Emotion

When I get tired I get cranky, and I must have been tired today because I sure was cranky. Doing the laundry, the washing machine seems like it's done, there's no water flowing and it's not spinning, let's open it up and get the laundry out, but we can't, the door is still locked. The fancy little digital display says it still has two minutes to run. WTF is it doing? It's turning the drum slowly. Why? Stupid machine. If I hadn't happened to walk in there at just that moment it wouldn't have been a problem, but I did, and I'm tired, so WTF are you doing you stupid machine? It finally finishes and beeps, so I open the door. Then the accursed POS beeps at me again. What kind of ignorant savages programmed this thing? Someone should cram one of these beepers in their ear.

I go to McDonald's to pick up a couple of sandwiches for dinner. It's dinner time and the drive up queue is full. This McDonald's is fancy, they have two (2!) speaker boxes for taking orders. I have been here before when they were operating smoothly and they will take orders at both boxes and never seem to get confused. Today is not one of those days. I pull up to the speaker box and it tells me to order at the next speaker box. Okay fine, not a problem. But then it tells me again. FU, you annoying POS, I heard you the first time.

Eventually I get to the goody window, but instead of handing me my bag of goodies, the large woman asks me to pull around front and park and they'll bring my order out to me. Well, sheet, but okay, that's what I get for ordering something with 'artisan' in the name. It's okay for five minutes, but when we get to ten I've had enough and stomp inside to find out what's going on. The small woman in charge tells me they are waiting for the chicken to come up. whatever the $%^ that means. Screw that, gimme my money back, which she does. I go to Wendy's and buy hamburgers. If they had warned me that it was going to take an hour when I ordered, that would have been one thing, but they didn't.

Some emotions are easy to identify. Cranky, cheerful, content, happy are pretty obvious. But stress can distort your emotional state without making itself known. My wife broke her wrist last week when she tripped over a stationary kindergärtner and fell. It didn't seem too bad. She went to the ER where they took some X-rays and and wrapped her arm up with a temporary cast. But then we go see the bone doctor and now it looks like surgery might be in order. It's not a big deal, they make two inch long incision, line up the broken bit of bone, slip in a little metal splint, screw it down and sew up the incision. Surgery was Thursday afternoon. I didn't sleep well Wednesday night, I got maybe a couple of hours. Surgery went well and last night I slept pretty well. Today I am still very tired and as a result I find even the littlest things immensely irritating, as you may have noticed.