I woke up today to find there was only one cup of coffee's worth of beans. I ground them and made coffee for Big Guy, who tends to sleep through first period if he doesn't have a cuppa Joe.

When I turned on my laptop, I got the black screen of death. Andrew later tried all the usual fixes, but no luck.

I got an email (on the kids' clunker) that my uncle fell and fractured four vertebrae.Then I received a phone message that our favorite priest died last night.

When I took the dog out for a walk he started to frolic and pranced away. I was going to prance along, but tripped on a piece of bluestone, skinned a knee, and wrenched my right wrist so badly that I spent the evening in the ER.

The bank still hasn't reimbursed us for the stolen money.

Enough of that. There's also this: someone wrote to me out of the blue to ask me to edit a thesis, Andrew gave me his laptop to use while mine gets fixed, I somehow met a deadline this afternoon typing with only one hand, and Eldest came home. I may succeed in meeting tomorrow's deadline. A very sweet acquaintance sent us a check, just because. And I baked chocolate chocolate-chip-peppermint-stick cookies, which were very, very good.

Bad things happen. Good things happen. Life happens. Extrapolating from the current moment is kind of silly. I haven't quite figured out why we do it.

My wrist isn't broken. We found the missing load of wash. Little Guy has finally used up the package of 260 twist-into-animal balloons, so the sound of screeching plastic will coming to an end before my sanity expires. Origami Santas litter the floor. I located the missing file of medical forms. All the kids are in bed. Alive.

If you had a bad day, it's come to an end. If you had a good day, there's hope for another. Goodnight, friends.