I’m heading to The Emerald City this weekend to visit with distant friends. I have clothes, allergy medicines, toiletries, snacks and amusements prepped and packed. There’s no doubt that I’ll forget to pack something I actually want or need, but I’m reasonably certain that I have the basics covered.

This is my first chance to get (and stay) out of town in quite some time. I hope for a reasonably relaxing and enjoyable couple of days. I also, of course, hope that Amtrak doesn’t screw things up more than they already have.

Be good, and I’ll see you next week.

Happiness is… receiving two text messages on my phone within thirty seconds of one another, one each from two of my favorite people, letting me know that they’d bumped into one other unexpectedly at one of the downtown Starbucks locations. (With as many of those one can find in Portland, the odds against this are higher than you might think.) As in, one was standing in line right behind the other. Serendipity at its finest, I think.

It’s the simple things that can turn an otherwise-drab morning into something quite a bit more tolerable, no?

Here’s an amusing bit of luck for you: This morning on the way in to work I stopped at the Starbucks for my usual hot cocoa and a pastry. (I normally get one of the breakfast sandwiches, but I try not to get stuck in that rut.) The total came to four dollars and eighty cents. I knew that my refillable card had somewhere in the vicinity of five dollars left, so I had the cashier give it a swipe just to see what would happen.

Imagine my surprise to see the receipt which read that my card, after completing the purchase, had zero dollars and zero cents remaining!

Neat, huh? Now if only I could translate that kind of luck into something involving serious amounts of cash…

I was almost asleep and then remembered that I wanted to get this posted before it slipped my mind completely.

Related to an earlier disaster regarding certain bank accounts, today I uncovered another slightly smaller disaster. During the process of getting things remedied, the customer support representative on the phone needed to verify that I am who I say I am. The bank’s preferred method of doing so, apparently, involves asking a series of multiple choice questions. Today I got the “addresses you’ve used before” quiz set. As this was being explained to me I stated confidently that I’ve only moved twice in the last decade so it shouldn’t be too much of a challenge.

Yep. I opened my big mouth again. You’d think I’d know better by now: The instant I make a definitive statement I’m proven wrong almost immediately.

The first question went back to the heady days of my early marriage. The second question was a trick, as none of the presented multiple-choice options were valid. For the third, they went back to my earliest days as a semi-independent functional adult person. It’s a good thing I remembered the street names or I might’ve had a much more difficult time getting today’s crisis settled!

I hasten to point out, mind you, that I’m very grateful that policies are in place to verify that the person who calls Washington Mutual to monkey around with my account is actually Me and not just some random identity thief who was able to learn my SSN and DOB. I highly approve of this sort of protective policy in general.

That’d make a fine band name, anyway. They would’ve been playing at the lightswitch rave in my bedroom last night. Though a proper rave would’ve included underdressed party girls, wouldn’t it? Damn my luck.

Let me explain. (There isn’t too much, so I don’t need to sum up.) You see, apparently the 5th of July is the night on which the neighborhood kids get to light off the cheaper fireworks. Their weapon of choice? The strobe bomb (or whatever its technical name is, which I can’t be bothered to look up right now on account of being very, very tired and a bit cranky). I gotta tell ya, it’s awfully difficult to get to sleep when my bedroom is illuminated to almost daylight brightness several times per second for ten seconds, every few minutes, for well over an hour. Occasionally they changed gears and lit off various screamingly noisy things. Hooray for variety. I think they ran out of ammunition around 11:30, then settled for just talking at full volume for a while. Neighbors, schmeighbors. Nobody needs to work the next day, right?

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to see about staggering and stumbling my way through my workday.

She’ll always be the “kid” of the family, because she’s five years younger than I am and each of us only has the one sibling. (My present to her is that I won’t state my age here to prevent casual readers from doing the math. See what a loving big brother I am?)

Happy Birthday, Sis!