On Mondays

Sometimes, you know it will be an inauspicious Monday before you even get out of the car and trudge up the hill to your office building.

Yesterday, I was running late and on low blood sugar. I had cooked up some spaghetti for our Monday and Tuesday lunches and doled them out into 4 plastic containers, trying my best to divide the spaghetti evenly among them (388 calories each). This activity kept me from eating my morning Cheerios, which really can leave me in a bad mood. To make matters worse, I could only find 3 lids, so I slapped some plastic wrap on the fourth container and figured I would take it to lunch that day in order to just get it out of the way.

I rushed to work, having left home about 10 minutes after I normally do. And, being who I am, I was stewing the whole way there over how late I was going to be. As I whipped through the rain-drenched streets, I nearly spilled my plastic-wrapped spaghetti container on the floor going around a corner, and quickly resolved to be more careful. I drove a little more slowly the rest of the way.

When I arrived in the parking lot at work, I juggled my newspaper, industry education textbook, umbrella, and lunch as I got out of the car. I finally settled with the newspaper and textbook under my left arm and the umbrella in my right hand, along with the spaghetti. This was my first significant mistake.

As I walked into the fierce wind, struggling to keep my umbrella from getting out of control, I made my second mistake. I thought I could certainly reconfigure my umbrella to limit the amount of surface area exposed to the wind, so I tilted it back. Not much, but enough to make my morning much, much worse.

A gust of wind caught my umbrella, jerking my arm back. I lost control of my lunch container, and my umbrella was swept inexorably to the ground. Fortunately, I had a tight enough grip on the handle of the umbrella to keep it from blowing away.

And, as I looked down at my predicament, I saw that my entire lunch had deposited itself neatly into my umbrella. Just then, a co-worker walked by. She looked at me curiously, and I can't blame her -- there I was, standing in the rain and wind, with my umbrella upside down and resting on the ground, and a neat little heap of spaghetti and meat sauce piled in it, while I held an empty plastic container.

"I swear there is a logical explanation for this," I told her. She just smiled and kept going, clearly impressed by my prodigious intellect.

It is very rare that I give a day up for lost at 7:45 a.m., but when I do, I always have excellent reasons for doing so.