Wine

I don't drink, but now I do.

Slowly, at the behest of women I am on dates with, I have had increasing amounts of wine. Perhaps an entire bottle over the period of a month.

This fits with the philosophy of getting into more trouble this year, of relaxing the restrictions this year, but truly what was in the back of my mind more times than not was that I just wanted to go to sleep, dammit.

Yesterday was a day when many things went wrong.

I exchanged a fish filter that wasn't working; I only vaguely noticed that the replacement box was open instead of sealed as I headed out the pet store door, but when I got home I found that half of the parts were missing. Back for another exchange I went, sweating that they would refuse as though I had been the one to steal from them.

Later in the day I searched through eight stores, looking for a longer shower hose to complement the new shower head I had purchased. I found one, but when I got home I found that it was the same size as the old hose, and not the size on the box. Once again someone had helped themselves to the contents of the item I had purchased, replacing it with their old hose. Twice in one day I was the unwitting victim in someone else's attempt to shortchange a store.

Other things went wrong as well, such as my carpet shampooer not spraying water (I eventually took a sports bottle, filled it with shampoo and water and manually sprayed the carpet), the sap not coming out of the dog's fur, calls from employers after I thought I was done for the day, and so forth. The phrase "everything that could go wrong, is" came to mind, but fortunately I could think of several examples off the top of my head where that wasn't true, and even more fortunately those examples stayed examples and didn't suddenly go wrong.

So, on the one weekend when the musician and I had "free time", it turned out that I would head over to her place for only an hour. She was setting up her new elliptical exercise device, and ran into a few issues of her own with it. I managed to figure out that the wrong bolt was used here, and these were the right screws after all, so I did contribute despite my natural aversion to putting things together. She was bashfully thankful, as she's always been proud of her do-it-herself abilities, and at some level I wondered if she hadn't purposely left those things wrong just to give me the opportunity to fix them.

She offered me a portion of a glass of wine. I didn't really want it. I could no longer say that I never drink, and I didn't seem to have a backup objection, so there I was, stuck with imbibing, with the knowledge that the police had a stop-check set up 3 blocks from my home. In the end nothing disasterous happened, but I remain unhappy with the precedent.

One thing that I have found to be quite common, as I commented before, is the friendship that wine offers so many of the single women I date.

Some marketer has done a really effective job for their product.