Even in Paradise, a day can go screwy

Down among the sweltering palms, life is beautiful. Usually. Without doubt, today was the excpetion.

It started at 6am. My wife heard a noise and woke me up. The noise turned out ot be nothing, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. I laid there from 6am to 8am, not sleeping. Since I went to sleep at 1:20 am, that gave me a whopping 4 1/2 hours of sleep.

When I went outside to get in the car, my recovering alcoholic and very sick neighbor was sitting on the bench waiting for me. He asked me to take him to the hospital. I of course couldn’t say no to the poor bastard, and the hospital is only 5 minutes out of the way…usually…so there we went. Needless to say I hit every red light and got stuck behind every slow-assed moron on the road the whole way. Then I got off on the wrong exit, had to make an illeagle move to get back on the highway (didn’t get caught!) and got on the right exit just in time for the train to hold us up. Finally made it down to the hospital, dropped off the patient, and got back on the road just in time to get caught up at the train coming the other way. Finally got past that, and the Hollywood Blvd. exit was backed up to Miami with construction. 15 minutes later I was on the circle almost at my office…got caught behind a bus, of course, but made it to work.

At work, niether elevator was coming down. Finally one showed it was on the first floor, but the doors didn’t open. I got the security guard to open it up manually, and the doors started working. So the UPS guy and I got in, the doors closed, we hit the button and nothing. Stuck. We yelled for the guard until he let us out.

The rest of the day was pretty much like that. My company’s owner twisted her foot getting out of her car. Our traffic manager had been up since 4am for no reason. One of our clients decided to do a major job for which we have one day to turn it around. Another client forgot to send us ad copy until 5:45, so I was at work until 7.

At least the rains didn’t come today, so I got to drive home with the top down on the convertible. But I made the mistake of deciding to mow the lawn. Of course, the lawnmower’s pull-start broke. I took it all apart and started to fix it. While I was doing that, our neighbor, who I’d brought to the hospital that morning, came over all whacked out, holding 11 bottles of prescription meds. He proceded to fall down in our driveway, then passed out. We called 911, and they took him to another hospital (he’ll be fine). It turns out he had scripts from three different doctors, and the meds have very bad interaction results.

I got the lawnmower  working, mowed two strips of grass, it hit a branch and died. I left it there, came inside, poured the last of my vintage Wild Turkey, and wrote this.

What a day!