I am sure that we have all had a string of unlucky events which we deem practically impossible until they play out as they do. That has certainly been the case for my husband and I this past week. It’s almost laughable at this point except that we are still in it. At some point in the future, I’m sure that we will look back at it all and say, “Remember when…” with a few chuckles. Our series of recent misfortunes began immediately after returning from our relaxing, mountain stay.
After a long day’s drive on a major highway during notable traffic, we pulled up to our gate. In hindsight, maybe we should have turned around right then and there and headed back from whence we came. As we’d come to discover, the farmer who cuts our hay accidentally locked us out. The plan to intertwine locks, his with ours, so that we could each get into the property had failed. Instead, his helping hand locked his lock rendering our key useless as our lock dangled from a completely different chain than the one holding our metal gates together. Not quite what we had hoped to see, but thanks to some quick thinking on my husband’s part and a bit of finagling, we drove our weary selves up to the house to unload our things. That was unfortunate event number one and only the beginning of what was to unfold little did we know.
Within three or four minutes of parking and reuniting with our kitty cat, my husband went to unlock the house door. Hearing no alarm sound, his days earlier intuition about a possible power outage was confirmed. Seconds later, I heard him shout, “The power is out!” Oh no! I wonder how long it’s been out?! Oddly enough, we’d had my brother check on the power four days earlier because of my husband’s hunch that our lack of wireless camera footage might have been more than just an internet glitch. However, when my brother’s text came through that Thursday to say that everything was fine, neither of us gave it another thought until it became a cold, hard reality (pun intended). You’ve got to be kidding! How uncanny! Sure enough, our refrigerator was room temperature, our fridge-freezer wasn’t a whole lot better and food near the top of our small deep freeze was thawed and wet. Event number two. So, instead of unpacking as anticipated, we found ourselves throwing spoiled items out and re-shuffling meat and the like which had thankfully still been frozen into our rather modest trailer fridge-freezer. It appears that having a tightly packed deep freeze saved us some money even though we’ve been known to curse its small capacity. Another saving grace was that there wasn’t much in our fridge to begin with since we’d taken most of our groceries on our trip. My husband and I later learned that a fuse at our roadside pole had completely blown sometime between when my brother checked in and we’d arrived home.
Event number three. The following night’s sleep, after our memorable return, my husband called out to me again. This time, he’d wondered if I smelled anything funny. It was two o’clock in the morning. Our bedroom did have a weird odour. Our ensuite was where we clearly identified the unpleasant reek. Skunk! Oh brother! Just what we needed. Too bad, we’d left behind the fresh mountain air. It would have come in handy that night and for the next two or so, as the stench persisted.
While event number four transpired in part before our trip departure, I’ve included it in our list of misfortunes because our frustrations and dealings with it are ongoing. To help cool our bedroom at nights, we’ve relied on a portable air conditioning unit for close to a decade. Thus, we weren’t totally surprised when the AC stopped working one night prior to our holiday. It had been more than well-used. Since we’d been happy with its overall performance, we chose to purchase a newer version of it from a nearby store that was one of the few places with stocked units. Thinking we were lucky to have found another conditioner so quickly, my husband eagerly hauled it home, assembled all of the parts and took our old one out to the garage. Within an hour or so, our seeming luck turned sour when we could tell that the air conditioner wasn’t working as it should have. It continued to cool our room well beyond the set temperature instead of cycling between the fan and compressor as needed. If our moods weren’t already frosty enough, our room certainly made up for any difference. To boot, the store refused to take the dysfunctional item back even though we called in about the problem right away. Just this week, thanks to two ladies in the warranty department who sided with us, we finally got an exchange. Yay!! Until we found out three nights ago that the second AC unit does EXACTLY the same thing! Ahh… this can’t be happening to us!! But, it is and we’ve yet to get to the next step in resolving the situation. That will be this week’s adventure.
By now, you might be thinking that there SURELY can’t be a number five on my list except that you would be wrong. So wrong! Two days ago, after going out to our trailer to plug in our saving grace fridge/freezer from event two, my husband glumly walked toward me on the sidewalk announcing that he’d found mouse poop. What on earth? Ironically, the feces was found in both the fridge and freezer compartments. Wow, you can’t even make this stuff up! How can that be?!? We had just been in our camper a couple of days prior reclaiming our cold and frozen foods that we’d stored there until we were confident that our electricity worked. Needless to say, the long weekend camping trip with my parents was a no-go for us. Now, we’d have to play a figurative game of cat and mouse in addition to clearing out as many trailer items as we could. So far, we’ve trapped one mouse. The question is, how many more are there? Unfortunately, the answer to that remains to be seen. As my mom pointed out, it’s a good thing that this mouse business didn’t happen at the start of our mountain trip whilst away from home. Can you imagine? My answer is uh-uh. It’s bad enough as it is.
Event number six? Yup! There is one. Though minor in nature by comparison to the others, I wondered out loud to my husband what more could possibly happen as I found myself mopping up half a pot’s worth of water. Last night, while filling up the bottom of our rice steamer, it seems that the cord inadvertently got caught on a cupboard handle. The next thing I knew I was dumping water everywhere as I’d attempted to transfer the appliance, with the caught cord, to our nearby island. Normally, an incident like that would be too negligible to mention except that happenings one through five make it noteworthy in my mind.
So what lies next? All I can hope for at this point is that the next number—number seven, really is a lucky number for us in that our unluckiness changes. In fact, seven could even be part of the next string of fortunate events turning us into lotto winners with all seven numbers matching. Fingers crossed, folks! Time for Lady Luck to smile on us… or at least give us a fighting chance. 🙂
Jibber Jabber with Sue 