You're Doing It Wrong

It seems like I’m either frazzled or recovering from being frazzled.

I’m in the former right now. Will (hopefully) graduate to the latter on Sunday.

We bought a giant boring legal book for the office at a cost of $250.

Yes, that’s correct: $250.

It arrived yesterday. I just opened the box and inside there’s an envelope with a note that tells me that “due to an unfortunate publishing error” my copy is missing the current front matter. The forward and list of contributors. To remedy this they sent me a set of “complimentary” replacement pages. This in the form of 8 giant stickers that I’m supposed to paste over existing pages.

So to sum: “Hey, we charged you $250 for a book that we screwed up but we won’t charge you to fix it yourself.”

Last night at about 9:30 I went into the garage to put something into recycling and one of my hubcaps was gone.

I stood there gnashing my teeth for a few minutes while my brain reeled off scenarios, first for how it came to be missing, like maybe it was stolen or what stupid thing did I do now?

And then, what sort of giant clusterfark was it going to take to replace it? Searching hubcapsяus.com or a trip to Toyota where a grim-faced employee would explain that the stock hubcap for a 2001 Camry is now a collector’s item and better liquidate your 401k so we can get this process started.

Then I thought, why not just live without it. Who cares?

Except I do. I take good care of my things and every time I went out to my car and saw that it would make me mad.

Then I remembered that when I stopped at the dry cleaners earlier, I had taken that curb pretty hard. Maybe I should hop in the car and drive over there and see if my hubcap was sitting in the grass. I didn’t want to leave it until the next day.

Then I also remembered that driving home from exercise class I had heard a weird scraping noise. I figured it was a branch or something and did not investigate further.

“Bob! You have to help me find my hubcap.”

I found some flashlights. My husband, who was on his way to bed, went and put on his shoes. We walked toward the area where I’d heard the weird noise. Luckily it was on our street.

And there it was in the middle of the street waiting for me.

Finally, something went right.

Remember my story about using a gift card and needing help to do a return? This was all the stuff it took to mail me a new gift card for the balance. Sometimes the presentation for gift cards blows my mind. I guess I can understand that there are high maintenance people that think handing off a simple gift card seems too pitiful. But to me it seems wasteful to have to have a box and a envelope and another envelope and padding and another envelope. That seems like trying too hard.

I watched a movie called Gone Baby Gone this week which I recommend. It’s a good movie anyway but it’s a complex story. I don’t want to be spoiler-y so I will be vague. It does a good job of creating questions about what is doing the right thing. Also, it’s good movie to study characterization. Everything is shown by the way people act and how they speak. I’m still thinking about it days later.

I was downtown at Noon and saw flashing lights and heard drumming and I assumed it was another stupid protest.

Nope! It was Portland’s Christmas tree on its way to the Courthouse Square.

There was a band and a baton twirler and a few random vehicles and a guy dressed up like a pig. (Your guess is as good as mine.)

And look who else?

I know it’s blurry. That’s my specialty.

The internet tells me it’s a 75 foot Douglas Fir.

I had no idea there was a Christmas tree parade. I miss all this stuff because I hide in my office.