When I'm suddenly expected to actually *do* something, I often end up in a similar headspace of a tree sloth who, while reaching very, very slowly and with total concentration toward a juicy beetle, suddenly finds himself grasping, instead, a ping-pong paddle while facing off against Ariel Hsing in the Beijing Championship Semifinals.

Today was such a day.

I got up around 1 PM, which is early for me, so I was already confused. I couldn't see because of shit in my eyes, so it was hard to tell what time it was. After finally mustering the energy the scrub the sand out of my eyes well enough to read, I discovered that some kind of scooter-related buying excitement was happening with spottedvasa and that I might be expected to actually be somewhere at 9 AM the next day. The thought of being somewhere at 9 AM *tomorrow* when I haven't yet gotten up *today* was way too much to deal with, especially when I found out the chicken situation had once again gotten more complicated.

So, the chickens.

The chickens were supposed to delivered on Wednesday. Then on Thursday. Now, still disoriented by consciousness and a palpable vehicle purchase vibe with a possible deadline trumpeting across Austin, I discovered two things.

1) No chickens today.

*This* part is *good*. I don't have a coop yet, because I'm going on the Funky Chicken Coop Tour this Saturday to get ideas of how to build the coop, so delays in chicken delivery reduce the amount of time that Unquantified Levels of Poultry Chaos might have to be loose in my sun room.

2) The guy, who lives in fucking Lakeway (not in my bed, we'll note) not *only* wants me to drive all the fucking way out there on Friday to get the chickens, he *also* wants a ride into town. For this, he's willing to forgo the $20 he was going to charge me for the chickens, feed, and hay.

Keep in mind, I haven't even gotten out of bed yet. It's ok to feel sorry for me now. You can do it later, too, if that works better for you.

While these little gems are slowly sinking in, I get up, eat some "breakfast," feed the dogs, dose the rabbit, and think about what I'm doing for the rest of day. Shopping would be good, since I haven't gone this week, and going to Poly Dinner also sounds good, so I figure I can hit Wheatsville on the way back from Central Market afterward.

At this point, Amy calls. Do I want to go for a walk? I like the idea of a walk, but today already seems too complicated for it to be even remotely possible to have time for one. Anything, on the other hand, that gets my ass moving is probably a good thing, and I can't *really* think of any reason not to go. The nagging feeling that I'm forgetting something persists, but luckily I at *least* manage to remember to *finally* get an appointment for acupuncture which I've been meaning to do for about two weeks, but haven't been awake early enough to schedule.

I feel like I should answer both the chicken guy and spottedvasa as soon as possible so everyone can plan their day. I also can't find anything *specifically* wrong with going to help her with the scooter, except for the General Obscenity of being up at 8 AM. There was an offer to sleep over, which was very appealing, but 1) I have to do dog feeding/rabbit dosing later in the day, and 2) once I leave the house I wasn't planning on coming back until I's done with everything.

Now, as if this wasn't all complicated enough, The tires on my CR-V are iffy (we don't have time for *that* story right now, Thank God) so I'm hellbent on the idea of using my electric scooter for all this. It can barely do the home-to-Central-Market route and back without re-charging, and although *most* of my destinations are on that route, there is some extra driving and *no* recharge points. I could *also* simply keep going north until I end up at spottedvasa's, but, as much experience as he has with drugs and needles, I don't really trust my roommate to dose the rabbit without supervision. The scooter takes at least five hours to charge from this kind of adventure, so there's *no* *way* I could actually come back to the house in between at some point in any of this.

Isn't this beginning to seem like some kind of game show where you're confronted by Satan and required to do pre-calculus story problems while tripping on bad acid? I thought so.

I call Amy back, and say *yes* to the walk, because it's the only thing that's clearly a good idea, and it's definitely on any route I take, *and* she's already on her way to Flipnotics and is basically waiting for me to show up. I reluctantly make the painful executive decision that rabbit dosing has to take precedence over Vasa-snuggling, blearily herd everything I think I'll need for the rest of the day toward the scooter, and wobble northward.

