On the whole, the weekend wasn’t a bad one, though the shadows of a couple of serious downers cast a somewhat nasty pall over a generally okay landscape.

Not the best of metaphors, I admit, but accurate nonetheless.

I took a few hours off of work on Friday, which is always a good way to start of the weekend, in order to check out the return on my not-insubstantial investment, in the form of Mary’s end-of-dance-camp performance. This was an enjoyable 40 minutes or so on folding chairs in the small studio – the kid seems to be learning something, or at least is trying to show me that she’s deserving of adding another session a week to her already twice-weekly schedule.

Saturday started out with fence mending; literally. I actually fixed a broken fence; the little dog-ear stake thing separating my driveway from the neighbors. The new eight-foot section doesn’t match perfectly, but it looks much better than the broken bit it replaced (which in turn donated a couple of good pickets to fix the broken ones elsewhere).

Of course, after I fixed the fence, I took a little drive to run a couple of other errands, and had to be rescued by my wife because the minivan decided it wasn’t going to work any more after it stopped at the grocery store. Feels like catastrophic alternator failure to me, but I’m going to hope it’s just a bad wire or something; I know it’s definitely electrical in nature. Argh.

Combine this whole “dead car I don’t even particularly like but have to fix” issue with the nasty sinus headache I was dealing with all weekend…makes it really easy to forget the good stuff (and there actually was good stuff), like the fact that my bedroom is nice and clean, and everybody spending two hours turning the driveway into a makeshift campground (which was way more fun than it had any right to be) to make sure we had all the parts for our tents ahead of the coming weekend’s camping trip, in addition to the fixed fence.

Here’s to hoping this week has more good than bad. I spent the morning running around getting the van towed to my neighborhood garage, which was a frustrating experience, though I still made it up to DC with my carpool partner, only about fifteen minutes behind our usual schedule, so thus far, it’s still a draw.