Antibiotics and a Wedding

Sometimes you just have one of those days…or weeks…or lives…where nothing goes the way you would have wanted it, if you had taken the time to plot everything out in your Franklin planner. I suppose that’s just part of life. Sometimes it seems like all of life.

For starters, it would have been nice if I had had a neat packaged little experience this week that I could share with you in this blog. But this week, my life has not been neat. Nor has it been packaged. This week I feel like a box that someone has accidentally stepped on, with chocolate pudding dripping out the corners.

I did have a to-do list on Monday. Our family has a big upcoming event to prepare for, and I made a careful preliminary list of what I needed to do. I expected to have all week to work on it, so I wasn’t too worried. Well, it took me until Thursday to finish most of Monday’s list. Never mind what I would have done on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday if I’d finished my to-do list when I was supposed to.

Meanwhile, our dog is on antibiotics. We thought we’d outsmarted him by popping the pill into his regular breakfast and mixing it with a little canned dog food. It worked for a few days, till one afternoon when I found the pill he was supposed to have eaten at breakfast. He’d bitten into it and decided he didn’t like it. (I can’t say I blame him, but still.)

So we tried peanut butter. That worked too, for a while. But he decided that he was tired of eating peanut butter with pills tucked inside.

So I tried opening up the pill and pouring the powder all over his regular food. And our usually ravenous dog suddenly decided he wasn’t hungry anymore.

So now we’re making the dog peanut butter sandwiches three times a day. Just small ones. But he loves bread, and he still loves peanut butter. Hopefully he won’t figure out that they’re actually peanut butter and pill sandwiches before he runs out of pills.

Wednesday we got a phone call that Brother So and So was getting baptized in about three hours. Usually this kind of call has the postscript, “So can you come play the piano?” This time, oddly enough, I didn’t get asked that. We went, and as always it was a sweet experience. I always feel like applauding when an individual comes up out of the water after baptism.

And then yesterday a family member called me and informed me that she was getting married—today. In Oklahoma. And where am I? Wisconsin, I think. Well, I did look at catching a flight and attending, but it would have been a real stretch to make it work. So, *sigh*, I am here (still in Wisconsin) and she is getting married (without me) in all of fifteen minutes from this writing. I called her an hour ago to let her know I was thinking of her.

“I’M FREAKING OUT!” she said.

“So are you still going through with it?” I asked.

She said: “…so far…”

I talked to her for another minute, and she responded pleasantly, but I could sense the tension in her voice. The tension that said, I’m about to lose my mind and you expect me to stop to talk to you on the phone??

So I told her I’d better let her go or she’d be late to her own wedding. And then she said, “Oh, that’s okay. They can’t do anything without me.”

Which conjured up images of an impatient groom who decides to go on and hold the wedding without the bride…and she arrives only to find out that she missed her own wedding and now she’s already married…

Well, anyway. This is life. Theoretically a bride can schedule her wedding, but I can’t schedule when my dog will decide to cooperate with the antibiotic program, or when a family member decides to get married (without me), or apparently when I’m going to have time to work on Monday’s to-do list. All I can really do is (hopefully) enjoy the ride.

And find whatever antibiotics the dog has hidden around the house.