Bad Day 179--Are Godot and Verizon the same thing?

Our house phones have been broken for over a week, which means that no one can ever call to ask for favors, so that is good, but it also means that I can't reach the children unless one of them with a cell phone is home and that phone is on and is not on vibrate and they are near it, which basically means I can never reach the children. The phone is in Husband's name, so of course that meant that it was impossible for me to go online and request a repair service. So he arranged for someone to come on Thursday and they never showed. They did call us after we left for the airport and Husband told them to come on Saturday. Then we got a lovely e-mail from Verizon saying that someone would come on Saturday before 7pm. Yes, you read that right. They gave themselves a nice 11 hour window during which they could show up at any time which meant someone had to be at home all day and since Child 1 had tutor and other activities planned, that meant me.

So I spent the morning alternately napping and knitting and waiting and running one errand with my fingers crossed that they wouldn't come while I ran down the street to the jewelry store to get my bracelet repaired and for once they did what they normally do which is not ever show up and I made it back on time. They finally arrived at 4, which I'm sure in their minds is three hours early but meant I had spent 8 hours waiting around. And after 45 minutes of plugging things in and testing them, the repairman determined that the problem was that our phones were old and broken. So I bought new phones. They are fancy and have about a thousand features which I will never use, but now we at least have a dial tone. Remember the days when you could just plug in a phone and it worked immediately? And there were no buttons? Yeah, I know. You were born after 1980, so you have never even really "dialed" a phone and you never ever wished with all your heart that you could have a princess phone in your bedroom and to you a "princess phone" means a pink cell-phone with Disney princesses on it, not this.



The Republican National Committee will be happy about our new phones because we are now best buddies or at least they think we are because they call me all the time. I bet I have a ton of messages from them and they must be worried because I haven't answered the phone in over a week. I'm going to start speaking Chinese next time they call and see what they do since telling them that I am voting for the Pirate Party hasn't worked. (Don't judge. It's a real political party in Germany.) They'll probably transfer me to a fluent Mandarin speaker or maybe a pirate. I speak fluent pirate. But with my luck, it will be a Chinese pirate and I will have to resort to saying "please place your left index finger on the red light" because I said that a million times on the visa line in China and it's about all I remember. OK, only 25,000 times, but still. Would Chinese pirates vote Republican?



My friend "Sparrow" suggested that these people on a flight from Iceland are having a worse day than me because of this guy.



Apparently he drank all of his duty free liquor and then started punching his seatmate and screaming that the plane was going to crash. The passengers and flight attendants had enough so they taped him to his seat and taped his mouth shut. This appears to be completely legal and OK because when the flight landed at JFK, the passenger was taken to the hospital where he sobered up and was let go. So thank you, Mr. Drunk and Unruly, for reminding me to be glad that I'm not flying anywhere anytime soon and next time I do, I just may bring my roll of Hello Kitty duct tape with me. It might come in handy.

Bad Day 178--The other 177 have nothing on this one

Today was a banner day, if by banner you mean the kind that say "Go home Yankees!" or "Death to America" and have an angry mob behind them.



This day was out to kick me in the behind and it so did. Let's start with when I woke up, or more accurately when I didn't wake up until an hour after my alarm was supposed to go off and it didn't because I apparently didn't turn it on. Child 2 came in panicked and yelled why wasn't I awake and didn't I know what time it was? Because I overslept and no, apparently not. So I rushed to get ready and get up Child 3 who was also still asleep and she just made it in time to the bus but I was 15 minutes late to the metro. And once I was there, I realized I had completely forgotten both my phone and my iPod. Too late to go get them! Luckily, I had knitting I could do on the commute to keep my occupied because I'm still not finished with that darn scarf.

I managed to make it to work just on time and started right in on writing something I was supposed to be writing and completely forgot about a meeting I was supposed to go to. Two of my friends who I really love were supposed to get married this week and broke up instead. (I know, that's not about me, but my heart aches for them.) I spilled balsamic vinegar all over my white sweater. I remembered my knee brace, and my knee still really, really hurts. I told Child 3 to remember to go to after-school care when it is a Friday and she's supposed to go to piano lessons instead and I didn't have a phone to call when I remembered. Luckily, Genevieve is our piano teacher and knows I'm a little distracted at the moment. Child 2 is at a party and was supposed to get a ride, but she didn't and now I have to go pick her up. And then Child 3 did the thing she is not supposed to do with her chair even though I have told her a million times not to do it and so has Husband and Child 1 but she did it anyway and she broke my hand-painted glass ornament from China that Husband gave me. So all, it was not a good day and I didn't even include the part where someone's school counselor called me.

