Nobobdy expects...

When the kids were little, we invented a game called Rugby Is Not.  Rugby was our dog, a Boston terrier runt with a curmudgeonly personality.  We would take turns imagining all the crazy things Rugby was not doing, like tightrope walking, eating sushi, skiing, wearing a tutu, reading Harry Potter, taking a bubble bath, toilet papering the house, and so on.  We did this when we were not at home, so we did not, in fact, know what Rugby was doing.  Most likely, he was sleeping on the bed, which was against the rules.  The point of the game, obviously, was to make each other laugh rather than to construct some sort of probability model in which Rugby was more likely to be paw-painting than speaking Hindi.

This morning, I was thinking about predictions.  I get up with a general idea about what I expect to happen during the day.  It’s a good bet that on any given day I will do laundry, at least until such time as I convince the household that clothes are useless markers of conspicuous consumption, which I am unlikely to do since I like wearing clothes to stay warm, among other things.  But I didn’t think that today I would spend a chunk of time on the phone with the doctor’s office about T.’s back (his back is going to be fine; he overexerted himself at the food bank over the weekend and needs to rest, ice, etc.).  I did not write down that I would spend way too long trying to figure out how to make the online component of my CPR recertification function before giving up and emailing Brent for help since I’d already talked to the lovely people at the Red Cross several times.

So far, today’s unpredictable events have been not what I would have chosen.  I will hold out hope that maybe later on some kind of pleasant surprise will occur.  Maybe I will be wearing a tutu.