Yesterday. Yesterday could, as they say, have been better. Actually, it started over the weekend, but it all came to a head yesterday.

Bad things, they say, come in threes.

One: Matt got up when his alarm went off, went downstairs, and fed the cat. I fell back into a doze. My doze was sharply cut short by Matt snapping, "Diamond!" I opened an eye and made sleepy inquiries, and learned that - in the time it had taken Matt to come upstairs and go into the closet to take off his watch and rings for his shower, the cat had followed him up and peed on the pile of bedsheets that was on the floor awaiting the laundry.

So Matt took the cat back downstairs and shut him in the bathroom. We were perplexed. Diamond usually only pees on things when he's mad at us for not getting up early enough. And he hasn't done that for months. I did catch him peeing on the bathmat in the guest bathroom a couple of days ago - but I'd been pretty certain at the time that he was mad at me for loitering upstairs too long.

After I woke up, I let him out of the bathroom, and he went into his usual schtick, following me around the house and occasionally meowing pitifully and looking for Matt. Late morning, while I was talking on the phone, he jumped into the laundry basket. He does this pretty frequently, so I didn't think anything of it until he crouched down and started to pee again. I smacked him on the head and he ran away.

When Matt came home from work, he went into the computer room to look for something and discovered that at some point, Diamond had taken a crap on one of the (bagged, thank goodness) comics.

I called the vet that afternoon, seeking possible causes. The vet admitted that the special diet food we've put him on lately might be the problem, but he wants us to bring Diamond in for another round of urinalysis and blood tests, to make sure that his kidneys haven't suddenly started to fail. (He wasn't very reassuring. He kept calling Diamond the "Bob Hope of cats" and saying things like, "at his age."

I can only hope there's a medical reason he's lost his litterbox training, but we're afraid he's begun to sense that the order of things is about to change, and is acting up.

However this ends, I don't think it'll be pretty.

Two: Sunday evening, when we got home from visiting the Brandts', we discovered that the house was rather warmer than we had set the thermostat, and the air conditioning unit was running continuously. So yesterday, Matt called our repair guy and left a message. Twice.

Finally, just after I got off the phone with the vet, the repair guy called back and came out. It didn't take him long to find the problem - despite him having recharged our freon (or whatever it is they're using instead of freon these days) less than a month ago, we were already almost out. He recharged it, and agreed that they would come back out "sometime soon" to test the whole system for leaks.

This doesn't sound cheap, but what choice do we have? Freon is expensive, and we can't just keep having to have it refilled every four weeks.

At least the house is comfortable again, while we're waiting.

Three: In case someone wanted to get in touch with me, or I needed to get in touch with someone quickly, I asked Matt to bring my cell phone upstairs before he went to work in the morning. He did so, but told me as he put the phone on my nightstand that it had spontaneously turned itself off as he'd picked it up, and the battery was at least half-charged.

I thought it was odd, but I didn't give it much thought, as I was well on my way back to sleep.

Late morning, as I was dozing after my shower, the phone rang. I half-rolled over and picked it up, just in time to see the faceplate go blank. I hadn't seen the name or number of the caller. When I turned it back on, the call wasn't listed either as "Missed" or "Received," so I had no idea who'd called me.

I called Matt, who said it wasn't him. (And later, he confessed, it never even crossed his mind that I might have been calling to tell him I was in labor.)

I wondered if it might have been K.T., but she usually sends text messages rather than calling. Then I remembered that Matt and I had left our "swim" clothes at the Brandts' Sunday evening, and I'd asked Kris to call if they were going to be out and about and able to drop them off. I called Kris, who said she had indeed sent Braz out to get the oil changed on their car, and to drop off our stuff.

Mystery solved, I poked at the phone. I discovered that if I jiggled the battery just so, the phone would shut off. I spent the rest of the day handling the phone gingerly, trying not to even touch the battery pack.

So either the battery is broken, or else the whole phone is. Compared to the previous two complaints, this is merely an annoyance, but it did put the icing on the cake for me. I made plans to go out the next day (today, that is) to go to the place I got the phone in the first place, and find out whether I needed to buy a new battery, or a whole new phone.

Except that late last night, I jiggled the battery, and the phone didn't turn off. This morning, I jiggled the battery for about five minutes straight, and the phone didn't turn off. So maybe it was a temporary fluke. What good would it do me to walk into the cell phone place with an irreproducable problem?

Like I said, yesterday could have been better.

Oh, and they lied about the Threes. When I did the laundry, if only to clear the bedroom of the scent of cat pee, I forgot to check the pockets of my shorts, and a tube of strawberry-scented lip gloss escaped my notice. When I went to take the clothes out of the dryer, there were weird pink oily stains all over everything that I didn't understand until I found the now-empty tube. I ran them through the wash again, but it didn't do any good. I might have listed this as a bigger disaster than the phone, except that the worst of the stains were just on the sheets, not the clothes, and we're about to have a baby, so I expect we'll be acquiring much worse stains in the upcoming months. At least the pink stains will smell good.

I also had some minor complaints with the drugstore's refill system, and some pregnancy-related complaints that I'm quite certain no one wants to know about. Not to mention the fact that I'm only two days from my due date and have yet to "drop" or feel a contraction that really means business. (When the baby kicks or stretches, Matt used to respond to my oofs with "Pushy baby!" Now, I try to convince her that if she's moving that much anyway, she could be using the effort to move downward - and Matt says, "Pushy mommy!") And Matt had a Moment with his computer that I was afraid was going to turn out very badly, except it fixed itself when he rebooted, thank goodness.

So much for threes.

The weird part about it all? Except for being exceptionally worried about the cat (my first baby, really) I didn't really get upset about anything yesterday. I spent most of the day (when I wasn't actively dealing with things) lounging in my comfy chair and reading a funny book. I can't say I was happy about any of the assorted crises, but I never really felt overwhelmed or frantic or angry or actually upset.

Maybe this is the beginning of a parent's prized outlook and patience that lets you only sweat the things that really matter.

Or else, y'know, I was just too tired to get worked up.

--Liz