Have A Nice Day

Yesterday morning I discovered that it's possible to be an idiot in at least 3 different ways, and all before 9:00 AM.

Way # 1: I congratulated myself for getting out of bed as soon as the alarm went off at 6:45, and spent an hour on the treadmill; and when I went back upstairs at 8:00, hubby said, "Weren't you supposed to meet Ida for breakfast at 7:45?"

Oops. I spent 10 frantic minutes trying to get in touch with Ida, without success, since I don't have her cell phone number.*

*Later I called Ida to apologize for being an idiot, and she said, "That's OK, I'm an idiot too- I wasn't there either, I overslept."

Way # 2: When leaving for work at 8:40, I stepped out into the lovely, powdery, unblemished snow that had fallen during the night--and promptly slipped and fell all the way down the steps and landed on my butt at the bottom. I was holding my car keys, three matted 11 x 14 photographs, and a bulletin board. The prints got full of snow, the bulletin board broke into pieces, and my keys went flying. It took several minutes to find them.

Way #3: Since I was late by the time I got to work, due to the falling incident, all of the spaces in the parking lot were full, so I had to park on the street. Remarkably, there was a space right across the street from the building. I backed into the space--but before I was all the way in, the car got stuck in a frozen, rutted, gray mess of ice and snow, which isn't surprising since the City of Chicago does not believe in plowing the side streets. Now the front of my car was sticking out into the street, and I couldn't move it forwards or backwards. I went into the building and asked the maintenance man for a shovel, and he (and another large man who was passing by) spent half an hour getting my car out. I found another, cleaner, spot in the next block, and finally got into my office, with fingers and toes frozen and boots wet and filthy.

Fortunately, the rest of the day passed uneventfully--when the day starts out like that, it can only get better!