Another lovely weekend

Well, at least I wasn't throwing up this weekend, but it wasn't one of my better ones, nonetheless.

I guess Saturday was pretty much okay, just my normal errand running. In fact, now that I think about it, Saturday was good, because I went back to bed after Bob went to work, and slept a couple more hours, which is always nice. Then I went out, and it was sunny and nice, so that was good.

Sunday, though, was stormy. Thunder and lightning and a LOT of rain. I stayed in and did some housework, messed around on the computer, and kept the television on so I could hear if we had a tornado warning. They kept announcing flash flood warnings, but that was about it -- not something that we really need to worry about, although flash floods in the basement are always a possibility.

It must have been around 4:30 or 5:00 that I decided to go out. I had a package that I needed to mail, and I wanted to get a couple of things at the grocery store, so I braved it. By that time the heavy rain had slowed down, and it was just sprinkling. I got to the post office, went in and mailed my package using the automated self-service station, but when I came out it started to rain hard again.

I hurried to the car, kind of bent over (as if that would keep me from getting wet), and as I approached the car I apparently tried to get in it before the door was open all the way, because I pulled open the door and WHACKED my head with it. Very smooth. The pointy corner of the car door hit me on the forehead right above my eyebrow. I can't say that I actually "saw stars," but it really hurt.

It also blew away any inclination to go to the grocery store; I went directly home so that I could put ice on it immediately. I sat around for the rest of the evening with a bag of ice on my head, and was hopeful that I had waylaid a black eye, but no such luck. The swelling pretty much went down, I don't have much of a lump, but I've got a beauty of a shiner. I wake up every morning anticipating what colors I'm going to see -- I look like a kid took a Magic Marker to my face.

At our Monday morning staff meeting, we go around the table and do show-and-tell about our weekends, so I started mine off with, "I guess I should explain about my black eye . . ."

And then, that evening, I did laundry. Bob has to wear special shirts to work, they're dark green and gave the store patch on them. He can wear either dark denim jeans or khakis or khaki shorts. I washed a load of the shirts with a couple of pairs of his jeans, and when I took them out of the washer to put them in the dryer, saw the parts of an ink pen in the bottom of the washer. Wonderful. This wasn't the first time I'd washed a pen, but I think it might be the first time I've washed a red pen.

I'd checked his pockets, but obviously not well enough. I'm not sure how I missed it, but his shirt pockets are deep, and it was a small pen, so I suppose it could have been lying horizontally in the bottom of one of them. In any event, I missed it. He'd been doing a good job of checking his pockets, too, so I think I'd gotten a bit blasé about it. But it gets better -- in addition to the red pen, I washed a pack of gum. Which wouldn't have been too bad, except I didn't notice it until I checked on the load in the dryer.

Wet gum wouldn't have been too awful; wet gum that had been tumbled in a hot dryer: not so much.

This is the second time we've washed gum. It melts, of course, and then collects fibers from the clothing, and spreads all over the clothes and the inside of the drum. So I had to take the clothes out and scrub gum out of the dryer (much of it having picked up the red ink from the pen). I was afraid that all of his shirts were ruined -- they all had either red stains from the ink or patches of gum. But I pre-treated them with Spray-n-Wash really well, put them back in the washer and hoped, and they came out pretty well. I got the gum out; a couple of them still have small ink stains, but they don't show too bad.

Bob had called in the evening before I did the second wash, and I related the events to him, and apologized and said that I would buy him some new shirts. He said it wasn't my fault -- although I felt like it was, since I was the last person to handle the clothes. Yes, he should check his pockets when he takes his stuff off, but I should check, too, before I wash it. Equally guilty, I suppose.

So I was very glad that I was able to salvage his shirts and wouldn't have to buy him any new ones.

Then, yesterday morning, he called me and asked me where the iron was. I asked him what he was going to iron, and he said he was going to iron patches on his shirt. Now, this had been my job -- he had patches indicating that he had been through training that were supposed to be put on his shirts, but I'd tried ironing one of them on and wasn't successful, and had ended up sewing it on, and the patches are really stiff, and it was a difficult job, so I had only done one. I'd had it on my list for weeks, but just hadn't done it yet.

So I felt guilty about that. I told him that I didn't think he could iron them on, that I'd have to sew them on, but he said that other people had done it, so he was going to try.

I called him later to see how it was going, and he said he had been able to iron them on -- I had apparently not been rigorous enough with the iron -- but the problem was placement . . .

In retrospect, it probably would have been a good idea to baste them on before ironing. Getting a patch on the arm of a shirt and placing it correctly isn't exactly easy, which Bob found out. In fact, even though I saved his shirts in the laundry, he ended up having to buy a few new ones yesterday due to operator error in patch placement . . .

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