I just had a very fun day. As fun as possible with a back injury which feels like someone has hooked up electrodes on either end of my spine and used a clamp at the lower end just to make sure it stays in place. Or how I imagine that would feel. But, that aside, very fun.

I had plans to meet my friend Jenny in Boston for lunch, kids-less, so I slept till 9:00, showered (she probably didn't even know to be grateful for that) and got on the road. The drive there was a tad more interesting than I expected, but only in a very brief stretch. In Lynn, just north of the city, I got to watch as the front driver's side tire shredded and fell off of a van in the northbound lane. It was pretty neat to watch, primarily because no one was hurt and it didn't involve my side of the road, and plus the sparks and swerves were pretty darn impressive. Less than a mile later, as I was still trying to decide who to call first to have an exclamation-point-filled chat about "Guess What I Just Saw!", I came around a curve in the road and was face-to-face with an SUV in my, southbound, lane, facing northward, all snuggled up to the concrete divider in the middle. I was able to swing around it, and even hydroplaned a little just to keep it exciting, and continued on my merry way. I decided to wait until after I was out of the rainy-drizzly-slippery roads portion of the day before I called anyone.

I arrived in Boston a full half-hour ahead of schedule, which just never happens in my world. I've come leaps and bounds from college, when I had my own personal time zone that was 15 minutes behind everyone else's, but the status quo is to be on time or maybe a minute early, not a half hour. I thought I might eat up a bunch of that time by searching for a parking space, but clearly the cosmos were aligned in my favor today (I had thought my chakra seemed particularly lustrous and snuggly today), because I got a space *directly* outside of the restaurant where we were meeting. Bliss! And I parallel parked just like I knew what I was doing! Ecstacy!! And it's Sunday so the meters were free! Rapture!!!

So I had half an hour to myself. I made the mistake of turning to look in the backseat and realized that my children have been traveling in a mobile disaster zone for some unknown period of time, so I took 10 minutes to scoop everything into one of two bags: Crap That Goes Back Into My House and Crap That Goes Into the Trash. Then I realized that having remembered to register the car before the end of May was all well and good, but it was even better to actually put the little stickers on the license plates. So I hopped out to apply them.

While I was standing by the rear of my car, a delightful, polished, coiffed young man pulled up alongside and said, in a calm and cultured voice, "Pardon me, ma'am, but are you about to leave?" I said, "No, I'm sorry, I just got here." At which point his Mr. Hyde medicine kicked in, and he went off on a tirade. I wouldn't feel right transcribing his tirade verbatim, as there might be impressionable children in the audience, so I'll replace a key word with "frog." Thus: "FRRROOOOOGGGGGG! You gotta be froggin' kidding me! I been driving around this frogging city for 45 frogging minutes and there's no spaces anywhere on the frogging planet! Now you're just standing around by the back of your car! FROG! What the frog am I supposed to do now?!?"

I didn't have a good answer for him, but the car which pulled up behind him and began beeping didn't serve the purpose of lightening his mood, assuming that was its intended purpose. He drove off, frogging merrily along the way. I was glad he'd been nudged along, because I honestly couldn't figure out precisely which answer I should give about what the frog he was supposed to do now.

Lunch was delightful, good company and good food and if my back hadn't been aching all the way to my ankles it would have been perfect. (Did I mention that I did see a doctor and she suspects a herniated disc? Having a semi-official diagnosis makes me feel better about whining so much.) Then we thought about going shopping, but apparently whoever controls the Boston weather can't read a calendar, because it was cold and misty and wet and slimy and as un-June-like as a day can possibly get. So we went to Borders and continued to chatter and drank hot cocoa. Though this was at the Starbucks inside the store, so calling it hot cocoa would have been far too plebian and pathetic - instead, we drank Triple Chocolate Mocha Cocoa Delights or some such.

Then on the drive home I was listening to news radio - because I am a cutting-edge musical rebel when my children are not in the car - and because I had a free hand I decided to call in for their ticket giveaway to an Irish festival next weekend, and I accidentally won. Apparently it doesn't take much to tickle me to pieces, because I literally laughed out loud after winning. Yee haw.

The remainder of the drive was characterized by ambivalence... I wanted to get home, but I wanted to stay in range of the radio station long enough for them to announce my name. It probably took them all of 5 seconds to do, but that's 5 seconds out of my allotted 15 minutes, I wanted to hear it! And, hilariously, right after they announced it (juuuuust before I drove out of range) my phone rang. It was Jenny, "Did they just say your name on the radio?" So I caught her also listening to news radio when the kids weren't in the car, but it was SO exciting to not only have my 5 seconds of fame but have a witness!

So, it looks like I'll be back in Boston again next weekend. Slainte!