Java Jive

I've just found out that if your day starts out badly, it may just be superstitious to think the entire day will go that way.

When I woke up this morning, I was comfy and happy and enjoying the soft sheets and the sound of breeze. Then I got up, and everything changed. When I alter my position from supine to standing, within about five minutes my sinuses go berserk. So the floodgates opened, and then I noticed that I was wheezing again, and it immediately got tighter and tighter until it was LOUD. But I couldn't take care of it; I had to leave the house because the Tyke had to be at school early for an "explorers' breakfast" (he was Hernan Cortez), and I was the parent who had been asked to bring the plates. You can't strand a whole room full of hungry kids and parents without any plates.

Honey made me a big cup of coffee to go but it was nearly overflowing. When I snapped the lid on, scalding coffee shot out of the drinking hole, burned my hand and made a mess. The lid goes deeply into the cup, so you can't fill this cup to the top. Not having time to clean up, I got a rag anyway and wiped the counter. I poured out half a cup of coffee and stuck the lid on again. Then we all started trotting down to the garage. At the last possible moment I realized I had forgotten the plates, and went back to get them.

I slung my purse strap over my shoulder, and suddenly felt a heavy thump. A tiny screw that holds the hardware together had come undone, and the strap came right off and the purse fell. There was certainly no time to fix it, so I just fumbled around, still holding the plates too, until I clutched the bag part of the purse tightly under my arm. On the way down the stairs, I winced about the purse. It is the only purse I ever spent a good amount of money on, and it's my very favorite one, and for it to fail (okay, so I've had it eight years without a mishap) was just upsetting.

We went out the downstairs door into the garage, and Tyke, elaborately dressed as Hernan, tried to keep our surrogate dog, Luke, from escaping. But Luke shot out into the garage and tried to get into the car. Tyke tried twice, in a rather gawky way. to get him back into the house. The dumb last-minute mishaps were beginning to set us back.

As we were pulling into a parking place at the school, I tried to take a sip of coffee, and quickly remembered why I hate that particular insulated travel cup. Because it has such a deep lid--almost like an inverted cone--the sipper has to tip the cup pretty far before anything will come out, even when the cup is nearly overflowing. And then it comes out in a flood. And so it did as the car jerked simultaneously with my attempted sip, and it was absolutely boiling, and I got a huge mouthful, and a trickle went down and caused the gag reflex, and I had no choice but to spew it all out. On my clean WHITE shirt and Honey's car seat. Great. But now I HAD to get out and go into the classroom with coffee all over my shirt and my lungs sounding like squeaky bellows.

(Best Girlfriend's comment reminds me to finish post which I hastily ended because I was in a hurry to be somewhere else.) Oh, yeah!I started this post planning to show that "bad start to day" meaning a whole bad day is perhaps just dumb superstition. Anyway, the classroom was so crowded that I don't think anyone noticed the coffee stains on my shirt. And I was hot and uncomfortable but so were all the other parents/guardians. And the fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. B., had assembled a lovely PowerPoint presentation of our children's school year. That made a wonderful re-start to the day. And then nothing else stupid or bad happened. No flat tires, ample good parking spaces everywhere. Huzzah.