I should have known as soon as my computer crashed that yesterday was not going to go well.  Probably I should have gone back to bed right then and waited for the morrow.  I especially should have taken into consideration the way in which my window into the world beyond my office suddenly went dark and could not be retrieved.

I had posted my blog.  Barely.  All the while I had been writing it, strange hesitancies and uncertainties were signaling me that all was not well in computer land.  “A virus,” I said to myself and proceeded to double-click on my handy-dandy antivirus program.  I was absolutely right, though it was the wrong thing to do.  But how could I have anticipated that my anti-virus program contained a virus?

It took a little time to determine that I was not going to be able to resuscitate the computer without professional help, so I toddled off to Mike’s Computer Repair and left it with Mike’s daughter.  Mike was out making a house call.  He touched base in the afternoon, said he could fix it, it would be XXX amount and it would be ready by ten the next morning.

The call came just as we were gearing up to go to a friend’s for dinner.  Never mind that we had houseguests and both Nyel and I wondered why in the world I had thought it would be okay to desert the homefires and leave them in the lurch.  But… there it was on the calendar and, of course, our houseguests said, “Go!  Go!  We’ll be fine!”

Home again! Home again!

Something about the looks of the house when we got to our destination didn’t sit quite right.  There was an extra car in the yard.  (Maybe another couple invited though that hadn’t been mentioned??)  But…  I boldly rang the bell, someone inside turned down a TV, our erstwhile host answered the door and gave us the blankest look I’ve ever seen.

After insisting that we “Come in! Come in!” and introducing us to his in-laws and calling his wife to help sort things out, we discovered that our dinner date was for July 17^th, not June 17^th.  Despite their gracious insistence that we stay, we extricated ourselves as quickly as possible, leaving a dozen of the girls’ finest as a consolation hostess gift.

Nyel’s comment on the drive home:  “Well, that’s never happened to me before!”  Me either. And I couldn’t help offering a silent plea that it wasn’t to be the first of many such mix-ups.  At our age, you never know!

We got home in time to tuck into fried oysters (“We have plenty!”) prepared by our long suffering friends who loved our story and were suitably reassuring about the state of our minds.  (Mostly mine since I am in charge of the social scheduling.)