A Jonah Day

"The trouble is, I've got things the matter with my conscience," sobbed Anne. "Oh, this has been such a Jonah day, Marilla. I'm so ashamed of myself. I lost my temper... I feel that I have humiliated myself to the very dust. You don't know how cross and hateful and horrid I was..."

Today started out as a "Jonah day." I'm not sure where Anne of Green Gables got that term, but it is perfectly fitting for the way my morning began. I woke up six hours after falling asleep because our upstairs neighbors decided to assemble furniture at midnight. Cal wouldn't let me do the food prep that I needed to do for our Easter dinner, I am awaiting an insanely stressful week at work (60 hours!), and it looks like the only time I am going to have to do laundry is on Monday, which, incidentally, is my birthday. For some reason, having to do my laundry on my birthday seems like a miserable indignity. Which just goes to show how easy my life really is, when my biggest problem is having to do laundry on my birthday.

I snapped at Scott, I yelled at Cal to "leave me alone for five minutes!" (which fortunately made him laugh instead of cry, which made me cry) (which made him laugh harder...) and finally I decided I needed to get out. I had to sack my first plan of walking along the beach because I wouldn't have time to make it back for a baptism we were going to, so I did the next best thing -- hiked to the very top of a high hill where I could see the ocean from a distance. I walked for over an hour, listening to bands from high school like Dashboard Confessional and the Wreckers, nodding my head to lyrics like, "You can't fake it hard enough to please/everyone, or anyone at all."

And by the end of the walk, I could see a little perspective. Which is not to say I've been angel for the rest of the day -- I still have the grumblings of not-enough-sleep-hello-I'm-stressed raging around in my brain. But I feel restored enough to get through the rest of this "Jonah day." Cal even has done me the courtesy of taking an extra-long nap, allowing me to put together his Easter basket, hide the eggs, finish the dinner prep, finish an episode of Call the Midwife, read a book, and re-catalogue my Goodreads shelves (it's amazing what one can do with an extra hour of free time).

Hopefully by tomorrow I will fully recover from my evil mood, but I am grateful that this little bout of rejuvenation helped. What do you find restoring on those days where it seems like everything is going wrong?