A sleety birthday

Thank you for all of your good wishes and comments on my birthday. I am now mulling over whether I have crossed the point of no return: to wit,

1. Birthday cake purchased by husband had "Happy Birthday, Mom" written on it. Husband did not get hint when clerk asked him "How old's your mom?"
2. In-laws gave me Target gift card for present. (Let's live it up: free paper towels for everyone!)
3. Twenty-five-year-old sales clerks call me "ma'am" instead of "miss." (Okay, they've been doing that for the past couple of years, but I'm trying to round out my list.)

But that's an existential crisis for another day.

My birthday was, on the whole, a little odd. It started out pretty normally, until the sleet arrived. Or maybe it was freezing rain; it's hard to tell the difference. Frozen precipitation began at around 8 a.m. on Friday and continued nonstop through the day. Sure enough, school let out early, and around five o'clock, when the roads were getting steadily worse and Tom was due to arrive home, I began thinking of birthday cake and presents and a cozy night by the fire. Alas, it was not to be.

I received a phone call shortly thereafter from Tom, who had locked his keys in the car while it was running was scraping his windshield when the car's automatic locks spontaneously went off, thus locking the keys in the car through no fault of his. So I had to pack up the three kids and head out into the sleet to take him the extra keys. (Just to add insult to injury, I was out of gas, so I had to stop at a gas station on the way.) It took us an hour for what ought to have been a 15-minute trip. Even though we were driving an all-wheel-drive, heavy vehicle, we almost got stuck and the roads were treacherous. (Or as the local news station is wont to report breathlessly, "The roads are a CHAMBER OF HORRORS!!")

By the time we got to the client's office where Tom was, we decided he should leave his car (of course, after unlocking it and turning it off) and drive back with us. It took another hour to get home, with the defroster not working and having to stop every so often to deice the wipers.

By the time we got home, we were all stressed out.

I did recover enough to open a few presents (including Last-Minute Fabric Gifts: 30 Hand-Sew, Machine-Sew, and No-Sew Projects and The Natural Knitter: How to Choose, Use, and Knit Natural Fibers from Alpaca to Yak, which will be my next book review) and we did get the aforementioned cake, so all's well that ended well.

I shan't even mention the trip later in the weekend to pick up Tom's car, involving an hour of ice-chipping (Tom with a metal shovel, me with an ice scraper -- take that, Lyme hands!) . . .

In case this entry has not seemed pathetic enough (what can I say? I've been reading Rabbitch and I'm competitive), it's time for today's dime-store psychological insight.

I have been told many times before by a dear friend who's known me since I was twelve that I have a tendency to try to hide my stress from the world, to try to put on a together front even when I'm feeling anything but. (Stop snickering, Tom; I said "from the world.") Lately, I have been feeling anything but together. Part of it is the impact of this Lyme relapse: I'm still fatigued, and headachy, and jointachy. Part of it is stress. So I may be retreating a little inward in coming weeks, until I feel a bit more together. Don't take it personally. (Especially if it takes me a long time to return your phone call or answer your email.)