I Should Have Stayed In Bed
Well, it's barely past noon, and the day has already gone horribly, horribly wrong.
It started with me inadvertently missing the snooze bar on my alarm clock, and instead turning the thing off. So, I'm up 45 minutes later than normal. Considering that I normally get up about 20 minutes later than I should anyway, this will make me irretrievably late.
Although, if you want to get technical about it, you could say that my day actually began at 4:00 AM, with Linus delivering the news that he had another "accident". I use the quotes because when something happens like clockwork for two weeks, is it really an accident anymore? And then, in the course of getting him changed and in bed with us, Lily wakes up and stays up for at least 45 minutes. When I go to check on her, she's on her stomach, raised up on her hands and exploring the railings of her crib. This stomach-at-night thing is a first, and I took a few seconds to just marvel at this new trick. But then I remembered that it was 4:00 AM, that I had already spent a part of my morning with the too-familiar smell of urine, and that my alarm was going to go off in the not-distant-enough future, and I lost all patience for her new trick. Besides, I know an attempted escape when I see one. She's just sizing it up for when she masters the ability to pull herself into a standing position, and then all Hell will officially break loose as we will have two kids and an oversized dog in our plastic bed.
So, then. I eventually wake up and take the unsatisfying Late To Work Non-Shower. Then I arrange for Jane to take Linus to school, and I'm out the door.
First thing I notice is that it's cold. You know, like -20 below, -36 windchill cold. Next time you feel like bitching about 0 being cold, try dropping it 20 notches and see how you like it. I seem to recall being in something like -29 cold once, but I can't verify that, and absent that verification, this morning may have been the coldest cold I've experienced.
Then the Saturn won't start. Not even close to starting. Joe Lieberman has more life in him this morning than my Saturn. And of course, it's in the back of the driveway, blocking the path of the Golf, which does start because it's engineered by Germans, as opposed to the people from Tennessee or Saturn or whoever built my Saturn. But hey, at -20 (at 8:00 AM, mind you. It was probably much colder overnight...), I can't really blame the car.
Jane comes up with a good idea, that we will start the Golf, put the Saturn in neutral, and use the Golf to push the Saturn out of the driveway. We have to use the car to do that because my driveway is on an incline, and there's snow and ice on it anyway as a result of the relegation of the Shoveling Plan to the snowpile of history.
We push the Saturn out, then we try to jump-start the Saturn with the Golf. No dice. I don't know why no dice, but no dice. Maybe it's the jumper cables? I hook them up to my testicles to test them, and everything checks out with the cables. It's the Saturn that remains the problem. So now we've got our car at this weird angle, sticking sort of halfway out of the driveway. Oh, and did I mention that Jane and I can't feel our fingers or toes at this point? Meanwhile the dog and Linus and Lily are inside, calling up Parents magazine to nominate us for Parents of the Year (POTY).
Jane asks me to get back in the Golf to push the Saturn into a parked position along where the curb would be, if we had curbs. But I can't get the Golf lined up at a direct line on the Saturn, and instead have to come at it from around a 45 degree angle. As I let out the clutch on the Golf to push the Saturn, I hear a loud *pop* noise. I get out to see that I have broken the plastic bumper on the Saturn, as though it were a child's toy. I suppose it didn't take an automotive Nostrodamus to see that pushing on a frozen plastic bumper with a car from a bad angle might cause damage to one or both cars. Clearly, Jane and I were rapidly losing our faculties in this cold weather.
Eventually, we managed to push the Saturn back in without breaking any more bumpers. The damn thing is still sitting there, and I don't expect it to start until Spring Training begins.
Despite all of that, I made it to work! It's that kind of gumption that keeps America on top.
1:22:16 PM 
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