So yesterday afternoon, admist all the trauma of not having access to my 250 satellite TV channels (and having to settle for only about 50 cable channels), I got a call from the place across town where I’ve rented a storage unit for the last twenty years or so. It’s a luxury, I guess. The alternative to keeping it is either finding a place to store all that useless stuff here at the house, or (shudder) throwing it away. And I’m not up for throwing things away unless I know to a certainty that no one could ever possibly want to see them again, from now until the day after the end of time.

Besides, the folks who run this storage facility are very nice, and they’ve only raised my rent twice in twenty years. When they called yesterday, it was to tell me that I had mailed them not the $47.00 check for my storage unit, but the $650.00 check for my portion of the house rent. (The Boss pays the rest.) So I said I would pick it up today, although I had other things I needed to do.

This afternoon I abandoned the baseball game on (cable) television to drive across town and pick up my rent check, and turn in a check for my storage unit. It’s a good thing I always mail these checks a few days early, so I could mail the rent check, with a note of apology, and still have it postmarked before the end of the month. Apparently it’s not so good that I write both checks at the same time, but I have to say I think this is the first time I’ve been too lazy (or too tired) to make sure I was putting the right check in the right envelope.

In the end it wasn’t a problem at all, except for the mild embarrassment at getting the phone call and the minor hassle of all that extra driving. My landlord doesn’t usually deposit the rent checks until the middle of the month anyway, so he probably won’t know I sent him the wrong one until he has the right one in his hands. That’s the kind of mistake I don’t mind making, one that can be corrected before I have to explain myself to someone I owe money to.