Thursday, March 03, 2016

When good news and bad news go hand-in-hand

Good news: The cashier noticed that I'd left a twenty dollar bill sitting on the counter when I left the store, and being an honorable person, she tracked me down and called me up so I can retrieve it. 
Bad news: It's a 30-mile round trip to a store I wouldn't otherwise need to visit this week.

Good news: Thanks to a grocery-store discount, I filled up my car with gas at 99 cents per gallon this morning, which makes that 30-mile round trip more palatable.
Bad news: Low gas prices keep kicking our Petroleum Engineering program in the butt, exacerbating the enrollment crisis and making the entire campus gloomy.

Good news: I'll escape campus gloom for a Spring Break visit to my adorable granddaughter next week.
Bad news: While I'm enjoying my granddaughter's company, I'll have to squelch the sense of guilt over not being in Florida with my ailing mother, who may or may not be out of the hospital soonish.

So I'm having a kind of up-and-down week, looking forward to fun while lumbering under a load of unpleasantness. But at least a tree didn't fall on my car while I was driving this week! This happened to a colleague, who now considers himself either the unluckiest guy on earth (because what are the odds of driving under a tree just as it's falling?) or the luckiest (because what are the odds of walking away from an accident like that uninjured?). 

Lucky/unlucky, good news/bad news, glee/grief--sometimes it's hard to find the point where one ends and the other begins, but for now, I'm considering any day on which a tree doesn't fall on me a good day. And if I'm twenty dollars richer at the end, so much the better.  

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