A Thoroughly Messed Up Day of Minor Disasters

Some days you just shouldn't get out of bed.

Exhibit 1: One of the printers in our home office was smudging, so the DH decided to carry it down to the kitchen to clean it. The office is upstairs at the front of the house; the kitchen is downstairs at the back of the house, and the kitchen sink is the farthest possible point in the house from the printer's home on the office desk. I now know exactly how far it is, thanks to the trail of large, black, liquid ink pools that we spent the morning cleaning off the carpet, the stairs, the wood floors, our shoes...

Exhibit 2: I laid the tile on the bathroom floor yesterday. This morning the dry waller called and said he could come out to fix the hole in the wall. Not wanting to miss this unprecedented opportunity, I checked the tiles and deemed the adhesive "dry enough" for him to walk on. I was wrong. Totally, completely, horribly wrong. After he left, I went in and discovered that my carefully-measured, marked, spaced, and leveled tiles were...not. Not spaced, not leveled, not measured. They had, in fact, slid in all directions everywhere he had stepped or knelt. This was not his fault. He had carefully laid a sheet of dry wall atop the tiles and covered that with a tarp, but the adhesive just wasn't set up yet. I almost cried. I spent the rest of the morning carefully prying and sliding and spacing the tiles, trying to shift them gently back into position without breaking whatever bonds they might have formed with the floor.

Exhibit 3: The bride-to-be of Icarus fame is completely out of control. I suspected she might be heading down that very slippery slope when she had an engagement party and two bridal showers, all of which her bridesmaids (of whom I am one) were expected to attend, bearing gifts, notwithstanding the fact that none of us live in the same city. I was pretty sure she was well on her way when she sent out a call for "one or more" of her bridesmaids to come to her final dress fitting to learn "how to put it on"--even though the closest of us lives over an hour away. And folks, I know we ostentatiously call it a "bridal gown" but it's just a dress. I even wore one myself. I don't need a lesson on how to fasten hooks and button buttons. Now she wants to have a "spa day" with her bridesmaids, next weekend, again near her home, which is a three-hour drive each way for me. Aside from the expense (gas, spa treatments, and lunch for myself and my share of hers), I actually do have a life, which includes, on the day in question, one music lesson, two karate classes, football signups, a birthday party, and a trip to Nana's house. I politely, and without so much as a tiny white lie, explained that I just can't make it, please go on without me. I got an indignant email in return, suggesting that we either make it for a different day or meet the Friday before the Sunday morning wedding, three hours from my house, for a girls' day. I already have to spend two days--one for the rehearsal, one for the wedding--away from home. But now we should get together a day earlier to...what? Talk about how exciting this all is and how happy we are for her? It is, and I am, but I've about exhausted my stock of things to say about it. And frankly, I think I've already spent more on this wedding than I did on my own.

With the sort of day I'm having, I'm not about to handle sharp knives or heating sources. We're going out to dinner.