What a day

Tuesday evening I looked at my weekly planner with nervous uncertainty. My planner is usually very empty, to the extent that I frequently plop it down on the counter at work and forget about it until four days later when I move the stack of tapes that had somehow gotten placed on top of it. But for Wednesday the 22nd I had quite a lineup. At least things were neatly scheduled into place. 10:30 withdraw money because we only get one chance per week to do so and I was $20 in the hole. 11:00 two guys would be coming to clean our roof and rain gutter. 1:00 lunch, during which time the cleaning lady would hopefully come and then go again in time for me to get back and  make a Skype call at 3:00 to some guy in the United States who I have been unable to contact for 3 weeks. Then two friends would come in at 4:00 to finish up some recordings in the studio that they have been working on for a few weeks. We would wrap up by 6 and then I would rush home to meet up with my senegalese "brother," Kabo, at 6:30. We would spend a culturally appropriate amount of time together, hopefully ending before 9:00 so I could get packed for a camping trip on thursday.

Instead, this is what happened:
I tossed and turned until 15 minutes before my alarm, got up, turned off my alarm, and then went back to bed. I finally dragged out of bed again 12 minutes before I was supposed to leave for work. I shoveled down oatmeal mixed with yogurt (quick & easy) and stumbled to morning prayer. The morning was uneventful, partially because our email server had crashed, and I managed to withdraw my money and repay my roommate. So far, so good!

But then 11:00 came around and my roof cleaners didn't. I looked high and low for their phone number. No beans. I went back to work, hoping they wouldn't show up while I was trying to Skype, or while the cleaning lady was here, or while we were recording... My worries about that were quickly dwarfed when I realized that I had accidentally deleted the project that I have been working on for 2 1/2 weeks. You know those cartoons where somebody presses "delete" and the whole computer dissapears? Yeah, it was basically that. 2 1/2 weeks of work. One dumb move. My biggest angst was fearing that my coworker would never trust me again. He is particular about details, and now he would never again let me delete an ancient file, never leave me alone in the studio ever again.... argh!!! Fortunately, after 24 minutes of searching and digging and begging God for mercy, I discovered that all was not lost. For some reason completely beyond my comprehension, the program saved two copies of the work that I had done in places where I had never told it to save anything. Normally I would be have been very annoyed. This time I was grateful.

Grateful, but still in a bad mood. The ordeal had reminded me of the dismal state of our file system. Namely, we don't have one. Also, the trial had taken me 5 minutes into lunch break and as I was about to leave I remembered that I needed to prepare the studio for the cleaning lady. So I was a solid 15 minutes late for lunch. I ate, and took my time about it, and when I returned I fully expected the studio to be cleaned. Nope. It was obvious that the cleaning lady had never stepped foot inside. This was distressing. She was going to interupt my precious skype call. As I was stewing about that, the phone rang. Two boys were waiting for me to come and show them how to clean the roof. They made it, just 4 hours late! I checked skype and my would-be contact wasn't even online, so I ran off to get the boys set up. How many people does it take to find a pair of work gloves? In my case, five. I finally got them started and stepped back into the studio. My contact still wasn't on Skype. An hour later the boys were still up on the roof, raining down leaves and branches, when my friend came through the door to do her recording, waving the dust out of her face and picking leaves out of her hair. So we started the recordings, occasionally starting over when the bumps on the roof got too loud. 

After a while I stepped outside for an update and the boys confessed to me that they had knocked a hole in the roof. This was very bad. We had had a sprinkle the night before and at that moment the clouds were menacing the first flood from the heavens for the year. So I abandoned my poor friend in the studio and immediately began running around the center looking for something that would strike me as a solution. I barged in on our director, who was trying to skype somebody, and he helped me come up with a couple of ideas. I hurried back and started at it, noting that it was already nearly 5:30. My evening with Kabo could be in danger....

Long story slightly shorter, I was still finishing up the patch job at 7:15. My friend finished the recordings on her own and left. I never did get the guy skyped. The cleaning lady never showed up, which was just as well because I ended up dragging a nasty, dirty, rust-covered old plastic tarp into the studio and drapping it over our most important electronic equipment just in case my roof repair solution blew away in a high wind. And poor Kabo was wandering around and around my neighborhood, texting me every half an hour to see if I was ever going to show up.

When I finally got home I was tired, sweaty, and covered in dirt. I always have a hard time understanding Kabo on the phone, especially when I have bad reception and it cuts out halfway through sentences.... so my understanding was that he had given up and gone home. I was about to peal off my filthy clothes and get in the shower when he called and said that he was on his way. I was unspeakably depressed. I just wanted to crash, not have a cross-cultural experience in French all evening. It was already 8:00!!!

So I wandered over to our meeting point, a 5 minute walk, and ended up standing there for half an hour waiting for him. It gave me time to think. When I got there I was in agony, begging God to send him back home. By the end I was still hoping he would go home, but I had also said a prayer, with a tiny shred of faith behind it, asking that he and I would actually have an enjoyable evening.

He showed up at 8:30. And we had an enjoyable evening! Praise God! Miracles still happen! And then I took a shower and should have gone to bed... but I started writing this instead.