Raining Spears

It's been raining big spears on us for the past couple of days--points down. It all started on the trip back home to Oklahoma from the funeral in Baton Rouge. The plan was to avoid the running sore that is Dallas and take the blue highways through Oklahoma back home. Great idea until we got to Atoka, OK. Sounds like a speed trap, doesn't it? Well, it was, and the ticket for "72 in a 55" cost me--are you sitting down?--$241 frigging bucks!! The cop was polite, and I knew the minute I saw him, we were doomed. No mercy: he could plainly see a couple of geezers in the car, but that didn't stop him from writing us up. It's obvious this is Atoka's sole source of income. And it occurred to me that this cop got paid out of the same pot that these outrageous fines go into. There's a conflict of interest here somewhere.

But this is just the first in a series of disasters to befall us in the past three days. Next thing was my discovery on Saturday, that the battery in the car was dead as Franco and had to be replaced. Which in turn required my going to the Mart of Darkness, and worse, hanging around for almost 2 hours in the hideous place until the car got fixed. More money for this.

There's more: my iPod has crapped out. I don't know if it will be worth fixing. It's got some kind of hardware problem. Will not play after being turned on. Sad, sad face. I use my iPod a lot. I will have to be repaired or replaced.

There's more: the microwave oven in the kitchen has also crapped out. My wife says she overcooked an egg in there, and after that happened, the thing would make this awful noise whenever the door on the microwave was shut. When the noise stopped . . . eventually after I gave it a couple of hits with my fist, no more heating. Let me make this observation right now: modern man cannot live without a microwave. Susan says she would give up just about every other appliance before the microwave. Yet another costly problem staring at us. Guy is coming tomorrow to fix it, we hope. Maybe it will be something simple and cheap.

Against all these disasters, Susan leaving her phone charger in Baton Rouge and being without a phone since we got back . . . well, this is just a very minor annoyance.