I Guess You Had To Be There...

Saint EB has been working her butt off...literally. She has not only been preparing for her BIKACIDE ride (which, by the way, is now only a few weeks away!) in September for the MS Society, but she has also been the RING LEADER at my place of employment in steer-heading our chaotic move to the new building. In her own words, she's become a bit "manic" with everything going on in her life.

All of these near traumatic events did not stop her, however, from coming to my rescue yesterday evening and insisting on taking me out for a chocolate malt because (as we ALL know), "A chocolate malt can cure anything!"

Our trip to get a malt started out innocent enough...I had developed cabin fever after only two days of "bedrest" as ordered by Dr. SWWNBN (because I wouldn't/won't agree to much of anything else the good doctor has to offer me)...Saint EB had developed a full blown case of "mania" from lack of sleep and very long hours she has been working to try to make the office move run smoothly. Needless to say, we both had the "giggles"...you know the kind...where nothing is really funny, but everything makes you laugh and it is infectious.

Soooo...we had our malts (or I should say I had a malt...Saint EB had a rootbeer float) and she announced to me there was a brief errand that needed to be run. It was a trip to the local hardware store for "zip ties"...it seems the moving company that brought the ten thousand JI-NORMOUS crates to our office had neglected to leave enough zip ties to close the darned things. Saint EB was on a mission to retrieve the zip ties before morning so she could complete the loading of the one million crates (oh yes...the size and numbers of the huge, orange bins grew substantially over the course of a few days...but I DO exaggerate, too. LOL).

We headed down the street at dusk toward the local hardware store, laughing and continuing to carry on like deranged fools, and stopped at a red light. Just above the street was a giant billboard that caught our attention. It was one of the local MS Society's ads about Multiple Sclerosis in the Northwest.

Now, in case you've been living under a rock and not heard the statistics, MS is quite a popular disease out here in the Emerald City and state. Estimates range from about 8,000 to 10,000 individuals diagnosed with the disease, which is a very large density of MS in ratio to the population. This past Spring, the local MS Chapter launched a billboard awareness campaign to let EVERYONE know MS was an issue in our fair city.

The billboards are actually quite tastefully done. Many have pictures of area landmarks (like the World's Fair Space Needle...when you think Seattle, don't you think Space Needle?!?) and they all contain questions regarding the unknown cause of MS. The billboard we were staring at had the Space Needle in a sepia tone with large rain drops on it and the caption read, "Is it in the air?" It is a quite striking billboard really...hats off to the creators (it mentions nothing about a "movement", thank goodness!).

So, we're sitting at this red light, staring up at this billboard, and Saint EB reads the title out loud..."Is it in the air?" she says to no one in particular.

At the very exact moment she finishes her sentence, an obvious albatross flew somewhere over the paling sky (we later decided it HAD to be a large bird...although there ARE no albatrosses near Seattle) and relieved itself. With the sonar exactness that only a bird has, it relieved itself squarely on its mark...directly on the driver's side windshield, and splattered with a most disturbing "thud" sound.

There was another very brief moment of silence as we both digested what had just occurred on the heels of Saint EB's, "Is it in the air?" statement. I think we might have been silently pondering the meaning of this physical "sign".

And then, the gut-wrenching laughter broke out as I stated, "Well, I guess it IS in the air!" Neither one of us could see clearly as we wiped the laughter tears from our eyes and tried to compose ourselves for the trip inside the hardware store!

It is for moments like these, I toast my dear friends...for keeping me crying from laughter versus crying from heartache...for the chocolate malts...for the comradery in chaos...I guess you really HAD to be there...LOL...