And the streak continues

When I reread my last entry, I realized that I forgot to tell you about a couple of other things that happened last week, both of which fit nicely into the category of "things gone wrong."

First, there was the pizza that I didn't intend to share. My plan as I cut off the first hot, cheesy slices was to have pizza for at least three meals over the next day or two. Unfortunately, while I was enjoying pizza in front of the TV, a solitary fly found its way into my home and enjoyed the other two-thirds of the pizza in the kitchen. When I spotted the fly, I didn't get the impression that it had done a quick buzz in, touch down and resume flying thing. No, it behaved as if it owned that pizza, as if it had frolicked over the melted mozzarella and hopscotched from one pepperoni slice to the next until its little fly body had contaminated every morsel.

I hated to waste the food, so I asked myself how much I'd be willing to spend not to have to eat pizza that a fly had crawled on. It turns out I was willing to pay more than the value of the remaining pizza, so I threw it out. Fly 1, Velvet 0.

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Another kitchen incident occurred when I carried bags of groceries into the house, setting them on the countertop and, when I ran out of room, on the glass stovetop itself. When I brought in the next bunch of bags, I smelled something funny and noticed that the stove was turned on! I must have accidentally bumped the stove handle on the front when I leaned in to set the groceries down.

The packaging on a few food items had partially melted, so it took five minutes or so to repack the items in plastic wrap, and it took another 40 minutes to scrape all the burnt plastic off my stovetop. The most embarrassing part of this tale is that it's the second time that's happened. Wouldn't you think once would have been enough?

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Okay, that brings us up to last weekend. I needed to be at the office at seven o'clock Saturday morning for the move, and I made it there on time despite the fact that my left rear tire blew out on the way. I heard the explosion, but the car continued to handle so well that I thought the noise must have been caused by something else. I was about four miles from the office when the tire blew, and I was only about a block away when the steering wheel began vibrating and the road noise got really loud.

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We were finished moving by ten a.m., and it was a good thing we finished when we did. All of us were completely drenched in sweat, literally dripping from toiling in the direct sun while the temperature reached a record-setting 104 actual degrees. Between the extreme perspiration and the toting of multiple boxes from one place to the other, I was exhausted by mid-morning.

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When I got home from the move, Kim was here. At one point in the early afternoon, she was in the bathroom, and I heard her say, "Oh, my gosh, you have a problem in here." My immediate thought was plumbing problems again, but no, there was a new, different kind of surprise in store for me: an ant parade, all along one wall at floor level, then up and over the shower enclosure. I picked up my camera as I went to get the bug spray.


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Yesterday, Sunday afternoon, I went to the office and worked for about four hours to get semi-organized. Sunday was a pretty good day, all in all. At least if anything bad happened, I haven't found out about it yet.

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When I got to work today, I discovered the cover of a four-foot-long fluorescent light fixture hanging suspended by one tiny clip directly over the chair where I'd spent the previous afternoon. I was tempted to think of it as one more in a long chain of recent annoyances, but I prefer to put a positive spin on it and call it a narrow escape. That way, I can believe my luck may have finally changed.

Whew! I'll sleep better now.