A superlative day with a fragrant ending...

I'm working on this customer. I normally will spend my day on the phone with possibly a couple dozen customers. Monday I spent about 4 hours making calls to vendors, internal calls, trying to resolve issues for this one lady who is a cornucopia of neuroses and, uh, special circumstances. I hate this and I love it. The people who are negative vortices of energy are the biggest triumph when you ride them out and make them fans anyway, and that's always my goal-- show them they can't wear me down and that I'm going to surpass their expectations no matter how committed they are to their disappointments and failures. I feel I turned the corner with her and it's all going to be okay. And then, if against all reason, they are still disappointed at the end of the day, I can reasonably conclude they are clearly insane not to fall utterly in love with me and I move on with my life and to hopefully help someone more deserving of my exceptional attention to service.

After two months of generally feeling sick and crappy, the last week I've been feeling healthy again. I feel [touch wood] that exercising won't put me into a pneumonia-vulnerable state any more, so I only worked an hour late Monday. After work, I showered with a lovely lavender soap and went to yoga for the first time in over 2 months, hair swept up in a long ponytail. It felt amazing and I loved the smell of the soap and the fresh workout gear. I arrived at this class, and classical music was playing as the teacher put us through a slow-flow fusion of yoga styles. The studio was nearly dark, with a couple of indirect soft lights, and there was a nice scent-- vetiver or somesuch. Some poses were utterly unfamiliar, and some were glove-fit-perfection, and the first half hour was pretty rigorous, but by the end, laying in corpse pose felt like a great reward, eyes closed. The instructor put a cloth over my eyes and a nice lavender sachet on top of that. The scent was heady and relaxing.

Driving home afterward, feeling turbo-chilled and like nothing but nothing could possibly harsh my mellow, the path curved around when too late my headlamps illuminated the roadway ahead leaving void a distinctive wodge of negative space waddling into the roadway, white stripe cleaving its middle like a belligerent middle-finger waggling the threat of olfactory horrors my way. Whoopsie. Having swerved over as far right as I might without leaving the roadway, my left front tire still managed to squish the varmint soundly and I was in paroxysms of squick as I drove the rest of the way home, suddenly unmellowed to a profound degree. Went to the little supermarket in my town and noticed the folks seemed -- something-- odd-- I didn't think about it too much. I approached the cashier and she smiled then her face clouded as I drew near. I suddenly fancied I smelled something undesirable and blurted "do you smell skunk?" and she seemed not to want to say so, kind of screwed up her face and said, meekly, "kinda."

I stink of skunk. Goody.

I got home and the pups seemed to think I smelled interesting. Too interesting. Clothing got bunged in the washer and I gave meself a proper scrubbing and hair-washing. *shudder*

Later, dear friend Daniel came by in his luxurious new sedan and took me for a ride around the block. I asked if he smelled skunk. He said he didn't but then again, he'd just run over one about 20 minutes earlier that had recently been killed. What are the odds that your friend in a new car will run over the skunk you just killed? Anyway, I suppose if you're going to have friends, it's nice if you're all inured to the same kind of stink, innit?