I was away for a week, enjoying doing nothing at Lake Powell but get a tan, swim, boat, and eat.

Once again, the trip back home dissolved all my relaxation immediately.

It started with my flight from Grand Junction to Phoenix being delayed. It was just enough of a delay to make me late for my next flight. However, once I got to Phoenix, I saw that my second flight had been delayed, so I ran across two terminals to get to the gate. (Yes, the departing gate was not only two terminals away, but also at the very last gate at the end of the terminal.)

I dashed up to the gate, where the door was already closed. The agent said, “L.A.? You need to be on this plane. get on now!” “What will happen to my luggage?” I asked. “They will get it to you, just get on this plane!” It was almost rude, as if it was my fault I was late.

As I handed the second gate person my ticket, turns out this was not my flight. The door to my flight, two gates away, was not able to be re-opened. But the flustered first agent told the second agent to just let me on.

I got on that flight and was so flustered myself now that I think the flight attendants thought I was a terrorist. “Any seat? How about this one? Can I go to the bathroom first? What’s this flight number? When does it get into L.A.?”

I had to text Marcy, who was picking me up at LAX, and then, once the plane was off, I was fine, melted into the world of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.

Once at LAX, I had to arrange for my missing bags to be delivered to me. Fortunately, this was simple and only took a few minutes.

Once home, however, I discovered something odd: Someone had shut off the power to my apartment. In the laundry room, where the breaker boxes are, the switches to my place were off.

That’s when the stress of the trip home started getting to me. Once I switched the power back on, I had to not only re-set all my clocks and the VCR (What’s a VCR?), but I had to throw out everything in my fridge but the drinks.

Who turned off my power? I have some theories, but none of them make sense. Say I’d left my clock alarm on accidentally, and the upstairs neighbors got tired of hearing it go off every morning at 4:45. The only way to stop that is to turn off my power. But then why not turn it back on? Everyone knows those alarm clock reset the instant they lose power. Or what if my noisy next door neighbors, who saw me packing my suitcase for the trip, decided to get revenge and turn off my power? The laundry room is often unlocked, so that would not be hard to do. But that gives them simply too much credit. They are not smart enough to come up with such a scheme.

So I do not know what happened, but it made me very angry. And these days, when I’m angry, I go to The Wren Forum to rant.

But guess what was not working? Yeah, maybe you saw the message if you tried to visit the Forum, but my account had been suspended. Turns out I’d given the wrong year on the expiration date for the card I use to pay for this fine service, and the notice of the payment failure went to my work e-mail, which of course I don’t read outside of work. And I’d been gone a week…

More infuriating, though, was that I could change the card info and have the invoice paid automatically within minutes online, but had to wait until Monday to have my account re-activated because that’s done by the billing department, and they only work on weekdays.

So so much for the calm, relaxing mood from my vacation. Again.