First Weekend Back

It's been a week since my triumphant return to the U.S., and the jet lag combined with trying to do too much all at once has been taking its toll on me. It also didn't help that I either caught the cold that was going around Melbourne before I left, or someone on one of the planes or in the airports gave me a fun head cold.

But I sucked it up and spent the weekend at a fabulous music festival, listening to some great music and escaping death.

On the whole, it was a great weekend, I saw great music, spent quality time with friends, and read the Harry Potter book (yay!). But I did not escape a run of bad luck. Many things went wrong this weekend. Most of them could have been much, much worse, so I was able to look back and laugh at it all, but still, it was slightly more than I needed to deal with:

Friday: I left my ATM card in the ATM. I completely blame the jet lag and also the fact that there was a horrible, high-pitched tone in the room where the ATM was, so I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. The tone was so bad it apparently overpowered the beeps that the ATM machine makes when you leave your card in the machine. I called and canceled my card and will get a new one.

Saturday: A drunken crackhead drove his SUV into the crowd I was in at the music festival. I'm not kidding. You can see the news coverage here. We were relaxing on our picnic blanket while waiting for the next band to start and all of a sudden we hear screaming and a SUV is barreling down the hill. Luckily people jumped on the sides of the car and made the driver divert AWAY from the crowd. It's even luckier that the stage was dark because if it had happened 15 minutes earlier or later, there would have been hundreds of people in the crowd, and people would be dead. Crazy!

Sunday: I was dog and cat sitting for friends that were out of town, and when I was bringing the dog in, one of the cats got outside. It was late at night and I was freaking out, since I love my friends very much and don't want to be the one responsible for the loss of a beloved pet. I kept going outside and calling the cat, using the whole shaking the food in the food dish trick. The cat came back the very next day, slightly damp (it was raining) but otherwise unscathed. Luckily it was the cat that likes me, and not the one who I feared was going to kill me in the night, so I was able to get her to come up onto the porch and pick her up to take her back inside.

Monday: After the immense relief of the relief of the prodigal kitten's return, I went into work to find that Pomegranate, my newest betta, had jumped out of his bowl. He was sitting dried up and dead right on my desk to welcome me to work for the week. Alas, poor Pommie, I hardly knew you.



Pomegranate
March 2007 - July 2007
R.I.P.

It's been quite an emotional rollercoaster of a weekend. Hopefully things can remain relatively calm for the rest of the week.