One of those mornings

Let's just get it out there: it's 9:19am and I am having a BAD DAY.

It started out just fine. I got up earlier than usual - 6:30 - in order to finish up a quick one-page reflection paper that I had to turn in today. No problem. I finished my morning routine (shower, brushing my teeth, making coffee, packing lunch, etc.), and left myself five minutes at the end to print my paper before I had to run out the door.

I hooked up the printer to my laptop - no problem at all. I began to print, and when it was about 3/4 finished printing, I took the risk of shutting down my computer, assuming that at that point the printer had processed all the information it needed to print my one-page paper. Not so much. The printer stalled and froze. So I rebooted my computer (now dangerously close to being late leaving the apartment), printed again, ,watched the printer spit out an unnecessary second copy of my paper, grabbed them, shut down my computer, shoved it in my backpack, and ran out the door.

I reached my car at 8:11. Here's the deal. It takes me 25 minutes to drive down to Hyde Park for class when I leave by 8:00, even driving through the first slowdowns of rush hour. But if I leave at 8:10, I am in the THICK of rush hour, and it takes me 40 minutes to get down to LSTC, which still affords me 10 minutes to park and get into my 9:00 class, but it's a tighter squeeze than I prefer. So when I reached my car, I had already resigned myself to a slow drive.

My slow drive was even slower than I had bargained for. Turns out that there was a stalled car in the left lane somewhere down Lake Shore Drive such that it took me 40 minutes to get to the S-curve by the Hancock Building (somewhere near the halfway point of my drive). Soon after that traffic broke up a bit and I drove as fast as I could (within reason and within the bounds of a healthy fear of being stopped) and reached Hyde Park at about 9:06.

The next challenge: parking. I hoped that there wasn't street-cleaning, because that wipes out half of all parking spots around the seminary. I was in luck on that count. No street cleaning. But due to the storms last night, there were some trees down, and in the middle of the main strip along the side of the seminary (where I usually park), there were city sanitation vehicles cleaning up a huge tree that had fallen. So it took me yet extra time to find a place to park since this main street was blocked off.

I walked into class sometime after 9:15. I HATE being late. And we had a few extra people sitting in on the class today, so it took a bit of disruption and shuffling before I had a spot to sit.

Yuck. I hope that my morning doesn't set the tone for the rest of my day. I have too much work to do to experience any further breakdowns today.