I should have known that Monday would nearly be my undoing.

I spent most of Sunday on the internet changing the auto-pay settings for 23 payors to whom I shell out money every month.  This prime example of no-good-deed-going-unpunished flowed from making a contribution to a fundraiser for someone’s funeral.  Within minutes, my card had been hacked and my phone chimed with warning after warning.  I found myself praising the angels for fraud protection even as I cut the card in half and starting the process of rearranging my life.  

So much for Sunday, sweet Sunday.

I describe myself as a morning person but that strictly applies to my personality.  My corporal existence protests the dawn.  With that schizophrenic battle raging, I brewed French roast coffee and scrambled eggs, then sat down to read the grim news of the weekend.  My stomach soured.  I finished dressing and drove through a grimy fog across the bridge to the small town where I work.  Within minutes, I discovered that the internet didn’t want to cooperate and my printer had taken an extended weekend offline.  I looked at the stack of files on my desk and shook my head.

Shortly after five o’clock, I finished an hourlong call with an accountant and gathered my belongings, spent and weary.  I pulled my body along the sidewalk and lowered myself into the driver’s seat of my car as gingerly as my degenerated spine would allow.  Balancing on the better of my two bad hips, I navigated the car out of the city and over the bridge.  Back on Andrus Island, I passed workers struggling with broken equipment and a fallen tree.    I crested the hill on Jackson Slough Road  south of Owl Harbor at the precise moment that the sun let its evening blessing streak across the Delta sky.  As I stopped the car and reached for my camera, I sighed and thought:  Well, that just saved some part of a day I had rued.

It’s the thirty-first day of the ninety-seventh month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.