Slipping Sunday

I woke up this morning with the cough still lingering in my lungs, just enough there for me to taste the coppery rust in the back of my mouth, the detritus of hours of suppressed coughs accumulating into greenish-brown microlayers, not enough to produce a loogie, but enough to make its presence known.

I really should have brewed a kettle of tea and let the steam clean and sterilize those nasties back there, but I had a bowl of cereal and a Diet Coke because I am a hopeless addict to the faux cola.

After I cleaned the kitchen and made my bed (I cannot start the day with sticky counters and an unmade bed), my mother called with a new problem at her townhome.

“I pulled the drawer, Scott, and it … it fell off!” she said.

“Fell off?”

“Yes!”

When I got to her place, she led me to her kitchen island, where a drawer was in place, but exposed with no front.  I pulled it out and saw that, sure enough, she had somehow pulled off the decorative panel attached to the front side of the drawer.  The drawer itself was made from very cheap particle board and the front side of the drawer had basically disintegrated at the corners.

I had brought wood glue with me to glue the side back into place, but I knew the glue/particle board would eventually give way again from my mother’s Hulk-like pulls.  

So what to do?

And then - snap! - I had the solution.  I unscrewed the decorative panel from the front side of the drawer, reglued the side back into place, and then reversed the drawer so that the back side was now the front side.  I am waiting for the glue to set so that I can secure the wall with some wood screws and then I will reattach the runners and the decorative panel on the new front side.

And boom - a solid new drawer where the weak side is on the back bearing no stress.

We will see if this works tomorrow!

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After I got back from my mother’s house, it was time to go to the Rockets game with my wife and children.  For various reasons, we don’t do this very often, get together as what my wife calls the “OGs,” the original four.

It was great.  We had dinner at a Tex-Mex place before the game and talked about old times and new times and our planned vacation in Galveston, and then went to the game and watched the Rockets bench play the whole meaningless game.

The only glitch in the evening was when a lady in the row immediately behind us said, “Scott!” and I had no idea who she was.  I worked the problem and eventually realized that she was one of the people in HR at my old job, and by the end of the first quarter, my memory laid her name out in front of me, far too late.

There are few things worse than you forgetting a person you should have remembered, and that person realizing that sad fact.  This lady was a kind person who had frequently helped me and I felt horrible that I’d very likely hurt her feelings.

But she was graceful about it and we parted in a friendly way at the end of the game.

Old age, if you didn’t know, sucks.

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Tomorrow, I start working on my conflicts book and I return to the gym.  Also, I suspect there will be some new developments on some pending legal matters I am handling, so a cloud of dread is hovering off in the distance.  I really need to start winding down my practice and concentrate on my health.

As my trainer says often, “Health before wealth!”