Addendum

Okay, so you know that saying, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all"?  Well, I read that as giving me permission to say whatever I want as long as I say something nice while doing so -- which is why I put all the nice things I had to say about this weekend in my last post. 

Why (WHY!?) is it that every time something was going really well this weekend, there had to be some little plague to take off some of the fun? 

It all started last night at the Brooklyn Rider concert.  As we walked up to the synagogue, I turned to Amy to make sure she had the tickets.  Her response:  What do you mean? I gave you your ticket after I bought it last October!  Me:  Not to worry, let's just have the will-call office give us a reprint.  To which the will-call office said, Oh, yeah, we don't do that.  At which point I tried to be charming -- but actually ended up being kind of Godmothery -- and won.  They let me in without my ticket.  Which should have been great, except that then I was plagued with victor's guilt for the rest of the night.  Gah!

AND THEN . . . today at the ballet.  Amy and I are sitting down in the prime orchestra section; our seats are awesome; the show was awesome; we are awesome -- until a woman who may have been related to the Pillsbury Doughboy sits down next to me, refuses to take off her puffy coat, and proceeds to occupy half my seat.  Seriously folks, what's the point of being skinny enough to fit within the boundaries of my own two armrests if everyone else gets to invade whenever they want?!?  And not only that, but then she starts jabbing me repeatedly with her elbow as she reaches into her coat pocket to get out cough drops (which resulted in her blowing menthol-breath all over me) and then peanut M&Ms (which resulted in her blowing peanut breath all over me).  I kid you not.  I was literally being attacked by a puffy-coated peanut-breathing dragon while Alice danced with the hot caterpillar.  The only way it could have been worse is if she'd been eating Doritos.  It was extremely distressing and I wished more than anything that I'd worn the device that Amanda had given me in penance for after an earlier peanut-breath incident on a bus in Peru.  Sadly, that talisman was at home on my bookshelf.



You're supposed to fill the slotted vial with some
good-smelling thing and then hold it to your nose
when plagued with odors.

FINALLY . . . tonight.  As the dinner party wound down, I offered to give the intern couple a ride home.  A good deed, right?  Right.  And no good deed goes unpunished.  In this case, I needed to move a bag from the back seat of the car into the trunk.  Only instead of just throwing the bag into the trunk and driving off, I threw the bag AND MY KEYS into the trunk -- and then closed the trunk.  Merde.  Of course there's no way to get into the trunk without a key:  my model of Kia doesn't have a separate trunk release, nor can you access the trunk from the interior as you can in most modern cars.  And, natch, my spare car key was in my office downtown, and my office key was in my apartment, and my apartment key was in the trunk, and in any event I was on foot without out a coat in sub-freezing weather more than a mile from the nearest metro stop, and I still had two twentysomethings who needed to get home. 

First things first, I took the twentysomethings back to the house where we'd had dinner and tore our hosts out of bedtime routine with their children so they could give the twentysomethings a ride home instead of me.  Then I summoned a private driver through Uber (thank heavens I hadn't locked my phone in the car, too!) and set off on what I was sure would be a multi-stop wild goose chase.

Fortunately things started getting better from there.  The guy at the front desk in my building handed me a spare key to my apartment without any hassle, and then I discovered (glory be!) that I actually had a second set of spare car keys stashed in my filing cabinet, so I didn't need to go all the way into town after all.  I was able to get back to the car and home without any further adventures.  (And I'm grateful for that, I really am, but sheesh!)

*    *    *

Now I'm sitting here at home, comfortably blogging about the weekend, wondering why all these stupid little annoying things had to happen this weekend.  I mean, it's not like people are dying or there's been an earthquake or anything truly disastrous (knock on wood), but still, it's as if I've been caught by the evil eye or something.  Fortunately I've got evil-eye protection all over my bedspread -- so at least I should make it until morning without further afflictions!