Meetzorp

Yesterday I felt terribly smug about how my journal has become significantly less whiney in recent times.  I sure set myself up for something, let me tell you.

I had something akin to the adult version of Alexander’s Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day today.   It was a day of bungling, being thwarted, and reacting badly to stress.

The day started out with promise.  I awoke from pleasant dreams, warm and comfy, snuggled up against Joel.  I got breakfast going, oatmeal with frozen blueberries in it and a nice pot of coffee.  Things went awry when we sat down to eat.

Or didn’t sit down, as my case might be.  I remembered three things I’d meant to do last night:  get the laundry baskets to take to Joel’s house for sorting laundry, bring up the beer for tomorrow’s party, and divvy up to cookies for James’s party tonight and ours tomorrow night.  I also needed to hitch the trailer to my touring bike, as I was going to have work-related errands today which would necessitate greater hauling capacity than my panniers would accomodate.

So, I went tear-assing around the house, organizing all that crap.  The baskets, beer, and cookies would be going with Joel in his truck, so all I needed to do about that was consolidate them, though in the process, I got my skirt all dusty from the beer box.  Then I went to hitch up the trailer, only to discover that the quick-release skewer for the BoB trailer doesn’t fit my touring bike; it’s about 1/4 of an inch too wide.  So I had to put the QR skewer back in my spare 26″ wheelset, switch wheels on the old Trek, and then hitch up to that bike.  Then, I couldn’t find one of the hitch-pins.  Found it.  Had to air up all three tires.

Oh yeah…food.  Sat down to eat.  I’d stirred a little honey into my oatmeal, and it seemed kind of too thick and sticky, so I poured in some soymilk…which had gone bad.  When soymilk goes off, it goes off dramatically.  It smells like a cross between spoiled regular milk, a bad fart, and latex wall enamel.  Ye gods it stinks.  So I ruined my bowl of oatmeal and grossed myself out so bad I didn’t have the heart to eat anyhow…which was just as well, because by that point it was 20-til, and I should already have been out the door.

Of course when I’m late, I get even more incompetent, so I kept losing stuff I needed, tripping over cats, and generally making like all three Stooges contained in one body.   Joel offered to lock up and encouraged me to get on the road.  So, off I took, leaving my keys at home.  Of course.  He caught up to me at the stoplight at Benton and handed my keys over.  Good grief!

I got to work, 10 minutes late, to discover that I’d left my lock at home, wound around the seatpost of the bike I ride most of the time.  And I’d especially needed a lock today, too, what with having to run around downtown and pick up flyers for a work project.  I prefer to have one anyhow, but I actually truly required one if I meant to go out and make stops downtown.  I managed to borrow one from a cyclist co-worker, so that was covered.

I got in a good, solid couple of hours of design work between arrival and having to head out and collect my flyers.  The first pickup went off with only a few small hitches; somebody else had taken the run of flyers I was supposed to have, but they had more in stock, so they bundled up another batch, and I was on my way.  At the second stop, things continued deceptively smoothly.  Two cases of brochures fitted neatly onto my trailer, with just the perfect amount of space between them to snugly wedge the other, smaller box of flyers.  Woo-hoo!  I was off once again.

I rounded the corner from Broadway onto 12th and felt my trailer take a dramatic dip and scrape bottom.   A quick glance showed one of my hitch pins had fallen out somewhere.  Oh good grief again!  This was seriously starting to suck.  It could have been scripted, “The Day That Wouldn’t Go Right.”  I dragged my contraptions up on to the sidewalk and commenced to jerry-rigging.  I switched pins so that my remaining pin was on the drive side (the pin that was lost had been the right-hand or drive-side pin) and improvised a tie-down with a scrap of inner-tube rubber on the left side.  I figured I only needed to get it from Broadway to Oak (maaaybe 6 blocks) and if worst came to worst, I could leave it at the office until I could get another pin.

The improvised hitch worked fine, so I schlepped my boxes of promo material back to the office, stored it, and got back down to my design work.  I’m a total novice at this whole graphic design thing, and have been finding Adobe Illustrator to be especially non-intuitive, so most of what I have created so far has been painfully ham-fisted, butt-ugly, and frankly amateur.  As far as I’m concerned, that’s never an acceptable state of affairs, but it’s especially unacceptable in the current situation as the stuff I am designing is for a fairly high-profile public event.  My co-worker Dee helped me with one particular phase of the project that was fixin’ to give me both a migraine and an ulcer, and finally, around 3:00 p.m., my day started to turn around.

Pretty much from 3-til-close, the rest of my day was as mundane as possible.  I reverted to the normal range of questions, copy-editing, research, and planning/scheduling that make up my job.

In all, the frustrating events of my day weren’t really anything that monumental or even especially bad as such, they were just so continual.  It was just one damn thing after another, to employ a cliche.  I expect a lot of the level of annoyance I derived from it all stems from overall stress.  I’ve got a lot of deadlines, a few family commitments and worries, and I’ve been “on the run” an awful lot lately, and it’s all wearing down on my patience, sense of humor, and nerves.  It will certainly get better, but for the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be a runnin’ son-of-a-gun.  Or whatever it is if you’re a woman.