108 - Christmas

Well, Christmas Eve was a semi-success. My cousin Jamie and I spent most of the day cooking and arranging food, as did her daughter, Ashley, and my mom. People started to arrive around the scheduled time and the party got started. I made buffalo chicken dip, jalapeno poppers, sausage balls and salsa (I call it chunky salsa but I guess it's really pico de gallo). The salsa was the biggest success, everyone wants my recipe... problem is, there really isn't one. I eyeball it, I taste it... there's no known quantity as everything depends on the ripeness of the tomatoes, the amount of juice in a lime, the size of the jalapeno, etc. I attempted to explain it, but it's just something you have to play around with. Jamie made onion dip, banana bread, and took a recipe for cookies off my hands which helped immensely, plus she helped in many other ways when I needed it. She even bought me an apron. The girl gets me. Everyone contributed in some way... grandma still didn't relax though, I don't think she sat down until everyone went home... 87 and still ticking.

The last three days were not the best for us. So far nothing horrible has happened today, but the night is still young, and until the day is over I refuse to call it good.

The day we arrived was definitely not good. The roads surrounding the RV sites at this park are not user-friendly. As we were attempting to back into our reserved spot, the front passenger wheel dropped off the asphalt and onto the shoulder, which is probably an inch or two difference. Because of the angle the RV was at, it connected (solidly) with the driver's side of the truck bed and dented it. I heard a loud crack, but I thought it was a large branch giving way under the tire, and when Mike started to yell, I thought the wheel had gotten bent. We thought it was the straw that broke the camel's back but we were wrong...

The next night we met up with family for dinner at The Country Squire, originally one of the nicer restaurants in the area, which has kind of fallen in the ranks in the last few years. They used to bring a slab of beef when you ordered a steak, it was on a cart, covered in a towel, and a cook from the kitchen would uncover it and ask you how thick you wanted your steak; you paid by the pound. It was really cool, but they don't do that anymore. Anyway, it was chaos. Our waitress was overwhelmed by us, and the layout of the table was not conducive to conversation. Catfish was good though. Afterward we planned to head to Walmart to grab what we needed for the Christmas Eve party instead of waiting until the absolute last minute. The GPS pulled a fairly common stunt and took us in the wrong direction, so Mike pulled onto the shoulder to double-check the address, and that's when things started to go wrong. It had been raining, and Mississippi is made of red clay. Our back end is so heavy that when he cut the wheel to get back on the road and we started to move, we started to slide down the embankment. The harder he tried to get us back up, the further down we went until we finally settled into a low point. We couldn't move forward, we couldn't back up, the wheels were digging further into the muck. He has offroad skills and says he's been through worse... it's just the ground here... wet clay is unforgiving, even when you have 4-wheel drive.

It was amazing how many people stopped to see if we were okay. At least seven. The second person tried to pull us out, but his truck didn't have enough power. Of course it rained the hardest when Mike was outside hooking up the tow cable... he was drenched, muddy and cold. I tried to call roadside assistance, but the signal was weak, and just before someone answered the call was disconnected. I tried both of Mike's phones (work and personal) but they wouldn't even ring. Finally I got a signal and was just about to have a truck sent out when another guy in a truck stopped. He turned his truck the other way and pulled us from behind instead of from the front. At first it seemed hopeless, like a repeat of the last guy, but finally we got traction and he pulled us out. Mud was flying everywhere, I could smell how hot the tires had gotten, but we were out. If that hadn't worked, there was another guy who stopped earlier that was going to come back with a truck, and another guy took our number to call when he got home to see if we'd gotten help or if we needed him to call someone. People like that deserve good karma for their willingness to help. It sure helped us out... but I was already drained from the previous night, and everything else that has happened to us recently so I had a mini-meltdown and decided Walmart could wait.

I say that Christmas Eve was a semi-success because we almost made it through a night without something bad happening to us...

Grandma's house is fairly rural, and therefore, pretty dark at night. Instead of attempting to back up in the dark, we were going to pull forward, and turn around so we could drive down the driveway and be able to see. Mike had vented the sunroof, which put the back of it up at an angle. At first we thought the antenna caught a tree limb, but then our sunroof came tumbling down the windshield and down the hood. Grandma has some low hanging electrical lines coming from her garage to the house, and we couldn't see them in the dark. We had walked underneath them several times before when it was light outside, but didn't give them any consideration that night... hell, even if I had I probably would have assumed we could fit underneath them with no problem, but we couldn't... and the sunroof caught them as we were backing up. It's a wonder that the wires didn't come down on top of our truck, or snap and take out the power at grandma's house.

We were pretty much in shock at that point. I mean... how does that happen?

It doesn't.

It can't.

But it did.

So we headed for home, and by the time I thought about calling to make sure everything was okay at grandma's, we were about ten or fifteen minutes down the road... and my phone was dead... battery was drained. So I had to wait until we got to the RV to make the call. Mike was done, it was all he could take and he ended up on the floor, exhausted. I called it in to Allstate and did what I had to do for the night (filling the fresh water tank so we have water if it freezes, and scooping the litterbox). I tried to cover the sunroof with a trash bag... wasn't long enough. I had some thick plastic sheeting with me that NASA issued after hurricane Ike. It was a bag, but I cut the end off and cut one side so that it was one big sheet. I tried to make that work, but I was tired, it was windy, it was dark, and I couldn't get it to cooperate so I was going to lay it across the seats... it ended up in a wad because I kept hearing noises and didn't know if there was an animal nearby, or a person... I spooked myself. After that I pretty much collapsed onto the couch. I was exhausted and wanted to sleep, but I was too wound up, and then the stress collected in my gut and I felt nauseous so that prevented me from sleeping. I think I finally passed out sometime after 3 am.

Today, it didn't rain... it poured. Mike got the plastic snug over the top of the roof about an hour or two before the rain started. It still leaked a little bit though. We have an appointment with a claims adjuster tomorrow morning. Allstate has drivethru claims centers where you take your vehicle in, they ask you what happened, they write a damage estimate and issue you a check on the spot (minus your deductible). When I used it for my Mini it was painless. And they cover rental cars for the duration of the repair, or up to 30 days. It may have to be done in Alabama though, because we're set to leave here on the 27th or 28th.

So... another $500... plus the hassle of taking the truck in for repairs... again... and the scar all these things leave on your psyche. You start to wonder if you're a bad person. What did you do to deserve such a shitty run of bad luck? Why is this happening? Most importantly... when is it going to stop? Seriously... a person can only take so much and we've reached the end of the rope.

On the upside, we continue to be awed by our friends and family. People who haven't seen us in years have offered to help us if they can. They also deserve good karma, and maybe it helps (them) to know that gestures like that do make a difference to our mindset. It may not be outwardly apparent, but each gesture is like a rope to grab onto and pull ourselves out of the muck.

We're hoping that by parking the RV at one of our home parks, where we stay 'for free' 21 days out of 28, things will improve somewhat. Less travel means less opportunity for damage, or so we hope. It sucks that Mike will be staying in hotel rooms, eating out every day on the job, and I will be in the RV where transportation can be complicated... but something's gotta give, and it's better than having him in the middle east and us being apart for months at a time. I'm trying to wrap my head around how we could get my car to Alabama... I am all for that, but the issue I have is that if we do pick up and move, we have to be able to put it somewhere.

Anyway... here's hoping 2013 is an improvement. And I hope everyone else had a merry Christmas and enjoyed spending time with friends and family like we (mostly) have. :)