Partly Cloudy over Missy's House

My friend Missy and her family took a vacation to the beach last week. It's something they do every couple years. When she called me tonight and described their numerous vacation mishaps, I told her she never should've invited me over for that Maryland crab dinner at her house a couple weeks ago - my bad luck must be contagious.

I should let her tell the story - she had me in stitches when she described the "comedy of errors" they endured at Sunset Beach. I can't possibly do it justice, but here's how their family vacation went.

Missy's youngest daughter, 8-year-old Natalie, was riding a bike during vacation when she got her foot caught in the spokes and tore up her leg so badly that she is still on crutches today. She literally ripped the skin off part of her leg. That fiasco handled, Missy tried to soak up some rays on the beach. While there, she got a visit from her husband who said he was taking their 14-year-old son Derek to the emergency room. He'd cut himself on some coral (or barnacles). Derek ended up with stitches on his arm and eight staples on his leg! Staples - ick! The staples were so uncomfortable that he had to get a local beforehand. And I suspect that Derek hates needles as much as I do. I cringed when Missy told me about that.

Meanwhile, their other daughter, 12-year-old Kendall, has been confined to a bubble as a preventative measure. She's still alive and has yet to require an ER visit.

So they left early to come home, thinking they could leave my bad luck at edge of the Atlantic. Not so!

Today Missy had her first day at her new teaching job, and I asked her how it went. She told me it was chaos. Basically she spent her whole day helping kids find their school buses. Huh? Mysteriously, this morning it was discovered that all the school buses had flat tires. A teenage prank, no less. So on opening day of school the buses were running two hours behind, wreaking havoc on families everywhere. I was laughing so hard. I thought, That's the perfect prank - let all the air out of the school bus tires on opening day! She said it is presumed that the perpetrators got the idea from an MTV show.

To top that off, her husband's car stalled and her computer at home is down.

So I told her it was a mistake to have me over to their house. Even Missy admitted it had already occurred to her that it was as if my little black cloud had moved over to her house. My thoughts exactly.

I'd sure like to see that little cloud move on to someone who deserves it, for a change - like that contractor who completed my 10-day deck/fence/patio job in three months last summer, or the doctor who botched my Lasik surgery in February, or the woman at Howard County Recycling who hung up on me this morning when I called for the sixth time to complain about them leaving my recycling bin on the baby grass I am trying to nurture, or the idiots at eCost.com that sent three defective computers in a row this spring then put me through hell trying to get my rightful refund (which took two months). . . .

Oh, never mind. The blogger server doesn't have enough TB of disk space to store such a list.