Post-holiday reality

Is there some kind of cosmic Rule that requires we balance a holiday weekend with a shedload of tsuris immediately thereafter? There must be.

Monday afternoon the fan on my HVAC unit stuck in the on position. The AC compressor cycles on and off, as per the setting on my thermostat, but the fan runs ever on.

It could be a lot worse—the AC could have conked, or the fan could have stuck in the off position; in either of those cases, I’d be SOL in DC-area early summer heat/humidity.

But I just have visions of my next Dominion Power bill, and I do not like the number of places to the left of the decimal point that I see.

(And I was just so chuffed at putting out my mosquito zapper on Monday. I hope to God it destroys those things in their thousands—even if it is a bit unsettling to hear that ZZZ ZZZ sound as it does its work.)

Then—work. I’ve got about six spreadsheets going to try to corral various aspects of the business plan. I had a mid-morning meeting where I attempted to tame various human aspects of this project, and then IT needed my laptop because it’s been acting screwy and the Lenovo technician was supposed to do something that would fix it.

I saved to Dropbox everything I had open—just as you’re meant to do—and handed it over. Forty-five minutes later I got it back and started back to work. Only one of the spreadsheets wouldn’t open. Nothing but an error message saying that Excel didn’t recognize it any more, so tough.

Naturally, Sod’s Law being in effect, the bollixed file was the one, mission-critical spreadsheet containing my financial models (such as they are) that I absolutely needed and that would be a gigantic pain in the tuchis to rebuild. So I freaked.

The help desk guy also could not open it, and my anxiety level was rising every second. Eventually, he asked if I could try opening it online at the Dropbox URL. I could, and it did! I downloaded that sucker, changed its name and saved it in two places. Whereupon I slunk home to call the HVAC repair guy and make an appointment for him to come out today.

And then I poured a glass of wine. To propitiate the cosmic Rule.