Luck, Be A Lady Tonight

I sure hope my luck is waiting to meet me at Summerfest, because it isn't with me today. I couldn't run all my errands this morning, the gardening crew arrived just after I bought the flowers but right as I was starting work and couldn't return home to drop them off, the parking office gave me the wrong bus schedule making me 10 minutes late to class, and my baby is teething (I am typing this one-handed while being kicked, pinched, and punched by a screaming Bagel who is trying to simultaneously grab my glass of water).

And then there was the mail. I put my mail on vacation hold online, and checked the box that said I wanted my mail delivered to me at the end of the hold. The helpful website neglected to tell me that my particular branch post office doesn't provide this particular service, so I didn't receive my packages which included a tagging gun for attaching my price tags. I discovered this after Bagel had just gone down for a nap and Princess out to play with her friends. I had to leave the kids in the neighbor's care and run down to the post office and get my mail.

Also, since our hard drive crashed we are limping along on a neurotic old hard drive that has to be coaxed into booting up and forgets everything you just installed the minute you reboot it, so I've reinstalled Word Perfect twice now. I had to find and install the font I use separately because for some reason this font wasn't showing up, and then when I opened the file to print out my tags, it permanently changed this font for a much more comic-looking one and I had to change it all back. When I finally got the file straightened out, I went to print the price tags and discovered the printer is out of ink. I dug out our old printer which takes the same cartridges and swapped out the cartridge, only to discover that it too was empty. Not to worry, we have a laser printer-- which, unfortunately, this neurotic little computer can't find, because it's a network printer. So I'll have to go over to my mom and dad's and maybe reinstall my font, and print these things out.

I'm having a fun day. I sure hope tomorrow goes much, much better.

UPDATE: I shouldn't have said anything because it just got much, much worse. As I was bringing out three quarts of dye, Sonshine wouldn't get out of my way and I tripped and spilled it all over the living room-- the large area rug, the stereo equipment, my pile of merchandise, and a bunch of socks I had just matched. Hoping I could salvage some of the stuff that got dyed, I immediately threw it in the washer with Synthrapol hoping the dye wouldn't have had time to set. I also threw in the clothes I'd been wearing. Then I went to e-mail the file to my friend, and realized to my horror that the last place I remembered putting my thumb drive was in the pocket of the pants that got covered in dye and were currently in the washing machine. I have not eaten all day and I am so, so hungry. I've been going nonstop for days, working from dawn till dusk, packing boxes and cleaning, and my house is even messier than it was when I started.

MORE: The thumb drive miraculously survived the wash load and did not short-circuit anything when plugged into the computer. Taking this as a sign that the Lord had not totally abandoned me, I stayed up until midnight overdyeing the ponchos that had been destroyed by the dye spill, and they turned out well (but a little shrunken). The rainbow oven mitts and such that were spilled on also survived the attack of the gray dye, but only because I washed them, and now I can't sell them as first quality and will have to sell them as seconds. The matching rainbow scrubber, however, was not so lucky; the dye washed out of the colored and nylon parts, but stained the white border. The socks are permanently damaged, but socks are cheap and during the summer my kids scarcely wear any anyway.