Ever have one of those days?

I have. Today.

I’ve been putting in long hours at work for a brand new training program that I’m in charge of at our company. Despite this, yesterday I got home pretty much on time! So I was in home-improvement mode after work. I knew the next day we had Jon Linstad, Heather’s cousin, coming to the house to help us with some of the finishing work on the bathroom. I wanted to get it our ceiling done so it wouldn’t have to do it with all the fixtures in. That and we’ve been without the master bathroom for about a year and I’m looking forward to having both of our upstairs bathrooms work!

I dug out a bucket of ceiling plaster and mudded up our master-bath ceiling and applied a “knockdown”. A knockdown for those of you that don’t know is a type of textured ceiling. I’ve seen it done a million times, and I even did it in our dining room and our main entry walls before. I finished and it didn’t look to shabby.

Later last night… I stayed up too late trying to finish some audio editing for another website I work on. Apparently I was being a bit loud and so I unintentionally woke up my wife who had fallen asleep around 8:30. Defeated, I finished at midnight.

Despite a feeling of accomplishment when I went to bed last night, today didn’t start as well.

At 4:20a.m. Heather woke up. This isn’t new. In fact, I expect it sometimes. However, today it wasn’t helping me. Since I had woken, I got up to use the facilities. This was my first mistake. On the way, I decided to stop off and check on my handy ceiling work from the night before. It was all cracked! Spider-cracks running up throughout the entire ceiling which I had just finished last night! My first thought was, “Oh no.” my second thought was me hearing Heather in my head saying, “I told you so.” It seems that about 50% of the time I manage to really make a mess of projects. A long time ago, my dad told me that he always ended up doing jobs 2 or 3 times before they were done right. I guess that trait is hereditary as I obviously would be paying for this mistake… either by having to redo it myself or by way of payment to a tradesman. (P.S. Heather didn’t ever say, “I told you so” and she would never do that.)

However, my morning was about to get worse.

I tried to go back to sleep. Between having already woken up once and the cats whining for their food, (way to early as they are fed at 6 a.m.) I could not sleep. I laid in bed until 5:50 a.m. and finally got up. I was thinking too loudly about my botched ceiling work. I went to make some breakfast and coffee. I made breakfast, watched the news for the weather and then headed back to the kitchen, cleaned up and started making coffee. Like my normal routine when making coffee, I took some beans out of the cabinet, dropped them into my Braun coffee grinder and began grinding. I heard a snap. The other blade on my grinder had broken. Let me explain, this grinder was my mom & dad’s. When he bought a new one they gave this one to me when I moved into my own place in 1994. When I got it the first blade had already broken. Despite this, the grinder worked very well. It finally gave up today. I was still able to grind the coffee–though it was a little louder than normal and the motor was working a lot harder. This was frustrating. That grinder is awesome. Was.

I sauntered back to the back toward the bedroom and Heather asked if I was going to get ready. I said, “No.” I wasn’t really in the mood. She then reminded me that the Glass guy was coming. Well I knew Jon was coming to do some work in the bathroom, but I had forgotten that the Glass guy was coming to do a bid on the shower door in the house. So I scrambled to get ready.

He arrived a couple of minutes early and I literally finished getting dressed seconds before he came back to look at the bathroom. He really seemed to know his stuff and was giving us a couple of options on the shower door. After a few minutes he gave us some not so great news. He said he would not hang a door unless the curb for our shower pan was fixed. Last week, as many of you know our tile was installed. It looks fantastic. However, as the glass guy pointed out, there is a slight pitch toward the main bathroom floor instead of toward the pan and drain as one would expect. This is where I get really unhappy. The bathroom was starting to look really good. And now I have not one major setback in my ceiling mistake, but two–with a tile job I didn’t even do.

So now I’m generally in a foul mood. Woke up too early, coffee grinder broke, bath ceiling is wrecked, glass guy is in our house telling us he won’t work on our door, tile guy is going to have to come back and on top of that, I’m now running late to get to work for the training program. Though I wasn’t presenting today, I am the “MC” for the trainees and my presence is required. Jon showed up. I wasn’t very cordial. Already I had fumed around the house and upset Heather with my foul mood. But to top it off, I was being ornry about Jon being in the house too. Mainly because I wanted to be there to tell him about the electrical and help get things started. But I was to mad to think straight and so I excused myself abruptly and left the house.

I called the tile guy and informed him that there was a problem with the curb. He said that he’d never heard of that before. I didn’t argue but I insisted that I wanted it fixed. So tomorrow they’re coming out. This is somewhat problematic as the vanity will then be in place and it will be difficult to lift and re-set the tile.

After getting about half way to work I realized that I forgot my bag that I need for Physical Therapy. (BTW–I have been having major medical issues with my lower back lately–so that helps my mood too.)

So basically I’m a colossal idiot. I let everything get to me (as usual) and I’m still mildly upset. Oh, not at anyone in particular. Just me.

Hopefully things will turn around and it won’t be too painful.

It is always after a day like this I remember what my dad used to say to me when I was so incredibly hopped up on adrenaline and angry: “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

Yeah, but what if it adds up? Don’t worry. I’ll get over myself. I’m just hoping everyone else does.