It wasn't the smoothest of weekends, but I've had worse.

Matt's flat tire turned into all four tires needing to be replaced, and resulted in a particularly foul mood. He went to bed early in the hopes that the weekend would be better.

Except that something happened at K.T. and Kevin's weekly gaming-or-whatever session, and Kevin was so amused and astounded that he felt he had to share it. Unfortunately, he wasn't entirely aware of the passage of time, and he decided to share it with Matt and I. Where were both heavily asleep.

We don't get actual phone calls very often. We never get phone calls after 9pm. The phone ringing after 9pm means that someone is in a serious case of hurt. So there's the adrenaline reaction that happens even before we're all the way out of bed.

Kevin, blissfully unaware that it was 11:30 at night, shared his news with Matt, who was too sleep-befuddled to even understand him, much less appreciate the irony. All Matt understood was that this was not, after all, an emergency. So he was a little grouchy.

Kevin, for some reason, decided the best thing to do would be to pass the phone to K.T. Matt repeated his demand ("Why are you calling my house?!") and K.T. - realizing we'd probably been asleep - backpedalled quickly. Matt hung up.

I was... confused. Especially since Matt couldn't even tell me what Kevin had said when he first picked up the phone.

So it took about an hour for the adrenaline to wear off enough that we could go back to sleep. And in the morning, I text-messaged K.T. to ask what the heck had happened.

To which she responded - several hours later - with more denials of blame, no explanation, and a distinctly aggrieved tone.

I hadn't been annoyed, up to that point, merely confused. But the implication that K.T. was more of a victim than Matt and I was a little bit beyond my tolerance. I responded snippily, and wasted quite a bit of time grousing at Karen.

And it hung for a while, because Matt and I went down to visit my folks. Or, more precisely, we dropped Penny off and went to the mall. Which was actually a fairly nice trip. I found two pairs of shoes and a couple of shirts, and got my gold necklace fixed.

Funny bit: I came out of the J.C. Penny's to see Matt sitting on a bench, reading. How sweet, I thought, he went to Waldenbooks but is waiting for me to do the rest. "Hi!" I said.

He looked startled. "Oh, hi!"

I hefted my bag at him. "I just finished."

He stared at me. Blinked. "I've... done the whole mall."

So he went with me anyway.

And then my parents took us out to dinner at a Mexican place around the corner from them. Penny was amazingly well-behaved, for her - a little loud, but cheerful and mostly content to stay in her highchair. She did get grouchy about it toward the end of dinner, but by then my dad had finished eating, so he happily took her up to the lobby to wander around. Which was even more surprising considering she'd only had a 1-hour nap.

Sunday, between chatting with K.T. and her posting the blog entry and an email Matt got from Kevin, we got the whole phone call thing straightened out, finally. It's bizarre how these little things escalate.

So the rest of the day was nice. Penny was fairly good (which is to say she is almost two, but she didn't turn into the whining demon-baby in the middle of the grocery store) pretty much all day, and was very funny playing in the pool. (There are pictures and movies that will be posted soonish. Today or tomorrow.)

And now I'm back at work. Hoping this week is calm.

--Liz