Some days you know you should just go right back to bed. Some days you don’t realize that fact until it’s too late.
Sunday morning started well enough with one of those nearly perfect cups of tea. The sort where you get the brewing time and the cream ratio just right. The temperature rapidly headed toward the ideal drinking level. I even made some cinnamon toast because I was feeling luxurious. The dawn was barely creeping over the treeline and I sat down to get some really solid editing done. A welcome change from the past few weeks, it was going to be a good day I thought.
My first tiny sip to test if cool enough. Delightful. Bliss in a cup. Best tuck into that cinnamon toast straight away while I wait and make the morning really special, right? I made to sit the steaming hot cup down on the coaster… and missed by half. Just enough that it sent the cup cascading all over my desktop and into my previously perfect crisp toast. Drat. To make matters worse the reflex action to try to catch at least a portion of the spill instead sent it spewing across a wider area while leaving just enough to make cinnamon toast soup out of my breakfast. Dammit.
Not one to put on heavy canvas trousers first thing in the morning, my leap up to grab some towels causes the boiling hot tea to cascade all over my bare legs. Screaming with scalded rage, I then proceed to leave a fair size chunk of my knee on the table leg as I spin to find the last paper towel on the roll is all that’s left. Bugger.
Twenty minutes later, bleeding and bruised, I have most of the spill captured in a now ruined tea towel. The irony and inadequacy of the name is not lost upon me. I would insert ‘drenched’ and ‘sponge’ in there somewhere. I sit down to try to at least proceed with my work to find the seat of my chair has a new found talent for imitating the aforementioned tea towel in all its soggy glory. Mind you it takes a good minute or two for this to become obvious and for my shorts to really soak up the reality of the situation.
Sigh. OK. Persevere I say quietly to my rapidly dwindling inner Zen master. Sitting with a wet arse and trying to search for burn remedies, I find that the wash of tea has caused my wireless trackball to give up the ghost. Nothing. Not even a flicker. I love my trackball. As a writer I have a close personal relationship with my trackball. For those of you stuck in mouse scooting purgatory, you should try one. You’ll never go back. Really. When I try to operate a normal mouse after decades with trackballs it’s like trying to write left handed while bouncing upside down on a trampoline. The point is, I’m not easily switched to traditional input devices. I’m a crusty writer set in my computer device ways.
If you’ve tried to work a computer without a mouse-like gizmo lately you know it’s close to impossible despite what the touch-screen smart phone set tells you. I get the micro-tools out and set to work on an internal cleaning project in hopes of breathing life into the thing but after an hour I’m having no success other than managing to shoot one of the tiny screws across the floor. Half an hour on my injured knee and lots of sifted floor fluff later I can’t find the screw but I did turn up three now defunct Canadian pennies which despite government hacks touting otherwise, no one will accept in payment. Defeated, I go to backup plan A and drag out the old version of my beloved trackball to see if I can salvage the day of editing. Lo and behold, it works just long enough to interfere with my wireless keyboard and then dies. Now I have neither trackball nor keyboard. Blast.
Plan B. Get out the really dusty box of wired components from years past. Since my world is on the computer I have to have levels of backup for just such occasions. I had become addicted to wireless freedom over the last few years it seems but deep in the bottom of the archive I can see just enough bits and bobs to make it work. Some considered spaghetti of cables later, I’ve managed to test them and see that they work but alas, the computer needs moving closer to the desk to make it practical. Ah well, I needed to clean out those corners anyway but it’s not helping get chapter thirty to anything like a finished state. And I still haven’t had any tea today.
Two more hours of tool finding, wire splicing, and general cable maintenance, I’ve got things moved. Over near a door that gets opened perhaps once or twice a year in fact. There’s a small gadget I made for temperature sensing hanging on a flat wire that I simply shut into the gap around the door and as part of the process, I need to move it a bit. No worries. I wrestle the hulking table that had sat in front of the door just enough to squeeze past and get into an awkward and immobile position to turn the knob so as to open the door just a few inches. What could possibly go wrong?
