Do I present as someone who is cool, calm, and collected? Most of the time? I try to. Well, I am here to tell you, I am a fraud. I aspire to be one of those “too cool for school” kids. I consistently fail.

Seeing a massive blob of dark navy oil paint on a pale brown carpet in the bright light of day in my “brand new to me” house set me off. Remember yesterday when I said how calm, cool, and collected I was over this little “accident?” I was either delusional or lying. I was actually livid.

Here is what I hate about “mistakes.” They inevitably cost time, energy, and money. How much depends on the magnitude of the mistake. Murder someone, get caught and you’ll likely end up paying with your life for the rest of your life.

Car “accidents” alter the course of people’s lives. In horrific and tragic ways. I have experienced those tragedies with people in my very own circle. The outcome is – as in the wake of all accidents – there is aught to do but pick up the pieces, work at healing, and try to put life back together. Irreversibly altered.

By comparison, a square-foot indelible blob of navy blue in a piece of carpet paint has cost me very little. But it has cost me. To start, the carpet has to be taken up and trashed. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, I worked frantically with water and paint remover, and cleaning spray to remove the blob. That now bemuses and saddens me a little bit. The fate of that carpet was sealed at the moment that paint can fell over.

So the initial “move-in” plan was to get the rooms painted – bippity, boppity, boo. Painting would have taken a day or two. Then the carpet cleaners were to come in. I was going to give the carpets a day or two to dry really well. Then – when the carpets were practically desiccated – the furniture could be moved in.

We would sit in our new living arrangement and “ooh” and “aah” over our new digs and hoist a glass of bubbly together to celebrate. I don’t see that happening now for a month.

The next week will be filled with getting on the phone to make appointments with other painters, meeting up with them, getting estimates, and deciding among them before the job even starts. That’s at least a week.

I’ll be schlepping back to the hardware store to get more paint plus carving out time to be on the job site to “supervise” people. Clearly, I should have supervised this job, too. I just told my concerned husband my mood would improve when this situation improves.

As I often do, I am looking for the lesson in this very minor disaster. Good parents teach their kids a lot of little life lessons in the safety of their home environment before they are launched in to adulthood.

Children should be encouraged to make a lot of little mistakes when they are young so they don’t make them again when they are established adults. It is the rule of “the hand on the hot stove.” If it happens once when you are a child, it is unlikely to happen again later in life unless there are copious amounts of alcohol involved.

The consequences of adult mistakes are often much harder to unravel. The emotional and temporal costs are hard, too, but harder to put a price tag on.

So in the wake of this screwup, I am looking for the “blessing in disguise.” We have decided laminate flooring is the way to go in the now carpeted areas given our lifestyle and lackluster housecleaning chops.

My dear friend and architect Diane – who knows just about everything there is to know about houses and job site screwups – gave me a boost when she sent me a message saying: “Hey, maybe there is hardwood underneath the carpet!”

Unlikely but it gave me a chuckle and a glimmer of hope. Sometimes that is enough to get you through inevitably difficult life patches. Friends rule.