"Hi, this is Lacey! I'm really, really sorry I missed your call, but . . . oh, just leave me a message and I'll get back to you soon, okay? Bye!"

. . . god, that voice is freakishly perky, isn't it?

Lacey had ended up sleeping on a park bench last night, which had been cold but she didn't mind all that much. If nothing else, it'd give her material to use if she ever decided to stage a protest piece about the homeless. (She probably would. She was, after all, a Confrontational Spoken Word Performance Artist.)

Trying to figure out where she was, on the other hand, was more of a challenge and she'd ended up a little bit lost in the preserve. Not one to be horribly deterred by this, she started improvising a monologue about how being at the mercy of monolithic telephony corporations was like being lost in the woods.

And then the teal deer started showing up. First one, then a couple more, until a whole flock of them surrounded her.

"Aww, hi!" she cooed to the baby teal fawn that sidled up toward her, looking curious. "You're very pretty. Can you help me get out of here? If you show me the way out I'll start a movement to get you guys your own protected sanctuary. I can do that. I'm a confrontational spoken word performance artist."

The fawn looked at her as if to say "Yeah, I know," then turned and trotted away down a path, pausing expectantly until Lacey started to follow, surrounded by the rest of the teal deer.

Half an hour later, Lacey was out of the woods, and Totally Inspired. Now to find a place where she could put on a show . . .

[OOC: Establishy! Was going to do this earlier but yay for dizziness and unexpected long naps.]

Something was tickling Lacey's nose, which was why she woke up this morning -- which was a shame, because she was really warm and comfy, and wow, when had her sheets gotten this soft? That something, as Lacey discovered when she sneezed, was a feather. From the down comforter. That drifted up into the air when she sneezed, swirled, and settled on her face in its tickly way again.

Lacey sat up and screamed, kicking the offending comforter off of herself and jumping out of bed.

"Dubdub! This isn't funny! There's nothing comforting about a blanket stuffed with the warm coats of hundreds of poor defenseless birds!"

It wasn't until the initial horror of having been warm and comfortable at the poor geese's expense had passed before Lacey realized this wasn't her apartment. Which was to say she was out of the (oddly well-appointed, in a slave-to-corporate-consumerism kind of way) bedroom and halfway down the hall before it sank in.

"Dubdub?" she called again, tentatively, and wandered into the kitchen, drawn toward the refrigerator.

Where Lacey Burrows had, last night, set a nice large beef roast to marinating on the middle shelf.

"Oh my god, they're trying to brainwash me!" Lacey shrieked. "Is this supposed to be some kind of shock therapy?"

She couldn't stay here, obviously. Flailing her way back to the bedroom with one hand over her eyes, she got dressed (not really questioning why some of her clothes were in this closet) and fled the apartment, with its animal cruelty and probably exploitation of child labor, too.

[OOC: Establishy! If you thought I wasn't gonna turn Lacey into The Middleman's Lacey Thornfield this weekend, you were wrong, sorry to say. Because COME ON.]

Having mentioned the Kitchen of Minor Cataclysm (not that she called it that) to Brent yesterday, Lacey thought it was only fair to invite him over to actually see it, and maybe sample the coffee from the sink.

"Now, you promise you're not going to say anything about this place that's going to make Hank and Davis want to show up, right?" she asked as she opened the front door.

[OOC: For her erstwhile business neighbor, and SP for great yay. Curse you, timezones and LJ breakiness!]

The scene cut abruptly to Lacey pacing the length of her apartment floor, accompanied by melancholy violin music. Pace. Pace. Think, think, think.

"I can do this," she said suddenly, out loud, as the music swelled dramatically. "I'm not ashamed of myself! I'm perfectly comfortable in my own skin! I'll show them!"

And with a dramatic flourish, she turned and strode out of the apartment, her skirt and hair swirling behind her.

We all love our OCD threads here, right?