The door is stuck. The daylight is now waning and I seriously need a nap. Ah well, I’ll deal with it later I think to myself and extract my aching legs from the pinned corner. I go out the front door to get the sheets I had drying on the clothesline but forgetting to spray myself down with repellent, I’m eaten alive by the legions of bugs of early evening stirred up by the lawn crews mowing earlier in the day. The same mowing that has coated my sheets in grass clippings. That’s going to be three days of itching and another round of wash I think to myself. Daily productivity takes two more steps backwards.
I coat myself in ammonia to stop the itch at least temporarily (really, it works) and finally pass the kettle long enough to fill it again and set it to work doing its duty. A cup of tea will calm me after this day I suspect. Twenty minutes into idle waiting for the telltale ding of boiled readiness, I realize the tea kettle has died too. Perhaps it was some sort of appliance solidarity with the trackball but for whatever reason, the timing is a pain in the butt. Feck.
Right. Not to be daunted by the gods of luck I haul out a saucepan and fill it with water set to boil. I’ll show them. And while I wait I’ll go sort out that stuck door. Back into the cramped corner with a bit of yoga I go and start to really tug on the door until it finally releases. Ha. So there.
The partial swarm of wasps that flow into the apartment before I can get the door shut scream with rage. When asked randomly what is on the other side of any given door, a nest of enraged flying insects with mindbogglingly painful stings comes surprisingly low on most people’s list of likely answers. At this time of the night I’m sure every one of them was home asleep and not expecting their huge damn nest to be ripped asunder from the place it had been parked sealing my dis-used door shut for several months. The size of a football easily. I’m pinned in the corner by immovable furniture and get stung, not on my arm, not on my legs, but hey, let’s aim for the fingers of the guy that writes on the keyboard all day. At least two of the bastards sting me before I can flail around enough to get out of the corner. They hurt like hell and of course my fingers swell up like pickles. The cats look at me like I’ve gone insane.
Buzzing everywhere they have me in their sights for more abuse. I avoid further wrath and inflammation by quickly arming myself with a fly swatter and a can of seriously toxic spray. It’s worth noting that wasps* don’t swat easily and require three or four hits each. I’m sure it sounded like I was practising the ancient Peruvian slap dance from outside. The cats go and hide in the bedroom while I run about looking like some deranged amateur exterminator with fat fingers covered in richly diverse variety of itchy and painful welts. Goggles, a lab coat, and a helmet would have completed the look.
* They could have also been hornets. Or yellow jackets. Or the airborne stinging descendants of tyrannosaurs for all I know. Precise entomology wasn’t high on my list of priorities at the time.
And here’s a fun fact; apparently wasps love the scent of ammonia. I try in desperation to wash it off and soak my excruciatingly painful swollen fingers in cold water at the sink with little effect but do succeed in reaching for the now boiling saucepan with slippery wet hands. You can do the gravity math and tell why my left foot is now the red of a boiled lobster.
Going out to dispense some serious wasp Armageddon safely from the other side of the door next morning I pass my new neighbour who says “Yeah, we noticed that when we moved in”. I also realize that the maintenance guy who mowed the lawn earlier surely would have passed the nest a few times. I suppose a giant buzzing nest of pain on the side of someone’s door isn’t newsworthy in most people’s eyes.
The only saving grace is that now, twelve hours later with the lingering pain in my fingers turning into a sort of dull throbbing that perfectly keeps me from sleeping properly, I’ve worked the idea into a little bit of humour for the book. The Luckvars, a race of people polarized towards genetic luck in their lives with a decade of bad fortune as a sort of puberty for them. Every keystroke of getting it down on electrons hurts like hell but artists must suffer, as they say.
I wish this wasn’t a true story but that was my relaxing Sunday. I should have stayed in bed. And I never did get any tea.
