When It Rains

I’m not a big believer in luck. I think maybe there’s too much chance to it – I like to think most good things that happen in my life happen because I worked hard for them, and I also blame myself when bad things happen – like the dryer broke because I’m bad at managing money and so it’s my fault that I don’t have savings and can’t run right out and buy a new dryer right now.

But I have to tell you I’m having a run of something and I just need a break. When we moved into this house it was partially because Mr. E had to two days in which to find us a place to live and partially because it really is a cute house, it’s very nice and it’s to our taste. We usually end up living in older houses because more than anything else I need high ceilings and wood floors and there’s just a certain aesthetic that I’m more into and that means an older house, which is fine, but never in my life have I lived somewhere more prone to random collapse than this house. And the luck seems to be spreading to all of us, our dog and our cat and our car and I hope you don’t get contaminated simply by reading my blog.

So this house. It’s safe to say it’s not well constructed and I think it’s had a lot of amateurish home repair - we notice small random glitches every day. Cabinet doors open the wrong way. Light switches are reversed. The bedroom door was installed slightly off kilter and would never shut all the way. This fall the house filled with thousands of mayflies that bred in the hundreds of rotting walnuts littering the lawn – the bugs are so small they can come right in through the screens. Some of the electric outlets are put in backwards, which means you can’t use a night light in them. The heat vents all face the wrong way. None of the sink stoppers work. Cell phones fail – anywhere in the house. The windows and roof both leaked like sieves and had to be replaced in days long projects involving a multitude of banging and lots of loud, bad construction worker music - heavy on the Creed.

Then there are all the things that simply break. Every time the toilet flushed, nasty water leaked out of it onto the floor, so that had to be fixed. The kitchen sink backed up and had to be snaked twice – I think the garbage disposal is a pretense at best. And we learned that in desperate situations, a bucket of hot water can sometimes unclog a toilet that won’t plunge.

Our dryer broke. The microwave caught on fire. The oven died.

And it spread. The dog gave us all ringworm. Our car wouldn’t start, for the first time since we’ve owned it. It’s freezing cold inside, all the time. Our electricity bill for the month of December was $315 dollars. And yesterday while I was taking a shower, the cold water knob snapped off in my hand, and when Mr. E went to take a look at it, the entire business at the end of the pipe flew apart and out of the wall, and a stream of icy water shot out of the hole that remained – for an hour and half, while all concerned searched frantically for a way to turn off the water to the house.

A plumber just now came by to take a look at the faucet and wanted $500 to tear out the whole wall and replace everything, which our landlords declined to pay. So…here I sit. Nine months pregnant, no water, save two five gallon jugs we bought yesterday at the grocery store.

This morning my doctor told me I was measuring small, and that she was ordering another ultrasound. And then Mr. E and I drove home - in the fog - to our house of many disasters – but not before noticing a mysterious and oily substance leaking out of the vents of the car and coating the insides of all the windows.

Now it’s almost like a game. What will go wrong next?

The computer appears to be making a high pitched whining noise, but Mr. E also reports a mysterious ticking emanating from his barely over a year old and just slightly past the warranty IPOD.

The race is on!