You know how it is that sometimes, you make one bad decision, which leads you into a circumstance where you make a worse decision, and then you make an even worse decision and by the time you come to your senses you’re standing there thinking, “how on earth did I end up in the middle of Olive Garden with this bloody axe in my hand?” I call that a Cascading Fail of Suck. And today, I had one.

So, Sugar Cookie has this kind of ball she really likes. It’s those super-chewy rubber Chuck-it balls. They come in two varieties — floaty and non-floaty. They also cost like eighteen dollars each, which makes losing one of them a minor fiscal tragedy. And she has this particular game she likes to play with them. She perches herself on a hill above the river, drops the ball at the top, and chases it as it bounces crazily down. She considers it a bonus if the ball lands in the river because then she can have a splashdown, which to her is a gay old time. Anyway. Today she was playing this game with one of the non-floaty balls on the banks of the Clackamas River, and one thing led to another, and the ball bounced out too far and sank to the bottom. Are you with me so far?

Now, the Clackamas River is an exceptionally clear river, and it has a nice smooth sandy-gravelly bottom, so it was easy to see where the ball was. It didn’t look like it was too far out. And I just did NOT want to lose another eighteen dollar ball. Which led me to the bad decision that kicked off the Cascading Fail of Suck … “I’ll just wade in and get it!”

I carefully remove my coat and my fleece vest — wouldn’t want those getting wet! — and my boots and socks. I roll up my jeans (which should demonstrate my ridiculous and ill-founded level of optimism) and proceed to wade into the Clackamas River in early March. It is cold. Motherf–ing cold, to be brutally precise. Meltoff from Mt. Hood, you see. It’s also running along at a pretty good clip. But hey, I’m just wading out a few feet, right?

I’ve got the ball in my sights. I reach down with the Chuck-it to try to dislodge it from the river bed. I nudge it, but I can’t quite get it. I take a step forward to get a little closer, and suddenly I’m in the Clackamas up to my neck. Lovely! You see, I’d forgotten all about the part where the Clackamas River is shallow for about two feet before there’s a dropoff into the Marianas Trench.

And once I’m in the river up to my neck, I realize, “Gee. There’s rather a bit of current out here. Getting swept away by the raging Clackamas River to retrieve a dog ball wasn’t on my agenda for today.”

So that was that for the ball. I climbed out of the river, feeling like the Prize Moron of the World, and started gathering up my nice dry things. All the things I’d so carefully taken the time to make sure stayed dry. All the fabric items which, had they gotten wet, it wouldn’t have been a tragedy, necessarily, but it would have meant additional discomfort to the already uncomfortable situation.

Now, you think you know where I’m going with this. You’re thinking, “Oh, the dog sat on her clothes and got them all wet” or something like that. Well, HAH! I fooled you. That’s not it at all. What really happened is that after all that care to keep my stupid fleece vest dry, I realized that I’d waded into the Clackamas River WITH MY CELL PHONE IN MY BACK POCKET.

Oy vey.

I pulled it out and made some desperate attempts at drying it off, but when you see water sloshing around behind the screen, you know you’ve got troubles. Big troubles.

So, to sum up. I not only lost my eighteen dollar ball (which actually cost about $3, which makes my attempts to save it all the more pathetic), I destroyed my Blackberry, almost caught hypothermia (well, OK, probably not, thanks to my Walrus-like physique) and almost drowned (well, OK, probably not because I’m a good swimmer and I was within four feet of the shore, but I could easily have ended up a half-mile down the river, had to walk back barefoot along the rocky bank, stepped on a rusty fishing hook and died of tetanus.)

But at least the dog had a good time.