The Road to Hell is Paved With My Good Intentions

School this year has, in some ways, gone really well; and in other ways... eh. Mostly ‘eh’ because of what I felt to be lack of organization and schedule-keeping on my part. So my New Year’s resolution was to get my butt in gear, have clear goals, stick to a flexible schedule, yadda yadda yadda. Starting TODAY.

Then my kids reminded me that we had a dental appointment scheduled for today. Crap.

That was the beginning of our misery on this coldest day of the year (so far).

Around nine in the morning I bent over to shove the pans strewn across the floor back into our kitchen cabinet when I felt cold air blowing from our kitchen vent.

Uh-oh.

Yup, the annual crap-out of our furnace had occurred, and the house was down to 55 degrees (which amazingly didn’t feel that much colder than our usual 68). So I call David and he offers to come home right away- don’t worry about it, I respond. We’re going to spend the morning at the dentist and then do some shopping. You can fix it when you get home, says I, thinking we’re going to be nice and snugly warm in our dentist’s office. Oh yea.

We get to the dentist’s office around ten, and guess what? His front door decided it didn’t feel like closing anymore, so instead of a snugly warm office we sit and shiver, subjected to an even longer exposure to bad TV since the office PIPES HAD FROZEN and so our dentist was running around like a madman trying to fix it all rather than seeing patients. The dental people were all (understandably) cranky, and three hours later we trudge out of the dentist office (yes, with clean teeth and no bad news- one good thing at least in this day), scorfing down our crushed ham and turkey sandwiches and longingly dreaming of our frigid home. But first, Wal-mart.

My dear brothers and sisters, perhaps you have heard from well-meaning preachers that your souls are in danger of the fires of hell because of your sinful ways. Well, let me tell you the truth: repent, or spend eternity in Wal-mart.

Oh. my. gosh. I shop there because the only viable alternative is Target, and I’m too much of a snob to shop with all THOSE snobs, them and their trendy housewares and cutesy marketing. Give me the world-dominating, employee-mistreating, redneck-loving, overly crowded aisles of Wal-mart any day. Except today. Or tomorrow. Or... well, preferably never.

The good thing is that Wal-mart was the absolute low point of the day- though really, can it get much worse than that? We came home to an abode that was still hovering around 50; made coffee (!); David came home and quickly fixed the furnace, and despite the resurgence of my cold, I managed to whip together a yummy mushroom-leek soup with homemade rolls.

And tomorrow, SCHOOL!