But two good things: 1. I got to see my friend "Jonas" who is visiting from Moscow, and 2. I ate potato skins for dinner because it was that kind of day. Child 3 says potato skins are the best potato recipe ever. But that was before she broke the ornament.

Speaking of broken things, the owner of this guitar is having a worse day than me.



He tried to take it on a Delta flight but they wouldn't let him even though they had every single time before and instead of taking care of it like they promised, they crushed it in an elevator. It will cost around $2000 to fix, which is good because in this photo, it looks like a total loss. And of course, Delta will not pay for it, because American carriers stink. So thank you, sad guitarist, for reminding me that things are just things and glue will fix the ornament (sort of) and I love Child 3 more than an ornament anyway and I just so wish Husband were here to hold me and tell me it will all be OK right after he walks The Dog. But of course, he's not so I have to go walk The Dog and pick up Child 2. Ugh.

Bad Day 177--The Worst Car Ride Ever!

Have you ever been in a car full of sobbing girls? Well, I have and it was no fun because one of them should have been me but it is hard to drive and cry at the same time so I had to try to hold it together. You have probably guessed already that Husband left for Afghanistan today. Nobody wanted him to leave and it was a very, very emotional good-bye. So to make ourselves feel better, we went shoe shopping and to Outback Steakhouse for dinner, having learned last time that clothes shopping doesn't make you feel better if what you buy is too small (stupid British designers!) Three of us got new shoes and one of us got neon socks that she apparently has been dying for. I didn't know neon socks were a necessity, but if you only ever wear Converse or Vans, then I guess neon socks are a must.



Now it is homework time and the whining has begun. I hate homework. Sometimes, I think teachers assign it just to torture me, the parent. What did I ever do to 5th grade teachers that they assign so much homework that I can never get anything done? At the school in China that we hated and switched our kids out of, they seriously thought 4 hours of homework a night was appropriate and I so hated that school. Also, their spelling books were from Australia even though it was the "American" school and it had questions about Aussie prime ministers, like who was the PM in 1972 as if your average American 5th grader would know and it's a good thing Wikipedia wasn't blocked in China back then or Child 1 would have failed spelling.

Speaking of spelling, this girl in Iceland is having a worse day than me. The girl is on the left. Her mother is on the right. Must be Icelandic genetics because they do look like sisters.



I know. You are thinking that she is beautiful and her father is not in Afghanistan, so how can her day be that bad? But that is because you do not know that when a child is born in Iceland, her name must be from an approved list provided by the government. Her mother named her after a character in an Icelandic novel by a Nobel Prize winning author. And the character in the book was female, but the government has decided that her name "Blaer" is a boy's name so legally she can't use it but since the Priest OK'd it and put it on her christening certificate, she is legally nameless. Sometimes I wish our government would tell people they can't name their babies things like "Hashtag" or "Latrine" but I supposed that would be Unamerican. But Blaer is a lovely name and the Icelandic government should be ashamed of themselves. So thank you Blaer, for reminding me that even if my husband is in Afghanistan and I'm still sick all the time, at least I have a name.

Bad Day 176--Time to Dye

I think that the pounds I lost have been replaced by gray hairs. I have a bunch more than I used to and now there are too many to pluck out. So it's time to find a hairdresser. I've had my hair cut a total of twice since I moved back (and once was when I was visiting Sister 2 in a state across the country,) mostly because I have a lot of anxiety about getting my hair done after living in Asia where you tell them to do one thing and then they completely don't listen to you and do what they want instead. I kept trying to get them to dye my hair red which is its natural color, but my stylist liked blond better so the longer we lived there, the blonder it got. Also she wouldn't cut bangs. I now have bangs and I do not regret them. But I do regret the gray hair so I'll be hunting for a hairdresser. I think now I won't care if it's blond, but I really don't want it to turn out like this.



I love Theresa Caputo, but this hairdo is one of a kind and it would not look good on me. Or probably anyone else in America, but she's so nice, I think she pulls it off.

Husband says he is having a worse day than me because he has to leave me tomorrow. That's sweet, but it doesn't count because it is totally his fault. But really the parents of this 7 year old boy are having a worse day than me. They gave him a metal detector for Christmas and he found a big metal thing which he took home and washed and turned out to be this.



In case you can't tell, that's a WWII era bomb. Luckily, it's a practice bomb which apparently the British RAF used for practice hitting targets and has no explosives in it. But still, the bomb squad had to come and everything and for several hours they must have wondered if the present they gave their son was going to kill them all. So thank you, British parents, for making me feel better about the tulle skirt I gave Child 3 which is in no danger of killing anyone, even though she swears it's to die for. I hope the next thing your son finds is a big bag of Roman coins which would be a whole lot more fun than finding a bomb. Also, it would pay for all the therapy you'll need after the bomb incident.

Bad Day 175--Owwwwah.

