A Good Run of Bad Luck

I always start each new year with antici (pause pause pause) PAYSHUN because it's a fresh start with good intentions.  You know, lose weight, exercise more, reduce spending and everything will be hunky dory.

Yeah, about that reduce spending thing.  That's pretty much just flown right out the window and it's only February.  So far, we've had a good run of bad luck and this bad luck has not been cheap.

Let's see, on only the 2nd day of the new year, Thing 1 hurt his knee.  Two misdiagnoses, 1 unnecessary and excruciatingly  painful procedure to drain non-existent water from his knee  and a total of 3 weeks of hobbling around in pain before we realized the first doctor was an idiot and we went to a specialist , Thing 1 went Under the Knife to repair a knee cap that was broken in half.  Our insurance deductible for this was in the low 4 figures.  We told ourselves it was better than having to pay the whole amount.  Oh, and we have Anthem Blue Cross who has informed us that our Individual Plan rate is going to be jacked up a whopping 39% in a few months.  We had switched our medical insurance because our monthly premium with our old carrier was a couple of hundred dollars MORE than our monthly mortgage payment.


Ironically, the weekend Thing 1 was injured we had made a nice investment into Thing 1's now on hold racing career by purchasing a new (for us) race bike and having his old race bike completely rebuilt as he was supposed to race his old bike in some races and the new bike in other races.  Yeah, that's not happening for a couple of months now but can I just say how pretty and sparkling and clean both bikes look sitting in the garage?  

Then this past Friday, my Lucy left us.  And we were left with a bit of a large vet bill.  I told myself our luck HAS to change.  And it did.  But not for the better because for some reason, fate has decided to kick me/us in the teeth while we're down.


I woke up Saturday morning, still worn out from the events of the day before and discovered that my 3 year old laptop, the laptop that I have to have for business purposes since the programs that are required for both construction bids and my District officer job are not Mac compatible, up and died on me without any sort of warning whatsoever.  It was working fine and dandy Friday night, we shut it down at bedtime and somehow in the middle of the night it died.  With all my files trapped inside.  I found this out when I went to fire it up and got a blue screen telling me of some sort of error and when I consulted with people who are much more computer literate than I am, they told me my hard drive is dead and good luck with that.  So now I have to spend more $$$ to replace the hard drive and hope that the files can be recovered and if so to fork out more $$ for a backup hard drive so that if this happens again, and you know it will, I will have all my needed files safe and sound.


I've had my iMac for about 6 or 7 years now and yeah it's slower than molasses in a New England winter and the disk player hasn't worked in about 2 years and I'm still on OS 10.3.9 and not able to upgrade even to the 10.4's but unlike my 3 year old Gateway laptop turned paperweight, my old Mac just keeps going and going.  I love my poor old Mac.


Oh, and I found out the hard way that my paper shredder that claims to also shred credit cards lied.  Oh, it shredded the card all right but the plastic from the cards fused the blades of the shredder together and now it won't work.


And, last night I was informed that I had screwed up someone's points last year because I completely misunderstood how a scoring procedure was supposed to work and while it would have been nice if this had been brought to my attention  before the 2009 racing year's points were finalized instead of waiting to speak up 6 weeks into the new racing year at which point there's nothing I can do about it especially since my laptop with the scoring program is dead but I still feel like a complete idiot and really, can I just start this year over?


And if you've made it all the way to the end of my whiny kvetch, you deserve sainthood.