It was my own fault.
I got a little too full of myself, so karma — who we all karma can be a disagreeable person — smacked me in the head.
Not too hard. I mean karma may be disagreeable, but it doesn’t just go around smacking people in the head hard enough to hurt them.
At least I would like to think karma doesn’t do that, but with karma, who knows?
Last week, I bragged about the fact that we had a free weekend with nothing to do and nowhere to go. I described it as an “unencumbered weekend.”
I shouldn’t have done that because after my wife read that column she informed me that we didn’t have another free weekend until after Thanksgiving.
“That’s not possible,” I said to my wife.
“Yes, it is,” my wife said.
Then my wife proceeded to list everything we have to do and everywhere we have to be on every weekend from now until after Thanksgiving.
The thing is, my wife listed everything we have to do and everywhere we have to be from memory.
Look, I don’t know what we’re doing tomorrow let alone on every weekend through Thanksgiving, so how can my wife know — off the top of her head — what we’re doing on every weekend?
We’re different that way. My wife and I.
My wife’s a planner, and I am not.
Because my wife is a planner, when some sort of plan for a weekend comes up she marks it down on her calendar and makes a mental note to herself.
Because I’m not a planner, when some sort of plan for the weekend comes up I look at either the St. Louis Cardinals baseball schedule or the Kansas City Chiefs football schedule to see if the weekend plan will impact my baseball or football watching.
Then I forget about the weekend plan.
See, we’re different. My wife and I.
I don’t how this happened. I don’t know how we managed to have something to do or somewhere to go on every weekend until after Thanksgiving.
By nature, I’m not the sort of person who likes to be busy. If I wanted to be busy, I would’ve become one of Trump’s attorneys.
By nature, I’m the sort of person who thinks sitting in my Jimmy Buffett Adirondack chair on my porch with a beer in one hand and a cigar in the other is something to do on a weekend.

My wife doesn’t share my philosophy. Don’t get me wrong, my wife does enjoy the occasional unencumbered weekend, she just doesn’t enjoy too many unencumbered weekends.
So when my wife hears about an activity that might encumber an unencumbered weekend she gets excited and commits us to that activity.
The problem is, we usually only have a limited number of unencumbered weekends available, so when my wife encumbers some of those weekends, we run out of weekends.
That’s how we have something to do or somewhere to be every weekend through Thanksgiving.
To be fair, not all of our encumbered weekends are my wife’s fault. Some are work-related and some involve our 20-year-old daughter, Emma, but had my wife not voluntarily encumbered our few remaining unencumbered weekends, we wouldn’t have something to do or somewhere to be every weekend until after Thanksgiving.
Not that I’m obsessing about this or anything.
But I’m nothing if not a survivor, so for the next 13 weekends, I will do what I always do. Every weekend I will be where I need to be and do what I need to do and then I will look for a bar.
Unencumbered, of course.