Taturday

My Saturday is a day that most of the world actually refers to as 'Tuesday'. It is the one day of the week when I am basically guaranteed to not have to get up early, not go to work, and definitely not lead a church service followed by a lunch potluck where I spend most of the time trying to think of appropriate questions to ask a pastor from the DR Congo. Ah, Tuesday: a day where I am allowed to do nothing at all*.


By this theory, everyone else's Monday is my Friday and their Saturday is the Wednesday where I daringly go out and party it up at Mennonite bachelorette parties even though I do have to get up at 7:30 to prepare for church the next day. I am such a wild child.

Like I said, most people do not follow my weird week system but it would appear that there is at least one other person in the West End who does, and he had himself a pretty wild Monday/Friday night and decided to pay us a visit on our Tuesday/Saturday morning in his still-inebriated state. Unfortunately, even though we have the same mixed-up week system, he and I did not become fast friends.

I was preparing to go for my late-morning Taturday jog when I heard a knock coming from our Hobbit Door. I opened the door leading into our front porch to discover a rather intoxicated stranger peering in through the hobbit-door window. After some effort I found out that the man was looking for someone named Kristin and did not believe that she didn't live here. I shut the door on him and waited for him to leave. He sat down in our Gandalf rocking chair and waited for Kristin to emerge.

I was more or less fine with this. If you're going to put comfy furniture with cushions and everything on your front steps, it's kind of assumed that people are going to use it once in a while. I decided to slip out the back door instead, so as not to wake him. However, as I walked to the backdoor I couldn't help but notice that my inebriated Taturday friend was having similar thoughts. Through various windows in our house I could see the top half of his head saunter around our side yard. I was slightly concerned. Then he began throwing himself against our back door, and I became quite concerned.

I started pounding on the back door and yelling "This isn't your house! Kristin doesn't live here!" and other phrases I hoped would encourage him to leave. My mother, overhearing the polite conversation between me and my Taturday friend, emerged from the shower, assessed the situation, and joined me in trying to convince him that he had the wrong place (as though the mishmash of monuments to various bits of pop-culture weren't a tip-off).

Not to be discouraged, the man continued to alternate between throwing himself against the door, kicking buckets of sand (I have given up questioning the strange things that appear in our back yard so I have no real explanation for these), swearing at us, and making eye contact with us through the windows whilst flipping us off. It only took a few minutes for this routine to become tiresome, at which point we phoned the police.

As usually is the case with such things, our Taturday friend vacated the premises moments before the cops arrived, but I pointed them in the right direction. Turns out there was already a warrant out for the guy's arrest and the police came back less than 20 minutes later to say they nabbed him at a convenience store.

Crisis having been averted, I went for a jog and spent most of the rest of the day sunbathing on the deck. And that, my friends, is what Taturday is all about: apprehending criminals who think your name is Kristin, and lazing around in a swimsuit in an inner-city backyard.

*Incidentally, this is why I throw a temper tantrum every Tuesday, beginning at about 4:30 pm and ending at 6:30 when I realize that it won't be raining buckets this Tuesday either and yes, I do have to go to yet another group gardening day at church and, awesome as the garden is, who the hell wants to go to a church garden meeting on a Saturday night?