Excitement Abounds

Well, what an exciting week.

I'd like to introduce you to my new bff.

I don't have a picture of it, but imagine if you will a LG Rumor, in the lovely green color.

I don't know how I've lived this long without text messaging. Seriously, I never understood it before, and I always had the undying desire to shove phones into various orifices of texters. But I see the appeal now. It's easy. Lot quicker than picking up the phone and calling someone to tell them something simple.

And the pull-out keyboard? Oh my, I'm in love. I didn't have an unlimited text plan with my old phone, may it rest in peace after being smashed with a hammer for the heck of it. It was utter confusion trying to figure out how to backspace when I typed the wrong letter. I managed to send texts with only a bunch of gibberish while trying to get back to the beginning to start over. It just didn't work for me. I didn't even know how to compose a text. I could answer one, but that was about the extent of my ability.

But this new phone, oh yes, we will be friends for a very long time.

Though I promise I'm not going to become one of those people. You know the sort that can't finish a meal or go through the grocery without using their cell. I don't do that now because I think people look like total idiots walking around talking while tossing a loaf of bread in their cart. What is especially amusing to me are those who are so important that they have an earbud and they appear to be talking to no one as they vacilliate between bologna and old-fashioned loaf. When I see someone blocking an aisle because they've stopped to text, I want to ram their heels with my cart. And from personal experience, that hurts. It would get the point across.

That was the highlight of the week.

The rest involves a bad case of vertigo. I had it last year at about this time, and I was convinced I was dying of some exotic, incurable disease. I didn't know what vertigo even was until I explained the symptoms to my husband.

Whenever I rolled over at night in bed, I got this sensation that I was being flung from a tilt-a-whirl. Unsettling, at best. It tends to make you wake up with a gasp and a scream when you think your surroundings are moving but you are not.

"You've got vertigo," my husband told me.

"Vert-i-what?" I asked.

"Vertigo."

"Wasn't that a Hitchcock movie? Had something to do with birds?"

After he cleared it up for me, and that vertigo had nothing to do with a movie about having your eyes pecked out by crows, I looked it up on Google. It passed, and I only noticed it while lying down. At the same time, my sinuses were making me nutsy, cuckoo, crazy and my ear was plugged up.

It was no different this time except I got that dizzy, room-spinning, going to fall flat on my ass feeling anytime I tilted my head or stood up. A few times, I was sitting still when it felt like someone spun me around in a desk chair - except I wasn't sitting in a desk chair. It's not been fun, though it's better today. My head and ear are all plugged up, but I'll live, I suppose.

I did head out to the grocery on Wednesday when the symptoms were at their worst. I had no choice. Someone had to go, and my husband was going to be out of town. It wasn't so bad as long as I made no sudden moves, which totally goes against my shopping philosophy of get in, get it done, and get the hell out of there.

But while shopping, I observed this little old man guy. Short little dude, totally white-haired buzz cut. He looked like it'd been a few days since he'd shaved. He walked with a bit of a stagger, carrying one arm folded across his chest. On closer inspection, one side of his face looked a bit droopy. Probably a stroke victim. With my vertigo, I was worrying he and I might end up having something in common besides roaming the aisles together.

I passed him several times in the store, and it seemed like he was carrying something different each time. He had bananas, and the next time I saw him, they were gone. Once, he had a quart of 10w-30 motor oil. He finished shopping when I did, and got in line behind me.

He had denture cream, a half-gallon of milk, and kabob skewers. I wouldn't have asked if I could have. I was waiting for a replacement frozen pizza because it wasn't until I was in the check-out did I see that it was missing part of it's protective covering. This meant he was paying for his purchases while I still stood there.

He made this sound that I can only describe as a cross between a rooster crow and a grunt. The young kid working about jumped out of his skin. Watching the exchange was so worth waiting for the slow pizza retriever.

When the little guy spoke, he sounded like a drunken pirate. Bless his little heart.

He said something about the denture cream, after making the rooster grunt.

"I put it in your bag," the nervous youngin' said.

"It's not mine," the little guy told him.

The checker sort of shook his head and smiled.

"Where's my bananas?" he asked and made the rooster grunt again. This time, there was something so gutteral and primal about it that it struck me somewhere in my fight or flight area of the brain, and not a moment too soon. The ditz who'd went after my Tombstone pizza finally arrived with it.

Whew, I was really afraid to see what might happen next.

Exciting.