(diaryland) August 16, 2010 - 11:39 a.m.

When I have a bad morning, I don't do it by halves.

Well, the start of Saturday morning was kind of good, apart from the fact that there was a very real threat that I would run out of petrol at any given moment after my moderately successful guitar lesson with my uncle (I had practiced a bit).

So afterwards, I rang Roland to see if he could put money in my bank account so I had actual money to buy petrol with. Turns out, for the first time ever, he was awake and out of the house before noon. So there went that idea.

I knew that there was a metallic jingle in the bottom of my bag. Maybe there was enough coin to get me a few bucks worth of petrol. I looked in my bag to find a sole dollar coin. That's how I found out I didn't have my wallet. I keep my house key in my wallet. BUM.

So, after a terrifying drive home, in which the needle departed from the E on the petrol gague, plunging down ever further, I got down the driveway.

Then, I had to break into the garage, because I had to get a folding chair in order to break into the house. Roland does this thing where he opens the garage door with a stick instead of a key, gently prodding the underside of one garage door corner, so I did that. Phew. Then I got the chair and went round the side of the house where I knew there was a loose window.

I stood on the chair while I opened the window. That was the easiest bit of my morning. Time was running out, because it was my Grandma's birthday at one o'clock, and I hadn't wrapped her present yet. I fiddled around with the flyscreen on the window, and it popped off. Great.

Then came the bit where I wished I had an ounce of upper body strength. I jumped weakly at the window, and got halfway in. This was a pretty small window, by the way.

My arms were so weak that I couldn't push myself the rest of the way through the window. There was also an incredibly varied amount of junk and precious objects strewn on the floor of the eternally messy bedroom in front of the window. Oh, yeah, and a camera tripod I could have gotten impaled on right in front of my face.

So I just lay there a while with my legs dangling out, getting winded because the window frame was cutting into my abdomen real bad. REAL bad.

I could forget about my arms helping anymore. They were useless now. I had to get my left leg involved. Somehow it works better than the other one. So I had to get it around my body and over my head, kind of. It was uncomfortable. But, as soon as it got into the house, I knew I was all in.

I could pretty much be a cat burglar now. As long as it was for my house, because I have cased the shit out of that joint, and that's how I knew its weak point.

I wrapped my present for Grandma, grabbed the heart-shaped shortbreads I'd made her, and got some Goddamn petrol.

Despite my obvious deficiencies at day-to-day survival, I'm thinking very seriously about doing a Masters next year.