Chaos Cloud

A chaos cloud has followed me for the past 26 hours. It started when I almost died twice driving to work. It continued through work when everything that could go wrong, did. Both the Heartless Siren and I had massive drama projects lingering in front of us that needed our great attention. Every time I touched my database, something else burst into flames. For every I got, I had to send five to fix/answer it. For every email I sent, I got three back. You do the math. Every time I tried to fix a problem, I found another one. I had sent this amazing report of a huge problem we've been having to the vendor responsible the other day and got the most ridiculous email in return that was supposed to fix it. Kreacher, the BYU programmer I work with, actually called me, laughing so hard I could almost hear the tears, wondering if I was suffering from hysterical fits of laughter as well. It got to the point that I was laughing to keep from crying. And there was much laughter. I realized later that I was actually entertained. I was laughing just because I thought it was funny. Towards the end of the day, when I didn't think I could take any more, every time Heartless Siren would say something, I would pull my blanket up into a ball on my lap and bury my face in it, then tell her to bring it on.

On the way home, we decided to cash in a coupon I had for a free car wash. Out of pure luck and Heartless Siren's good eye, we were able to breeze past the ginormous line at the Parkway exit and turn right to find the correct Chevron. I got the code for the coupon, then drove over to the carwash... only to find out it was a do-it-yourself carwash. Are you kidding me? I was in a dress, and the chaos cloud was looming over me. You think I'm going to wash my car by hand? Pshhha. So we left. But traffic was horrible, and any way out, I had to turn left. It wasn't gonna happen, so I turned right. At the next drive on my left, I planned on doing a U-turn. But, of course, my car has a horrible turning radius (though, much better than my last car) and I had to pull in. Tragically, it was a UTA only driveway. I got turned around and left. As we were turning the corner back around the Chevron, Heartless Siren noticed an automatic car wash that we had somehow missed. But the line of cars in the other lane was staggeringly long, so I couldn't have turned left into the Chevron had I tried. Besides, I didn't want to try to get out of there again.

Mom had told me that after a day like this, we deserved ice cream. So we stopped at the mall. Probably the most chaos-free part of the day. After finding a fantastic parking spot, we entered the mall and decided we wanted dinner. After eating Chick-fil-A and eavesdropping on a fantastically entertaining conversation about returned missionaries (you don't want them too weird because that's just annoying, but you want them somewhat weird so that you know they learned something on their mission) and watching this dad whip a huge knife out of his pocket in front of his children for no apparent reason (which became apparent after a moment when he started cutting his daughter's pizza), we headed over to Radio Shack. I am now the happy new owner of an AV cable that allows me to plug my iPod directly into my car radio. Last stop, Coldstone. I was incredibly full and had actually considered not getting any ice cream, but then I decided I could always take it home and put it in the freezer to eat later. One taste of dark chocolate peppermint ice cream later, there was no way it would ever make it to the freezer. Adding raspberries to it just sealed the deal.

We decided the evening would be spent at home at a movie night with some girls in the ward in our pajamas and not leaving at all. So, of course, that's not at all what happened. I forgot and changed into jeans, but promised to change into pjs when I finished answering the Board question I was working on. But before I finished, we were invited over to Yellow's house to play Sonic. So we went. I stayed in jeans because his apartment tends to be cold, but Heartless Siren stayed in her pjs. Sonic was fun. I had only ever played once and it was Heartless Siren's first time. Yellow told us there was a way we could play cooperatively, and started us on a competitive level. After gaming chaos, we moved on to other games in the Sonic game. Having no idea what the grey blocks were in the Tetris-like game (or rather, where they came from... anyone? anyone?) we moved on to Lego Star wars. It had to be highly entertaining to watch. Heartless Siren and I didn't play nice together... I'm not sure we were meant to play cooperative games. She kept trying to go forward while I was trying to stay back and explore and she kept killing me on accident and I kept doing useless things like using the force to blow flowers up to get coins. (Useless because we weren't saving our game.) At one point, I pulled on my controller and pulled it out of the game cube. I put it back in, but alas, it no longer wanted to recognize it. much chaos later where they kept killing me to try to make me move and also lost control of Heartless' controller, we discovered that position 1 and 2 had switched to 3 and 4 and we were able to play again. We got to a flying/racing level and I knew we were in trouble. I'm awful at racing. Even better, we had to fly together. We could kill each other... and believe me, we did. We finally made it through... to find it was only the first of 3 laps. I think Yellow and Hoday were slightly annoyed and us continually making the same mistakes and dying over and over again (Yellow actually flew for me for awhile when Heartless Siren was dropped out of the game so she could put on chapstick) but we were having a lot of fun. What is gaming chaos compared to work chaos? We'll take this any day. We were probably on the racing portion for near an hour... we had one section left--a section we did easily the previous two times--when the game froze and emitted an awful buzzing noise. We took that as our cue to go home. Oh, and sometime during the evening, Heartless Siren broke her compact... the lid snapped right off.

This morning I was about to leave for work in Orem and glanced back and noticed Heartless' light wasn't on, but her car was there. Sure enough, she was still asleep. So I woke her up and told her it was ridiculous to go to SLC, so just to come to Orem, then I left. I got to work, determined to fight the chaos cloud, and was overwhelmed by emails, phone calls, and the fax machine. (Ironically, it turns out that Optimistic. had taken Heartless Siren's brain and gave it back this morning, but warned that it may have been damaged over the fax machine transfer.)

Heartless Siren just walked into my cubicle and we realized more chaos had just ensued regarding loading books. (Oh, I musn't forget that this relates to her big chaos problem from yesterday which is also the project I talked about in this post. She read it last night and was laughing so hard that there were tears. Particularly about the line, "Maybe because I just know that she'll do a good job") Of course another problem would creep up as I'm writing about chaos. We have determined that it is no longer a chaos cloud. It's a chaos inversion. There's no telling when it'll leave. Pray for us.

Oh, and my thumb still hurts from the Game Cube last night. But that's totally worth it.