My life in a series of tableaux vivantes:

The drama. On Thursday evening, I left a meeting with a promise to revise a file and send it out before a 9:00 a.m. meeting the next morning. It was a fifteen-minute job but I wasn’t able to start it until 11:00 p.m. As I was firing up the laptop containing the file, I noticed that I had left the power cord at the office and remembered that I only had a little battery left — 14 minutes, the indicator told me. No problem, I thought. I’ll just transfer the file to one of the six other computers on the network and edit it from there.

When I tried to access another computer, though, the network was down, despite a strong wireless signal. No problem, I thought, as the battery indicator clicked down to 12 minutes. I’ll just hop on the internet and e-mail the file to myself. But there was no internet access, either.

Now I was getting frantic. I tried a few tricks — restart Windows Explorer. 10 minutes. Do an ipconfig/release and renew. 9 minutes. Remap the network drive. 8 minutes.

No problem, I thought. I’ll just get a thumb drive and pop the file on there. Should have thought of that to begin with. I looked in my bag — no thumb drive. 6 minutes. Searched the house and came up with one in my husband’s bag. 4 minutes. Attached it, and nothing happened. The thumb drive could not find the correct drivers.

As the clock ticked down, I was nearly renting my garments in frustration. I was literally sitting in the middle of seven computers, but the one file I needed was stuck on the one that was going to go dark in minutes. It was terribly dramatic, like “24″ meets Office Space. (”If this battery goes dead, Jack, you know what that means.” “We can’t have the meeting without the TPS report, Tony.”) In a last-ditch effort, at Husband’s suggestion, I cycled the power on the wireless modem, and everything sprang back to life. I e-mailed the file with less than one minute on the clock.

The runaway. I took Dog and Aitch for a walk around a nearby lake. At one point, the path around the lake is raised and drops off quite steeply a good distance to the water. Aitch and Dog were running along the path, and I was pushing the empty stroller. The stroller is a brand-new marvel of engineering that looks like a single carriage but allows you to add a seat to stack two children vertically without expanding the stroller’s footprint.

Aitch was jumping in puddles, which I generally allow him to do, but I saw him run toward a deep one and made a move to head him off. When I turned around the stroller was rolling gently across the (perfectly flat) path toward the edge of the embankment. Then my brand-spanking-new so-expensive-that-it-must-last-until-the-next-baby-is-grown stroller took a suicidal plunge about fifteen feet straight down. I was horrified. It reminded me of the time my dad forgot to set the parking brake on my Triumph Spitfire and it crashed into the shed. The stroller, though, cost several times as much as the Spitfire (which my dad practically bought as spare parts, but still).

I told Aitch to wait for me, but Dog of course followed me right down the hill. I was afraid that Aitch would follow Dog, so I told Dog to “Sit,” a command Aitch promptly followed as well. I then scrambled down the hill, righted the stroller, retrived the bag with the Epipen from the basket so it wouldn’t fall out, and then dragged it straight up the embankment, scrambling on my hand and knees for the last few feet. The stroller and I were covered with dirt, but otherwise no damage.

The emergency room. Dog woke up at 3:00 a.m. on Sunday scratching madly and soon developed hives all over his body, but particularly on his head, which made him look like an extra from Star Trek. We gave him some children’s Benadryl by mixing it with some soup. I called the emergency vet for further advice, and she (strongly) suggested we bring him in. Feeling guilty (because I was not about to drive the dog to the emergency vet 30 miles away at 3:00 a.m. unless he were in immediate danger of expiring), I sat up with Dog for several hours to make sure the symptoms didn’t worsen. By morning he still had a few hives so, feeling guiltier, I insisted we drive him to the emergency vet. Two hours and one moderate vet bill later, we left with the advice to give Dog more Benadryl.

The bloodbath. Husband kindly took Aitch for a walk so I could catch up on my sleep. On the boardwalk, Aitch took a tumble into a piling that left him with a nasty nosebleed, his first ever. On the way home, another bodily fluid leak led Husband to the realization that we had neglected to change poor Aitch for going on six hours.

The townies. Two sets of neighbors are arguing over some proposed development in the ‘hood. One side is for it because the developer has promised them a few perks in exchange for their support. The other neighbors are against it because the nothing has changed on this street for thirty years, dadgum it, so why start now? Each side is very eager to enlist our support, which means they often buttonhole us in the driveway and give us way too much detail about zoning commissions and planning boards and also some of their personal history while they’re at it. We’re nominally in favor of the development but really just wish they would leave us alone.

You’ll get an idea of the level of interest involved when I say that this weekend, one of the “pro” neighbors called me from the psych ward of the local hospital, to which she had just been committed, to badger me about the latest zoning board contretemps. Oh, yes, and to ask me to bring her her eyeglasses, which I did, and a grande decaf latte from Starbucks, which I politely declined to do.

I felt like kind of a heel, but really — is asking a near-stranger to deliver your coffee order to the hospital a symptom of mental illness, or just impressive audacity? I decided it really doesn’t matter. In either case, this waitress already handles a permanent table of one who’s always bellowing for his sippy cup, and I’m not taking on another customer.

How unfeeling am I? No, really, I want to know.