Reversals

Yesterday was a series of one terrible thing after another. First, those car repair woes I blogged about yesterday. Staggering under the weight of that suffocating sadness, I turned on my email, thinking maybe the universe would decide that this was the day to send one tidbit of good news to Claudia. And - wait - there in my inbox was an email from the editor of a journal to which I'd sent a children's literature article last spring - I had gotten one reviewer's comments, did a major revision, sent it in - and just enough time had gone by that this email should be the editor sending me my acceptance!! But - no!!!!! It was the editor saying that there had been a "mixup" and I was supposed to have gotten a set of comments from a SECOND reviewer, and he had just found them, and here they were. As in: time to start the revision process all over again. And THEN, when I checked my email later in the day, in desperate search for even the teensiest scrap of something to make my life worth living, there was an email from the University of Maryland, politely inquiring when I was going to FedEx them the proofs for the quarterly publication I'm guest-editing: the proofs that I had already Fed-Exed them last Thursday! And were apparently lost, to be laboriously done all over again, because of course I hadn't made a copy, as Fed-Ex never loses anything.

This was, to quote Judith Viorst, a "no terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day."

But today, inexplicably, everything is better. The car repair place swears up and down that after hours of exhaustive checking (for which they did NOT charge me), they are POSITIVE that my head gasket is not leaking, and the previous appearance of leakage was just caused by "residue" from the earlier repair. The editor of the journal emailed me to assure me that he wasn't expecting a major overhaul of the article, just a tweak or two: I can do tweaks! I verified that my Fed-Ex package had indeed been delivered to the University of Maryland on Friday; the production guy there found it and already make the changes and emailed the new proofs to me.

And it is snowing!!! Ten to eighteen inches forecast, and probably ten on the ground already. Gregory didn't have school; I did, but my classes were all in festive snow-day mode, and the university closed early. All my brownies and Jello from yesterday's attempt at self-comfort are long since eaten - so maybe now some celebratory apple crisp?