:: The Wendy House ::

The Oxford English Dictionary Online refuses to recognise that ’scatty’ is a legitimate word.  Bloody-mindedness I’d say!  Meanwhile,  the ever faithfull slang dictionary provides a description that clearly matches my colloquial understanding:

 scatty Adj. Absent-minded. Possibly from scatterbrained. {Informal}

Here’s a short (who am I kidding?) account of this autumn’s scattiness that excludes normal stuff like losing my car keys,  my car in the car-park,  and occassionally the car-park I’ve left the car in.  This autumn has proved exceptional.  My outstanding achievement of absent mindedness this autumn includes,  but is not limited to:

1. Left handbag in downtown restaurant. August
2. Left jumper in Bristol. September.  Will be posted as packaging around a B’day present (hooray!).
3. Left camera battery charger with battery plugged into a wall in Portsmouth. October.  Currently in the post.
4. Lost Passport and Advance Parole documents (2x). October. Found them each time within 2 hrs.
5. Lost boyfriend.  October.  Partially retrieved in October.
6. Lost Mobile phone power 2x. October.
7. Left slippers at friends temporary home just before he moved out. October.
8. Left company entrance card-key inside the building when I left,  house keys & lip-balm. Today.  Retrieved all.
9. Lost my appetite. October.
10. Lost sleep.  Monday.  Found Tuesday onward… hoorah!.

 Do I get an award or what?  Just feel the attitude.  Sleep deprivation does wacky things to the superficially normal gal.  I must remember to be polite to my colleagues tomorrow,  or should i….

Wendy where-did-i-leave-my……

Met a fabulous British lady at a party last Saturday who’d just been dumped by her boyfriend.  Evidently,  he said she was too ‘crazy’ for him,  he couldn’t ‘deal’ with it.  Hmmmmm…..   …either it was the full moon,  craziness is contagious or inherent in british lasses…  …because that sounds spookily familiar and potentially accurate… 

Anyway 

Crazy lady is taking me out on Friday.  Hooray.  Who knows what will happen….   ….one thing is for sure.  There will be high-heeled pointy-toed thigh-length calf-hugging boots involved…..

After a steamy hot shower (mmMMmmm….) I tumbled into the trusty old Honda Civic (called Loo Sea). Loo Sea’s windows instantly went opaque as we left the warmth of my home. I know a bit about physics - condensation is attracted to cold surfaces. So I whacked up the heating controls and directed all the vents at the windows and pulled over while the windows cleared.

Accident avoided.

Guess I’ll have to either shave my head or get a hair-dryer because Loo Sea’s directional heat controls are a bit funky.

Wendy wet-hair

An unexpected side effect of recently-dumped-ness is that your Mobile phone batteries start running-out way too frequently in places where your charger isn’t handy.

Solutions?

• Use the car charger even when I’m not driving. Heck no! That means sitting in the car with the engine running waiting for the phone to charge. How sad is that? That’s 700x sad. I love my mobile, but not that much…
• Carry a charger in my back-pocket. Bumpy-bum? I dont think so. The power-prongs could produce painful side-effects when enthusiastically approaching a chair. I’m prone to approaching chairs enthusiastically.
• Carry a charger in my front pocket. Non-starter. Everything else is there. No room!
• Put charger in a handbag (US ‘purse’). Can’t do it, my handbag management skills are catastrophic. A handbag is something that I can, will, leave behind because its not physically attached to my body. In my 20’s I tried using handbags but it just didn’t work for me. I left them on buses, trains, Pubs, Disco’s, in other people’s homes….. This normally resulted in a stressful ‘Oh shite where’s my house keys, money, phone, camera, sunglasses, flat-erik and emergency condom’ experience. Followed by “can I borrow your phone or small change for a public call box” for a round of urgent phonecalls to multiple places. Just finding the phone-numbers was a nightmare. Then I’d have to get back to pick it up. Retrieval trips could cover over a hundred miles each way. Nasty Nasty Nasty. I still have a couple of variations on handbags. I still leave them behind on the rare occasions I risk using them. A girlfriend recently suggested attaching the bag to my clothes with a chain. Novel, but somewhat bizarre and my bizarreness ratings do not need enhancing at the moment. I have bucket loads of admiration for people that have mastered the skill of handbag management to a level where it looks seamless and automatic.
• Check the charge level more frequently and plan to charge it at sensible times. Ugh, I’ll try this one. Scattiness is also a by-product of recently-dumped-ness so I’m not too confident of this solution working.
• Carry a fully charged spare battery. Is that even possible?
• Have lots of chargers left in the places I spend lots of time. Back-up plan for the incurably scatty.
• Tolerate dead-phone for hours. What? Can’t text, take pictures or feel the pleasant vibrate in my front pocket during ‘important’ meetings. NO WAY!
• Use phone less to place and receive calls. Preposterous!.

Wendy mobile-phonophile

Across the 24hr period of ’singleness’ I’d posted a ‘profile’ on an international dating service. I received emails from

• 55yr very polite fellow. Looks and writes like he could be older than even my dad….
• 51yr Seattle East-sider self-described ‘techy’ with big income, requires his girlfriend to have a PhD, wrote 2x making ‘overgenerous’ suggestions. No evidence of a sense of humour.
• 48yr handsome artsy gentle natured buddist with silver hair and a painful, giving, low-paid job (technical support helpdesk).
• 45yr Seattle local who recognised my boat, can cook, has firm abs, a witty email technique and humorous profile.
• 44yr rotund, big income (self-reported) business man based in NY (?!).

2/5 almost matched my ‘requirements’ list. The Seattle guy with humour and the Buddist smelt of potential….

I didn’t pay to let them know of my unexpected lack of single-ness. Their messages go cruelly unanswered. This internet dating thing involves a lot of uncertainty and requires robustness.

Feel bad about not paying to reply.

3 other guys ‘winked’ (for free) at me. This seems like a good way of working-out whether writing will be well received…. ….I don’t feel bad about not returning the winks.

The service sent me links to 12 profiles that were ‘mutual matches’, they fit the explicit requirements I’m looking for and I fit the explicit requirements they are looking for. Judging by the 12 photographs, self-assessments of body-type vary dramatically. Either these people have lost a lot of weight, or seriously toned-up, since they posted their photographs!