Best News Ever

I just got the best news ever (hence the title of this post) and it's way too good to let it go by without making it a part of this little in-progress autobiography known as my blog.

This news is so good because a) it was a total surprise, b) it was sprung on me in the most delightful way, and c) everything about it is wonderful. No, Mack and I are not getting married again. Not yet anyway ;)

When I got this news, a smile stretched across my face and has not subsided even though it's been like an hour. In fact, it made me downright giddy, a state of emotional frenzy that alarms Mack but one that I imagine must be like heroin. This news is a miracle of news, it's a testament to the goodness of the universe, it's a karmic reward. It is the best news ever.

I would tell you what it is, but a) it's not my news to tell, b) I sort of like keeping it a secret, and c) what it is isn't the most important thing about this post. What is important is that life just got better, exponentially more perfect, even more full of joy, and it's moments like these that make the moments spent watching an old man's belly get drained of 10 liters of fluid fade away for ever.

Sure, trust me with people's lives.

Nursing school is going great. I got an A on my first exam, am getting Satisfactories on my care plans and assessments, and was allowed to shadow a nurse for the first time ever last week.

If only I didn't fail skills all. the. time.

So far I've had to go to remediation for two skills. Two out of four. Wanna know which two? Temperature taking (with a glass thermometer) and injections.

Wanna know why I failed? Well, I wanted to leave the thermometer in the pooper for 5 minutes when it only needs to be in there for two. And with injections, well, I forgot to put on gloves. Something about touching a blob of pretend flesh on a table top just didn't inspire me to glove up the way a human's greasy abdomen would.

Remediation is pretty painless. The teacher looks at you like, why are you stupid and how is this possibly challenging to you, if you can't do this you shouldn't really be pursuing this career path. And then you redo the skill for her, paying extra attention to emphasize the part you got wrong the first time. You ought to see the way I put on gloves now.

I managed to pass medication administration and doing an all-over physical assessment on the first try, and I plan to redeem myself for being a 50% failure on the next check off. That's right, crutch walking. I'm making you my bitch.

Covered bridges. Yes, that is my idea of adventure.

After Kentucky, I've spent most of my life in Indiana. Weekend visits with my dad, summers spent at Aunt Tina's pool, that time we lived with my grandpa, vacations spent at Aunt Becky's, Fourth of July lawn mower races, that addiction I had to my grandma. Indiana is to be credited with taming my city kid and teaching me humility. It's where I got comfortable with being dirty and fell in love with the smell of basements, where a big wheel and a drainage ditch meant endless entertainment.

While it's got a special place in my heart, Indiana is not at the top of my list of Places to Visit. Unless Heather mentions photographing covered bridges for two years in a row and I finally agree to go with her to the Covered Bridge Festival in Rockville, Ind.

Let's paint a picture of Rockville, Ind., shall we?

Population 2,765, 98.16% of which is white.
Home of the late Morris K. Jessup, UFO conspiracy theorist.
Known as the Covered Bridge Capital of the World.

Rockville is the seat of Parke Co., which has 31 covered bridges. There used to be 52 1/2 (the 1/2 one crossed a county line, and since Indiana is nothing if not fair, they don't claim that whole bridge)... can you imagine the fame of Rockville if those other 21 1/2 were still around? Mayhem.

The "festival" has become pockets of flea markets/giant yard sales hosted by several of the "towns" in Parke Co. Heather and I weren't really interested in funnel cakes or Amish brooms, so we tried to avoid the traffic clusters around the towns and see as many bridges as we could in three hours. We raced along gravel roads, stirring up dust and taking breaks to pee in fields, and managed to explore five bridges in all. To keep it exciting, we took a different pose photo at each one. We are animals.

In case the bridges don't get your blood going, we also stumbled across this old timey cemetery with graves from the 1800s. I had as much fun taking photographs here as I did at the bridges, and if the sun hadn't been on its way down, we could've dilly dallied here for an hour.

After our whirlwind bridge tour, I was all ready to lay down some money and spend the night at the jail inn. But Heather was dead set on camping and there was no vacancy at the jail, so after dinner at the Thirty Six Saloon (one of two restaurants in Rockville), we went to Rockville Lake Park. Heather pitched the tent while I made the fire. I got kicked out of Brownies in the second grade and I don't think Heather's mom would have ever paid for Girls Scouts, but it turns out we are a couple of bonafide outdoorsy types.  We were drinking beer in our camping chairs by a toasty warm fire in under 30 minutes. We even had a little visit from a glowy eyed raccoon.

If I'm having this much fun at something as senior citizen as a Covered Bridge Festival, maybe I should start going to Bingo. Or take up Bridge.

Because it's 96 degrees outside.

Fall is one of the few things about Kentucky that I find redeeming. If there's a crisp breeze in the air, the smell of soggy earth sprouting from the ground, horses racing under a bright blue sky, and a zombie parade on the horizon, I can tolerate the rampant obesity, the slow motion twang, the threats to pedestrians and the Jesus campaigns in  front yards. But when I'm riding my scooter home and the bank says it's 96 fucking degrees outside on Oct. 11th, well, fuck Kentucky.

Luckily, McSweeney's is feeling my rage and I'm going to share this rant of f-bombs inspired by fall. And gourds. And bad attitudes like the one I'm having today.

It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers. By Colin Nissan.

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I'm about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it's gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There's a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

I may even throw some multi-colored leaves into the mix, all haphazard like a crisp October breeze just blew through and fucked that shit up. Then I'm going to get to work on making a beautiful fucking gourd necklace for myself. People are going to be like, "Aren't those gourds straining your neck?" And I'm just going to thread another gourd onto my necklace without breaking their gaze and quietly reply, "It's fall, fuckfaces. You're either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you're not."

Carving orange pumpkins sounds like a pretty fitting way to ring in the season. You know what else does? Performing an all-gourd reenactment of an episode of Diff'rent Strokes—specifically the one when Arnold and Dudley experience a disturbing brush with sexual molestation. Well, this shit just got real, didn't it? Felonies and gourds have one very important commonality: they're both extremely fucking real. Sorry if that's upsetting, but I'm not doing you any favors by shielding you from this anymore.

The next thing I'm going to do is carve one of the longer gourds into a perfect replica of the Mayflower as a shout-out to our Pilgrim forefathers. Then I'm going to do lines of blow off its hull with a hooker. Why? Because it's not summer, it's not winter, and it's not spring. Grab a calendar and pull your fucking heads out of your asses; it's fall, fuckers.

Have you ever been in an Italian deli with salamis hanging from their ceiling? Well then you're going to fucking love my house. Just look where you're walking or you'll get KO'd by the gauntlet of misshapen, zucchini-descendant bastards swinging from above. And when you do, you're going to hear a very loud, very stereotypical Italian laugh coming from me. Consider yourself warned.

For now, all I plan to do is to throw on a flannel shirt, some tattered overalls, and a floppy fucking hat and stand in the middle of a cornfield for a few days. The first crow that tries to land on me is going to get his avian ass bitch-slapped all the way back to summer.

Welcome to autumn, fuckheads!