the bad start

This morning I woke up not feeling so well.  I contemplated calling out of work but that just is not easy with my job.  I drop off my kids at daycare and look at my large blinking gas light.  I quickly flip the mode button on my steering wheel and notice that I now have 9 miles until I am out of gas.  No problem, I'll just stop and get gas.  I flip open my center console and... the wallet is not there.  Oh. My. I must have left it at the grocery store when I went with the kids on Wed.  Really, it meant that my memory is so bad that I forgot about the wallet in the time it took me to buckle K. into his car seat and push the cart across the street to the gathering spot.

I quickly turn the car around to try and search my house.  In the mean time, I call out of work since I obviously will not make my first appointment and my nausea has now escalated.  I call food lion, nothing.  I empty the back seat of my car which is still filled with Easter eggs, stickers, and said egg filling now stuck to the carpets in my car, still nothing.  I find $4 in cash in my kitchen and realize that will barely get me from the parking lot of the gas station.  Hhmmm... where else do we have money.  Oh, my lovely daughter has been doing chores for a quarter to fill up a little white folder with large letters "FOR THE NEEDY" to turn into church on Sunday.  Yes, I sunk to an all time low and stole form my hard working daughter, the church, and "the needy" all at the same time.

I drive to the gas station.  The car now reads 3 miles until empty.  I sit in the car peeling the quarters from the folder which my daughter has so lovingly taped into each slot. I embarrassingly pay while the gas station worker is obviously annoyed at receiving payment in all quarters.  I purchase my 3.531 gallons of gas and drive up to the food lion fully ready to search through all of the carts.  Well, in the time that it took me to steal from the needy and be judged by the gas station worker, someone turned in my wallet.  That someone did not take a single thing from it; they didn't take the credit cards, the grocery list, or even my old navy coupon.  Now, I have a full day to sit, drink some sprite to settle my stomach and  refill a little taped quarter packet for the needy.  What a turn around.