Only In My World

/ Diane Henders

I’m a weirdness magnet. All kinds of oddball stuff happens in my world; everything from finding machete wrappers at bus stops and dick prints on my hotel window to experiencing unusual coincidences pertaining to warm guns and email.

The past few weeks have been no exception.

I was out for a walk when I spotted something on a perfectly-manicured front lawn. When I got closer I blinked twice, but I wasn’t hallucinating. Nope; no matter how I looked at it, it was still a large dead mouse smushed in a mousetrap. You don’t see that very often on nice suburban lawns, even if you’ve been partaking in unusual substances (or so I’m told).

The whole situation was weird. Both mouse and trap were soaking wet, so the homeowners must have dumped them in a bucket just in case the mouse survived getting whacked. I’ll grant them points for thoroughness, but since they’d obviously succeeded in making the mouse as dead as possible, why would they chuck it out on the front lawn?  Why not release the body and flush it or bury it or dump it in an unobtrusive corner of the back yard instead of displaying it to passersby like a bizarre welcoming gift: “Hello, may I offer you some lovely drenched vermin attractively served on wood with steel accents? No? Whyever not?”

Just to keep things interesting, Fate has served up a couple of unusual coincidences in the past few weeks, too.

Such as the day I walked into our local postal outlet. The postal clerk knows me by sight, though not by name… I thought. Until she cheerfully greeted me, “Hi, Kelly!”

My brain was deep in plotting my current book and I absently returned the greeting before realizing that I was not, in fact, Aydan Kelly. Explanations and laughter ensued, but she still insisted that I looked like a ‘Kelly’. She had no idea I’m a writer and she hadn’t read my books. So what are the chances that she would have called me by the name of my main character?

And speaking of coincidences, it’s no coincidence that I mentioned the dick print on my hotel window earlier in this post. Only a few days after we got home from that trip, I was over at my friend Chris’s place when he eyed me very seriously and said, “I hate to tell you this, but I’m afraid you have a stalker.” He pointed to the sidewalk outside their house. “There’s a dick on the sidewalk over there. It followed you all the way from Canmore.”

Sure enough, somebody had chalked a dick there. I just laughed and told him it hadn’t followed me; it had followed him. Not my problem, bucko.

But I spoke too soon. The very next day I stepped out of our house only to discover this:

It followed me home; can I keep it?

It followed me home; can I keep it?

I realize kids draw, er… unusual things… now and then, but I’ve lived here for sixteen years and this is the first time I’ve seen a dick drawn on our sidewalk. It’s so soon after my Canmore experience the coincidence seems ridiculously far-fetched. (Unless Chris has chalk dust on his fingers… hmmm…)

Am I really the only one? Please tell me somebody else has happened upon a sodden dead rodent on a suburban lawn, or something equally peculiar…

33 thoughts on “Only In My World”

  2. You might want to research a German style of wine-ice wine. I believe they harvest the grapes after the first frost or freeze and try to get them to the next phase before they thaw. It makes a very sweet wine if I remember correctly. It’s one way to use the hand you’re dealt.

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    • That would be fun to try! I only have one little grapevine, so not nearly enough fruit to make wine, but maybe I should put those grapes into my batch of hard cider this year. That would add an interesting flavour and colour! 🙂

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      • Just thought of something I read a while back about ice and alcohol. Take something, brandy, for instance, chill it down to about 0 degF. It will still be liquid. But drop an ice cube in it, and a significant fraction of the water in the brandy freezes to the ice cube. Still tastes like brandy, but the percentage of alcohol content in the remainder gets *very* high! It tastes a bit different, but after you’ve already had a couple, most people wouldn’t notice. A good way to get someone very drunk very quickly.

        So I’ve heard…

        Don’t try this at home, boys and girls. 🙂

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  4. I don’t know what to make of this, but when I think “dick print” I think of something executed with an actual dick and, say, moisture. As to the mouse: someone who was not the trap-setter came upon the thing and flang it. The point was not to decorate the lawn, but to get it as far away from the flinger as possible.

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    • Actually, I wasn’t entirely sure the print in question hadn’t been created using the method you describe. It was remarkably… lifelike. If not for the odd orientation on the window, I would have been convinced it was an imprint of the real thing, and I’m still not convinced it wasn’t. If the “artist” had been both flexible and determined, it would have been physically possible.

      You’re undoubtedly right about the rodent-flinging. In fact, the Rodent Fling might be a little-known sport; you never know. The first time I attended the Highland Games, I was shocked to discover the “sheep toss” is one of their events. Sadly, it turned out to be merely a product of the poor public-address system and my faulty hearing. The “sheaf toss” wasn’t quite as entertaining. But I’d line up to watch the Rodent Fling.

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      • “Welcome home, Daddy!” said the little girl in pigtails. “How did you do at the games tonight?”

        “Hello, Princess!” he responded enthusiastically. “You would have been proud of your ol’ Daddy tonight! My sidewalk art and window paintings were the talk of the evening. Very avante garde, everyone said. Very realistic! And you should have heard the crowd gasp at the rodent fling! Our venue this evening was the alley behind that old Greek restaurant over by the park, remember it? I flang three of ’em from the alley to the fountain, and my last throw skipped twice across the lake and made it all the way onto a manicured lawn clear across the street! The crowd went WILD at that!”

        “Oh, Daddy! I’m so PROUD of you!!”

        See? Nothing to it. Problem solved. You’re welcome.

        🙂

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  6. One of the nitwits down the street (‘one of’ inferring correctly that there are more of them down the street) walks his dog and lets it leave piles of poop on my SIDEWALK. Moron. Not actual weirdness, just near-terminal rudeness.

    When our whole family and a bunch of our rowdy friends go out for chicken fried steaks, I get the one with gristle in it.

    When people bring screaming children into a restaurant, they are automatically seated directly behind me.

    When I’m traveling by air, the babbling nutcases all want to sit by me. And they all have screaming children.

    It’s also a city ordinance that whoever lives beside me also has big dogs that bark nonstop.

    Coincidence? I think not… 🙂

    (This pretty much cancels out the kitten painted on my face in my Gravatar photo, right?)

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    • A most excellent curmudge! You’ve almost succeeded in overcoming the kitten’s cute factor.

      And it goes without saying that when flying, the babbling nutcases’ screaming children will always sit directly behind you and kick the back of your seat every 3.2 seconds for the entire duration of the flight.

      Yep, my world, too.

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      • And just look at you blitzing past the 20% mark on Book 9!!

        If nobody’s told you today that you SO rock, please allow me to be the first!!

        Your Wednesday blog posts make my day anyway, but the progress bar updates are icing on the cake!

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            • Fortunately Environment Canada gave us several days warning, so we brought in just about everything that could be brought (including 80 lbs of carrots – what a haul!) I shrouded my grapevines in plastic hoping the plants would survive long enough to ripen the grapes that were on it, and it looks as though that’s working, more or less. About half the vines froze and a few of the clusters are looking more like raisins than grapes, but I’ll still get a few. Other than that, the only things left in the garden are potatoes and parsnips, and we’ll dig them tomorrow. Gardening season is officially over. Back to writing season now… 🙂

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  8. That’s really gross about the mouse. I admire your restraint and decorum for not taking a picture of it and tweeting it out for the world to see. Sadly, many people would.

    As for the postal clerk calling you Kelly, that is really weird. What are the odds?! That’s one of those things that gets even a cynic like me wondering about the universe.

    And finally, the chalk drawing. Eh, I think they could do better. 😉

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