And Things Were Going So Well
Two things happened last week that weren't very much fun at all. The first relates to the housesit I'm doing in Brisbane, which up until this particular point had been rather fabulous. Upon returning from a nice day out on the Gold Coast, I found the sad little body of Pika, the family cat, outside the front door. It looked like someone had run her over, and carried her up off the road. Naturally, panic flooded over me, as this is a pretty bad thing to have happened on my watch as a housesitter. There wasn't really anything I could've done though, and I'd actually specifically been warned that the poor wee bugger liked to play chicken with passing cars out on the road. I can always imagine that if I'd stayed home that day, and sat on the couch with her purring madly on my lap, she'd still be alive and drooling on my hand, but what about the next day? It's not like I could lock her in the cupboard indefinitely and sneak her chopped mouse pieces every few hours.
So I've said goodbye to the lovely Pikachu, and wished her the best for her next set of nine lives, or her stint in kitty heaven, where the houses, trees and rivers are all made of fish, there are endless fields of warm laps and disembodied massage fingers, and bits of fluff on string bobble from every bough. Adieu kitty, adieu.
The second bad thing that happened last week was that T's girlfriend Kathie was knocked off her motorcycle by a drunk driver, who then gallantly fled the scene. She broke both her wrists rather badly, with the left one a real mess. T emailed the xrays through, and... yeah. Let's just ponder the word splinters and leave it at that. According to T, she had five hours of surgery (two teams, one on each hand), then she's in for six weeks in plaster, and finally two years of rehab. It's a bloody nightmare, and although I've only met Kathie in person once I feel quite bad for her. I also feel seething, roiling rage for the complete asshole who decided to drive home drunk, and then compounded the crime by driving off and leaving her there in blinding pain. Yes, you are a bad person. I hope this costs you dearly.
As for the people out there who are thinking of driving home drunk, or high, or deathly tired - DON'T. Take a taxi, take a bus, sleep on the couch, get a friend to drive you home, or snooze in your damn car. Don't get behind the wheel of hundreds of kilos of steel and plastic and try and thread it through the streets of your town. You might hurt or kill someone, or you might hurt or kill yourself. Or you might hit someone on a motorbike one night in Kenmore, and be savagely beaten about the neck and face by her friends with a running lawnmower. Just a thought.