Birthday Chronicles (or The Day That Hasn't Gone Quite Right)

I don't generally feel the need to chronicle my birthdays. However...

It started out fine. I ate cereal, drank tea and then, as has been a recent development, watched BBC Planet Earth videos with our cat Puffin. There is nothing wrong with beginning the day with the rich sounds of David Attenborough narrating clownfish working together to move a coconut shell, or the drongo bird having a spot of fun with some meerkats. Puffin is super into it and I learn new and interesting things like flying foxes can overheat and so they swoop into the river to get water on their chests that they can lick off later to hydrate. Unless they get eaten by crocodiles.

My modest plans for the day were thrown off a bit first thing when I stopped at the eye doctor to pick up a pair of prescription glasses for computer work, the kind with the special lenses to filter out blue light. At about $100, these are easily the cheapest prescription glasses I have ever had in my life (thanks cataract surgery!). I put them on and the vision was great for the right eye. But it was actually worse for the left. As in - if 1 is my vision with no glasses and 2 is my vision with them, there would be none of that hesitant "Well, about the same maybe? Can I have the choices again?" in picking 1. WTH? So back to square one with that project.

My next stop was sure to be the highlight of the day. Oh wait, no...that will be dinner tonight with my husband. Well it's close though, because birthday shoe shopping is the best shoe shopping and I had a $5 certificate from DSW. And it was sunny springlike day to inspire shopping for something that was not boots. So I piled up some choices in the aisle and started trying things on, traipsing up and down the store, finding more things, putting some back...you know, like you do. Having fun dialog with the more fashion-forward son, like this:

And then...I tramped on a piece of broken mirror. In my barefeet.

It was nothing more than a pinprick, really, but as I looked around I found three more shards on the floor. So, off I went to find a sales associate - after putting shoes on of course. The youngster I approached took the shards, apologized, and went off to tell someone. Less than a minute later, another associate came over and again apologized profusely, brought me an alcohol swab, offered a bandaid several times, and then asked the first sales clerk where the shards were. 

"I hope you didn't throw them out," he said. And of course that is exactly what she had done, at which point she was instructed to start searching the trash can she had used, and she could not remember which one it was, so she got to search quite a few before finding them. Once the male associate saw the size of them, he called in reinforcements and I was soon surrounded by 3 sales associates and a manager and I am sure everyone else in the store thought I had been shoplifting or something.

They took photos of my foot. They took photos of the mirror shards. They found the source - one of the mirrors under the bench was not screwed in and must have been knocked over and no one had mentioned that the mirror had broken. The manager took me up front, still apologizing, took my contact information, gave me an extra $20 of my shoes and I am also now the proud owner of some DSW wine glasses and a shoe bag:

Note that the wine glasses have "Joy" on them which perfectly describes both wine AND shoe shopping, at least when one's shoe shopping does not include stepping on bits of broken mirror in barefeet.

I am home safely, without further mishap, but I am almost afraid to go to dinner now.