My Brother and his Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day

Have you ever had a terrible horrible no good very bad day? My brother had one of those on Saturday. I know I have had a day like that, when it feels like everything goes wrong. No matter what you do, how hard you try, you just can’t succeed. And it provides great content for my blog.

My brother, Neil, can best be described as a good person. He is kind, generous, friendly to everyone and well-loved. Whether a person is two years-old or ninety-nine, they adore him (except maybe my youngest child who cries when she looks at him). He deserves only good things. But some days that just doesn’t happen, even for Neil.

I believe that much of my early life was shaped by a book by Judith Viorst called Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day.

Nothing goes right all day for the main character, Alexander. His mother forgot to put dessert in his lunch, the shoe store didn’t have the style he wanted, his night light burnt out and so much more. His answer to making things better: a move to Australia. It’s the reason for my fascination with Australia for so many years. Everything must be better in Australia, don’t you think?

So, if anyone in my family is having a bad day, it is a terrible horrible no good very bad day. I am reminded of the day a couple of years ago when I dropped my car keys into a sewer grate outside my children’s school during morning drop-off. The day went downhill from there.

So back to my brother. He had a terrible horrible no good very bad on Saturday. Here are three reasons why:

Neck Pain

Have you ever fallen asleep at night in a slightly strange angle and woken up with pain in your neck? You try to turn your head but the pain is awful and then you walk around feeling so stiff that you kind of look like Frankenstein’s cousin. Neil woke up on Saturday with THAT pain in his neck and only with a couple of applications of my parents’ “special” salve did he have some relief. But it was a rough start to his day.

Broken Glass

After a visit to the local country market and a few stops along the way home, we all sat down to a delicious lunch at our country house. We are a good-sized group up here this weekend, of ten people, and it was a feat just to get all ten of us around the table for lunch. My sister-in-law put out quite a spread and my mother brewed some fresh iced tea. Neil grabbed a large glass, filled it with ice and tea and took a sip. First some drops of liquid appeared at the bottom of the glass then the bottom fell out, literally. The actual bottom of the glass, full of cold liquid, fell off. The iced tea spilled all over Neil and of course the table. Who drinks from a glass that does that? My brother.

Day
It’s upside down, but here is the glass whose bottom fell off.

Ticked Off

The icing on the cake happened in the afternoon. It was a hot day, and we are lucky enough to have a pool at our country house. What better thing to do on a hot day than lounge in the pool? Note that this is not a city pool. We are in the countryside, surrounded by fields and a forest. That means critters large and small. We are often joined in the pool by mosquitos, horse flies and wasps. A new visitor joined us this summer, the tick.

Neil has a unique high-pitched yelp he lets out when he stubs his toe, walks into a sharp corner of a table or, as we know now, is bitten by a tick. While the children splashed in the pool and the adults relaxed on noodles, suddenly Neil began to thrash and scream. He leapt out of the pool and grabbed his upper leg. We saw some blood coming out and a distinct bulls eye marking. We found the culprit (the bug) in the water and scooped it out, still alive. It was a tick.

No one wants to be bitten by a tick. It hurts and this nasty bug can sometimes carry Lyme Disease. We all pulled out our iPhones and read about what to do. We saved the tick in a bag and decided that Neil’s best course of action was a visit to the local walk-in clinic. The tick is now at a lab being tested and my brother just took one heavy dose of antibiotics to ensure that he won’t be sick (though the side effects of this heavy-duty dose may give him a second terrible horrible no good very bad day).

Some people say that good, and bad, things come in threes. So, Neil had his three experiences that came together to give him his terrible horrible no good very bad day.

Some days are like that.

Even in Australia.

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