It always happens in three’s

FIRST
It began on Saturday when I was sitting on the toilet lid and leaned over to the pet Miss Kitty. I went forward while the lid slid back in an unnatural way. Hal witnessed the whole thing and we both realized that I had broken it. But when he asked me, did you just break our toilet? I looked him square in the chest and said, no. Yet, when I went to stand up and had to push the lid back into place, I succumbed to the guilt even while repeating, it’s fine, it’s fine. I guess a trip to Home Depot is in order.


SECOND
Anticipating a hot weekend, Hal put in all of our air conditioners last Thursday. The mother of all our ACs sits in a large living room window, is 12,000 btu’s (I really don’t know what this means but I know it’s a good thing) and has been effective at cooling off our entire area. So Sunday, when it was disgustingly humid and everything felt sticky and damp, Hal went to plug in the air conditioner. But the reset button wouldn’t reset making our relatively new AC defunct. Understandably, Hal was frustrated since it’s only two years old and trying to get it serviced is as convenient and cost effective as purchasing a brand new one. He of course took the machine apart (because why wouldn’t you?) but there was no blinking light signaling “I’m the broken part”. I guess a trip to Sears or Costco is in order.


THIRD
I needed to print out something for the wedding, a piece that required Hal’s pagination* skills. We struggled with this piece between laying it out, printing it straight and cutting it to size. During the process, I was getting more and more frustrated but my very patient fiancé managed to talk me down from the ledge long enough to remind me that we’re only going to do this once so we should enjoy this time. Just as we hit our groove and like a well-oiled machine things were progressing smoothly, our printer stopped working. As Hal put it, there’s no power going to it. All I heard was it’s broken. At that point I just wanted to yell, Nooo, not the printer tooo. I guess a trip to Staples is in order?? Nope! Fortunately, Hal managed to use his wits and talent to fix our finicky printer and half past midnight we were back on track. Thank goodness for levelheaded fiancés who know how to rally when their brides-to-be are not feeling this special, special time.

And at the end of the day, after everything seemed like it was breaking and technology and toilet lids wouldn’t cooperate, Hal sat me outside to stargaze for a moment. And that’s when we saw a red moon! It was very low in the sky and gorgeous. I’ve never seen that before. After this frustrating trifecta of mishaps, this crescent of a fireball in the sky was like being given the cherry on top of a melting sundae. And I thoroughly enjoyed it.


*Pagination is the system by which the information on a newspaper, bookpage, manuscript, or otherwise handwritten, printed or displayed document is laid out. I know, there’s really an official name for this, and it’s considered a system!