The past 7 days: brought to you by Satan

The past 7 days: Brought to you by Satan 

 Hello everyone! Get ready for the next Series: several rants on how awful the last 7 days have been. Here are days 1 and 2.

It began last Wednesday morning, when I awoke to find my dog in the process of dying by the back door. Details are sad and unnecessary, but she looked in pretty rough shape. It was my day off, and I was up at 7am mostly because I had to do the Community Garden Food Bank delivery. I was severely uninterested in leaving poor Kaitie to drive out to St. Boniface to deliver an 50 pink tomatoes and 12 rubbery carrots to a foodbank that was about to receive a tidal wave of leftovers from Winnipeg Harvest anyway, but Karen had been doing it every single week of the summer so I couldn’t exactly cop out on the one day she asked me to do it for her.

I arrived at the church, unlocked the door, and realized that the alarm pass code I had previously memorized had readily evaporated into the oblivion of my subconscious mind. I hurriedly began to phone everyone in my phone book who might know the code, but half a minute later the alarm began to blare. I went and sat on the basement floor and cried angrily to myself until the alarm stopped sounding, then phoned the alarm company. I’ve done this several times, but seeing as I don’t actually have a security code, there’s nothing the company itself can actually do for me. So I had to start phoning trustees. I only remembered who 2 of them were, and one was already gone to work. I finally got it sorted out, and went and deposited the vegetables of little consequence in the basement of the food bank.

Traffic was a nightmare. When I got home, Kaitie was clearly about to die. I phoned the vet to see if I could move her appointment up. I could not. In the spirit of a university student who has forgotten what school is like, I had chosen to leave all my homework to do on my day off. So I sat there stroking my corpse-like pet and tried to finish reading The Dangerous Book for Boys**. I got about halfway through it, and the vet called to say I could bring Kaitie in early. I ran down the street to enlist the help of my friend in loading Kaitie into the car.

By the time we got Kaitie onto the vet’s table, she was barely breathing and seemingly unaware of anything going on around her. I expected the vet to come in, take one look at her, and tell me she wasn’t going to make it. Instead, he examined her for about 15 minutes, and then told me he didn’t think she was going to make it. While he was explaining this to me, she stopped breathing entirely. Surprise! The vet became horribly awkward and kept on apologizing for my loss and telling me how much everything would be.

I know that nothing is free in this town, and I don’t expect it to be, but I still found it rather amusing that I was charged $60 for a check-up that ended in diagnosing my dog as dead. Had I chosen not to move her appointment up at all, she would have died on our kitchen floor before I got her to her appointment and I could have done the diagnosis myself.  But I’m being uncharitable. The vet did a good job, and I was just glad I didn’t have to decide to euthanize her.

Anyways. I went home, logged on to the university Blackboard site, and found out that my sadistic ecocriticism professor had assigned us 125 pages of literary criticism to read. And 33 pages of it was written by John Locke. Have you ever tried to read John Locke? Dear God.

I wasn’t much in the mood to read it, so I did that fun thing where you read the first sentence of every paragraph and go to school and are still the only one who can comment on any of the reading because none of your classmates have done it either.

Then there was Thursday. The only bad thing that happened with Thursday was I found a letter at the bottom of our letter basket that I had chosen not to open when it arrived several weeks before. The letter told me that I owed the bank $10,000 and had until September 15 to prove I was still in school or they’d start charging interest. It was September 16. By the time I found the letter, the bank was closed. I knew there was no way I was going to get a proof of enrolment to them before October because the university has decided it would be a great idea to require proof of enrolment forms be handled by Student Central, which handles all the business of new university students and has an hour-long waiting line for most of September, and is also only open from 8 until 4. All I had to do was hand in that damn form and give them 7.50 and I had to stand in line for an hour? Every time I asked them if there was an alternative, they gave me a new and equally unhelpful answer. So I phoned the bank and left them a message promising I was still in school. Then I made curried carrot soup with the food bank carrots I had deemed too ugly to give to charity. I decided the soup was a tribute to Kaitie. Eating soup can be an emotional affair.

**a book that gets away with being remarkably sexist and heteronormative by being designed to look like it was made in the 1940’s, so’s no one will realize it was written in 2006 by men who should know better, and published by a company that should know EVEN better. All the same, there are some pretty wicked paper planes in this book. And it tells you how to make batteries. I am divided on how I feel about this book.