Somedays you’ve gotta’ laugh...

Have you ever had one of those days where everything just seems to go differently than you had envisioned? When I married Tim he claimed that I was endangering my life because I would inevitably be struck with his typically bad luck (sharing everything and all). Tim tends to get frustrated when his “bad luck” strikes, having dealt with it for so long, but I tend to find such situations quite comical. One Sunday a few weeks ago, Tim and I had quite the comical morning.

Our morning troubles actually began the night before while I was doing our laundry. In our apartment complex there are two laundry rooms for tenants. I had loaded up five loads of laundry and hauled them down to one of the rooms in the early afternoon. Having to do two people’s laundry is certainly more work than just doing my own! Upon reaching the laundry room I realized I didn’t have any quarters or any cash with which to get quarters. A bit annoyed, I drove to US Bank, got cash out of the ATM (so I wouldn’t have to pay an ATM fee somewhere else), drove back to the Dairy Mart next door to our apartment, got the $20 bill changed into four $5 bills, then walked next door to convert the bills into quarters at the Gateway Laundry and Diaper. Feeling as though I had conquered a much larger task than I really had, I trekked back to the apartment complex laundry rooms to start my piles of laundry. The washing process proceeded uneventfully, but when I came back to get my clothes out of the dryer, I noticed that one load had not dried at all. I moved the load to another dryer, paid another dollar to dry it again and took my other four loads of dry clothes back to the apartment to fold them. Unfortunately, the lonely load left in the dryer had to spend the night in the laundry room because it closed before I could get my clothes out.

The next morning (the Sunday in question) was a busy one. I needed to finish that last load of laundry, Tim had to get gas in the car (for our trip to McMinnville later that morning) and go get cash so we could go get the lamps we were considering buying from a lady who posted them on craigslist. We rushed around trying to get ready to leave for our day-trip to visit family and finishing last minute chores. The laundry room key was in my car, and we live on the second floor with an outdoor landing that has a straight shot to our parking spot. Tim was taking the car to get gas and cash so I asked him to toss the laundry keys up to me on the landing. He tossed them… but onto the roof!! Oh dear! His face was priceless – he just stared at the roof with a look that said Why did I do that? What was I thinking? Did that really just happen? all at the same time. Through spurts of laughter I told Tim I’d call the maintenance guys and get them to bring a ladder.

Tim rushed up the stairs to get something he forgot and on the way back down the stairs cracked our top step!! I had stepped inside to find the maintenance phone number and I had to laugh as Tim yelled up to me that I should tell the maintenance man about the top step as well.

After several wrong numbers, I finally got the maintenance man out of bed. He cheerily met me at the laundry room to let me in. I told him about the broken dryer, the keys on the roof and the broken step and he laughed at me. I hadn’t really stopped laughing since the whole thing started. The kind man got our keys off the roof and kindly marked off our stairs with DANGER tape (which we now disregard and use the stairs anyway) – not promising that they would be repaired or replaced anytime soon. Just before he left he shouted up to me (in the apartment) “anything else you need fixed while I’m here?!” Once again I couldn’t help but giggle at how differently the morning had gone than planned.