Clippings is an extension I've had for a while now, that lets you save different frequently-used text strings for later use and paste them into web form fields. I've got all my business OCD thread headers saved in here, to save me the tedium of typing them up every time, and you can probably do longer bits as well. It's pretty simple to use, accessible through the right-click context menu on a PC, and actually kind of nicely featured -- you can set your clippings with placeholders for variant text that you'll be prompted to fill in when you go to paste them into a text box, organize them into folders, set shortcut keys, and some other stuff.

I figured a few people might find this kinda useful. :)

It had started out as a fairly normal day, until Lacey had tried to wash her face and gotten tipsy.

This definitely warranted a phone call home. She'd tried Wanda first, but Wanda begged off, claiming there was a customer and she had to go. She called Corner Gas again, and Brent picked up the line only to blurt something out about how he had to go because Wanda had gotten up on tiptoes to check someone's wiper fluid, lost her balance, and gotten wedged headfirst beneath the hood. She tried Oscar and Emma Leroy next, but Oscar screamed something about how he paid her taxes and then hung up on her, in which case Lacey decided she didn't want to know.

She --

***
The phone rings in a darkened (for your sanity) house on the outskirts of Dog River, and the silhouette of a hand comes into frame and picks up.

HANK: Hank talkin'.

Cut to Lacey in her apartment. Ominous music builds in the background, and her eyes widen in horror.
***

-- No, she didn't call Hank! She wasn't that desperate. It wasn't too surprising when Karen Pelly, rookie constable of the two-man Dog River Police Department, picked up, though -- it wasn't like the DRPD ever had anything to do. Poor Karen, though, picked up the call and instead of hearing all about how Lacey's plumbing was running booze (instant Irish coffee if she ran the kitchen sink the right way) got an earful of the tinny electronic rendition of "Angel of the Morning."

"Who is this? Hello? Hello?!?"

She didn't get a reply as such, although "Angel of the Morning" segued into "Take Me to the River," which was the only answer Lacey could give now that she'd just turned into a singing trout wall plaque.

. . . sadly, as far as people wishing she'd just shut up went, it wasn't much of a change from the norm at all.

[OOC: While I don't leave for Comic-Con until tomorrow afternoon, I couldn't resist doing this now. :D :D :D Lacey's neighbors are welcome to mod faint strains of wall-trout song!]

Okay, so as of today there's a community bulletin board in Luke's Diner, available for -- community use. Who knew? This is one of those things Lacey does to try and make herself relevant.

This'll be available as an OCD thread in the diner posts, where you can ICly post bulletins, flyers, ads, (links to) cartoons, whatever -- just please, keep it comm-safe/worksafe. Flyers going up around town can handwavily be posted here too; feel free to mod the board for that purpose if you're putting up a general "posted around town" sort of post.

You can, of course, react to each other's bulletins -- hey, get into bulletin wars if you want to, but please, please don't mess with other people's flyers without permission first. Because it just isn't a Lacey Idea (pat. pending) without it backfiring on her in some way.

Um, I think that should about cover the gist of it . . . questions? Pie? Breakfast because I haven't had it yet?

Forty kilometres from nowhere . . .

Bingo wasn't until Sunday, so there was no way to get a little competitive thrill. It would be a while until Wes tried to install an ATM in the liquor/insurance store and turn it into the hottest spot on the Saskatchewan prairies for a person to have a lively conversation. Hank didn't have a roadside corn stand to accidentally catch fire and cause a drop-everything-and-come-see spectacle. There were no specials at the Food Market (FOO_ MAR__T if you went by the sign) today, either, which meant that it was a normal day in Dog River with no excitement and no novelty value whatsoever.

That, in turn, meant that any action to be had was at the gas station and adjoining diner at the edge of town (all three streets of it), just off the highway.

( Still, this was Dog River after all. )

[OOC: Wow, uh, that was long. NFB/NFI for distance, natch, but OOC == FTW. Lacey'll be making her way into town tomorrow, huzzah!]