What A Life I Lead!

Oh, Brother!

It’s incredible! I finally think I’ve begun to get my life back on track, and what happens? I get sick! Again!

This time, it was pneumonia. I wasn’t prepared for it; who is, really? But of all the health issues to crop up in my life, I really hadn’t been expecting something as common as pneumonia. I know it sounds egregious to speak of anything as potentially deadly as pneumonia as common, but my health has always been enmeshed in various life-threatening illnesses, and after a while even they become commonplace. Anyway, the disease caused me to use up all of my sick leave, most of my vacation leave, and quite a bit of money (the money because I had to go to the emergency room).

My vacation plans were endangered by this, but with diligence and a firm focus on the thought of spending a week at a cabin on a lake in New Hampshire, followed by a large family reunion, I was determined to go. So I worked hard to stay healthy—and build up some vacation time—and gradually made up the difference I had lost due to the illness. I had even managed to find some (relatively) inexpensive airfare.

Then the bottom dropped out.

The day I was supposed to buy the tickets, I had a catastrophe at home; mind, I didn’t know it was a catastrophe until later, but what I could see at the time was bad enough. I was washing clothes, and as the wash-water was draining out, the sewer line backed up. This wasn’t an entirely unexpected problem; it had happened several years before. It just meant spending some money to get the tree roots removed from the pipe. I called the rooter service.

The real dissolution of my vacation plans was brought on by the discovery that there were far more roots in the pipe than the rooter could simply remove; it would take a special machine to remove the materials that blocked the pipe, and that was going to double their initial estimate. I had no choice but to accept the cost of the job. The payment I made when the job was completed was such that I had to cancel all vacation plans... I had just spent all the money I had saved since January.

It wasn’t over yet.

The next addition to this catastrophe was the news that the sewer line was broken between the house and the street. I was now looking at a cost equal to my entire investment portfolio! It was no longer a simple catastrophe; it had become a cataclysm.

Now I am considering the unholy mess that I have encountered, and trying to figure out just what to do. I’ll be back to tell you about it—if I survive it...