My No Good Horrible Really Bad Day...

Yesterday I needed to go into the office in Mississauga but my carpool was either on vacation or in meetings off site so I had no ride in. My mom offered to let me borrow her car for the day, something she hates to do because she is afraid that something will happen to it. It is too bad that we can only see foreshadowing in retrospect!

I arrived in Mississauga and had some time before I had to be in the office so I treated myself to a coffee. We all know how much I love coffee and most good days start with a good dose of caffeine. While leaving the Tim Horton's parking lot, six blocks from the office, I realized that my breaks weren't actually working. My foot went all the way to the floor and the car only slightly slowed. I managed to get to the office parking lot via a side road with only a couple of stop signs. Just a little stressful. When I got out of the car there was a puddle of break fluid on the pavement and a trail of fluid following my route to my parking space. I'm not very good with cars, but I know this is not a good thing.

I called my dad who drove all the way to mississauga from Waterloo, fixed the car so that it had front breaks (the back break lines were very broken) and left me the van so I could have a more reliable ride home. Again I missed the foreshadowing.

After work I went out for dinner with the other two WV interns who were in DRC and Tanzania while I was in Rwanda. We met at Yorkdale Mall and ate at Moxie's and it was fun.

And then I drove home.

I left for home around 9pm. They have been tearing up parts of the 401 for several months now so when you drive on these sections it is very loud. I finally noticed that the van was making odd noises even on the smooth sections of the road. It was only a couple of minutes later that the sounds got worse and I was thinking I should pull off at the next exit when BANG!! The van made this heartstopping noise and something fell out the bottom and dragged on the pavement for a short distance. I was in the middle of three lanes and had to cut off a transport truck in order to get over to the side. Luckily the exit for Highway 6 was right there so I managed to get up the off ramp and over to the side before the truck completely died. It is now 10pm and after I stop shaking and can pick up my cell phone, I once again have to call my dad to come and get me. He arrives about a half hour later and looks under the hood. Beyond repair. Or at least not worth the money it would take to repair.

A rod went through the crankshaft and into the engine and fell out the bottom of the van. Essentially the engine blew up. Again, I am not very good with cars, but this is a very bad thing! So after cleaning out all the stuff in the van and putting in the trunk of the car with only front breaks we drove home and left the van on the side of Highway 6 for the wreakers to pick up today. I got home after midnight and promptly went to sleep so that the day would end.

And so ends my story of the No Good Horrible Very Bad Day.

a new kind of pack-rat

I am working from home today and am having trouble concentrating. Most of my work requires me to think in French, which most days is tres facile, but other days I just cannot get into the zone. Today is one of those days! So I thought I would take a break and do something I have been meaning to do for a long time...

I am not a pack-rat really. I have moved around enough that I have learned the value of having fewer things to pack up. The annual garage sales my parents would have in our front yard when I was a kid also helped train me to keep only what I actually use. I have one box in my parents house of things I am keeping for sentimental reasons from my childhood and I can't remember the last time I got rid of a book (why would anyone get rid of books?!) but aside from these things, I am pretty good at purging and keeping my worldly belongings to a minimum.

Except in one area. My email inbox. I have a hard time deleteing emails. I'm not sure where this comes from but maybe I think that I will want to read them again, or that for one reason or another they will someday be useful. So I have become a new kind of pack-rat. Now according to hotmail I have only used about 1% of the available storage space, but having reached 28 pages in my inbox I began to suspect that maybe it was time to go through some of these...

Wow. I had emails dating back to before I lived in South Africa! Some of these emails were easy to delete - notifications that someone had commented on my blog, emails about events that are now long over, updates from traveling friends about their adventures, emails from old camp friends. Other emails were surprisingly more difficult. Emails from my French exchange partner, the email that told me my cat Buddy had died while I was in SA, emails with news of new babies and upcoming weddings. Going through these emails reminded me of people I haven't emailed in a long time and gave me a chance to respond to some of them. There were even a couple of emails from people who I have forgotten how I know them....

Now, after much successful procrastinating I have widdled the inbox down to only 2 and a half pages. I need to transfer contact information to my address book and write out a couple of recipes and then I will get it down to one page. Now I just have to remember to delete emails as they come in so I never have to deal with this again! Although, it was a very useful means of procrastination...