Update/thanks
Thanks for the notes yesterday. The day was mostly fine, though every once in a while something would go wrong and I would notice how much more easily upset I was getting than usual.
The main example of that was my new sprinkler system, which instead of the ten minutes or so per day it's supposed to water the lawn, ran for somewhere between two and five hours yesterday. I couldn't figure out how to shut it down; eventually called the guy who installed it, and he talked me through the manual shutdown process, but it required me to get soaked. I didn't cope so well with that. (Edited to add: Especially because I cut my finger while trying to turn the valve.)
(Edited again to add: Also, I had planned to mow the new lawn for the first time that day, which was made impossible by it being temporarily more like a lake than a lawn.)
But it all worked out okay, and he'll come out today and fix the system (he was going to come fix it immediately after I called, but I asked him to hold off). I suspect a burned-out fuse in the control box, though it seems to me that it's a design flaw if a burned-out fuse could leave the system stuck in the on position.
Oh, yeah--I suppose I should mention that I have a lawn now! And a slate patio. I have photos of the whole process; will post them sometime soon. Not quite everything in the yard makeover is totally complete, but it's most of the way there.
Also yesterday I re-repaired my dishwasher. There's an important component that's no longer held in place by screws, because all the screw holes' threads have been stripped, and when it comes loose (as it's done twice now) there's no way to operate the dishwasher. Fixing it temporarily is easy--unscrew the inner surface of the door, move the relevant piece back into place, put the screws back in; takes less than five minutes once I actually start--but fixing it permanently will require more effort than I'm currently willing to put into it, and I let my home-appliance warranty lapse a few months ago because I wasn't getting much use out of it. The real answer is probably to replace the dishwasher--it's old and in pretty bad shape even after getting repaired twice in the past two years--but I'd like to remodel the kitchen some day, so getting a new dishwasher now seems kind of silly.
I also took a couple of customer-service risks: I went out and got Indian food for dinner, and stopped at the Apple store for a new MacBook battery. (I forget if I asked this: have any of you who I've visited in the past few months found a black battery, roughly 8" x 3" x 1/2"? My spare seems to have disappeared; I suspect I left it somewhere I was visiting.) I've confirmed that the problem I was having with my MacBook shutting down instead of going to sleep when it runs out of power was indeed a problem with the battery; the new battery works as expected. So now I just have to convince Apple of that and get them to replace the old battery.
. . . I referred to those purchase experiences as "risks" because my entering into a customer-service experience often results in things going badly, and I was trying to minimize things going badly yesterday. But in fact both experiences went well, and I ended up with yummy Indian food and a working battery.
Anyway. The upshot of all this is that yesterday was mostly fine.