almost_the_worst_day_ever birdmad Well. Right now i am just grateful for the poor planning of a 13-year old. My neice, sometimes precocious, sometimes ditzy decided that as payback for being severely grounded as a result of having racked up a $460.oo phone bill she was going to make like Joan Jett and Lita Ford. She decided that during an unwatched moment, she was going to sneak out and run away. I wonder if the cops would have been so non-chalant about our phonecalls if we had been calling from a more upscale zip code? as it stands though, i made a walking round of the neighborhood, my sister-in-law called my neices friends and my brother took the van and decided to make a wider search. Luckily, he found her. She didn't plan her getaway very well and didn't get very far. We actually had to call the cops back and tell them we found her ourselves. i'm still trying to climb back down out of freak-out mode. A bright kid. good thing for us that strategy and tactics aren't her strong suits I'm sure that she just got her sentence extended for this little stunt as well. 030327 ... subliminal birdmad as it stands, my personal worst day was in early december 1974 when, as a 2 year old toddler, i subconsciously commanded an obese 8 year old to lose his footing in my grandmother's front yard near where i was playing and fall on me, fracturing my left femur and causing me to spend two months in a pair of itchy plaster overalls 030327 ... x hard to say... probably a tie between the day my dad died and the day one of my ex's broke up with me. you'd think that my dad would be the obvious worse, but i had been expecting it for awhile. somehow, i didn't think i was ever going to break up with my ex. all those fantasy statements... "I love you and I always will"... "I want to be with you forever"... i believed them. i wasn't sure if i could breathe without him. couldn't comprehend how i could continue to live. i kept telling him that i couldn't do it. he said "do this... for me". they say there's no love like your first love. i think that's because you're permanently damaged after that. good riddance. at this point, i look forward to being increasingly more callous. 030906 ... birdmad 1. Tie: Mom's and Dad's terminal diagnoses (Aug 87/Oct 94) - I would have said the days that they died, but for them and for us, other than the immediate fact of their loss, it was a relief...it was every day from the medically spelled out death sentence to the end that managed to be terrible in it's own way 2. TIE: Broken leg, age 2 / Tania's miscarriage 3. my shallow grave/ premature burial incident 4.5,6,7 - heroin withdrawal weekend (though if i could count them as one day, i'm sure they'd be in the running for the top spot) and number 8 - well, that one is tied between a handful of contenders scattered through the last 15 years or so, the incident that prompted this blathe is maybe loosely tied with one of the withdrawal days, i had been doing my best to forget as much of the rest of it as i could when that happened but i realized over time how futile that can be 030906 ... nomatter monday the 11th 030914 what's it to you? who go blather from