Sometimes I blog because I need to share my opinion, sometimes because I'm bored, and sometimes because I haven't posted anything in a few days and want to at least have something posted from the last week or so. And then sometimes I post for you, the reader. By reading such posts, you are bound to feel better about how your day has gone. Just a few examples of these from the past year can be found here (in which the water turns off in my apartment, right after I had lathered up my head with shampoo) and here (in which a trip to the store turns disastrous).
Today was just as fun. I felt like the pathetic character in some tragicomedy, watching everything go wrong, powerless to stop it.
The day started normally enough. I woke up, worked on some work stuff, and was mostly lazy, reading some blogs and some Harry Potter message boards. Then I had to head out for a doctor appointment. Easy enough, right? Well, it was raining outside. Hard. My umbrella was, of course, in my car. And, for some reason, none of the jackets I have with me in Tucson have hoods. So, in order to reach my car, I put on a bath robe over my clothes and a shower cap over my hair. The shower cap worked. The robe failed miserably, not only letting the clothes underneath become soaked, but leaving me with a huge soaking robe in my car.
Either way, I was in the car, and that was a plus. But as soon as I get out on the roads, it's clear that this isn't going to be an easy trip. At one point I got into what was perhaps too deep a patch of water. My car started sliding along with the water, finally being stopped on its course by the curb. Never have I been so happy to run into the curb on the side of the road.
I finally get to the doctor and have my appointment. Then I have to head to campus for a meeting. Easier said than done. The roads are now worse than ever, especially the roads near campus. Two attempted routes to my parking garage are blocked by police cars warning that the water is to deep to drive. I finally find my way into a garage. Just as I enter, a loud crash of thunder sounds and the lights in the garage turn off and several car alarms sound.
I prepare to get out and make my way to the soc building, determined to brave any and all bad weather, with my umbrella now by my side. I get to the first road I must cross and find that the water depth is somewhere between my ankles and my knees--and it's moving pretty swiftly. I brave on, reminding myself of the many times during The Oregon Trail during middle and elementary school that I decided to ford the river rather than pay for a ferry.
Just as happened during many a river fording back in the day, my fording of the flooded street failed. The failure was not immediately apparent. At first, I lost control of my shoe, which just flitted off my foot and started gushing down the river/street. Still feeling in control of the situation, I run after the shoe, at one point putting out my umbrella into the rushing water, trying to watch the shoe as if in a net. This is unsuccessful, merely serving to flip the umbrella out, inverting it, and breaking one of the metal pieces. I continue to run after the shoe. I am, at this point, running in mid-leg-length water, completely soaked. But it got worse. I tripped over something--a rock, a hole in the ground, someone else's escaped shoe, or my own two feet, it's not clear--and fell. Right into the water. Any bit of me that had remained dry during the shoe chase was now wet and cold.
I decided to give up on the meeting. I couldn't really walk into the soc building literally soaking, with one shoe on. So as I watched my shoe sail away, I decided to head back to the car, not bothering to fix the umbrella. What was the point at this point?
After a dejected, one-shoed walk back to the car, I called the person I was to meet with, and said that I need to go home and change shoes because I lost mine in the flood. I didn't mention the fall, or say that I need to go home to completely change my clothes, but I needed to do that as well.
When I get home, I realize that the only other shoes I have in Tucson are dress shoes. My sandals died and several pairs of tennis shoes are in Denison. So, my options are going to a shoe store with one shoe on, or going into a shoe store with two dress shoes on, while not wearing dressy clothes (I wasn't after all, about to go dress up simply to go to a shoe store. I'd been through enough). I choose option number 2. Around this time, the person I was meeting with called to say that the office had been closed due to a leak and that we should meet tomorrow morning.
Fine. But I still needed to go get shoes. So, again, I made my way through absurdly flooded streets. But I finally got shoes. And I just now got home.
Was your day better than this?*
*I do realize, of course, that most people in the world are having a worse day than this. What with war, genocide, and poverty, some would love a day where getting stuck in the rain is their biggest problem. Indeed, today wasn't so bad for me. It was mostly funny. In retrospect.
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