WWO: Mr. X Has His Own Shock

Wow. 

So I've had minimal contact with Mr. X since the pool table night.  Just a few text messages back and forth.  And one missed call from him.  I left a playful message in return on his voicemail (Phonetag you're it!!), but heard nothing for two days.  (For the Y chromosomes out there, this is a significantly long stretch of time from a Female vantage point.  The equivalent for your gender, in terms of noticing something amiss, would be at least a week. Maybe two.)  It seems like an especially long silence when you're about to leave for a foreign country for two months...

This afternoon, I called him and finally, finally got ahold of him in person (after three or four rings, when I'd resigned myself to another rendezvous with Mr. X's answering machine). 

And I discovered why he's been so unavailable and hard to get in contact with-- one of the major manufacturers his company relies on just went BANKRUPT.  Oh geez.  Poor Mr. X has been scrambling to source four-catalogue-pages' worth of supplies from other places.  OUCH.   Poor guy-- and I think it started the week before the pool table night (he'd mumbled something about having a bad week before trailing off in drunk incoherence).  No WONDER he'd gone on a fourteen hour bender to escape for a bit.

And now I feel SO bad for the txt message exchange with him two days later, out of frustration that I hadn't gotten to actually TALK to him during that rather odd night, and he wasn't making any initiative for even a quick meet up.  

It went like this:

Me: how's the recovery going?

Him: could be better.. im at work and its sunday!

Me: aww :) 

[then being a bit frustrated and mischievous]

Me: a pity you're 2 busy 4 a massage-- I was going to suggest using oils this time.  oh well...

Him: That was not fair!

Me: hey you made your own choices about how to allocate your time this wkend. that poor back of yours, all tense in that office chair... tsk tsk!

Um, oops.  Talk about bad timing...

I guess this means I can't rag on him about his SUV right now, either.  Gosh, I wish I could DO something to help out with all his work. 

He's going to try to figure out someway to meet up with me before I leave.  I'd been hoping to see him twice more before I leave, but I guess I'll just have to be satisfied with once. 

Hmmm.  I'd been preparing myself to ration gas, food, electricity, etc.  But I didn't expect having to ration time with Mr. X quite so much.  A pity, a real pity. 

I promised to follow through with a real massage when I do see him.  He said he'll look forward to it as a light at the end of his tunnel.

Meanwhile, I've got to arrange having my cousin drive up his truck to pick up my mattress and bureau from my sublet.  Time is getting tight.  More than I've let myself process, I think.

***
PS. Horses. No picture, but I'm no more than a thirty minute bike ride from a horse-- there are stables on the St. Paul campus where my science lab is.  Getting hold of these horses, of course, would be another matter entirely...