2002-10-17 - 2:49 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Sweet Home Alabama"

I keep expecting my life to calm down enough for me to write journal entries on a regular basis, and it is just NOT HAPPENING.

Last Sunday morning, at 10am, the phone rang. It was my dad. "Your brother broke his leg last night, and we're at the hospital with him."

This actually happened while he was dancing. "But he doesn't dance," I said. Apparently after a beer or two, he begins to waffle on his dancing policy.

Anyway, as it turns out, there was a large weak spot on the bone (which turned out to be benign), and some pressure on it at the wrong angle, and it shattered. He needed surgery to fix it.

I was horrified. He was in a lot of pain until they got him to the hospital and doped him up on morphine. To think of my poor baby brother in that kind of pain, and probably scared, breaks my heart. He's come through marvelously, though -- he's staying with my parents for a while and is lord of the manor over there, I'm sure. We're going to see him this weekend. But I was up at the hospital for a few days until we knew everything was okay.

We're still struggling with the carpet issue. The next higher-up guy claims the "gap" look will disappear with regular vacuuming, which draws up the pieces that have been tucked under. I'll try vacuuming the hall every day for a week and see how it looks. I'm still suspicious.

This city. I swear. Sometimes stuff looks like crap on the outside and then you go inside and it's utterly gorgeous. Other times it looks like crap on the outside and then you go inside and it's even worse.

I went into a store once where everything was filthy and they didn't even bother to put merchandise on the shelves. They just put the box of the items on the shelf, and one sample of the item in front, so you have to go into the box to get what you want, unless you take the sample.

Also, I made a trip over to Fabric Row, and most of those stores don't even try to look presentable. They just throw the bolts all over the goddamn place. It's like walking into somebody's attic. It seems to me that somebody could make a killing down there by cleaning their place up a bit (making it look nicer than everyone else's store), but that idea doesn't seem to have hit anyone on the Row.

Yet just as often, I'll walk into a restaurant or store that looks grungy on the outside and is pristine on the inside. Then I wonder, why do they leave the outside looking like such crap?

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