~~~
Day’s Verse:
He who guards his mouth and his tongue,
Guards his soul from troubles.

The horse is prepared for the day of battle,
But victory belongs to the Lord.
Proverbs 21:23, 31
~~~

I don’t usually use this as a forum for my complaints. But when I take yet another uninspiring-temperature shower, I feel the urge to say something. The something is this: How can the apartment no longer have hot water for showering? All my showers for the last two weeks have unfailingly ranged from icy to, at best, tepid. I shaved my legs in tepid water (which quickly feels cold, let me tell you) for Easter; I’ve skinnied my in-shower time to a bare, miserable minimum followed by half an hour of shivering outside the shower.

I cannot understand how I shower at 6:30 and have no water, but showering at 9:45, 2:00, or in the evening produces equally unsatisfying results. Surely people can’t shower all the time in the other apartments, even if they have totally changed their showering schedules from how it’s been all year. Once upon a time showering at 6:30 would ensure an abundance of hot water. Surely a gap must exist in which the hot-water heater has warmed enough water for one eight-minute shower.

This reminds me of a blonde joke I loved when I was a kid (I loved all blonde jokes). The joke:

A blonde goes to a doctor. The doctor asks what the problem is, and she replies, “I think there’s something horribly wrong with me. It hurts when I touch my arm, my leg, my shoulder, my head—it hurts when I touch everything!”

The doctor takes a look and eventually says, “That’s because you’ve broken your finger.”

This hot-water situation may be a case of a broken finger, if you get my drift.

In two hours I start my MQP presentation. That means I need to go talk through it again to make sure I have everything down pat. Pat, pat, pat.

Update: My presentation went off OK, if not as well as I hoped. Ian mentioned that I said and too often, and that left me feeling pretty down. After I had put all this work in, all I succeed in doing is repeating a word too often to prove how nervous I suddenly got halfway into the presentation. Still, I talked through everything smoothly to the half-dozen people listening, and at the end felt terribly deflated.

In my mind I thought of it as Very Important, worth wearing my suit for; but when we started, the first guy just stood up in his T-shirt and chatted with us. The rest of the presentations felt…slack, unloved, as if the pesenters had thrown together their slides the morning of because they could not be bothered before that. I spent the last three weeks working on the slide show and perfecting my presentation. And all I got was a crappy boxed lunch and no questions asked about my project.

This makes me sound very unhappy with the outcome, and although I felt fine with my performance, I really do feel unhappy with the general outcome of the event. I worked hard preparing, but considering what everybody else did, I could have thrown crap together this morning for all the difference it made. My expectation that this was Very Important proved completely off base, leaving me with a bitter taste (kind of like boiled dandelions, come to think of it) about the whole event.

By the way, Earth Day is coming up.