When things go wrong.

 Do you have days when everything seems to go wrong, break down or simply stop working?  My life has been like that for the last couple of months and it shows no sign of abating.

Are you ready for my tales of woe?  Firstly my printer has packed up. Well, not exactly packed up but more just given up the ghost.  I accept that it was a cheap printer, and in reality I don't print much - several letters on a monthly basis and the occasional talk or lesson material - but it did its job.  In fact I would go so far as to say that it printed great but I never was able to change the ink cartridges when they run out. No matter how hard I tried it was more by luck than skill on my part that the printer released up the empty cartridges and allowed me to put new ones in. It is not a pretty sight to see a woman grappling with a machine that is determined not to do what it is told and after wasting too much time on it, I have succumbed to simply emailing my friend the stuff I need and she prints it for me. After the printer came the fridge fiasco (good job I am writing and not attempting to say fridge fiasco - try it and you will see how hard it is). I think the thermostat has gone as it is constantly whirring away and using up goodness knows how much of my electricity.  Other than that, it works really well. My kitchen wall clock has been the next thing to stop and this has now been consigned to the bin.  It definitely wasn't a battery problem (I put a new one in just to check; I know how these things work you know) as the second hand was moving well but the clock was way behind the real time. After a day I realised that it was something fundamentally wrong with the clock so out it went. Considering it was a £1.50 special from Ikea



It looked like this.

 and I have had it at least three years and probably much longer, I don't think it has done badly at all.  It is just so darn inconvenient though and I have spent fruitless seconds glancing up at an empty wall and I now do think I must spend a great deal of my life checking the time for some reason or another.

In between all of these calamities I have had two minor health hiccups as well, so you can see that I could be feeling very much up against the wall. But am I down and out?  Actually I am not. The failures of the mechanical things are inconsiderate; they have all happened within a short space of time, but in the big scheme of things, they are nothing. With regards to my health, I have always refused to get stressed over something until I know for certain that there is something to be concerned about. In the first instance I do fret for a moment but then sanity reigns again and, as I found out in my case, there has been nothing to worry about.  Now if I was a worrywart, that would be a different matter entirely.  As an aside here, I have said that sanity reigns again and I sometimes wonder how we actually know if we are sane or not.  An interesting thing to ponder when one has too much time on their hands.

If I was a pessimist I would be wondering what else can go wrong, but as I have learned over the last few years that it is better to be optimistic (better for my health and equilibrium) I am merely going to laugh in the face of adversity and carry on regardless.

  

 

But that isn't the end of all my woes......  Last Sunday, there I was, sitting waiting patiently for my friend to emerge from her house so I could give her a lift to church, when some driver decided to park in front of me and preceded to take my car wing and bumper off!  There is irony here inasmuch that I don't give my friend a lift on a regular basis but her normal lift was away and when I do give her lifts, it is often nearer 9:15 than the 9:30 we had arranged.  She gestured from her window that she would be one minute. If I had not given the lift, or picked her up at the more normal time, or she had came directly out, the lady in the huge car would not have even been in the street!  These things were obviously meant to be.  To the lady's credit she got straight out and apologised, accepting that it was completely her fault.  She couldn't really do much else considering that I was parked at the time, but it was nice for her to accept the consequences (the person who ran into the back of me whilst I was stationary at traffic lights told me that his foot had slipped off the brake! He thought I was gullible when really I was merely being polite in accepting his stance). Of course her car sustained very little damage as it was a Mercedes A Class

 



It looked a lot like this but what do I know.....



 and thus a lot bigger than my Chevrolet Matiz. Would I be too dramatic in saying that had she hit me from a different angle she could have probably rolled right over me? 

 

My little car and same colour too.

She actually admitted that she was distracted by looking for her sons new home and misjudged the space! Now my car is miles away from home in the workshop awaiting its repair but I am told it should be back with me by the middle of the week.  Here's hoping for that as I do miss my car even if I don't use it a lot.

So, there you have it.  If I was a lesser mortal ( I feel a bit like superwoman....) I would have crumbled under the weight of all these added burdens but I am still here and alive to tell the tale.  Are all these things inconvenient?  Yes.  Are they life threatening?  No.  Will it help me to get upset over them?  No.  Will the mishaps etc. come to an end soon?   Probably not but I always live in hope.

Watch this space for more exciting (I use the term loosely) adventures from this rather wacky, not always all there but has fun sometimes on the journey, woman whose alter ego is this blog.  

See you next time, and don't forget that I am always happy to have comments left just to reassure myself that someone actually reads these posts!

Susan