Bad day

I don’t have high hopes for today.

This morning I headed down to the dry cleaners, to pick up our stuff that had been there for a few weeks. On the receipt it said $18.25, so I flipped a Jaskson out of Kristy’s purse, and figured that since I was in a good mood, our Chinese dry cleaning lady was in for a tip.

Sadly for me, she said to me, “chenty cheew and a coreter”. (I’m not trying to be heartless here, but the lady has a really strong accent). Cursing the taxation system, I flipped out my shiney new gold visa card, but she just looked at me like I was holding a bucket of mucus and said, “cash only”. Figures. I mumbled something about having to come back and headed home to get some more bread.

Thankfully the dry cleaners are at the 2nd Avenue end of our street (hence < 1 block walk) as it was freakin' cold. Still, in the time it took for me to get back to the apartment, slam the door, grab 3 singles, slam the door again, and get back to the dry cleaners, I had established that something was wrong. Even with tax, the bill should have been about $19.50, so what's with her crazy amount? All sorts of nasty accusations came into my head, mainly along the theme of her abacus missing a few beads.

But again, sadly for me, it turned out I had misunderstood the receipt. It was in fact 2 seperate receipts – one for $5.00, and the other for $18.50. Even more sadly for me, “chenty cheew and a coreter” actually translates to “twenty-three and a quarter”, so I was still short – by a quarter. The lady said “don’t worry about it” and let me off with a 1.075% discount – w00t w00t!

So I walked home in the cold feeling a bit stupid, but looking forward to breakfast. You just can’t beat a cheese, mushroom, and ham omlette to kick off the day! But even my omlette couldn’t escape the wroth of my bad luck – though Kristy had lovingly made it as a thanks for my dry cleaning run, I had forgotten to defrost some more ham after using it all up yesterday morning. My omlette went lacking. Sad for me.

Surely the morning coffee would be a saving grace! Ordinarily, maybe – but this was not my day. Our beloved machine was playing up, so by the time I got it all working again, I was rushing to make the coffee, resulting in a terrible tamp. Bad tamp means bad crema, and bad crema means bad coffee. Sad for me. I served Kristy her terrible coffee anyway, but remarked “It’s not a good coffee. I’ll understand if you don’t want to drink it, and instead choose to tip it down the sink and divorce me”. She drank it. What a trooper.

Finally, we left home. Kristy had noted that I wasn’t exactly in the best of moods (not sure what gave it away) and offered to buy me a custard Choux from the Choux factory on 1st Avenue to cheer me up. I said, “I think that may be for the best”, and followed her into the store.

No chouxs this morning.

Sad for me.