I have to warn you, this is a longer post than usual! If you don't read to the end, I understand!
When I was in college, I couldn't believe how easy some people have it. I know everyone has their trials, but I don't quite believe it when some people say that if you saw everyone's trials in a pile you would instantly grab yours back up. Whenever I hear people say that, I think of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. Perchik says to him "Money is the world's curse." He replies (as I think I would!) "May the Lord smite me with it. And may I never recover." I think we are given our trials because they are meant to be hard. Something that we have a hard time handling. I have told my mom that it seems like some people are ice skating through life, where things just seem to work out for them! And then there's David and I. We have the Mitchell luck. It feels like we are army crawling through it! I feel bad for David. I have some of the worst luck in the world and it has rubbed off on him. He used to have good luck, but when we got married that changed. The school forced him to graduate so now we don't get any financial aid from the government or the school and just to make things harder on him, he can't practice his cello at our apartment even during the middle of the day because our neighbors keep complaining to our managers about it.
The last few months I have had so many things happen that it's (almost) comical! I just need to get this off my chest so I can stop thinking about it and get some sleep tonight.
Around Christmas, we were driving home from my parents house after having dinner there. I dropped David off at the apartment so I could record the weather data. I took Asher with me because he was asleep in the car seat and I didn't want to wake him up. To get to the weather station, you have to drive up this random hill on a dirt road. I did the weather, and started backing the car down the hill (there's no room to turn around up there when it's snowing). The snow was so deep and so thick and wet, that I started veering a little off course and was sucked clear off the road. And got stuck. And I've lived in Idaho long enough to know when you're kind of stuck and when there's no hope of getting out without help. I was in the latter situation. I could've called David, but it would've taken him 20 or so minutes to walk up there (our 2nd car had a dead battery...more on that later) and even when he did come, the only thing he could do was stand there with me. So I called my dad to come rescue me. I don't know what I'm going to do when we move away! My parents have rescued us many a time...And he said he would be up soon. I started trying to dig out my tires with a snow shoe (the only shovel-type thing I had and just happened to have in my car), but it wasn't working out. At this point, Asher woke up. Wonderful. And he was tired and hungry, so in a REALLY good mood. I almost started laughing at how ridiculous my situation was. Right then, an older gentleman pulled over and asked if I needed help. I wanted to kiss him! I said I did and my dad was on the way, but I didn't know how long he would be. But the man told me his brother was driving right behind him and had a tow rope and they could help. I was so incredibly grateful and knew Heavenly Father had sent them to rescue me! So these two men who had to have been in their 70's were on their hands and knees in the snow trying to figure out how to best get me out. I was trying to help, but Asher was so upset about being hungry, tired, and now cold. The man said his wife who was sitting in the car could take him while we were getting my car out. I normally don't hand my child off to strangers, but I knew he would be ok with her. By the time my dad and brother got there, they had gotten my car out. I was (and still am!) so grateful for their help. But, ever since then our car has been making weird noises that keep getting worse. So now we have to take it in to the mechanic. David says that with our luck it won't just be some screw that needs to be tightened, they'll tell us that the engine is hanging on by a thread and will need to be completely replaced. So I can't wait to do that!
With our second car, we have an '84 Bronco II. It's a clunker and is probably more work than it's worth, but when it does work, it's nice to have 2 cars. The battery died in December when we were having temperatures that were about 20 below zero. We wanted to wait till it warmed up a little before we decided to switch the battery, and then we didn't have money or time, and then I found a sticker on it one day saying that if nobody claimed it, it was going to get towed because they thought it was abandoned. So I quickly called our managers, made sure it wasn't going to get towed, and we took the battery to an auto shop. They said the battery was basically dead and to take it back to where we got it because it was probably still under our 2 year warranty. So we did. They said the sticker on the battery was the expiration for the warranty. We were about 3 days past the date. They wouldn't give us a new battery. We even looked at the other batteries they had. Some of them had stickers that would expire in the next 6 months. I feel bad for whoever gets those ones.
April was a bad month too. One night, after I had put Asher down, I decided we should get some food in our fridge so I went grocery shopping. I was so tired after a long day of work, watching Asher, and finally grocery shopping, that I was so happy that I would get to spend the rest of the night relaxing. I was getting the bags out of the back of the car when my phone slipped right out of my hands. My phone that I've had 6 months. It didn't hit the pavement too hard so I thought it would be ok. When I picked it up, I started crying. The screen was cracked. Not as bad as when I cracked my other phone's screen back in November, but still pretty bad. Bad enough that there is almost no way I'll be able to make it another year and a half before I'm eligible for a new one. I felt so horrible that I was going to cost us more money on getting a replacement. I still feel bad. David was very nice when I told him about it. I don't have the money to buy a new one out of contract, and it's hard to find a used one that still looks like it works. I did manage to find someone to fix my screen and they said they had the right color, but when I took my phone in, it was the wrong color so I have to wait a little longer. I think I'm going to superglue it to my hand when I get it fixed.
Also in April, I lost my keys. I thought they would turn up after a day or two like they usually do, but they didn't. They didn't turn up after a week. I combed through our apartment. I looked all over our car, all over the Bronco, I even emailed someone at the Idaho Falls Symphony to see if I lost them during rehearsal. They never turned up. Since my keys were the only ones that had our mail key on them (another stroke of good luck), we had to tell our apartment manager that we would need a copy of it. When I asked him if he had a spare key I could copy, he told me that they had just emptied out all the spare keys. I could ask the post office to make me one for $40, or he had someone that could do it for $20. I knew, even as I was talking to him, that I would find my keys as soon as we got our new mail keys. The next day we got a new mail key. The day after that I found my keys. Another thing I wanted to hide from David because of how bad I felt. He was also pretty nice about that, but I could tell he was getting frustrated with me.
Right after I lost my keys, the Bronco got a flat tire. It honestly looks like someone just slashed the tire because it went from full to completely flat overnight. We still have to get that fixed, but we need both of us home to do that. One to watch Asher and one to take the tire to Les Schwab. But with our schedules, usually the only time we're both home is at night and by then we're both so tired we don't want to do it. Maybe that will be our project this weekend!
Last but not least, last night I dropped the connector to David's headphones in some soup and now they're ruined. I bought him some new ones (that I found on sale!).
In closing, if any more things go wrong I will probably just take David and Asher and move to Austria where my sister says it's beautiful and lovely and no one will complain about David playing his cello too loudly. ;)
