hard to please

Ever had one of those days when absolutely nothing makes you happy? It seems to be going around.

My son refused to eat breakfast this morning. He didn't want yogurt, he didn't want his favorite cereal. I even made him toddler-sized pieces of french toast with maple syrup, and he didn't want that either. He's had a runny nose since Thursday, and if I had kept track of every cold he's had since the fall we'd probably be up to number 25. But the last time he had a cold and didn't want to eat he ended up in the hospital with bronchiolitis, so it puts me a little on edge.

I filled his lunch bag with his favorite foods and sent him out with Myriam, hoping he'll at least eat some lunch. Then I went to run errands: post office, drugstore, groceries. This is what I do with my time "off." The neighborhood looked nice in the sunshine this morning, but somebody had already trampled some of the impatiens we planted on Saturday. Every year I wonder why we bother; people crush our plants, let their dogs "go" on them, throw their garbage in our flower beds. I'm not altogether pleased about the recent influx of hipsters and yupsters to our part of Brooklyn, but today I have no patience with the derelicts who plant themselves in our doorways with their bottles of malt liquor and aluminum dishes of fried rice and chicken wings (although to be fair, they've been here a lot longer than many of us have). WIth all the new construction going up to accommodate the hipsters and the yupsters, they probably won't be here much longer. Pretty soon it'll look just like the Upper West Side around here.

I got back from the grocery store with things to fix for dinner and had just finished putting the food away when I got a call from my husband to tell me that he has to have dinner with a network executive tonight. He said, "I bet you just got back from the store with tonight's dinner." I told him he'd be right and why doesn't he put that clairvoyance to work on lottery numbers or the stock market (no, on second thought forget the stock market) so he doesn't have to have any more dinners with any more network execs. Then I put all the ingredients for tonight's meal in the fridge for tomorrow. It's looking like a Lean Cuisine evening.

I think I'll go take a walk before the rain sets in. As a character in "Platoon" put it, "it's gonna piss on us all night."