Today was not the best of days. To start off, I got about six hours of sleep last night, so I really didn’t want to get up this morning. But I did, and I even got ready for work and left on time. On Saturday I had worked on the brakes on my car, but it wasn’t really drivable (or rather, it wasn’t really stoppable) because I still needed to bleed the brake system. The plan was that Brinestone would drive me to work in her car (which currently has no A/C) instead.

When we were about halfway there, the car suddenly stalled, even though it had apparently been running just fine. I pulled over onto the shoulder and tried to get it to start up again, but to no avail. It just cranked and cranked and never kicked over. I got out and waved at the cars driving by, but of course no one stopped. And we have no cell phone, so we couldn’t call anyone. So we got out Lego’s fold-up stroller and started walking back the other way. Luckily, someone then pulled over when we were only about fifty feet from our car.

We piled in the guy’s car (a beautiful 1955 Chevy Bel Air) and headed off. He said he needed to run a quick errand, and then he could drop us off somewhere. Meanwhile we borrowed his phone and called my brother Dave-o to ask him to pick us up. Quite serendipitously, our ride was headed to the retail store at my work, so he dropped us off there. I went to work, and Brinestone and Lego waited for my brother.

After our weekly team meeting, I got to work on my current project. It’s complicated, poorly defined, and almost certainly doomed to fail, but last I checked no one exactly gave me a say in these things. I’d been working on the darn thing for about two hours, and then poof! QuarkXPress, that most abominable pile of software, quit unexpectedly. And of course there are no program-wide settings for autosave, and I hadn’t saved it since I’d opened it, so that two hours of tedious work was lost and had to be repeated.

I really wasn’t in the mood to dive into that at the moment, so I went to chat with Cicada for a bit. That only delayed the inevitable, though, and eventually I had to get back to work. Meanwhile, Brinestone called a tow truck company and had the car towed back to our place. I figured that even if we couldn’t get it running, we could push it across the street to a little repair shop.

Lunchtime rolled around, but I had left my lunch in the car, so I headed over to the cafeteria, where I burned up a good fifteen minutes waiting in line (the registers were down). I usually just clock out for a half hour for lunch, but today I decided I needed a full hour. I’d make up the time another day. The rest of the afternoon was mostly uneventful, but it did seem to drag on far longer than it should have. And thankfully, Cicada offered to give me a ride home, so I didn’t have to bother my brother to come pick me up again.

It wasn’t the worst day ever, but it certainly wasn’t a great start to the week. And it could have been much worse—it could have all happened tomorrow, on my birthday.