I'm not sure if Mercury's in retrograde, if there's been a continuous full moon, or if I'm just going through a clumsy phase. There are others in my life that are having bouts of bad luck so I guess it could be the moon and the stars; with my luck though, it's probably a full on clumsy stage in my life. Let's hope it doesn’t last too long.
It started with bruises on my legs and arms that I couldn't account for. I wasn't exactly sure when or how I got them. My lunch buddies suggested I might be drinking too much but I assured them I wasn't drinking any more than normal (thankfully they didn't ask me to define "normal"). When I started paying attention, I realized that I was accidentally bumping into coffee tables, chairs, corners, other people and rose bushes. It went from those minor bodily thumps to glass collisions. I'd do the dishes, break a wine glass; do the dishes, break a drinking glass; do the dishes, break a vase. We're now down to two non-matching wine glasses (besides the ones we bought from Cost Plus World Market for cheap and the ones from Doc. B.'s mom – though I'm pretty sure I'm responsible for having broken some of those in the recent past as well).
With this spell of flailing fragility, it wasn't a surprise when I scraped the side of my beloved little silver (dump) truck. Yup, I was turning into a parking space and cut it too close - too close to a huge cement pylon that is. I'm mad, annoyed at my clumsiness, and disappointed when I break things...but scraping my truck was different. This is a 7 year old truck, formerly in perfect condition, with only 25,000 miles on it, that we were recently considering selling so that we could put the cash toward a new car. It didn't have one single flaw in it other than what it came with, or should I say what it didn't come with. Sure, I had to roll down the windows by hand, there weren't any car mats (and I'd been too lazy to purchase any) and I only had AM/FM music selections. But it was paid for and it many times over earned its name: The Wheelbarrow.
The reason the truck has so few miles on it – it stays in the driveway while I take MARTA to work every day. It just sits there patiently waiting for me to load it with mulch, loan it to a friend, drive to my once a month haircut and color, or speed up I-75 to my bi-annual dentist appointments ("speed" is of course relative when you are in a Ford Ranger). So it was an unusual day in its life when it was parked out on the street last week. We were having some rocks delivered and the only place to put them was at the end of our narrow driveway – so the truck had to be out of the way. When I came home from work that night, our neighbor came running over to inform us that the truck had been hit. A repairman at their house that day had backed out of their driveway right into the side of the truck. If only I had parked the truck the other way, the new dent would have been smack dab on top of the section I scraped. But alas, no such luck. This truck, that was in mint condition just a few weeks earlier, now had a dent on one side and a scrape on the other.
The repairman's company was very helpful. They agreed to pay for the dent repair and for a rental car while it was in the shop. So Doc. B. took it for estimates and discovered that we'll actually be getting my scrape repaired less expensively because a bunch of the labor can be rolled into the dented side (they have to remove the back end of the truck, match paint colors, etc. - all things they would have had to do to repair either side).
So, when it's all said and done, I don't know if this is good luck or bad luck? I guess its good luck in that I'm sitting here in Hilton Head while Doc. B. is handling the repairs. Thanks Doc. B. but I wish you were here!
