One of those Evenings...

This has officially been one of those evenings." I'd say it had been one of those days but work wasn't so bad even though we had to sit through more practice demonstrations, one of which was for one of the products I work on daily and didn't exactly need to see a demo of it. It was done by my coworker who usually does all the demos for this piece of software. I could gripe about how I do a great deal of work on the software but she gets the credit but I don't feel like it. Besides, I had a good old whine and a moan to my lovely mother and I feel better now.

Anyway, enough griping about work. I came home with a checklist of things to do since my good friend is coming in tomorrow from L.A. to stay for a long weekend. I needed to mow, do some cleaning, do some laundry and, somewhere in there, make dinner and spend time with the pups.

Well, I did manage to get the mowing done although I had a scary black-smoke incident after I accidentally ran over another tree root. The end of my garden is filled with these from the big old trees that were fairly recently chopped down before I moved in. It makes mowing a nightmare because when the grass is long, it's hard to see the roots and I only know they're there by the big old clunk of my mower, the scary whine it emits and the black smoke that pours out. Fortunately, it was a minor black-smoke incident and I was able to keep mowing.

It was a hot night for mowing. I didn't realize how hot it was and by the time I came inside after finishing, I was drenched with sweat and I had that alarming fuzzy-head feeling and ringing in the ears that comes with getting overheated. I quickly sat down and drank a lot of water and then took a cool shower.

It all went well until after I'd made dinner and started cleaning. My kitchen faucet has been leaking for a while from a crack. Tonight, I must have hit the faucet the wrong way by banging it accidentally with a plate as I lifted it up to put on the draining rack and, clang!, my tap bent the wrong way and water began to seep out. I nervously turned it on to see how bad it was and instantly, water began to seep out of the crack, turning into a gush and flooding the back of my sink and the countertop.

I was horrified. This past week, I went to turn on the light on my kitchen ceiling fan by pulling the light cord and it came off in my hand. Since it's an old fan, the only thing to do is replace it because the pull cord was really, really broken. This is the same fan that almost knocked me unconscious after moving into my house by having the dome fall down and shatter into a thousand pieces, barely missing my head by a foot.

Unfortunately, since the fan was on in the kitchen when I went to attempt to pull the light cord, this now means I have no light though I have a fan. It sucks not having a proper light in the kitchen. I'm limited to a small one above my leaking sink and the one in the nearby hall.

Now I have a badly squirting faucet. I have to replace that as well as my fan. Since I was still a little het up and crotchety from mowing the lawn in the heat, I am ashamed to admit, I had a minor meltdown and called my dad. He wasn't available so I ended up having another whine, moan and meltdown on my poor mother.

I hate meltdowns. They catch you off guard and make you feel very silly afterwards. Fortunately, I do have to say that I have two of the sweetest puppies in the world. When they heard me getting upset, they ran in to find me and then proceeded to give me a ton of puppy kisses. There's nothing better than two adorable furry puppies when you feel like you just want to lay on the floor and kick your legs and have a tantrum.

I didn't have a tantrum. I'm not sure I was every really prone to those. I'd have to ask my mother. I don't remember having many laying on the floor-kicking type of tantrums but it's entirely possible I did.

In the end, my dad ended up calling me back and helped me figure out how I might go about replacing the faucet. He's good like that. If all else fails, he's promised to come and help me. I felt better after that.

And then I tried to turn on my Dell Mini laptop to type this blog. First, I couldn't get Internet Explorer to come up. I only use IE because the silly little machine hasn't enough memory to let me install Chrome or Firefox. I tried to fix it but it froze. I rebooted and then discovered that my user profile has been lost and now I have to try to find a way to get it to let me open up windows.

So, I'm now sitting at my desktop. Except my monitor is doing this strange thing where it's flickering and changing colours which is NOT a good thing and makes me a little worried. I have a horrible feeling that's dying or it's going to pop or something. I certainly hope not but given the evening I'm having, I would not be surprised.

I think the only solution for this type of evening is to pour a glass of wine, finish watching "Top Chef Masters" on the DVR and then go to bed and hope tomorrow's better. At the very least, having my friend come and stay is something to look forward to. Also, since she's terribly handy and logical, I know she'll help me figure out this faucet thing. And the ceiling fan thing. I'd feel bad about asking her but she volunteered. Hopefully between the two of us, we'll figure it out.

But for now, I think I ought not to touch anything. It's been that kind of night.

Happy Friday. And have a great weekend!