Blame it on the moon

Dad says there was a full moon a couple of days ago and I'm inclined to believe him. Part of his job as the official Silent Partner of the Costa Rica Quilt Retreat is to receive checks made out to Rita or, usually, myself, and deposit them in the appropriate local bank account.

Over the past couple of days he has received two checks from two different future clients. One was made out to Janet (instead of Jennifer), and the other was actually made out to Dad instead of to Rita. And they got his name wrong to boot.

I blame the moon.

The effect is only just now reaching down here to the tropics though.

This morning one of Alex's clients needed to send a fax. Not sure why he felt it was necessary to call me "my love" while asking for a fax tone, but there you have it. (Seriously, how inappropriate is that? I'll assume he didn't realize that he was addressing the wife of the professional he's pressuring to get some work done as soon as possible. Which, curiously, doesn't make it any more acceptable. Can you believe people still do that?)

Ahem.

Anyway, the fax machine ate the fax, then ran out of ink film, then flat out broke. Really. A piece broke right off and now the cover won't close even though I've replaced the ink film and cajoled it with dulcet tones.

Anyway, the fax is no longer my problem.

The timing belt on the car, a little more so.

Heard this clanking noise as I was driving home this evening. At first I thought it was a rattletrap of a pickup truck that was passing me, but the sound stayed with me after the truck was gone, so I pulled into a restaurant parking lot and had a look.

Couldn't see anything about the tires or trunk that looked clattery, so I started the car back up and determined that the sound was coming from the engine. It seemed to be coming from the belts that are visible outside the engine, but I couldn't see anything obstructing them or scraping against them.

The lady in the restaurant placed a call to Alex for me, and he got the girls back in the car and came down to stare uncomprehendingly at the engine with me. (It takes two, you see.)

Alex thought the sound was coming from the timing belt, not the harmless little rubber belts outside the engine, which put the whole thing into another realm of "how bad could this be" - at least in my mind. Alex still wanted to try to drive it home, but the question was rendered moot when he tried to start it back up to stare uncomprehendingly at it for another little while, and it wouldn't start.

So we went back to the nice lady in the restaurant and got her kind permission to use the one car to tow the other car to the back parking lot and abandon it there, at least for the night.

So we did.

When we got home, the cat had vomited, wetly, on the ottoman of the glider rocker. Pretty much every other surface upon which she could have let loose can be thrown in the washing machine. The ottoman not so much.

Guess it was a pretty good day for me to pick up Buffalo wings and beer on my way home, no?