Can I tell you about the bizarre and frustrating events of this evening?

I got home from work and greeted my hungry and thirsty dog. While fetching him some water at the sink, the cookbooks, mixing bowl and weight scale that I have on the top shelf of the baker's rack in my kitchen all flew off and came crashing down on me. (turns out Philip had taken away his grandmother's recipe box, which had been holding the books up, causing a chain reaction fall.) Startled, I left the tap running in the sink while I bent down to pick up the mess. That's when I noticed that there were torrents of water gusing from the undersink cabinet. The drain pipes under the kitchen sink had spontaneously seperated and I spent an hour putting them back together and tightening them up (badly bruising my hand in the process).

Then the holiday groceries that I had ordered online (to avoid the pre-Thanksgiving madness of the crowded store) arrived. After the delivery guy left, I noticed that the order was completely screwed up - many items just not there, others substituted with unacceptable replacements (requested ears of fresh corn appeared as a bag of frozen kernels, pickled spiced ginger instead of ginger root). So, I changed my wet shirt and headed to the grocery store. The parking lot was madness, I had to swerve to avoid being hit by a massive SUV. Once inside, shoppers were frantic, some spinning in full circles with their shopping carts in the aisles, some screaming and yelling. I saw a dazed-looking 80-ish year old woman get hit with a huge trolley of frozen turkeys that toppled onto her (she just walked away and I encountered her staring blankly in another aisle). Bought a baked apple pie, the missing ingredients for my Thanksgiving meal and headed home.

Unloading the groceries in my driveway, I became aware that there were scores of police cars, firetrucks and ambulances barreling through the neighborhood. Police helicopters with search lights were flying low and noisily overhead. It sounded like the neighborhood was under seige. Found out later that there was some kind of spontaneous block-long brawl on the street two blocks south, with people smacking each other around with baseball bats and chains. Nice!

Once Philip got home I recounted my evening. He took one look at the apple pie and said, "You're not going to like this." Through the window of the still-sealed box, we could see flies zipping all around insde. Clearly they were getting an early start on their Thanksgiving dessert.