Idiosycratic Life

I have mentioned before that I am trying to do one new, fun or adventurous thing every day so I can learn my way around, because honestly, sitting in this air-conditioned apartment is quite lovely when it's 95 degress with 80% humidity. These adventurous things include checking out beaches, going to art shows, etc. I really want to check some wildlife preserves and other stuff that are supposed to be very nice.

However.... I never seem to get around to doing the "fun" stuff....

So much of my day, though, is spent trying to run errands, which end up taking forever due to traffic, incompetent people, and well, my own stupidity, which keeps getting me lost. :) Literally it took me five hours today to FedEx a photo album, find and buy ink cartridges for my printer, try (again) to pick up some pictures, and buy some some fruit and laundry detergent. That's all I needed- FedEx, ink cartridges, my pictures, a bottle of bleach, and some bananas. I spent five (FIVE!) hours doing this due to traffic (okay, no one can help that), incompetent people running the Photo Lab at Eckerds (they lost a roll of film, permenantly gone, of me, Liss and Steve hiking. Triple BOO! HATE!), and an extremely scary woman named Dee who works at the grocery store.

Dee is very interesting- she's very, very old, with many, many wrinkles, and she slathers on makeup: hot pink cheeks, raccoon eyes, bright blue eye shadow, blacker than black eyebrows, v. white hair. (I would really like to make a portrait of her some time, but anyway....) If she were checking people out ANY slower, God bless her, she would seriously be taking the groceries back to the damn shelves. OH. MY. GOD. And- when you're finally paid and bagged, she takes a blue highlighter and highlights each of the items on your receipt that were "Publix Discount Items of the Day" to point out "how much you saved today by shopping at Publix." AAAAAAAAAHHHHH! That's very sweet of her; seriously, but I was only buying produce and bleach!

Sigh.... And then, I got lost. I keep doing that, and I am sort of doing it on purpose. Like, I'll be driving somewhere, and I know relatively where I am going, but I see that this road connects with a highway that I know goes near my apartment, so I figure I might as well take that and see where it goes, since I need to learn my way around, and I don't have many other committments besides playing with my dog and making long distance phone calls, so why not?

So tonight I found myself on I-75, which is called "Alligator Alley." It's basically an interstate that cuts South-East and North-West across Florida. Anyway, the entrance I got on only gave you one choice of direction, Northwest, so I had to get on Alligator Alley for about 5 miles before I could turn around and head back toward the part of Miami where I live.

And the reason I-75 is called Alligator Alley is because it cuts through a swamp area, and- this totally cracks me up- when you get on it, you pass through a toll booth (annoying when I just need to turn around and go the other way. Grrrr...) and they give you an Alligator Alley Info Pamphlet, which basically says, keep your high beams on when there are no cars going in the other direction, and SLOW DOWN before you hit an alligator, if one happens to be in the middle of the highway, because they feel like big speed bumps. And then it STRONGLY encourages you, if you do hit one, NOT to get out and check if it's okay, because "if it's not dead, you are in real danger."

Hahahahahaha. That totally cracks me up. Where AM I?!?! Why am I HERE?!?! WHAT??!?! I'm sorry, I know being a subsitute teacher was surreal and occasionally life-threatening :), but NOW I am in a place that warns you of the mortal danger of roadkill?!?!?! Please. This still begs the question, "WHAT IS MY LIFE?" :)

Ah... who wants to bet I will hit an alligator before my internship is over? :)