Better?

I guess it's a sign that you're getting better when small annoyances start to become noticeable again. For a long time most things didn't bother me at all. I simply felt too bad for the ordinary run of minor irritations to even register on me. There were a couple of weeks when I probably could have lopped off a foot with a Sawzall and not even noticed.

But not any more - little things are starting to bug me. Like this morning, when I walked outside to go to work and went down to the barn area where my wife was. I was standing there, minding my own business, when my coffee cup emitted a sad little tink sound and fell off the handle. The handle stayed in my hand, and the cup fell and landed on my left foot.

That's a bummer. A waste of a coffee cup, but even worse, a waste of a perfectly good cup of coffee, now steaming on the ground like deep-seated regret.

I've thought about this, and not surprisingly I've come up with a theory. On the one hand, one has a cup of hot coffee. On the other hand, one has the handle of the cup exposed to reasonably cold air. There was ice on my car, so it was in the vicinity of freezing. I think these temperature extremes caused uneven patterns of expansion and contraction in the ceramic cup that eventually caused the handle to shear off.

Or maybe it was just a crappily-made cup with a built-in manufacturing defect; who knows? But it's a banner day when a broken coffee cup becomes the worst thing that happens to you in any given day!