Ever have one of those days?

So...

I'm not sure how to begin this, to be honest. It's just too damned surreal a day. It started off normally enough. I woke up a half-hour before my alarm went off and stared at the ceiling because, for a change, I'd actually had had enough sleep. I had a nice leisurely shower and breakfast and then ambled off to work. I came home, did the job search thing, planned my week's lessons for Wuhuan Engineering and generally relaxed or played with Lucas or both.

3:15 rolls around and I hit the road. I got to Wuhuan way early and wound up playing a video wargame on my N800 for almost an hour before my classroom was opened. (They're way off out in the boondocks, you see, and bus service there can be very, very fast like today or I can wind up with scant minutes to spare because of snarling traffic. Yes, I said "snarling" there. It's called a pun. Look it up.)

Anyway, my teaching goes exceedingly well (I have a really good class in Wuhuan and love teaching there), but the first bit of surrealism invades at about that point. Joan calls about an hour in at 6PM. She'd forgotten I was off teaching you see and was on her way home from work when the batteries in her scooter ran out. She had called to see if I could come out and pick her up, taking the scooter home. Since I was about a three hour walk (more, even?) away that wasn't really feasible so the poor little girl wound up having to push her heavy scooter home a distance that's a good 20 minute walk for me at full speed without a load. And push the scooter up the hill. It's a pretty damned tall hill.

Anyway, I finish my teaching, catch the shuttle bus that takes me about half-way home and then the public bus that drops me off about a 25-minute walk from home. (About 5 minutes, yes, away from where Joan ran out of battery power.) As I get off the bus, I call Joan to make sure she got home OK. Had she left the scooter somewhere, you see, I'd have picked it up on the way seeing as I carry the keys with me for just such a possibility.

Joan made it home alright, but she wasn't in the apartment. Nor was her mother. Nor was Lucas. They were all stuck out in the hallway because Joan's mother had broken the key off in the lock at about 5PM after returning from some shopping. They were stuck outside and had already tried one locksmith and were on their second in getting the door opened. Needless to say I rushed home as quickly as I could, finding my family sitting in the stairwell while a locksmith hammered and picked and hammered and picked and hammered and picked and ...

Well, I got it in my head that perhaps food would be needed for the spud (and the rest of the family, but mostly the spud). It was 9PM by that time, however, and any of the places we'd have wanted to get appropriate foods from were closed. I was sent off on a mission to get some things and managed to find none of them. I instead had to get more expensive alternatives that were sorta-kinda the things we'd sent me out to get in the first place.

This emptied my wallet, incidentally, of all my spending money for the month.

This trip itself was a half-hour round trip so I got back shortly after 9:30 and, just as I pressed the elevator call button, I got the message that the door was opened and I didn't need to go get the food after all.

Lovely.

So how was your day?