A Day I'd Just As Soon Forget

It all started about 8:30 this morning, when I was startled awake by those noisy Virginia Beach trash trucks rumbling through the neighborhood. Hearing them triggered my realization that I had forgotten to put the trash bin out last night. From that point to now, it has been all downhill. Everything I touched turned to...you know the word I'm thinking about.

Then, as I was readying my gear about midday, in preparation for going to the boat, loading it, and putting in some gas, the next episode showed its ugly face. Specifically, I was tying lures onto my rods for tomorrow's tournament. As usual, I was doing it in the den. The problem arose, however, because I had decided to do it from a standing, rather than a sitting position, which placed my rods in far too close proximity to the moving ceiling fan. In the blink of an eye, the fan blades connected with the rod tip, then snatched the loose line, which, as luck would have it, held the lure I was attaching, one with two treble hooks, I might add. As the line wrapped around the fan, the lure was jerked from my hand, nicking just the tips of two fingers...thank God for small miracles. The scene really could have been considerably worse.

After managing to cut power to the fan, I cut off the lure, unwrapped the line, checked the rod tip, and then restored power to the fan. I subsequently headed to the medicine cabinet where I doused peroxide on my two nicked fingers and applied some Bacitracin to ward off any infection.

Finally, I sat down, finished rigging my rods, loaded everything in the car, and was off to West Neck, where, you guessed it, Murphy once more reared his ugly head. First thing out of the frying pan, I couldn't get a good seat on my siphon hose for transferring gas from my 5-gallon can to the boat's tank (first time ever this has happened). Both cans served me with the same problem. And, as if that wasn't enough, the siphon hose worked loose from the one gas can and fell inside...to the bottom, no less...so I had to go buy a piece of new hose from Gene to even continue the gas evolution.

With that done, I started pumping outboard oil into the boat's reservoir. Everything was fine until I had extracted the last drops from the gallon container and was unrigging. I was lifting the hose out of the gallon container, wiping oil off the hose as I went, when the end that had been in the boat's reservoir, suddenly jumped out, spraying drops of oil everywhere. It took a while to clean up that mess and to put everything back where it belonged, and by then, I only had time to run down to the store, say a few words to Gene, and hit the road home, so I could relay my final decision on tomorrow's launch site to everyone by email.

Since arriving home, everything thus far has been quiet, and I haven't seen anything more of Murphy. The way I see it, he's had enough control of things for one day. I'm just hoping for a little rest tonight, so I'll be ready for the events of tomorrow. Keeping my fingers crossed that Murphy stays wherever it is he normally stays when he's not sitting on my shoulder.

I can't help feeling I would have been better served today if I just had gone back to bed this morning when I realized my first mistake and slept for a couple more hours.