Well, now that I got the Christmas thing off my mind for a while, I’m gonna meander on into other regions of my mind which have been wandering around aimlessly for a while now. Um, we’ll start with the Mom-mobile. A little while back, we took her in to get the oil changed, and the Wal-Mart dude wouldn’t do it ’cause he said there was damage to the oil pan. So we waited until we had a good opportunity to drop the van off at a mechanic to where we wouldn’t have to play car tag a lot with Ian’s little Celebrity. About a week before taking it in, we started hearing a clunk when we went over bumps, so when we took it in, we asked them to look at that too. They did, and they informed us that the sway bar (I keep trying to type “slay,” which worries me) had broken and as a result it had bent or mucked up the tire rods in the front as well. Woo. So all in all, we sank another 1K in the minivan, five times as much as we paid for it. We picked her up yesterday after work, and she’s running beautifully and I’m more than thrilled to have her back. I love my Mom-mobile!

So the next thing concerns my sweet little Cthulu who’s actually a girl though I keep refering to him as a her. No, I keep refering to her as a him. Dammit, I’m confused. So if I switch genders a lot in this explanation, bear with me; it’s the same snail. At any rate, recently Cthulu laid a bunch of eggs which I just cleaned up last night. I figure that probably took a lot out of her, especially considering how many eggs she laid. Otherwise, I really haven’t noticed any difference other than she was a bit more sluggish as of late. This morning, however, she was floating. Not entirely in her shell, even. This freaked me out ’cause the dead snails at the pet store were floating like that. So I picked her up with my fingers and looked at her, and she didn’t even respond to being picked up. Didn’t try to pull into the shell at all, didn’t move. I about cried. He’s been my little buddy for quite a while now, keeping me company at work and all that for so long. Maybe laying the eggs was a bit too much for him, or maybe he, er she was depressed that I removed her eggs and she committed suicide uh, somehow. While I was holding him though, she seemed to spit or something, probably releasing air from that little compartment or something. So I put her back and he sank to the bridge and didn’t move. I watched him for a while and he still didn’t move, so I thought I’d leave her in there a bit in case she came around later. I messaged Ian when he got up to go check on her, and he said she’s clinging to the glass on the other side of the tank, which means she’s alive. Phew! I was so upset that she might have died. I still worry, and I’ll check on her when I get home. Now to keep an eye on Nuggie and Azzie. They seem far too interested in procreating right now.

K, the third thing on my mind is my leg. Hehe, what a funny image. If I were that flexible I’d– Well, I probably wouldn’t be worrying about arthritis as much, eh? Where was I? Oh, my leg. Right. So yesterday or maybe the day before, I noticed a little pain on the back of my right calf just under my knee. It started off feeling like someone was pulling on my leg hairs, and with as infrequently as I shave my legs, that was sort of plausible except it was always in the same spot and there’s really no hair there. Then today it started feeling sharper, lasted longer and was in general, more irritating. Now it didn’t feel like a hair just getting pulled, it felt like getting stabbed when I walked. And not stabbed like little needles; we’re talking knives or maybe like that Swiss bayonet I got a while back. It hurt enough walking back from the Commons that I actually squeaked out a noise of pain, and coming from a reformed masochist, that’s saying something. I’ll look at it more when I get home, but I really don’t have the space to do it here except the bathroom and well, I’d hate to take up one of the stalls trying to get a look at the back of my leg. I’m not very flexible; this could take a while. So, I’ll just sit here and wonder what it could be until I leave here in uh, forever. Dammit! The day needs to go faster or I need to have more students come in. All this down-time makes my head hurt and gives me an upset stomach. Oh well. Time to color some more menorahs or make another dreidel.