Like a Hurricane Hit

You know your life is crazy when you forget to mention that your car broke down. When that's minor, compared to the other catastrophes of life.

My parents came over yesterday afternoon—ostensibly for the Bengals game, but really to see Eleanor. My mom noticed that the glass window in the back door had a huge crack running through it, sealed over with duct tape.

"What happened to your door?" She logically enquired.

"The dog did it," was my short answer, although the more truthful answer is that the dog caused me to break the glass.

He really has no shame. He eats anything and everything that is left within snout's reach. Wicker clothes hamper, plastic breast pump parts, dirty diapers ... anything that sounds entirely unappealing to a sane human being, my dog demolishes.

The middle of last week, Eleanor and I were unexpectedly running to the store to replace a breast feeding part that Beckett had eaten. I closed the back door and hadn't even made it down the porch steps before I heard him grabbing the empty pizza boxes off the stove. A hot, fiery rage filled my veins.

I ripped the door back open, grabbed the one pizza box on the floor, and started banging it around as I looked for the dog and the other pizza box. When I found him and the partially shredded pizza box (he'd only had 30 seconds, or else it would have been completely gone), I yelled at the top of my lungs about what a bad, disrespectful dog he was. I banged around the pizza box some more to work out a bit more of my frustration. I threw the pizza boxes on top of the fridge, which he hasn't figured out how to get to (yet), went back outside, and slammed the door for good measure.

Hence, the cracked glass.

Then on Friday, Keith's car wouldn't start when was leaving work. Completely dead. Some good Samaritan gave him a jump. Which you would think is a good thing ... except it meant that it died again a few blocks later. Only this time he was in the middle of a busy downtown street, blocking traffic, instead of in his parking lot. And the car was so dead, he couldn't even get the hazard lights to come on, so he got many dirty looks and filthy words hurled at him as he waited over an hour for the tow truck.

So yesterday afternoon I explained about the door to my Mom, but completely forgot to even mention the car fiasco. And that was BEFORE our power went out early Sunday evening, thanks to the high winds of Hurricane Ike's leftovers. As of mid-day today, our power is still out. The power company is saying that, with so many homes out of power (about 400,000 in the Northeast Ohio area, according to cleveland.com), it may be until the end of the week until power is restored everywhere.

This morning I packed up Eleanor, Eleanor-related necessities (two bulging bags) and the ungrateful, disrespectful dog, and headed out to my sister's place on the Westside, which had never lost power. And here I am.

I'm hoping the silver lining is that normal life won't seem so bad after this. The baby may be screaming, but at least I can watch "Project Runway" to drown her out! I'm dirty from cleaning up another one of the dog's messes? At least I'm assured of hot water for a shower!

After dealing with this, it will all seem easy, right?