So it wasn't my ankle this time--it's my knee. I am limping around the house on one leg because my knee is stiff and swollen and I have no idea what I did to injure it other than playing Just Dance 4. But even then I didn't move around a lot because there's not a lot of room and Child 1 was taking up all of it. I should have just done what Husband did and sit on the couch and wave my arms and then maybe my knee hurt and he got the best scores anyway. Walking to work from the metro tomorrow will be fun. Maybe I'll see if I can catch a bus because my knee really hurts. I just don't want to do crutches again. I hate crutches. I own my own pair and I still hate them and crutches in the snow are the worst. Seriously, why do I always break something in the dead of winter?



The children are all doing homework because they go back to school tomorrow and of course their homework isn't finished. Husband is recording a book for Child 3 which I know will get listened to over and over again. It was part of the swag from the Christmas party we went to and is a great idea because now when she is lonely for him, she will be able to hear his voice any time she wants. Although it's a book about Frosty the Snowman, so that will be a little odd next June, but still.

This dinosaur smuggler is having a worse day than me.



I know you are wondering how exactly does one smuggle an entire dinosaur into the US and the answer is you slap a label on it that says "Made in Britain." Because apparently it's OK to import dinosaurs from Britain but not from China. I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe we already have too many Chinese dinosaurs in America? But whatever the case, the smuggler has to give up his beloved T-Rex skeleton which will be given back to Mongolia and he might have to go to prison. So thank you, Mr. Bone Smuggler, for reminding me yet again that crime doesn't pay, and seriously, where were you going to put that T-Rex statue? You must have a really, really big living room and a super-tolerant wife. No bones on display in my house, thank you, although I'm sure The Dog would love it. What a snack that would make!

Bad Day 174--Happy Lame New Year!

Apparently, Husband and I are lame and boring, or at least our New Year's Eve plans were according to Child 3. The problem lay in the fact that Child 1 went to a bonfire and Child 2 went to a dance, so Child 3 was stuck home with us and we are no fun. Even though we played the game she wanted to play and ate the snacks she wanted to eat and watched the DVD she wanted to watch.



And we had holiday crackers with prizes and paper hats in them! OK. Boring, I get, but I'm not lame. Both of my feet work just fine, thank you, which if you know me is a miracle. I have a tendency to break my ankle or foot every New Year. It's a tradition I will gladly give up this year because if I can't drive, we are in a lot of trouble.

I hope you all have a wonderful year ahead--more wonderful than mine will be. I just about lost it when I realized that Husband will still be in Afghanistan for the majority of the year. This tour is taking forever! It doesn't help that I count down so I know we're not even 1/2 way even though Husband tells everyone we are. 174 is not 1/2 of 365. I am at least that good at math.

Hugo Chavez is having a worse day than me.



Not only does he have the bad sense to match his hat to his parrot, but he is dying of cancer and he has so ticked off everyone in the developing world that the only place he could go to for treatment was Cuba. Now, I'm not a doctor nor a medical expert, but since Cuba hasn't been able to purchase advanced medical technology for around 50 years, one can only imagine what their hospitals and medical care is like. So thank you, Senor Chavez, for reminding me to be grateful that even though my doctors still aren't sure what is wrong with me, at least I don't have to go to Cuba to find out. Also, I've been admitted to more than one Third World hospital, and I'm not eager to go back. And I will never, ever color coordinate to match my pet bird. Or The Dog.

Bad Day 173--Soap is better than a potato?

It is the actual day of Child 2's birthday and she had a lot of fun opening presents. However, because she is a very literal child, she is very easy to fool and we managed to convince her that her Grandma had given her soap for her birthday when really it was a ring that she had wrapped inside a soap box. She almost didn't open the box and must have thought her grandmother thought she smelled bad. Last year, I gave her a potato which was a reference to this Jimmy Kimmel video and made her laugh for like 10 minutes. But she loved all her presents even more this year and isn't even mad at me that I haven't finished that Ravenclaw scarf yet.

I'm not feeling well, so we'll just get right to the bad day. Former president George H. W. Bush is having a worse day than me.



Not only has he been ill and just got out of intensive care, which is bad enough, but he also learned from a German magazine that he had actually passed away because they published his obituary a little too early. It's not a nice thing to have Der Spiegel report your death while you're still alive. I don't know how you make up for that kind of mistake. It seems like a retraction wouldn't be good enough. But at any rate, I hope he can laugh about it. Plus, aren't Germans notorious for being early to things? So thank you, German reporters, for reminding me to fact check things before I publish them. Although for me, it's pretty easy to fact check with the children because they correct me every time I post something and I can fix it before too many people have read it. It's nice having my own editorial staff upstairs. OK, it's annoying, but rather helpful.