Anatomy of A Bad Mood

The day starts out fine. There is no war going on outside my windows. We have plenty of food and water, and most especially coffee. The power has not gone out and nobody close to me died yesterday. So, aside from the fact that I'm Jewish and antisemitism is running rampant on America's college campuses, how did I get in such a frickin' bad mood before 8:30 a.m?  Let's see:

My cat, who is 16, used his litter box liberally overnight, only he missed. So there's that to clean up. And why did he miss his litter box? Is he getting so old that he can't even see it? Is he dying? 

The neighborhood gets very noisy very early. Investigating, I see a huge truck parked three doors down. It's a tree service that is spraying for the browntail moth in our neighborhood, a service we bought for $240. (Gotta keep the cat inside until the noxious chemicals dry.) They do the three houses across from mine, and I'm expecting them to pull into our driveway next so I close all the windows. Only they drive off without coming to our house. So I call the tree service company and say, "What's the deal?" and they put me on hold for like 15 minutes and come back and say they have "no idea but we'll look into it and call you back." So I let the cat, meowing noisily at the door, out.

Meanwhile, a woman I met once a month ago finally responded to my invitation to meet for coffee sometime, only her email suggested 9 a.m. at a place I have never been to that's a 30-minute drive (during rush hour) away from my home. Why would I do that for anything other than surgery? I email her suggesting we meet later, but jeez!

The tree guys finally show up at my house to do the spraying, and a few minutes later a different woman from the tree service calls back and says she is looking into why the crew passed by our property but maybe it's because they ran out of chemicals. As she promises to call back and let me know, the tree guys begin spraying in our yard. My bad mood now fully formed, I don't tell her. 

My cat is out there somewhere, I hope holding his breath.

An hour after our trees have been treated and the noisy truck is long gone, the first lady I spoke with at the tree service early this morning calls to say that the guys had run out of chemicals and they were filling up now and would return this afternoon to spray our property.