This guy I was married to once (Jim, a man with a huge and wonderful sense of humor--the very best thing about him), used to say, cheerfully, "Some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you."
Today was one of those bear-gets-you days. Peggy Moody and I have been working on the relaunch of the Cottage Tales website. We had it all figured out, until the artist didn't deliver the crucial piece, and didn't deliver it late, to boot. So we're scratching our heads and trying to see what we can salvage of what we've already done. A good plan gone bad.
We had a crack in our car windshield and decided to get it replaced. The guy who fixed it did a good job, but he thought it was okay to take the TX Tag (one of those electronic gizmos that allow you to zip like Batman and Robin in their Batmobile through the toll plaza without stopping to feed the greedy meter man) off the old windshield and glue it onto the new. No. Not. Three emails, two phone calls, some language difficulties, a lost TX Tag envelope, and a few harsh husband-wife words later, we now have a new TX Tag on our new windshield and are good to go through the toll plaza, zip-zip. (The moral of this story: do not replace your windshield, no matter how bad that crack looks. It's not true that the glass will fall into your lap or shatter across your face. All those tags and seals and certificates and parking permits pasted across it will hold it together and keep it from breaking. You and your windshield will live forever.)
Oh, and speaking of the car. Our nice little Honda Civic only has about 110,000 miles on it (we drive our cars forever) and is still in very good shape. Her name is Nancy (Drew, of course--the other vehicle is Ned). Nancy just needed a "little" work to keep her tick-tocking for another 110,000 miles, right? Wrong. Turns out that she needs quite a lot of work, about $1900 worth of work. And that little red light that says the passenger's-side airbag isn't working? Hey, it's wrong, too. Neither airbags are working. Add $499 to the bill.
And today was the day our cat was supposed to get her teeth cleaned. (What? You didn't know that cats needed dental work? Now you do.) Turns out that she has a kidney or bladder infection, though, we're not sure which. Discovering this and getting the antibiotic ran to $137, and the teeth still haven't been cleaned. That will happen in two weeks, after the antibiotic clears out the infection. Lovely cat. Teeth of gold.
Some days it really is just you and the bear, Jim.
But we're still blooming here. This is monarda, otherwise known unglamorously as spotted horsemint. And tomorrow is bound to be better. Definitely. Tomorrow the bear and I will come to an understanding.
Oh, and if you haven't checked out the new What Wildness group blog, there's no better time.
Reading note, from "A Full Life in a Small Place," by Janice Emily Bowers, in What Wildness is This:
I pick up my journal again. A white-winged dove calls from the telephone wire, its voice throaty and muffled. He sounds as though his head is buried beneath a pillow. The watermelon vines sliently plot to take over the backyard. Tiny blue butterflies spark from the zucchini plants. The scutter of an invisible bug under fallen leaves brings the cat to attention. If these ordinary miracles aren't enough, that's too bad, because this garden--this here and now--is all I've got. It's more than enough for a full life in a small place.