Because I feel the need to complete my countdown, today is the last day of school. We have made it, battered and weary, to the finish line. Hallelujah and amen.
Now promise to remind me how anxious I was for summer in a month when I write about how I’m tired of listening to Caroline tell me she’s bored.
So yesterday I went to Smart Barre at 8:30 even though I think I’ve made it clear that I am not a fan of working out that early. It just seems cruel and doesn’t allow me the six to seven hours I prefer to wake up and function like a normal member of society.
But I had to go at 8:30 because I had to be at Field Day at Caroline’s school by 9:45. This basically consisted of an hour of watching my child play tug of war and shoot water guns at her peers while I visited with other mothers and stood in heat that would rival the surface of the sun. Except it wasn’t a dry heat. So it was maybe more like being in a dishwasher set on “SANITIZE” for an hour.
Needless to say, I was fresh as a daisy by the time it was over.
And I was meeting my friend Amy for lunch so I decided to run home and take a quick shower because I find that basic hygiene is a nice touch when lunching with friends. It’s the least I can do to not make people around me dry heave.
So I ran home, took a quick shower and met Amy. We had a lovely lunch and great conversation. Then I left there and ran by the bank because I’m homeroom mom for Caroline’s class which means I’ve spent the last two weeks of my life collecting money for various end of year things. And apparently many people still write checks.
P and I haven’t had checks for our personal checking account for at least eight years. I pay all our bills online and use a debit card or cash for everything else. This wasn’t necessarily an intentional choice to embrace online bill paying technology back in 2005 as much as it was desperation when I realized I’d forgotten to reorder checks and we had bills due. This is pretty much my standard method of adopting any sort of new technology.
For example, the only reason I ever learned how to use email was because the professor of the last class I took in college required us to turn in all our homework by email. He informed me halfway through the semester that I was on track to fail his class because I hadn’t turned in any homework. And I had to admit to him that I wasn’t sure what email even was and had only recently sent my first fax. So my dear friend Hite marched me down to the computer lab and showed me how to enter an email address and I told him email would never be widely used because the addresses were too long.
I also once declared that nothing would ever replace the cassette tape proving that I have always been very insightful.
But back to the checks, I never bothered to order them again after I discovered the beauty of paying bills online and saving all that money on stamps. And it really has worked out beautifully considering that I wasn’t above writing a check to pay for a large Coke at a convenience store. There’s really nothing that endears you to your husband as much as when he has to balance a bank account with multiple checks written for “One dollar and sixty-four cents”.
And if we ever really need a check for something, P has a business checking account. But that’s because he’s a responsible adult who remembers to order checks when they’re running low.
Anyway, I had at least twelve checks that I needed to deposit in our account yesterday. So after lunch I drove through the bank line, filled out the deposit slip and endorsed all the checks. Then I reached for the canister and dropped it. On the ground. Where it rolled. Under my car.
I attempted to get out of the car but I was too close to the pillars holding the magical thing that transports the canister to the teller. I realized I’d need to back up to open the door wide enough to get out and retrieve the canister. So I began to back up the car and that’s when I heard a loud CRUNCH. And I knew like you know when the sour cream has gone bad that it could only be the sound of a Volvo station wagon running over a plastic bank canister.
And I looked up with a deer in the headlights look as I tried to decide if I should just drive off or call the teller or join the Witness Protection Program, only to realize that the teller had been watching the whole scenario play out on the monitor.
Which is why I’m going to have to find a new bank because I can never show my face there again.