[Continued from part 2]

The phone didn’t ring any more on Friday night, and by Saturday morning it had been cleaned inside and out, wiping the dirty bits both literal and figurative.

My cellphone doesn’t have a batch delete option for the camera, so I had to delete each photo individually. The images flashed on the tiny screen, one after the other like a little nudie flip book. A jittery silent porno. Not much plot, but I’ve seen worse.

It wasn’t until the afternoon that I found the text messages.

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[Continued from part 1]

I left my cellphone in my car all day, this time on purpose. It needed charging soon, because the battery was low, and it needed cleaning even sooner, because it smelled of smoke. Yuck.

Later, as I was driving home after work, the phone went ping. The ping of a missed call. Or, in this case, the ping of 22 missed calls.

Missed call: Blocked ID
Missed call: Blocked ID
Missed call: Blocked ID
Missed call: Blocked ID
Missed call: Blocked ID
And so on, and so on…

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There was a woman’s voice on the other end of the line. This was notable for a few reasons. First, she sounded a little drunk and it was 8 o’clock in the morning. Second, it was my cellphone she was answering.

Let me back up a bit. I’d lost my cellphone earlier that week, on Monday, maybe Tuesday. I don’t use it much, so I didn’t notice it had fallen from my jacket pocket. Happens a lot to me.  Well, I guess technically it happens to the phone. I should probably get a little holster for it, but then I’d be the kind of guy who wears his cellphone in a holster.

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*Click*

That was the sound of my door shutting and locking.

*Damn*

That was the sound of me realizing my keys were on the other side of the door.

I do not like a door that locks itself. Gives it airs. Smacks of impropriety. Interferes with an otherwise congenial human-door relationship. And more than all of that, I don’t like the fact that I can accidentally lock myself out of my home.

Thursday. Early evening, still daylight. Nice breeze and birdsong. Lovely weather to be temporarily homeless. Better than February, I tell myself. Clearly I’m putting a positive spin on this and hoping I won’t notice that I’m not wearing shoes.

*Damn*

Well, that didn’t work at all, did it?

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Lisa recounting a story over dinner, the night after the mock funeral:

So she comes running in all frantic and says “The cake is in the autopsy room, right beside the corpse.” And I say, “I left it there because the room is cold.” And she says, “But I just learned that pathogens are airborne!” So I say, “It’s okay, I covered it in plastic.”

I have the most interesting friends, and some of the oddest dinner conversations with them.

I forgot to blog about the topsy-turvy cake I made. Whoops.

The cake was for Lisa, the sister of a very good friend of mine. She’s taking a funeral director course, and her latest assignment was to conduct a mock service for a fictional character. She selected Alice in Wonderland, and I volunteered to supply an appropriately angular desert.

Yes, I was going to bake a cake for a fake wake.

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You know all those things you keep telling yourself you’ll do someday? Like go to Paris, clean out the attic, or learn to sew? Well, Someday isn’t a day of the week.

I think we should do something about that.

I think the extra day in a leap year, February 29, should be called Someday.

Consider it a holiday from procrastination. Instead of taking the day off from work, you’d be taking the day off from putting things off.

I bet there’s something you’ve always told yourself you’ll do “someday.” If you haven’t done it by the next February 29, I say you give yourself a Someday and do it.

I’m putting it in my calendar right now. All day event, repeats semi-semi-annually.

Who’s with me?

The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me.

This offer does have some restrictions and limitations so please read carefully:

• I make no guarantees that you will like what I make.
• What I create will be just for you.
• It’ll be done this year (2009).
• You have no clue what it’s going to be. It will be something made in the real world and not something over the internet. It may be a mixed CD. It may be a poem. It may be a necklace or almond butter cookies or a bouquet of herbs from my garden.Who knows? Not you, that’s for sure! (Not me either.)
• I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.

Here’s the important part: In return, all you need to do is post this text into a note of your own and make 5 things for 5 others.

(This idea came via Lisa, awesome pal and dancer extraordinaire, who offered up her own 5 mystery object-crafty-thingies under these same terms. I snagged a spot for one of those, so this is my paying-it-forward-ness.)

UPDATE: And that’s 5. I look forward to coming up with something neat for each of y’all.

Jocelyne: I went to an insomnia seminar on Saturday.
Me: How was it?
Jocelyne: Good, but I fell asleep.
Me: Show off.

From MarketWatch:

“American International Group is set to pay $450 million of bonuses to employees of the unit that was largely responsible for the New York insurer’s near collapse last fall.”

You can say what you want about the French, but I bet they’d have dusted off Madame Guillotine long before it got to this.