Weird Juju Weekend

Sometimes you have one of those weekends that makes you intensely aware of the interconnectedness of the universe and it makes you think that Someone loves you intensely and simultaneously has it in for you.  This was one of those weekends.

The husband had a bad juju weekend.  I had pretty much a good juju weekend.  And when our forces combined… it was just weird juju.

Quick back story: He had to go to Irvine, CA to meet with his post-doc advisor.  I flew out Saturday to meet him.  End back story.

Husband:  The husband says his weekend of bad juju was foreshadowed by an oil change that had the capacity to morph into a $400 radiator overhaul.  He chose to ignore the mechanic and save himself some cash… and so began his bad juju.  (Just so we’re clear, I don’t know what the juju object(s) is (are) in this multiply-interwoven tale.  We may never know.  Just go with it.)

On Friday evening, the husband left work and found a parking ticket waiting for him on the windshield – even though he had his hard-earned parking pass (he had to wait behind five people to get it!) clearly displayed.  And this was after his advisor spent the day making fun of his Vibram Five Fingers (even though they are awesome).  And then Saturday he got a tomato-red sunburn on his face even though he wore SPF 45 sunscreen.  And he didn’t even catch any good waves.

And then the big one happened.  The mac daddy of awful, the major catastrophic event.  His computer died.  Actually died, kicked the bucket, gave up the ghost, bought the farm, died.  Right before he had to submit applications to two different places and finish revisions on a paper so he could discuss it with his advisor in the two days he has left in Irvine.  And he has no access to any other computer anywhere in California.

(Oh, and he says he’s had a three-day stomachache and headache and he can’t sleep and he’s pretty sure this freckle on his back is really cancer because it “looks suspect” and his stomach hurts and he hasn’t been getting sleep.)

Enter me.  My juju is good this weekend because I earned it with a hiccup just before I left: I braved the fire hose mud pit on my bike (in my best clothes, no less!) to go to the Festival of Books which I was otherwise going to have to miss this weekend, and I fought my way past the hordes of children and meandering parents in the kids’ area and raced down to the lecture hall with ten minutes to spare only to find a kindly white-haired attendant lady barring the door, who said that the lecture on “Social Media Marketing” was completely full and I couldn’t attend.  (If this blog fails, I can now trace it back to that exact moment.  Thank You, Universe.)

Anyway, I had a lovely flight with no problems whatsoever and didn’t even get plane sick (this is a true, honest-to-God for-the-books miracle), and I updated my blog and Facebook in Vegas to find even more fantastically awesome wonderful followers and fans moving to support my endeavors, and some lady on the second plane was reading Bless Me, Ultima (which is a book I had until then completely forgotten about and which has way more cuss words than my high school sophomore grasp of Spanish could fully appreciate – how could they let us read that book in class? – and which I came to feel, in my airplane-fear-induced delirium, represented some cosmic sign that I will succeed on my path to writing glory), and my bag was even waiting for me at the baggage claim.  (Husband with bad juju nevertheless circled the airport at least a dozen times waiting for me to emerge from Arrivals)—

And then our jujus met.  I brought with me a fresh laptop which would later be used to access what turned out to be the husband’s totally functioning hard drive… and he brought with him a wall of bad juju that knocked my phone out of my purse and onto the Arrivals lane, where it apparently stayed after we pulled away.

We keep having these juju oscillations ever since.  Here are my favorite examples:

-          Husband leaves to go talk to advisor one last time at 9:00, but calls at 10:00 to say he’ll be longer.  I say, “Great, I’ll ask for another day at the hotel before the noon checkout.”  Husband hangs up, I find out the hotel is full up.  I don’t have a phone, he doesn’t have a computer.  I run around packing and vacillating about how long to wait before wasting money on a long-distance call from the hotel. I send e-mails to all husband’s addresses and waste 20 minutes searching AT&T’s site for that elusive free text message sender they used to have and apparently no longer do.  Less than one minute before my self-imposed deadline, husband just happens to call anyway and we depart just in time.

-          Airport has my (intact) phone!  We spend the whole car ride there discussing whether to park or to save money and have the husband go circling the airport again.  Despite protests that it may send him spiraling into some fit of mad hysteria, he finally gives in and we pull up to the terminal… only to remember I have no phone and no battery left in that phone and that meeting up will be ridiculously difficult.  We park, go inside, ask ten people and get ten different answers about where to find the Lost and Found (it is definitely more Lost than Found), and search the same wall three times before finally locating the magic disappearing-reappearing Lost and Found service window (I swear it wasn’t there ten minutes ago.  If this was a Terry Pratchett novel my cell phone would now suddenly possess thaumaturgic powers that would open holes to the Dungeon Dimensions or kill Death or something)… And when I get my phone back I turn it on and find it miraculously fully charged.

-          Panera Café has free internet and tasty food.  Only after logging in does the husband find out the internet has a half-hour usage limit during the midday “peak time”.  We arrive smack in the middle of peak time.  Husband races to finish editing his CV and Research Interests so he can send them off… and misses the half-hour cutoff by two minutes.  I go to get a $2.39 muffin of consolation and find it’s only $.99 because we ate lunch there.  Five minutes of muffin-eating later, peak time surprisingly ends and husband may internet surf at his leisure.

On any other weekend these might be glossed over as silly and coincidental.  But on a weird juju weekend… it’s fate.

P.S. – the Weird Juju continues!  We’ve just changed hotels on Pi Day (3/14).  Bizarrely, we get room 314!

And then, when we get up to the room, we look at the clock and it’s 3:14!!!

I’m not joking.  Husband is gesticulating wildly about the lattice of coincidence and that pi only has to do with circles and therefore things must be turning around for us and something about Fortuna’s wheel and the ouroboros.  Obviously I’m not quite following.