Run of Bad Luck

So, it’s been a challenging winter and spring season. This has been one of the worst winters on record here for extreme snowfall amounts, and living on a rural private road as I do makes getting around in bad weather a challenge. For those who listened to 8 Hours in the E.R. you’ll know that I trashed my knee in a freak accident and the recovery has been slow. Combine that with nearly waist deep snow at times and the limits on my mobility really stack up.

I was so excited when the weather finally improved in the late spring that I would be able to go visit my family for a long weekend. I took a trip down to see them and that seemed to start my Run of Bad Luck.

While parked on the roadside in a marked parking spot, a crazy driver weaving down the road at high speed swerved off the road, crossed a bicycle lane, and side swiped my pickup truck. Of course, he didn’t stop and took off down the roadway and disappeared after weaving around a half dozen other cars. My dashcam decided that this will the ideal time to suffer memory card corruption, so even the off chance of my getting their license plate wasn’t to happen. The vehicle was deemed “unsafe to drive” so I got stuck at my relatives for two weeks instead of just a few days. After paying $1,000 to the insurance company, since I didn’t have a license plate for the hit-and-run driver, and to add insult to injury, fresh food in my fridge was wasted by the time I got home due to the extended unplanned stay.

Finally home and settling down to recover from the unpleasant experience, my area got hit with one of the 100-year storms. A million people without power, massive damage to infrastructure from fallen trees, and so forth. The second day into the outages my backup generator quit and wouldn’t start, leaving me scrambling to rewire some battery backup solution to keep my newly replaced fridge contents from going bad again. This continued for nearly two weeks, with having to run daily to the nearest town with power to recharge my battery pack to get through 24 hours. When all that was over, the arborist quote for dealing with all the shattered and partially fallen trees on my property nicked me for another $1,200

I’m really beginning, at this point, to think I must have done something really bad in a past-life to have this kind of bad luck… but Mr. Murphy wasn’t done with me yet. Never tempt fate by saying things like “…it can’t get any worse…”

Two weeks later another massive storm hit, this time torrential rainfall. So much water hit my property that it soaked through to the septic and raised the water level in my septic tank to the point that sewage started to back up into the basement. I took a while to notice that anything was going wrong down there, and by the time the smell worked its way upstairs to an intensity that clearly something was wrong the basement was partially flooded with sewage. Had it just been rain or surface water flooding the basement it would have been easier to deal with, but sewage contamination means that nearly anything touched becomes “non-recoverable”. The basement flooring, bottom three feet of wall, furnace, bathroom fixtures, and many boxes of stuff I had stored down there on the floor have all had to be scrapped.

Someone hit me up with the quote “If it weren’t for bad luck, you wouldn’t have any” and this inspired this little song. A lot of effort went into getting the fiddle work just right, so I hope everyone enjoys this song.

Enjoy this little clip while we wait for the full song to be available for streaming…