The rest of this pretty much degenerates into Whining, which, we'll note, is really more effort than I was thinking it would be, which is *more* Whining.

On the trip north, I have several close calls with Idiots on the road, and am already experiencing much higher levels of visceral fear riding the scooter, probably because the thought of spottedvasa getting one is nerve-wracking, *and* because hearing about it has been causing me to break, however briefly, out of the high level of denial necessary to ride a two-wheeled vehicle sanely in Austin and actually think about how fucking *dangerous* it all is.

At least I'm not wearing sandals this time.

I get together with Amy for the walk, and it's great. No real complications there, except the mammoth dead fish we saw not *one* but *two* of. They were at least 15 lbs each, kind of carp-y.

It was then that we saw the chicken.

"The chicken?"

Yes. The chicken. Specifically, a very healthy-looking Rhoade Island Red hen. Now, normally, seeing a chicken in the bushes during a walk around town lake would be a brief novelty, noted, giggled at, and perhaps mentioned briefly in later dinner conversation. Today, though, today was different. Today, I had imagined I'd already *have* a few chickens. Chickens I was already building a coop for. Unexpected chickens.

Unexpectedly *FREE* chickens.

I'm sure you can imagine the marginally, graspingly insane gleam in my eye at that precise moment in time.

The hilarity that should, by all rights, have ensued in my futile but highly amusing efforts to capture this wild, egg-producing gift from heaven, not to mention the subsequent comedy of errors as the chicken accompanied me, riding the scooter throughout the rest of my day (I mean, if you catch a chicken at Town Lake, why *not* show it off and brag about it in public?) was, unfortunately, forestalled by the presence of a veritable fortress of poison ivy in the Area of Anticipated Poultry Pursuit. This is probably the first time poison ivy has *ever* been in any way helpful, and it's most *certainly* the last.

So, with a tear in my eye, I left the chicken to its freedom, and continued back to Flipnotics.

I figured I'd head out to Poly dinner around 7 PM so the traffic could die down. I ended up leaving about 7:30 PM due to various camera dramae, pulling into Central Market about 7:45 PM. As I slid into the parking spot, I noticed the scooter right next to mine was the Scooter Revolution model that mine is cloned from. It was even the same color, so they looked like twins! I thought "Perfect! Vasa's in the market for a scooter, so here she can see the electric and gas ones side-by-side!" I excitedly hurried off to show her.

Except she wasn't there.

Nor was she alone in her absence. In fact, *all* the other poly people were also not there. Why?

Because they were somewhere else. Just like the dinner.

The fact that I've been coming to the second Thursday dinner for something like three years should clue you in to just how confused I was today.

So they, for like the eighteenth time today, I have to make another annoyingly difficult decision. Not *only* can I not both go shopping and go to poly dinner because of time and range constraints, but my extracurricular driving to Flipnotics has the scooter to a point where I'm not even sure it can make it home. There's only like an hour left of poly dinner, and it's at least 15 minutes away, but it *is* on the way home. If I ditched dinner and went to Wheatsville, there is a *chance* that I might be able to re-charge the scooter, but it's no sure thing.

At this point my brain completely loses patience, decides to cut its losses and find a better host, and jumps out, *SPLAT*!, onto the sidewalk. Once there, *it* can't move and *I* can't think, so I sit there staring at it for a few minutes until I see a brown fuzzy shape sniffing at it speculatively.

I beat the Pomeranian's leg-lift entirely out of reflex.

With a tired *slop*, I dropped my brain back into my helmet, figuring it would be in the right place when I put it back on, decided, in mindless act of which Buddhists would be proud, to go to dinner anyway, since spottedvasa would both have my safer sex kit for my date on Friday and probably be willing to pretend to feel sorry for me after my trying day, and performed a bowl-inversion cranialectomy while strapping down for liftoff.

Once I got to poly dinner everything was better.

Except it *just* *now* occurring to me that Chicken Guy might want a ride *back* to Lakeway.

Oh *GOD*.