My blog title pretty much describes how things went for me last week. It all started when I was driving our car up our driveway.
Since we live where the Red River Valley begins the landscape can be pretty much describe as flat. We live out in the country and our property contains one of the few hills in the area. Our driveway travels up the side of that hill.
The driveway was covered with several inches of loose snow and I didn’t get a good run when I was on the bottom of the driveway so as our Chevy Cruz began to crest the top of the hill the front wheels began to spin.
I knew I was in big trouble if I continued spinning my wheels so I stopped, put the car in reverse and proceeded to back down the driveway preparing to take another more speedy run at the pesky hill.
In the process I got a little too close to the edge of the driveway and suddenly I was sliding off the driveway and into the ditch! I was immediately stuck.
The bad luck had begun but we weren’t through the worst of it yet. As I opened my door, pushing hard because the snow was up against the door I must have unknowingly brushed against the automatic locks. After slamming the door I realized I had just locked myself out of my car.
But no worry, remember I was stuck in my own yard so all I had to do was walk to the house and get my second set of keys to unlock the car. When I returned with the second set of keys I was dismayed to find out the locks did not respond when I pressed the unlock device on my keyring.
My first set of keys were still in the ignition and I discovered that when that is the case the car doors cannot be opened by a second set of keys. So when the tow truck was finally called not only did the car have to be pulled out of the ditch but for an extra $40 the car had to be unlocked also.
How’s my luck holding up so far? 🙁
After that expensive incident I grounded the Cruz and replaced it with our four- wheel drive Jeep. So my luck seemed to be improving and I was starting to feel joyful once again as I roared up the driveway hill with ease.
And then my snow blower caused my luck to plummet into the abyss!
The snow banks are very hard this winter. The driving winds have piled the snow into drifts that are concrete-like which can be very hard on the belts that drive the snow blowers.
I had just put a new belt on a year ago so I was not concerned about having any belt problems this winter. Nobody had yet told me about snowdrifts of cement doing damage to new belts. We found out the hard way when the plume of blowing snow exiting the snow blower’s spout suddenly stopped along with the snow blower’s engine.
Not realizing a broken belt had caused the problem an attempt was made to restart the engine by pulling the starter rope. After several attempts at that the starter rope broke.
Do you see a pattern to this luck thing?
After closer examination it became obvious that the broken belt was the problem because when the belt broke it ripped a hole in the plastic shield. One could peek into the shield opening and view the twisted, mangled belt.
I made a quick decision to change this bad luck pattern by going into our local Co-op station and ordering a new “Cadillac-like’ snow blower. It was a top of the line machine! My luck had changed. It would take three to four days for the machine to arrive at the station but then, boy would I be able to blow snow! 🙂
That night we received five inches of snow and me without a functioning snow blower. The bad luck had returned but I made the best of it. Since my new snow blower would be delivered in a couple of days I cheated when I had to shovel the driveway by hand. I only shoveled out two narrow paths for the tires to travel in. Pretty clever I thought. 🙂
Bad luck reared it’s ugly head again when Thursday passed, then Friday and finally Saturday and no sign of the new ‘Cadillac’ snow blower!
Saturday night the winds picked up to forty and fifty miles per hour and continued to blow until Sunday evening.
The driveway that a day earlier contained twin shoveled paths for our Jeep’s tires was now full of three foot, cement like snow drifts. We were trapped, forced to miss church and most importantly missed my favorite jelly-filled roll at coffee fellowship! 🙁 Bad luck had struck again!
A quick call was made to a neighboring farmer and he assured me that bright and early Monday morning he would arrive and remove our cement-like drifts. So we settled in for a quiet Sunday trapped in our own home with not even a chance of obtaining a jelly-filled roll until the rescuing farmer arrived.
As Monday a.m. arrived I could feel my luck changing and then I heard it. It was the sound of a John Deere tractor charging down our driveway. And then beautiful plumes of snow began to fly far out into our field as the cement-like snowdrifts lost their battle to the powerful John Deere snow blowing machine! 🙂 We were free!
The good luck continued to flow as I asked the farmer how much I owed him and he smiled kindly and said, “You owe me nothing!”
Later in the afternoon I received a phone call from the Co-op announcing that my ‘Cadillac’ snow blower had arrived and they would be delivering it. My change in luck continued.
The new snow blower contains all the ‘bells and whistles’ and I may need to invest in a one credit grad school course to fully understand how to operate the machine. But even that is good luck because one should always be in the process of learning new things. Right?
So my string of good luck continues and to ensure that I don’t relapse I’m going out into our garage and locate that old horseshoe I found out in our pumpkin patch a few years ago. I’m going to tack that old horseshoe above our garage door for good luck.
In case that’s not enough I’m going to search the internet for a couple rabbit foot key chains to attach our Chevrolet and Jeep keys to. No more bad luck to this kid! 🙂
I hope your week went better than mine. 🙂
Until next time.
