Not quite as planned

You never know what the day will bring.

It was a wild night. The wind howled and it felt as though the roof would lift off. It was horrid and scary. There was much damage around the city. Perhaps it was a portent.

My moods, temper, disposition, attitude and decision-making capacity have been fluctuating wildly for the last week. The causes are various. Blame can be distributed variously between myself, Dr P (always a good target), the body politic, the weather, too much or too little sleep, the sore hip or the ambient air. Who knows? Maybe it is fluctuating hormone levels.

Tonight I should have been writing my Italian argomento for tomorrow's class. But it was one of those occasions where I was unable to seize the moment of inspiration, to write down the words, the thoughts, the sequences as they bubbled forth. By the time I was free this evening, the bubbles had all burst.

This morning I went to a dress rehearsal of Bellini's opera, La Sonnambula.  My kind friends who helped with the computer gave me their two tickets, as they are in Queensland this week. I asked another friend if she'd like to go with me, and she said yes. Yesterday when I rang her to arrange the time we should set out together, it transpired that she had failed to note the event in her diary, and had arranged to play bridge instead. This vexed me a little because ours was a prior arrangement. It left too little time to dispose of the spare ticket.

All I could think of was to offer the ticket to someone at the Opera House.  The Opera House shop seemed a good place to start. The first woman I approached accepted the ticket. She was amazed and delighted, especially as it was free. She was a Canadian tourist, here for an education conference, but doing the tourist thing today. The performance was excellent, the singing wonderful and the music gorgeous, and we both thoroughly enjoyed it. Afterwards, we parted company. We will never see each other again, but for those few hours we were a part of each other's lives. It felt good.

On the bus trip home my thoughts bubbled, and I wished I had thought to bring pen and paper. Never mind, I thought, once I get home I will be able to write. But no. Dr P and domestic harmony considerations delayed the creative surge yet again. Friends rang to let me know of the sudden death of a friend - a former colleague. In one of those strange coincidences, I had been thinking about her this week.

By the time I was free, the flow had congealed and I was too tired. I needed my old computer, with the on line Italian dictionary. The computer man has not yet been in contact. Time to hassle him, evidently. I do not yet know how to select Italian as the language in which to write. The Help and the new Text Book were unclear. I retreated from the computer, and sat down with pen and paper. But it was no good!  Unfinished and badly expressed ungrammatical sentences littered the page. Best not even looked at.

Tomorrow looms ominously.

Apart from having lost all that usable time and creativity, why is it that it takes twice or three times as long as anticipated to get anything done?