A Day in the Life. Sigh.

So the other day I met a friend for lunch in a quaint little German Village restaurant just down the street from where I work.  The only negative about quaint little German Village is that the streets are paved with bricks. Sounds all old-timey and makes you want to come visit, doesn’t it?  Well, hold your horses there, Skippy, because it’s not all that and a bag o’ chips. 

In reality, it’s a pain in the you-know-what.  Because the bricks are old and uneven.  Really uneven.  They are so uneven that cars that routinely drive up and down the bricked streets require front end alignments every 23 days.  I’m not even kidding.  My last car had a permanent list to the left because one time I waited a whole month before scheduling the alignment. 

And even though I’m a veteran German Village driver after having worked here for the last ten years, I did something really stupid on my way to the restaurant.  I tried to apply lipstick.

Go ahead – shake your head and roll your eyes. I deserve it.

Instead of looking less scary and ghost-like with my natural, non-existent lip color, I looked like Ronald McDonald with the exaggerated line drawn all around his mouth. 

But at least I wasn’t wearing the baggy yellow jumpsuit, goofy shoes or the fright wig.

 

Didn’t matter.  The big red mouth thing alone was scary enough. 

Nevertheless, I arrived at the restaurant within moments.  Knowing I wanted to make a pit stop to remove my Ronald-like lips, I happily snagged a spot on the street right by the restaurant.  I even parallel parked like I knew what I was doing and managed to align my car relatively, well, parallel to the curb.

Score – right?

Fortunately, I was first at the restaurant so I had time to fix the scary lipstick situation and by the time I emerged from the ladies room, the hostess was looking at me a little less aghast than she had upon first seeing me enter the joint. 

My friend arrived and we proceeded to have a lovely lunch together.  By the time the meal was over, of course, my lipstick was non-existent again so, yes, it did occur to me that applying lipstick prior to eating is a wasted effort.

But the real trouble started when I returned to my carefully parallel parked car on the street.  No, it was not a victim of a hit-and-run driver.  No, I was not blocked in with the cars in front and back of me so close to my bumpers that I couldn’t maneuver out of the spot without a can opener. 

The real problem?   Two words: The. Birds.

I swear to you, every bird in the tri-state area must have flown over my car to leave a deposit.  Every single one.  I am serious. If all those droppings had been hail hitting my car, it would have been totaled. 

It looked so bad, I was embarrassed to get in it and drive it away.  On the other hand, since I was clearly standing under a flight pattern of birds that had just eaten lunch, I decided being out in the open was not a great idea. 

Getting hit by bird do-do anywhere on my person would have been grounds for a true hissy fit the likes no one has ever seen.  All I would’ve needed was the crazy Ronald-like lips and someone would’ve called 911 and the men in the white coats would’ve come to take me away.

That might’ve been bad, but at least I wouldn’t have been the one who had to clean off my car.

It was disgusting!  And crunchy. I practically had to take a sand blaster to the vehicle to get the stuff off.  So no amount of drive-thru car washing would’ve helped.

Because I was at home when I did the cleaning, I didn’t run back out to take the car through a car wash to get it uniformly clean.  So my car was half clean and half dirty.  The birds apparently missed the lower panels. 

So for the past several days I’d been thinking I really needed to run through a car wash. Only there isn’t one close by and my schedule has been a little hectic. 

Well, as it turns out, it’s a good thing I didn’t spend my hard-earned dollars at the car wash.  Why?  Because as I was leaving the office yesterday, I noticed that my car was once again covered with bird...”stuff.”  And I had been nowhere near the restaurant I visited the other day! Instead, I was innocently parked in my own parking space at the office.  This, my friends, led me to draw the following conclusion: The birds had found me!

I shook my fist at the empty sky screaming, “WHY ME?” 

But the birds did not answer.

So what is this? Is it retribution for something I did in a past life?  Are they especially attracted to white cars? Did I not annihilate enough pigs in the Angry Birds game?  

Nah.  Probably it’s payback because I hated their movie.  You know the one?  The Birds.  Scared the snot out of me when I was a kid and I can’t stand it when more than two or three birds gather at one time.  I think they probably know this.

Interestingly, the black truck and the red car on either side of my car were guano-free.  Not one drop.  So maybe – just maybe – my paranoia is justified.

I had to do the sand-blasting thing again last night when I got home.  And I counted.  There were precisely 39 “hits” on my car.  Thirty-nine!  That’s a lot.  My car now has more clean areas than dirty, but it still needs some attention with a little soap and water.

So my plan this evening is to find a car wash – fork over the extra bucks for the deluxe wash – and then race home and hide my car in the garage all weekend.  And I will hope that the birds have decided they’ve paid me back enough and they’ll move on to another victim. Either that or the last of 'em have flown south for the winter.

But let me just tell you.  If a bird even accidentally flies into our garage in the next few days, I will be the one calling 911 and asking for the men in the white coats to come get me. 

Ronald McDonald lips won’t be necessary.