Ever have one of those days?

You know, where you:

• Wash the new sweater that you got 2 days earlier. Lay it out on the spare bed to dry because you don't want it to shrink in the dryer. Then come home 8 hours later to find it dried and not Barbie-sized, but now its got purple spots all over it.

• Get the electricity bill and it is twice as much as it was last month.

• Find a big puddle of water underneath the air conditioner in the bedroom, which you run all the time and probably contributed to the electricity bill.

• Get a bill from the doctor's clinic saying you didn't pay your last bill. But you did ... through the bank's e-pay, the money was taken out of your account 20 days earlier. The lady at the clinic refuses to negotiate with you, saying, "You need to call your bank." So you call the bank and they say, "You need to call the doctor's office."

• Think to yourself, "That's the same damn bank that withdrew $300 last week in an 'internal error.'"

• Have got a doctor's appointment scheduled for tomorrow. Now you have to worry that it will be marked in your chart somewhere that your account is "delinquent" and the doctor won't treat you.

• Have been suffering from gastrointestinal problems for weeks. (Remember the air pocket?) So you do a search of symptoms on mayoclinic.com and discover that you may be suffering from the stomach flu or colon cancer or about 12 other conditions of varying severity.

But right as you're ready to write today off as a failure, you get an e-mail from your friend Stacie Toenails. She's excited about venturing across the nation's 16th largest state (in area) just to see you for a few days. And you smile.