Beautifully Weird

I've come to the conclusion that life is beautifully weird. Any situation can be accounted for by either saying, "Well, it's beautiful, but so weird!" or "How weird...but at least it's a beautiful world!" Try it. You'll see the brilliance in my conclusion. 

Random much? Not really. Follow the reasoning behind my madness...

So today was a pretty cool day. Busy -- as seen by the fact that my INCREDIBLY eccentric knee is killing me (which is the weird part) but also by the mountainous amount of crap I bought for a hundred bucks today at the Rummage Sale (beautiful).  The Rummage Sale is pretty much the penultimate of all yard sales to ever be held on the planet. I kid you not. It comes around once a year in April. Basically, a church's insanely wicked (read: epically awesome) idea for fundraiser for their big summer mission project is to get everyone in the congregation to collect all of their junk and unnecessary items throughout the year and then bring it to the church so that it can all be organized, priced, and sorted into three parking lots and two gigantic revival tents so that other people can buy even more junk and unnecessary items that they'll just end up giving to Goodwill at some point within the coming year. 

Everybody following me still? Well done! 

Anyway, what with the Great Johnson/Swanson Migration to Union this coming August, we decided to hit the Rummage Sale and do some damage on the amount of supplies we still needed for the apartment. My mission was to find a recliner. I do all my homework from my chair, so a place upon which to rest my weary behind was the Necessary of all Necessaries, the veritable Holy Grail of furniture. This is the reason why Mom, Shelby, Aubrey, and my lovely future Union buddies Courtney and Heather were all outside in the cold at freaking 7:50 in the morning. To say that my comrades were grumpy about the circumstance would be to say that Joan of Arc was a charming girl that merely swatted flies that were trying to get into her homemade raspberry preserves. 

Despite this, we persevered and finally made it into the revival tents. I refrained from speaking in tongues and or asking someone to talk to me about the Lord and made a sanctified beeline for the furniture section. You see, we were battling half of Mexico here, and time was of the essence! I managed to find a lovely specimen of a recliner, though not the color I wanted, and promptly sat in it to mark my claim. This is the shopping equivalent of peeing on a fire hydrant or bonking a girl on the head with a club before dragging her away by the hair -- much more civilized! 

Those of you who are women already recognize my next dilemma -- having found a recliner in mauve rather than in the wanted tan or blue, I came to the painful realization that none of my intended bedding would work in my new bedroom! So I was forced to head to that section of the rummage section, where I finally ended up with a charming choreography of sage green, cream, rose pink and mauve. Friendly yet durable. I found a few knickknacks to warm up the room (a really cool wavy green bottle was my personal favorite, as well as a stained glass mirror and a green wrought iron basket with cream roses) and considered myself well on the way. 

After all of us managed to buy a lot of things we probably wouldn't use for at least a few years (*cough* HIGH CHAIR *cough*) and a few other fun items (Evan, I'm SO jealous over that lava lamp....no, I'm serious. If it were green, it would have been MINE!) we finally managed to make it home. It was at this point that we sadly lost Courtney and Heather's company. Mom then had Shelby and I put on dresses and gussy up and we went out and took pictures. It was mucho fun! (I'm supposed to know the word for that, but I'm too tired to care at the moment.)

(And I seem to be using a lot of parenthesis on this post.)

(Weird.) 

(--but beautiful!) 

(Yeah, if you say so.) 

(And now I'm having a conversation with myself...this is disturbing.) 

(Stopping now!) 

(Stop.)

Ahem. 

Anyway, the other funny part to the day was when I drove to pick up dinner for Mom and myself since we were the only ones home and neither of us felt like cooking. I had enjoyed the drive; it was a lovely day and I had the windows down admiring the budding trees and azaleas, not to mention the whole playlist I made of sappy music. I was humming "Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol (the ULTIMATE of all sappy songs and it always makes me happy) while I was standing at the bar waiting for my order to be delivered. There were three people sitting there eating: an older guy and a kid, most likely a visitation situation, and another older man who looked slightly more, um, button down shirt-ed than his bar-fellows. If you catch my drift. So anyway, like I said, I was just standing there minding my own business when all of a sudden I start hearing the non-button down shirt guy start talking, and while I was only listening with one ear, it sounded like he was talking about me. "Don't worry, she's not paying any attention to us. Got her mind in her own world. Damn redheads...."

It was at this point that I whirled around, ready to let him have it, when I notice that he's not even looking at me. He's looking down at his enchilada rather despairingly, and Button Down Shirt Dude is just sitting there watching me to see how I'll react, laughing silently. The bartender lady looked at the dude incredulously and said something to the effect of, "Man, you better be careful when you're muttering..." and gave me an obvious look. The guy looks over at me and VISIBLY jumps when he catches sight of my red hair. He looked like he was afraid I was gonna slug him! So I start laughing and said, "You better be careful about us redheads, we've got bad tempers..."

Upon realizing that I am not going to relocate his teeth to his right ear, the Bar-Fellow laughed nervously and said, "Yeah, and I don't really need another redhead in my life!"  I refrained from saying, Uh, yeah, cause you're never gonna have this one! and merely replied, "Yeah, I'm an Irish girl raised by hillbillies. You wouldn't have had much of a chance!" We were all still laughing when he told me to drive safely. Obviously hoping I wouldn't come back and haunt him for affronting my breed, of course.

Why do weird things always happen to me whenever I go to El Porton (see gay bartender post for details: http://blindingfirefly.blogspot.com/2008/03/series-of-random-events.html)? 

Oh, right, because life is beautifully weird!