IT WAS JUST ONE OF THOSE DAYS

Just One of Those Days.

Saturday was going to be one of those days… I Jumped [well, more like rolled] out of bed with a rare burst of energy. Great day to get a lot done around the house. Things that my wife has been gently suggesting I tend to.

After I showered and shaved, I noticed that the hand towel rack was still loose when the towel fell to the floor. I meant to fix that when she mentioned it around Christmas time. I finished dressing and headed right for the garage to get a screwdriver from my workbench.

When I went to open my tool box, I had to move a pack of outside lights I had bought a few weeks back when the HOA sent the letter telling me that my outside garage lights were out. I figured I better cross that one off my list right now. After bringing out the ladder, I laid it against the side of the house under the light fixture, kind of cramming it in against the very full bougainvillea growing there at the side of the garage door.

I did notice the hose lying out by the Palm tree that I was going to power water the other day and went around to the side faucet and turned on the hose so that it would water the palm while I fixed the light.

I climbed up the ladder and somehow managed to cut a nice long gash up the inside of my right forearm, so that I had to climb down and hurry into the utility room and get a few Band-Aids. But I had closed the garage door so that I could get to the light and then found out that all the doors of the house were locked, my wife having left for the fitness center.

I checked all the windows and finally found one open in the guest room. I removed the screen and brought the ladder over and climbed in, falling through onto an end table, breaking it along with a potted plant and a lamp my wife had brought home as a treasure she found during one of her many raids at Home Goods.

I took the white end table cloth [I really didn’t know it was her grandmother’s] and wrapped it around my bloody arm and made my way through the house to the utility room and, after using up the cloth and several towels and about 12 bandages, finally got myself together again.

I grabbed the Vacuum cleaner to pick up the broken glass from the lamp and hurried back to the guest room to get that mess fixed up before she returned home. I plugged in the vacuum and began picking up the debris when the vacuum suddenly made a terrible sound and spit stuff out all over the bedspread. Then the thing went “pop” and the lights went out. Smoke came out of the vacuum cleaner.

I grabbed the vacuum cleaner and ran for the hallway, ripping the cord from the wall and made it to the garage and threw the vacuum cleaner into the garbage bin, ignoring the power cord still trailing from the bin to the door to the house.

The door to the house slammed shut, locking me out of the house again. I opened the side door to the garage, made sure it would not lock again, shoved a bag of dry cleaning against the door, ran around the back of the house, threw myself back through the window and spent the next 20 minutes trying to clean up and braced the table with some books and pushed out the lampshade into something that resembled what it used to look like and turned the lamp around to hide the missing side and braced that with the plant shoved into the dirtless pot, missing its bottom.

I shoved everything else, including the dirt from the potted plant onto the bedspread and ran out to the side of the house, shook it out and shoved the bedspread into the washer.

I ran back and got the ladder, replaced the screen and hauled tail to the front of the garage, now an area that was now under water. In fact, the water was running back into the garage. I dropped the ladder, turned off the hose, grabbed a push broom and was pushing water out of the garage when my wife stopped her car in front of the ladder lying across the driveway. She walked up and asked me why the dry cleaning was floating in water.

I told her it was because I was fixing the towel rack in the master bathroom. We stared at each other for a few silent moments. Her eyes narrowed like she was working through something hard in her mind.

She said, “I think I understand. Why is your arm bleeding all over?”

“A bush did it,” I said.

“I see. Well, stop standing in water and pick up the things that are floating around.”

She went into the house but returned a minute later. “Why are you washing the guest room bedspread? It is a Dry-Clean-only cover. Why don’t the kitchen lights work?”

“I fell off the ladder”

“I see.” She looked at me for a second with her head cocked to the side, started to say something, shook her head instead and then headed back into the house.

On the way she stopped and picked up the vacuum cleaner power cord and looked at it, saw that it ended in the trash bin, looked at me again for a long, silent moment.

“Should I ask why my vacuum cleaner is in the garbage? Why is smoke coming out of the bin?”

“Stopped working. Caught fire.”

“Why? Were you using it to fix the towel rack?”

“No, I was vacuuming the bed.”

She actually smiled. Maybe there was hope.

“I see. You were vacuuming the bed. Anything else you want to tell me?”

“Not if I don’t have to.”

“I see.” She wasn’t smiling now. There was no hope.