Bad Day at the Office

This is what a bad day at work is like for me now. Work itself was fine. I emailed one article to the L.A. Times travel section. I polished another to send to the L.A. Times weekend magazine, but they like hard copies, so I printed one. Only I couldn’t send it because the stamps I ordered days, actually weeks ago, haven’t arrived yet. (As a side note, does it make sense for the post office to charge for postage when they send you something? You’d think they could work out some kind of deal.)

So far it wasn’t a bloggably bad day though.

I always found when I worked in an office that my feelings about my job and how each day went usually had little to do with the work. It was usually some personal interaction, or a policy change, or the way the machines I had to deal with worked or didn’t work that colored how I felt my day was going.

It’s the same now. The guy who was going to fix the stove never showed up, so I’m still singing my knuckles every time I make tea, and I spilled cooking wine all over myself trying to spritz up the stock I’d been simmering all day. But things were tolerable until it came time to knock off work and really start dinner.

Since I’m home now, it usually falls to me to cook on weeknights. I don’t mind this; I like cooking and in the days when Pipi and I both had full-time jobs outside the apartment we’d come home too hungry to cook and didn’t eat anything fresh during the week. We’d make a large batch of something Sunday and eat it as long as it lasted—or as long as we could stand it—and then it was frozen entrees or restaurant food at the end of the week. Sometimes one of us would make something after dinner to eat the next night, but then it was already a leftover before we’d even touched it. So this is much better.

On this particular evening, however, nothing seemed go right and it put me in a muttering funk. (Why doesn’t anything WORK around here? Why is it so hard to FIND anything? Who left the stupid BREAD on top of the stupid REFRIGERATOR?) I couldn’t find anything. The bag of Arborio rice I got a Farmer Joe’s the other day was nowhere. It just disappeared somewhere between the bulk foods section and the rice/grain/pasta shelf of our pantry. I was short an onion, too. The convenience store at the bottom of my hill sells onions, but the parking lot was full and I almost collided with someone going the wrong way. So I had to go to Albertsons. There’s almost nothing that puts me in a worse mood than large grocery stores during rush hour, and by the time I got home I could tell my cooking muse had deserted me, probably fearing I would start throwing things or decapitate her with a vegetable peeler.

So we ended up eating the salad I’d meant to have as a side dish as our main course. This was certainly good for us but a little disappointing. Unless you’re a rabbit, expecting rich creamy goodness and getting raw vegetables is a rough adjustment.

(Don’t feel bad for us, though. The salad had mozzarella cheese and marinated artichokes, so it’s not like we’re wasting away. And now when something like this happens I get to complain about it in front of a worldwide audience. So it’s not all bad.)