The Lord is Testing Me....

So, 2015 hasn't exactly got off on the right foot for me this year.Things just keep happening. Trying Things. Demoralising Things. Stupid, Why-Is-This-Happening-To-Me Things. And Things you'd rather didn't happen, but are the price of being Human in a Fallen World, and which make all the Other Things seem much more upsetting than they usually would be.

Some of the Things are small, and take care of themselves, such as plumbing problems, which are caused by a neighbour's nearly-frozen pipes, and that cleared themselves up as soon as there was no more near-frozeness to vex them.

Somethings are entirely out of one's hands, and have a slightly adventuresome feel to them,such as work-related crisises. When one works with the General Public, and the General Public happens to include Lunatics and Entitled Itinerants, there is bound to be a fair dose of Drama and Weirdness- often in tandem.

And then there are the Things that make you feel like Tevya on Fiddler on the Roof: "Sometimes I think, when it gets too quiet up there, You say to Yourself, "What kind of mischief can I play on My friend, Maria?" I an I have had rather a lot of those sorts of Things on top of all the Other Things.

Take, for example, the Perpetually Overheating Car:

The Subaru which is my current vehicle has had this trouble since I bought the thing. It is a used car, and the people who owned it before me must have stored it near a dryer, because the radiator was full of lint. I kid you not. My car was overheating because of someone else's linty laundry. So the mechanic power-flushed it, and it ran a champion.....And then, it was overheating again, and the radiator was needing to be replaced - no doubt because of all the stress it had been under from all that lint. Then there was the false-alarms,which was a faulty temperature gauge. It was replaced, and seemed to sort the issue for a while, but then it started doing this cute thing where it the temperature would occasional spike, and immediately drop down again. Not often, just enough to be troubling. The car was still running like a champion.... Until I went out, one day,just before Christmas, and the car wouldn't start at all. It made a dreadful asthmatic coughing, that seemed to tear it apart from the inside. So I had to have it towed, and the Mechanic re-built the engine, and declared that that had sorted the silly monkey, and I'd have no further bother with it. 

And then the car overheated when I tried to take it Off The Hill For Mass.I didn't get very far - maybe 15 minutes into the drive, and the temperature rocketed up into dangerous territory. I pulled over and contemplated for a while. The engine sounded fine, and there was no steam coming from it, and I was not far from home, so I decided to turn around and try again in someone else's vehicle. The car died just short of my home, steaming like a hot-springs, and smelling to high-heaven. So back to the Mechanic it went.

And then, one of those Other Things happened - to whit, I spilled coffee on my venerable old laptop, and even though I did all the things you are supposed to do to save it from such a calamitous event, including opening it up and checking for interiour damage (of which I saw none) it hath died the death, and I am at present without a computer, and loath to look for one, until I have word from the mechanic as to whether the Subaru is worth investing in any farther....

And today's crisis? The Loaner Landy, which the Mechanic bequeathed to me, whilst he struggles to discover what, exactly is the issue with that Dratted Subaru- and which has been in my possession a grand total of 3 days, and driven me a grand total of about 10 miles - that is, to work and back.... it has a flat tire. Totally flat.No air at all. Sitting on the rim. And the valve cap is missing. And it was fine last night! So it wasn't my fault!

So... that's what's going on here.Perhaps I broke a mirror and don't remember it..... perhaps there is a curse on me. But I sure could use a Nice Thing for a change!