The Freaking Out About France Series
Okay, I’m usually not a fan of labeling things as “good” or “bad” days/weeks/years. For example, 2020 is widely regarded as a bad year (pandemic), but it was actually one of the best years of my life (moving in with my then-boyfriend-now-husband). But this has been a decidedly bad week.
It’s actually pretty funny. I try to laugh at things rather than mope about them. It’s just been comically bad. We are preparing for a honeymoon in Europe, my first-ever international travel, and everything is going wrong.
Here’s what happened this week since Monday.
- My husband’s car, affectionately dubbed the Mossmobile because of the thin layer of moss it grew underneath the back windshield, started smoking (!) in traffic with us both inside. We managed to get it back home because we were only a few streets away. It’s an old car and the 100-degree heat has been bad for it. My husband put in more coolant and it seemed to solve the problem.
- I found more fleas in the bedsheet. It’s so hard to kill those suckers.
- I have a lot of laundry to do today in preparation for our Paris trip. Persephone decided to pee in the basket of clean laundry I’d already finished. I didn’t notice until I put on a bra and discovered it was soaked in cat pee.
- We received a letter with a $35 library fine from forgetting to return something.
- Persephone got a mysterious bump on her chin.
- We got in for an emergency vet appointment, and luckily it’s nothing serious – probably an infected bug bite. (Surprisingly not from the fleas. The vet said the only way to prevent it from happening was to “kill all the bugs,” and that if I manage to accomplish this, I will make a lot of money.) But we have to give her antibiotic topical treatment twice a day, which wouldn’t be a problem, except she’s going to be with the catsitter and this is a lot to ask of them.
- The car wouldn’t start on the way to the vet, so I had to push it for a while to get it to pop-start.
- When we tried to drive home from the vet, the Mossmobile wouldn’t start. We had to get a tow truck to get it back home.
- Which means we can’t drive to our catsitter’s house tomorrow to drop off Persephone like we planned.
- And I can’t go to the bookstore to turn in my summer reading. I read 25 books for it, and now I can’t redeem the prize.
- I got heat rash.
- We accidentally booked our train tickets to the Netherlands both legs of the trip on the same day, so we would travel 3 hours to the Netherlands and then almost immediately get back on the train and travel 3 hours back to Paris.
- I booked an AirBnB in the east of France, and then completely misplaced every single piece of information about it so I had to go on a detective hunt to find the details. I had to get the owner’s name from their email address and then Google them to figure out the name of the AirBnB.
- I had a stomachache and had to miss my last French class.
So many things went wrong this week, but I tried to keep a positive attitude that everything was going to work out. I made sure to ask people for help and even pray about it when I was feeling extra stressed. It’s easy to focus only on the things that went wrong, and they sure did, but here are the good things that happened in response:
- My catsitter was extremely kind and is going to pick up Persephone from our place. She doesn’t have a problem with medicating her.
- Persephone is the best cat ever and was so good at the vet. She didn’t protest at all. The vet said she was “perfect” and that sometimes torties can be “spicy.”
- I called my mom for help, and she drove me and Persephone home from the vet while my husband stayed to coordinate the tow truck. I am so lucky to have such a helpful and nonjudgmental mom.
- The vet let us wait in the air-conditioned exam room while we called people for help.
- We were able to exchange our Netherlands tickets for the correct day with no extra charge.
- Persephone is probably totally fine! If it doesn’t clear up over the next 14 days, we will take her back to the vet. And we got to cancel her annual well visit next month because they just gave her the rabies shot today, so we saved ourselves a trip.
- My therapist had an extra opening this week in addition to my usual appointment, so I get to see her two times.
I am honestly terrified to see what the next day holds, because it could still get worse, but I am confident that we will figure it out. For now, it’s tragically comic.