The trier you hard, the screw you more it up

Are you up for reading a whine?  A long one?
If so, gentle reader, read on. If not, you might want to come back in a few days when I'm not ranting.

I was having a perfectly fine day.  Not getting as much done as I'd like, but hey, I was still moving forward.
Around 2:15 I realized I hadn't done one of the most important things on my list: hit the grocery store.  I had a church activity thing I was taking my girls and another little girl to at 3:30.  So I figured I better head to the store before I picked the girls up from school at 3:05 (yes, school gets out at three OH FIVE).  
I headed out to the store, not really in a hurry.  But as I was checking out I opened my purse and saw I'd left my wallet home on the table when I was paying bills this morning.  It was now 2:45.
I live roughly an 8 minute drive from the store.  I give the cashier, who I know from shopping at the same store for 9 years, a panicked explanation.  She says "Dash home and get your wallet and come back.  We'll put it aside for you."
I run to the car.  It's 2:49.  I drive home pushing the neighborhood speed limit as far as I dare.  I get home at 2:55, park in front (no time to back into the garage like usual) and sprint in and out of the house, and speed back to the store.  It was just after 3:00.
I go to the cashier, she's ringing someone else up.  I bounce on my toes to catch her eye.  She looks at me apologetically and says, "I'm sorry, I screwed up.  They took your stuff over to Customer Service."
So I trot over to customer service.  Two ladies with a huge shopping cart of food are standing in front of the counter.  On the counter is my stuff.  The store employee behind the counter is scanning my jar of Boysenberry Syrup (what Thing 2 loves on her pancakes).  
She looks up at me bouncing.  When she makes eye contact I say, "I think you've got my stuff."
One of the ladies on my side of the counter says, rather amused, "So it's your croissants and pop tarts?"  (Thing 1 lives for cinnamon pop tarts.)
Yes.
"Well, they rang it up with our stuff."  She smiled.  They were taking it pretty well.  They didn't have anywhere else to be.  They watched me fidget.
The Customer Service lady tells me she has to "return" and credit my stuff from the two ladies and then she can sell my stuff back to me.
Can you do this later, after I pick up a bunch of kids from school which let out two minutes ago and get them where they need to be?
Sure.


I run to my car.  There are four cars idling in the parking lot.  I finally maneuver my way through the traffic jam and head to the school as swiftly yet carefully as I can, traffic cops have been known to watch for speeding carpool moms in this area.
I get to the school about 3:10.  There is no parking. I have to go around the block, and settle for a space further away than I'd like.  People are leaping out of the way as I RUN for our usual pick up place.


I find my girls and the other little girl, and they weren't as panicked as I thought they'd be.  I load them up and drive them to the church.  The class was for the 8 and 9 year olds to learn some basic sewing. They had borrowed my sewing machine and I had agreed to stay and help the lady doing the kids' class, but I figured she'd be okay while I ran back to the grocery store, where I got my groceries.  The cashier who rang my stuff up with the two other ladies came over and apologized a couple of times.  It's okay, she's still my favorite cashier.  Then I took my stuff home and put the cold stuff in the fridge. They can live without me at the church for 10 minutes.

The kids' church class wrapped up at 5:30.  It went very well, and Thing 1 was very proud of her sewing abilities.  (Thing 2 could have participated but at 7 is younger than everyone else and decided to draw pictures instead).  Time to come home and do homework.  Then I remember I had volunteered Thing 1's artistic abilities for a friend of mine.
Last month this friend had suddenly found herself in charge of the monthly school newsletter.  She asked if Thing 1, who likes to draw, would provide some clip-arty kinds of drawings.  They have to be in black-and-white, which is somewhat limiting.  But it makes sense to have student art instead of clip art.  Thing 1 would be thrilled.
I had tried to help this friend scan in a drawing her own daughter had made for last month's letter, and found our scanner doesn't do so well with penciled drawings.  So I told Thing 1 to use my tablet computer, which I inherited from Hubby (you can read about that little slice right here if you want to).  I thought that way I could just save all that scanning trouble.  Ha.

Finally an opportunity to take advantage of this whoop-di-do tablet computer. Except I can't find the stylus.  Don't know where it is, have no idea where it was last. Which makes this fancy computer just like any other old computer, she'd be drawing with a mouse.  Which is awkward at best.  So I find the iPad.  The iPad stylus is pretty wide and clunky, and I can only find one drawing program, which is a "Buddy Draw" and somewhat limited.  But it's what we have on the iPad.  Which has 3% of its battery left.  I forgot the charger when I was at my parents' house.  Great.   I hunt around for a while and finally find an alternate charger (which probably won't work anyway because the charger only works when the iPad is asleep but hey), let's see how far we can get on 3%.

Lucky she's fast.  Thing 1 finished her 3 required drawings of a pumpkin, a turkey, and a roasted turkey just before I put dinner on the table.

After dinner, bath, and bedtime for everyone but me, comes the challenge of getting the pictures off the iPad.
I am iPad illiterate.  I can play Field Runners, and Angry Birds, and watch Netflix on the iPad, but much beyond that I'm helpless.  So first I tried opening my yahoo mail on the iPad internet server, but it only let me read letters I'd already received.
I opened my husband's mail server on the iPad, at least there I could compose a letter, but it wouldn't let me attach anything to the letter. 

I got on the PC and did a little Googling and found something that said  open iTunes and then sync the iPad with the computer, and get the files through iTunes.  Which (to spare several minutes worth of details) I found didn't work.  I decided to take a picture of the pictures on the iPad with my cell phone, and email it to myself.  But the pictures came across too dark and cloudy and digitized.  I pulled out my REAL camera, but the battery was dead.  I charged it up enough to take a picture, and that looked pretty good.  Then I had to upload the file from the camera to the computer.  I plugged in the camera and then clicked on the pop-up window to copy the files over.  I clicked on it, (and here is when the clouds parted and I got a break) but it turned out it wasn't a window to copy files from the camera, I guess it had been there for a while and was asking me if I wanted to copy files over from the iPad.  It let me browse directly to the files on the iPad and copy them over.

It's been a long freakin day.

But since I'm at it... here are Thing 1's clip art drawings.

 
Just think what she could have done with color and a real stylus.


Now... to finish the rant, I'm up ranting until after midnight. I REALLY should have gone to bed two hours ago.  Rant rant rant.

Okay, now I'm done.