Mismatched buttons and peanut butter

You know those days that you can't quite complain about but just feel a little bit… off? Like wearing a shirt with the top button accidentally looped through the second button hole. Nothing quite works the way it's supposed to and you're never sure what's going on. You can't decide if you ought to be bothered by it or just laugh instead.

That's how yesterday was. I led my first-ever focus group in the morning, after carefully grooming my questions over the weekend to be sure I was fully prepared. I was expecting about six or seven of our regular participants to show up. By nine o'clock, all of the regulars were in the room chatting boisterously and drinking coffee, and by the time I abandoned ship at ten, there were sixteen people in the room, including a cute little girl with braids and a very serious-looking baby who wished he could climb across the table. The most ridiculous thing about this situation was that half of these people I had never seen before and no one had invited them. I don't know where they came from! My professors at Covenant would have been thrilled to peek into the office yesterday morning and see me trying to conduct "sensible and helpful" research in an environment that was in exact opposition to my purposes. It didn't go terribly, and I actually thought it was quite funny, but there were far too many people and too much chaos for me to do really ideal research.

By the time I left work I still felt rather thrown by the focus group and by managing things on my own all day, with Hayden gone in San Francisco. I clambered into my truck and was about to start it, only to realize that I had somehow got peanut butter in the ignition. What?! This struck me as impossibly funny and I laughed mindlessly on the steering wheel for a couple of minutes. If anyone saw me it probably looked like I was weeping.

In an attempt to make sense of a very strange day, I did something completely irrational: I drove half an hour just to find ice cream. Suffolk's only very serious fault is that it doesn't have a single place to buy an ice cream sundae within half an hour of downtown. For a place that already reached ninety degrees in May, this seems completely unreasonable to me. My own homeland still struggles with the 50s in that month, and there are like four good places for me to buy a cone within walking distance of my house. Anyway, yesterday was the final straw. I was not going to put up with an icecreamless existence anymore. So I chucked research for the rest of the day and drove out to Sweet Frog for a sundae (Sweet Frog is actually frozen yogurt, so healthy, and Christian-run, so spiritual. Boom! I win!). Afterward I went to the gym and ran until I wanted to die. Yeah, all of my choices yesterday made a ton of sense, too.

But the ice cream and the run made me feel better. Can't wait to see what the rest of this week holds...