Eclectic and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Month*

Once upon a time, there was a woman whose husband and three charming children made her life complete. Challenging, to be sure, but complete -- in a good way. Then, it became May 2008.

It actually begins sometime in April, when Mr. Eclectic had knee surgery. In itself, not so horrible. Next, Mr. Eclectic had a problem with his inner ear.

It got so bad that the swelling impinged on his facial nerve, which caused him to experience Bell's palsy, making him look like he'd had a stroke. It frightened Eclectic badly.

The medicine the doctor prescribed for Mr. Eclectic's Bell's palsy (or maybe the palsy itself, no one seems to know), gave the shingles virus an opportunity to rear its ugly head all along Mr. Eclectic's already irritated facial nerve. Shingles, in case you don't know, is not very much fun. So the doctor(s) prescribed even more medication.

Eventually, all the medicine combined to nearly suppress Mr. Eclectic's immune system, leaving him vulnerable to "secondary infection." Meaning, now Mr. Eclectic has pneumonia and he's been fighting it for nearly two weeks. He coughs a lot. Especially when he's lying down, like, at night when Eclectic is trying to sleep.

Then, on Saturday, because Mr. Eclectic feels like crap but still wanted to get out of the house, the Eclectics went for a drive. Which was great, right up to the part where we got lost on a tiny, TEENY track alongside an irrigation canal at the top of a fairly steep ridgeline in the middle of nowhere and couldn't turn around. (See "tiny, teeny track" and "alongside an irrigation canal" part of the previous sentence.) Still, the family Eclectic was having fun, being the sort of family that likes an adventure.

BUT: when everyone decided it was time for dinner, we still had to find a way down off the teeny tiny track, and the only way was across the side of a slope, through a pear orchard. The grown-up Eclectics got out of the pickup to survey the route, and everything looked great. What we couldn't see was that the orchardist had quite thoughtfully left the groundwater system on for what we later learned had been the past three days, meaning, there was 6-8 inches of mud hiding under the grassy surface between the trees.

The Eclectics drove slowly across the slope and rather quickly realized that the ground beneath our tires was sliding. It was really no time at all before the pickup nosed heavily into the trunk of a thirty-year-old pear tree, mired up to its hubcaps in mud and grass. Thankfully, the Eclectics have lots of friends in the area, of the sort who will good-naturedly show up for two days in a row and help get your truck out of a hillside orchard, including calling the orchardist to ask him to turn off the ( &%*#!-ing groundwater so the mud can dry).

The insurance adjuster is supposed to show up anyday now. In the meantime, they called our attention to the portion of our declarations page which notified us three months ago that they had discontinued rental car coverage in the case of single-car, at-fault collisions.

Some months, it's just best if you move to Australia.






*Apologies to Alexander and his author.