Not to be confused with a nice day

Today has not been a very good day.

This morning I got into bed at around 5am as I'd slept in until about 2pm the previous afternoon. As I was lying in bed and listening to my iPod (I listen to music or a podcast to help me fall asleep), when I feel something moving along my arm. Thinking the cat has got on the bed and I'm feeling his nose or tail, I ignore it. The 'thing' then moves to my chest and I suddenly realize that it can't be the cat. I open an eye getting ready to brush a fly off my chest.

It was a fucking huge huntsman spider.

Have I mentioned that I'm a severe arachnophobe? Put it this way, you know how most people say they 'hate' spiders when they really mean that they're afraid of them? I don't hate spiders…I'm fucking terrified of them.

So I jump out of bed, do the "my hair is on fire dance' and squeal like a little girl. If you're having a hard time picturing this, just imagine a naked fat guy getting zapped by a hundred tasers at once.

Anyway, the spider ends up as little more than a smear on the floor, and I walk into the living room with my heart rate at about 70,000bpm. Sunny arrives home to find me sitting in the living room looking like a patient at a hospital for shell-shocked veterans.

We then decide that while we're both home and awake we might as well drive to the dump to take the trash off, something we'd been putting off for a week, and then we could stop for breakfast on the way home.

So we drop off the trash and decide on Cracker Barrel.

Ok, at this point you have to understand that we were both a little dingy. It was about 9am and we'd been up all the previous day and the previous night as well. Let's just say I was so dingy, I got out to the car after breakfast when it suddenly occurred to me that I couldn't remember the cashier giving me my cash card back. Instead of doing the normal thing and opening my wallet and checking, I just assumed she'd swiped it and handed it straight back, and that was why I didn't remember her giving it back to me after I signed the receipt.

Like I said, I was dingy.

So we get home and go to bed…and I don't sleep for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch. My body was just rebelling against me, until I woke up for about the fiftieth time and found our bedroom had turned into a furnace. I pulled a sheet off the bed and went into the living room where I flipped on the air conditioning and settled onto the couch. I finally fell asleep.

For about half an hour before Sunny woke me asking where the cash card was.

Of course, then it's pure panic time. I search my wallet, the jeans I was wearing, the car, the whole time remembering that I couldn't actually remember the cashier giving me my card back…so as I search the car for the fifth time, I ask Sunny to call the Cracker Barrel. They claim no one has seen it or found it.

I call my bank and tell them I've lost the card, only to discover it has indeed been stolen. There's a charge on it for four dollars to an online store that sells IDs. It's the one bit of luck I have all day that the asshole that stole my card is an idiot and probably decided the best thing to do with a stolen credit card is order an ID with my name on it instead of heading to the nearest Best Buy and buying a five grand TV.

However, as you can probably imagine, I'm still pretty pissed off, but mostly I was just relieved that the person who stole it only charged four dollars, which the guy from my bank said I could dispute and get back. I'm just hoping they're stupid enough to try that now that my card has a stop put on it and has been flagged as stolen.

The one thing that's really pissing me off is that I'm 99.9% certain that the bitch who took my card this morning when I paid for my breakfast is the one who stole it. However, I can't prove anything and I could be wrong. I seriously considered calling the Cracker Barrel back, asking to speak to a manager and telling them that they probably have a thief working for them…but as I said, I can't prove anything and they'd just say I could have dropped it in the parking lot or whatever.

Anyway, let's just say we won't be eating at that particular Cracker Barrel ever again.

Finally, there was a little good news/bad news.

A few days ago I ordered some crow quill nibs from an online art supplier. After I'd sorted everything out with the bank and Sunny had left for work, she turned back up at the house five minutes later with the package. That bit was awesome because it had arrived a lot earlier than expected. He downside was that the art supply store charges ridiculous amounts for shipping. It cost over ten dollars to ship fifteen pen nibs, and it was basic FedEx Ground shipping where they ship the package to your local post office and let the USPS take it the rest of the way.

When I saw the package, I realized why they charged so much.

They shipped fifteen pen nibs, each about half an inch long and less than a tenth of an inch wide, in a box that's at least a foot wide by a foot tall.

Anyway, the moral of today's post:

Get enough sleep, spiders are evil, don't eat at cracker barrel and Dick Blick art materials will screw you on shipping.