I'm still alive

Thanks for asking.

It was a horribly rough day. I got up with MaxieC at some ungodly hour that started with a 6. He was cranky. Very cranky.

When The Mrs. finally waltzed out of bed almost four hours later, she announced she was going to Toys'R'Us to buy something for HannieC that was only on sale that day.

She left without feeding us breakfast.

MaxieC and HannieC fought with one another the whole time The Mrs. was gone. She was gone for an obscenely long time. Must have been close to an hour and a half.

Then she came home and immediately went out somewhere else with HannieC. I can't remember where, or any of the details. Maybe I imagined it. But I know MaxieC screamed the whole time she was gone, and she came home with Sonic.

Then, while we were eating, she said, "You know the GPS/backup camera thing in my van? Today it did something weird. It kept asking me to enter a code."

Did it display the map?

"I dunno. I didn't notice."

So I had to go check. Sure enough, everything worked except the GPS, which kept asking for a code. I remembered something about this being an anti-theft feature from when I picked up the van. I checked the manual. Yup, it asks for a code if the GPS has been unplugged from power.

This is doubly bad. First, I dunno where the stupid little card is they gave me when I picked up the van, and second, the GPS has not been removed from power. That means there's a loose connection somewhere, and I can probably expect it to lose power right at the most inopportune time sometime in the future.

I was angry. Angry because I had lost the little card. Angry because I had spent an extra $7000 to get a Honda over a Dodge, and this kind of stuff was what was not supposed to happen in a Honda. Angry because now I was angry in the middle of my lunch, which was my first meal of the day, and I was starving. And angry because I had already lived through 6 hours of non-stop 2-year-old hollering, and it was just past noon, and The Mrs. and HannieC were going to see The Nutcracker a 1pm, leaving me home alone again with screaming MaxieC in less than an hour.

Bruce Banner used to say, "Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

I watched for it, but I didn't turn into a giant green monster.

I found the card right where I thought I had put it. Of course, I didn't look there right away, because I forgot right where I had put it. Then, when I did look there, I missed it by a few inches and didn't see it. Took me about 20 minutes to get back to searching the same spot over again (big house), and then it turned right up. I punched in the code, and the GPS was again happy.

The Mrs. then took off with HannieC. MaxieC hollered.

And hollered.

And hollered.

He refused to take a nap, as he generally won't nap without The Mrs. putting him to bed.

Two/three hours later, The Mrs. called to say she was sitting at a railroad crossing waiting for a train to go by. She did it just to annoy me.

Eventually, she got home with HannieC, and then the two childrens started at it again.

My head was killing me, and I had had it by this point. I was reduced to arms-length backhands to try to keep The Childrens from screaming in my ears and climbing on me. It was like a living pinball machine. No matter what I did, they just kept coming at me, all hollering and such.

The Mrs., always a wise-arse, said, "Why don't you stop parenting for a while," and she took The Childrens off somewhere upstairs for like 6-7 minutes. It was my only reprieve of the day.