May you live in interesting times.
That’s supposedly an ancient Chinese proverb and curse, essentially saying that when things are truly interesting, you’d better hold onto your seatbelt because it’s going to be a bumpy night. Yeah, it’s time to bring out all the clichés. Like, “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” Or my personal favorite, “It’s always darkest just before you open the fridge.”
No one can say that my life has been boring this last month. In fact, it’s been so interesting, I keep wondering what will happen next. For the record, never, never, never tell anyone how well things are going for you. I think this must anger the gods.
It started with a friend’s unexpected death and quickly moved into influenza. Maybe one had something to do with the other. You tend to have compromised immunity when you’re feeling down, so I think I may have been susceptible to the myriad viruses floating around last month. But the flu left me with a terrible case of laryngitis; probably the worst I’ve ever had. I had absolutely no voice for 24 hours and it took about two weeks to speak without sounding like a frog. After four weeks, I’m starting to sound semi-normal, but I still can’t sing, which is pretty tough for me heading into the holidays.
You know how much you hate hearing "White Christmas" by the time December 24th rolls around? I’m the exact opposite. I’m one of those disgusting people who sings along with the Christmas carols in full voice, hoping maybe someone – even a stranger – will join in and we can harmonize on the choruses. Yes, it’s nauseating. I freely admit it. But Christmas is one of my favorite times of the year. So I hum or sing along with the mall music and actually enjoy Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters be-bopping together on "Here Comes Santa Claus." The only exception to this love of Christmas music is "Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree." I hate that song with a passion. It should be outlawed and every copy destroyed, if possible. But I digress.
So about two weeks into my flu-induced haze, I got sick of being sick and decided to get some yard work done. It’s been unseasonably warm this autumn, so I still had roses in early November. (In fact, I still had roses until yesterday, when we had our first hard freeze.) After raking some leaves, I grabbed the garden clippers and attacked the rose bushes. As I was returning the clippers to the garage, I dropped them. They landed perfectly onto my left big toe, slicing through the nail and into the nail bed. It didn’t hurt a whole lot, but it bled something fierce.
After hearing dire warnings from my mother about the possibilities of ending up in the hospital with lockjaw, I broke down and went to the doctor for a tetanus shot. He also gave me a flu shot, which I think was a little like locking the barn door after the horse is stolen. But I guess there is always the possibility of contracting a second strain of flu this winter. What joy that would be! In any case, the doctor said the toe looked okay, but I could still lose the toenail or end up having it permanently damaged. Only time will tell if it heals properly. With my luck these days, I’m not counting on it.
Two days later, I started up the oven to make some fantastic chocolate chip cookies for the guys at work and the oven wouldn’t start. I called a service company to come and look at it and they said it would be $85 for a service call, plus it would take a week to get an appointment for the technician to look at the oven. When he finally did arrive, he looked at it for 10 seconds (literally) and said the oven’s processor was damaged and I’d need a new one. Hey, I work in tech for a living, so I new this was a fancy way of saying the computer interface for the oven was broken. It would be $300 to replace it. Pretty aggravating since I’m sure this is something they could have diagnosed over the phone. But then, that wouldn’t cost $85.
Well, Mommy and Daddy didn’t raise an idiot, so I decided to price brand new ovens. Sure enough, a new one only costs $450. So I went to Home Depot and looked at their lovely selection of appliances. It seemed like I’d finally caught a break because everything was on sale. I should have known there would be complications.
Now I have to backtrack, because in the middle of the oven debacle, I had another joyful incident. I made a deposit at the bank the previous Thursday and also withdrew some cash at the same time. The bank teller gave me the cash, the deposit slip and my driver license (which I’d used as I.D.) in a bank envelope. I slipped the envelope into my purse and went to the grocery store. Some light-fingered Louie managed to snag the envelope out of my purse. Not only was I out the cash (about $120), but also my license and the deposit slip, which had my account number on it. So this thief could easily put my account number on a counter withdrawal slip, go through the bank drive-through and use my own license to take all the cash out of my checking account. That account is tied to my savings account for overdraft protection, so potentially this person could steal all of my available cash. Yes, that thought woke me in the middle of the night and made it pretty hard to sleep. The next morning, I went straight to the bank and closed that account. Fortunately, I have a passport to use as I.D. so I can actually prove that I am really me. All this craziness meant that it would be a week or more without checks, a debit card and a credit card – until the new stuff would arrive in mail.
So here I was at Home Depot, ready to buy my oven, and I realized I really didn’t have a way to pay for it. I had the cash, but only temporary checks and my passport as I.D. To make a long story short, I was able to use my passport to secure a Home Depot credit card and they let me put the appliance on the credit card. Since it was a little unusual to be using a passport as I.D., the clerk had to make three phone calls before she was able to find someone who could complete the transaction successfully. A passport is a legally recognized government I.D., but for some reason, you can’t really use it as I.D. – unless you want to go to Canada.
It took another week to have the oven delivered and in the mean time, it was time for more excitement. I was on my way to work the next day and the clutch on my Subaru gave out. It’s the second clutch I’ve burned through since I bought the car eight years ago. That’s pretty rapid, but this is a notorious problem with standard transmission Subarus. After getting the car up on the rack, the mechanic found another problem, of course. “Your right front axle is about to fall off. I’m surprised you made it in here without a problem!” Two days and $900 later, I had my car back.
Between the illness, car problems, oven problems and bank problems, I’ve missed a lot of work these last few weeks. Maybe there really is a silver lining to all the dark clouds in my life lately. But for now, I’m looking forward to some less interesting times.
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