Following is an email that I sent to my sister. Thinking about it, I thought, “Why should I just vent to her when I can spread the load around the whole world?” The email was written on Friday, November 26, 2021 (hence, the “today” referenced at the outset). I share this, knowing that everyone has had a day like this one and should, therefore, not feel alone. Be sure to check out the P. S. at the end …
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Today hasn’t been so great. Ever have one of those days when everything you go to do just doesn’t work out? I had bought a little DVD player a while back because it seems that none of ours work anymore. Today I decided to hook it up. First thing: the HDMI cable that was supposed to come with it wasn’t there (and, of course, we had bought it back before summer with the idea that I would try to hook it up in the RV, so there was no way I could return it now). I looked in my bag o’ cables (of which I have many) and, sure enough, I had one HDMI cable. Yay! The hookup was so simple a five-year-old could do it: plug one end of the cable into the player and the other end in the TV, and plug in the power cord, which I did. I even put new batteries from our own supply in the remote instead of using the two that came with the unit, not knowing how old the included batteries might be. I turned the player on, then went to the selection of inputs to activate HDMI #7 on the TV, but do you think I got anything? Nope. I tried all the other inputs, but the only ones that worked were for the cable TV channels. I was about ready to heave the whole mess out the window.
Karlyn [daughter] asked me if I would mind taking her to work this morning. She had made plans to have her friend J. pick her up after work so they could go to Christiana Mall to do some Christmas shopping. She didn’t want to leave her car at work because this guy … who has a vendetta against her knows her car, and she’s afraid that if she leaves it there, he’ll do some damage to it (he hangs around the mall a lot). So, as I was pulling into the two-lane ramp to make the turn into the mall where she works, she told me I would do better in the other lane! I like to use the left lane because when I drive around to the back of the mall, I can pull up to the door she uses, and the passenger door is right there for her to get out on the sidewalk. Instead, I got in the right lane as she wanted, and when we got to the back of the mall, she had to cross the parking lot lane to get to the door. “It’s OK,” she said, “if I had driven, I would have had to park in the lot and walk even farther.” But, chalk another one up in the “It’s Gonna Be One of Those Days” columns.
As I was coming home I noticed that quite a few people had their trash and recycling bins on the street. But there were also quite a few who didn’t. Normally, when there’s a holiday during the week, pickup is the day after the normally-scheduled day, but there were so many folks who had their bins out, I thought maybe they knew something I didn’t. So I called the office to see if [the office manager] could tell me definitely what was going on. She wasn’t in, but an answering service picked up my call. Of course, she had no more of an idea of what was going on than the rabbits under our shed, so I called the collection company directly. My call went to music, but after two minutes of that and no one picking up, I hung up. I decided that, since I really needed to have our recycling picked up more than our trash, I’d put that bin out. It’s going on 5:00, and nothing’s been picked up, so I imagine they’ll be here tomorrow, as I suspected in the first place.
Evelyn had gone thru two catalogs and dog-eared the pages of clothes that she’d like me to consider getting her for Christmas. The first catalog went fine. She had marked all the details for the items she wanted on the dog-eared pages (size, color, etc.). The second catalog, not so. Sure, she had dog-eared the pages, but she never said what exactly on those pages it was that she wanted. One page might have two or three outfits with a selection of shoes at the bottom. So, I’m like, “????” Didn’t make any headway with that one.
Kianna [Evelyn’s service dog] and I took our afternoon walk to the mailbox around 2:45. We got there only to find out that there was a substitute carrier today, and she was JUST starting to put the mail up! The saving grace was that Ev had written out a coupla bills to mail, so I was able to give them to the carrier, saving the walk from being a total waste. The bad part was that today we’re getting some really strong winds, dropping the chill factor down into the basement, so a really cold day to be out for a walk.
This morning I needed to call our PCP to request a copy of my latest labs to be sent to [my gastroenterologist] in Willingboro in preparation for an upcoming [test], but the person who takes requests for referrals wasn’t there, so I had to leave a voice mail. It’s late enough now that I’m sure I won’t hear anything now until at least Monday.
So, I’m glad we had such a nice day yesterday because today has taken me in the opposite direction.
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P. S.: In the interim I got the DVD player to work, hooray and hallelujah! Evelyn was looking for something in the drawer to our TV stand and showed me an HDMI cable still in its plastic wrapping. “What’s this?” she asked. I told her that it was the kind of cable that was supposed to have come with the DVD player. It wasn’t as heavy as the one I had tried before, so we hooked it up and, voila! the player works!
You might ask how that cable got in the drawer, and my answer would have to be, “I have no idea.” All I do know is that when I opened the box that the new player came in I found all the components except that cable (power cord, remote, batteries, etc.). I never saw the HDMI cable that Ev pulled out of that drawer, so the only thing I can say is that it must have been through the miracle-working power of God that it appeared there. Did God take it from somewhere else and plant it in the drawer? Or was this another ex nihilo event for which God is so well known? I’ll never know in this life. But I do have my beliefs about what happened.