10:07 a.m. - 2002-10-08
Bad Day
Yesterday was the strangest day. One of those days which is so useless I wondered why I had tried to get anything done at all. I would have been better off if I had just obsessively cleaned the coffee maker all day.
The first thing that happened was that, the minute I came downstairs in the morning, I realised that Athena had peed on the twin bed. It actually was no big deal, at least as far as the bed was concerned. We now have a washing machine so washing the bedclothes was simple. A little bleach and lots of detergent! Bad for the environment but the sheets will no longer remind me of Athena.
The mattress itself was saved by the fact that we sometimes have friends with young children stay over so I have a waterproof mattress cover on it in case of potty training accidents.
It's really too bad that at four years old Athena is still not potty trained.
I don't know why she does this. She doesn't do it often, just every once in awhile. And then she spends the rest of the day rubbing against my legs and purring. I don't know if she's trying to apologise or if she's proud of herself for messing up my morning before I've even had a cup of coffee.
Anyway, the pee-on-the-bed incident was followed by my falling for the the internet-virus-hoax incident, in which I got an email from a friend, who also fell for it. The email said that her computer had been infected by a virus and it was passed on to me via her mailing list. I should go find a certain file in the computer and delete it.
To make a long story short, Bruce figured out that this was a hoax, but not before I had emailed my whole mailing list and passed it on. Included on my mailing list are people like my cousin John who is 70 years old and not even as computer savvy as I am (which is basically on the level of being able to turn it on and off and then stare at the screen confusedly when it does something strange), and my cousin Bruce whom I have seen once in the last 20 years and only recently begun corresponding with, and Beth and Joey whom I'm not even speaking to right now.
I think the whole point of these viruses is to make you feel like a complete and total fool when you have to send out the retraction letter.
The rest of the day was followed by other, equally pleasant experiences. The only bright spots were finding a groovy book for Simon's birthday at the library's used bookstore, and finding my pruners. They were laying on the ground by the terraced garden in a spot I know I looked at a thousand times. At least a thousand!
Oh, and my pennywhistle arrived in the mail late in the afternoon. It's very lovely, and has a very simple book with it which I was making lovely progress with when I noticed the rabbits were disturbed. Very disturbed.
The rabbits may like Tom Waits, but they do not like pennywhistles. In fact, they hate pennywhistles. It must sound to them like the call of some gigantic bird that is coming to carry them off. They spent much of last night hiding behind their cage, even after I stopped playing.
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