Friday Shuffle - Slightly Skeeved Out Edition

Some days it's one full body shudder after another.

~ After the terrible bridge collapse disaster in Minneapolis, have you found yourself getting nervous about the bridges you need to use? I'll admit that it's caused me to think about it a bit. Normally I love bridges - so much so that I could be one of those people who drives bridge-phobic folks across. Since Magdeburg is situated along the Elbe river we have bridges but most of the city is on the west side of the river and I only have to go on those bridges if I'm visiting friends on the other side or if I need to put gas in the car since the closest station to us is there. And I've been comforted in hearing that Germany, being as they're quite anal about such things, inspects their bridges on a frequent basis. Still there's one bridge that has always freaked me out slightly - a railway overpass that I go under to and from the supermarket. Every time I'm stopped at the light as a freight train passes over I tend to get a twitch. Today I was twitching like a junkie hunting for a fix as a train carrying tanks of something - something explosive, I'm sure - rumbled overhead and that light just would. not. turn. green.

~ As I went out my door to take out the trash this afternoon I was hit with the smell of my neighbor's armpits. It was only a small step up from the times when I go in the hallway and it smells like his rabbit's dirty cage. And then I entered the elevator and it smelled inside like fresh baked bread. It was like the scent fairies took pity on me.

~ I've got something wrong with my left leg - when I walk for more than five minutes it hurts like I've got shin splints or something. As I took my evening walk my leg started to hurt to the point where I had to sit down on one of the benches along the street. I was in front of the bakery just down from the country saloon just enjoying the evening and listening to them line dance to Alan Jackson reminiscing about being way down yonder on the Chattahoochee (stomp, stomp, stomp, clap!) when a teeny little mouse came out of the flowerbeds that line the sidewalk and ran around my feet a few times. I don't have a mouse phobia to the same degree that Darling Mollie has - she got a few mice in a home she loved and had been living in for years and ended up packing her stuff and moving out - but I was still very close to ringing the bell on the mice-freak-me-out scale. Shin splints and big white ass be damned - I jumped up from there and scurried home like I was being chased by the hounds of hell.

I need the sort of soothing that only music can provide. Bixente the iPod, do it for me baby.

1. Use It - New Pornographers
2. You Really Got Me - The Kinks
3. Hooked On A Feeling - Blue Swede
4. Suddenly Everything Has Changed - The Flaming Lips
5. Desire - U2
6. Well Thought Out Twinkles - Silversun Pickups
7. Queen Of The Slipstream - Van Morrison
8. Down To The River To Pray - Alison Krauss
9. Tush - ZZ Top
10. Pictures Of Lily - The Who

Have a soothing weekend.