This morning
This morning I woke up, went downstairs to our living room and found our Christmas tree lying on its side – fully decorated, lights still blinking and lying on its side. Smashed ornaments everywhere. It was a disheartening and scary sight. Houses have burnt to the ground over lesser twists of fate.
We had just decorated the tree last night. In fact, yesterday was one of those whirlwind deck the house for the holidays, inside and out, stop whining, get it done, there’ll be plenty of time to enjoy it later, damn-it! kind of days. It was an exhausting exercise in warp speed decorating. We saved the tree trimming for the evening so we could have a glass of wine, turn on the holiday music and ease our way back to normal speed life. The tree never looked right to me standing in its base. I kept adjusting the tilt by screwing and unscrewing the supports. The plastic in the base was cracked on one side and the screw wouldn’t make firm contact with the tree. Finally, I just gave up. Our tree just wasn’t going to stand up straight, but it wasn’t so bad that I thought it would fall over. Wrong. It fell over on the side with the crack. Time for a new stand. Time to stop second-guessing my instincts.
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On my drive to the office this morning I learned that the anti-lock brakes work on my new Volkswagen. We had a bunch of snow on Sunday, but then the snow turned to rain, and the rain to ice for the morning commute. The streets were mostly okay by the time I ventured outside. But at one intersection I hit my brakes and just started skating. The anti-lock brakes went to work immediately. There was a whump whump whump whump noise as the car skidded forward. I had to remember not to pump the brake pedal. Old habits die hard. The car must have slid a good thirty feet and it was over in about four seconds. It seemed like a mile in distance and five minutes of my life. The car stopped in a perfectly straight line, which was nice, in the middle of a busy intersection, which was not so nice. No one was coming or it would have been a nasty accident.
I was lucky for the second time in one morning. In that slow motion, life-examining moment, I had the strangest thought. Well, first I had the perfectly normal thought of “Oh shit!” After that, though, I started thinking about Saddam Hussein. In that hole. Just the image of him lying in the ground in a six-foot hole when he was captured. What an odd thought to have when your car is sliding out of control. I guess it was my brain’s way of recognizing that things could be worse. I could be living in a hole (which, by the way, where I live, would still carry a $2,000/month mortgage).
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Bad things happen in threes they say. Just now my mother-in-law called to tell me that the computer I ordered for her from Dell arrived. My mother-in-law has never owned a computer before. I will need to go over to her house and set the thing up for her, a process that is fraught with peril. If I am lucky the pieces will snap together without a hitch. If I am not so lucky, well, it could mean a phone call to Dell customer support. It is no coincidence that Dell rhymes with Hell. Give me a six-foot hole in the ground any day.
12:41:08 PM 
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