Beats, Birds and Breakage

Yesterday began with rousing from a semi-restful snooze on our recently reassembled waterbed. After adjusting to the oddness of having to actually climb out of bed I called in to my soon-to-be former workplace and let them know that I would be taking the morning off to attend an important appointment with E. As usual, their response was bafflingly obtuse and I was left shaking my head in wonderment at how insane this job had nearly made me. We went to the ob-gyn and a few moments later I heard the most stupendously beautiful sound; Acorn's heartbeat. My natural response, "I must record this!", was patiently tolerated by the women in the room.

We returned home, E. took off to her internship and I tried to figure out my daily "mix" of job searching, errands, staring at the wall, messing with the dog, exercising and cooking. I decided to go browsing at a local pawn shop. While they had some tools I had been craving they were really beaten up and missing parts, so I passed and reassured myself that the tools I had were enough. On the way home the Beetle's clutch cable broke. For those readers who don't speak "Gearhead", a clutch cable breaking is one of the least frequent car problems, on the order of once every 150,000 miles. You'll probably wear out your engine before your clutch cable breaks. Since I am overly cautious when it comes to 37- year-old-vehicle maintenance I had picked up a spare clutch cable and accelerator cable a few months back. The cable broke about three blocks from my house, on a slight incline. After pushing the car out of traffic and up a slight rise (note, this is incredibly tiring even at sea-level), I was sitting and gasping for breath when a guy pulled up in his expensive SUV and offered to help. I thanked him and said I could use a tow for a few blocks. He forced an uncomfortable smile and stammered that he didn't have the time, he had to go skiing, and good luck. Ooooookaaaayy.... thanks for stopping, brother. I started the engine, turned the car around manually, coasted down the incline I had just pushed the car up and popped it into first gear, no clutch. Got home without having to stop and sighed with gratitude at my amazingly good bad fortune.

A few hours later as I was fixing the car I heard a great commotion of crow-noise outside. It went on for many minutes so I went to see what the issue was, expecting a bird of prey or dog or similar. I found a crow in a bush in our front yard that seemed very disoriented, unable to fly or even hold on to the bush. Its murder had been making all the noise, and quieted after I came back out to collect the injured bird. Wary of Avian flu and West Nile virus, I kept the crow in an empty trash bin with a lid and contacted animal control. They came by about an our later to pick up the crow who was still alive and very disoriented. The guy reassured me that there was nothing to worry about.