You know it’s going to be one of those days when the first thing that happens when you wake up is you step into the shower and there’s no hot water because the wind blew the pilot light out. It’s too late to go light it because its way down in the basement and you’re already wet, and late besides, so you freeze your cojones off and just tough it out.

Then your tea bag explodes in the microwave and you get a mouthful of tiny, little, gritty, microscopic tea particles that take you an hour to finally spit out and it was your last tea bag, so you wind up trying to strain the tea clean using a day old paper towel that had bacon grease on it. Luckily it was on the top of the stuff in the garbage bag and you didn’t have to root through the egg shells and ramen wrappers to find it. But you persevere because the hot tea raises your core temperature a half degree after your cold shower.

Then the zipper sticks on your jeans and it takes 20 minutes to find the pliers which are laying outside by the truck where you left them when you were trying to get the ball off the trailer hitch, and you almost took a header off the stairs trying to get down to them so you could fix your pants.

And of course you forgot to get milk and there’s only enough in the jug to slightly dampen your cereal and you hate to eat dry cereal but you can’t just throw it out because you don’t waste food and besides you’re really hungry, so you add a little water to the glutinous mess and you look out the window while you’re forcing it down and think of brighter days.

To top it off and bring your morning to its absolute perfect conclusion, the phone rings and it’s the ranger giving you hell because it’s your day to sit on the fence near Old Faithful so the tourists can take pictures and if you’re not there immediately you’ll be reassigned to sitting on the wet rocks up at Lewis falls, where the sun never shines and the cold drizzle mats your feathers together and you never, never get transferred back once you’re sent there. So forgive me if I’m not the picture of the bluebird of happiness today. Thanks for asking.