The Laundromat, The Vole - It's All Too Much

I went to the laundromat tonight with my piles of soaked and muddy bedding from Saturday's exciting Hot Springs camping excursion. Barfing up slightly used barbecue & Rolling Rock into the French Broad River at 8 am in the pouring rain and mud is an experience I highly recommend, but that's another story. This story is about stress and the laundromat.

I am stressed. I am having job issues. I am supposed to leave on a big ole road trip to NEW YORK CITY and other points, including a brief visit to an ex boyfriend (Jesus! I didn't lose 20 pounds yet! Oh holy shit!) on Friday night. However, this is all depending on what the bone doctor says about M's arm tomorrow morning at 10:30. And on how my car does: I discovered yesterday that my car needs a new clutch. I mean, I knew it needed a new clutch, has for a while, but having it confirmed by an actual mechanic was a big blow. A $700 blow to be exact. So now my car is going to the dealership in the morning to get a new clutch even though it isn't really broken. This sucks and flies against a certain kind of poverty stricken hippie common sense (it ain't broke, don't fix it!) but on the other hand I always get panic attacks on the highway and if I know the clutch might be going out that will give them something to feed on. Argh.

So. . the dog. . . the son's arm. . . the job. . . the clutch. And then I got home and there was a dead vole in the hallway. M cleaned it up. I tried to clean up the vole blood, but it wouldn't come up. It's like a permanent stain, like a psychic stain in a haunted British castle or something, like this was Queen Elizabeth I of the Vole Kingdom, and now it's going to haunt us. I suggested this to M and said - "that would rock, not."
"Not," he said, "not at all, that would really suck having a vole ghost around."
"It would be cool for like 5 minutes," I said, "and then it would get old."
"No," he said, "it would be okay for about 15 minutes and then it would be bad." There followed some discussion about the nature of ghosts in general - they can't, like, actually kill you with an axe or anything, they have to use your own mind against you, which in the case of a vole might be interesting.
"That's funny," I said, becoming hysterical, "I think I'll blog it."
"Jesus Christ Mom," he said. "You need help."

On googling, we discover it was not a vole. It was a shrew. Yuck. Whatever.

Oh and there was this guy in the laundromat who was really drunk and talking about how they caught the guy who raped his 85 year old grandmother. "He ain't never gonna rape nobody agin!" he said, with fervor. "That dude is sick, man! And he's born n' bred Madison County, just like me."