The Cascading Catastrophes of Fall 2012

November 1st was the deadline for mom and I to turn in the manuscript for our forthcoming book, The Bullying Antidote, to our editor at Hazelden. And boy, was there "trouble at the border." It started innocently enough...

1. Fenders Bent & Epic Road Trip

It started a few days before my birthday, when my brother and sister-in-law drove into town. They woke up the morning after their arrival to find their car—with contents yet to be unpacked after a late-night arrival—gone.  Not my bad luck, theirs—but that day I got into an almost comical 50/50 fender-bender, backing into another car that was backing out of a parking space behind me. Friday night at my birthday party, adventure got the better of me and I volunteered to drive my sister-in-law back to Moab in the rental car (my brother went on to Hawaii) and fly back the next day. It was awesome, getting out of the city and seeing the wide empty spaces of America, bonding like crazy with a soul-sister. I lost a few days of writing, but we still had three months to go.

2. Goodbye Auntie

The weekend after I returned, I hung out at the pool with my Auntie Rita, who has always adored me. She gave me my first (and best, and only) cat when I was two. She told me about her latest community-building exploits (always a mover and shaker) and mentioned her weird occasional dizzy spells.The next morning she died suddenly from a brain anyeruism/stroke thingy. I spent the next few weeks grieving and organizing music and graphics for her service and online memorial...(ripples of love, mystery, sadness)... and not writing very much. Somewhere in there, a new dent mysteriously appeared in my bumper, but I never got a chance to call the insurance company...

3. Where's my TV?

Labor Day brought a relaxing afternoon at the pool with good friends, and a gorgeous red sunset painting a new fall pallete in the sky acknowledged our grief but also welcomed a new season. When we got home, our TVs were missing. Our poor dog was locked in a bedroom. On the bright side, they took my monitor but not my computer. They didn't take the laptops. They tossed my jewelry across the bed but didn't take anything (I don't have any gold, just rhinestones). On the dark side, they stole about exactly the amount of our (very high) deductible. (Goodbye, Christmas.) The insurance paperwork ate into the writing time. 

4. Where's my Data?

The following week, my netbook had a hard drive failure, eating up 18 months of my journals and putting a real kink in the book writing process. (Thank goodness I use Dropbox for the book!)  My mom found me a new laptop on Craigslist, (thanks Mom!), but moving into it was slow and sometimes frustrating process. I had to order new memory three times before I got it working right. A week after that, Donald's laptop failed, taking weeks of essays and Chemistry journals with it. And a week after that, my desktop computer also died. We think it got dropped in the burglary. The repair guy inadvertently erased the disk that had all my data on it. I discovered Disk Drill and Crash Plan. Not one, not two, but three computers. What are the odds?

5. Really?

So one day in the middle of all that, all the lights came on on the dashboard of my car, a 2006 Toyota Prius. The prognosis? The main battery had failed, a $3000 part. The good news? It was still on warranty! Woo hoo! Good news! Happy dance! But the weirdness continued... I got a shuttle home from the shop but could not enter my neighborhood to get back to writing because the police were hunting down a bad guy with a gun. Maybe it was the robber.

6. A Thump on the Head

Driving around with my new battery one day, feeling as if my troubles had passed, I got one more little howdy from the Universe. At a red light turning green, a Mini-Cooper hit me from behind. I got a whack on the back of the head from the headrest and a license-plate print on my bumper. Off to the chiropractor I went for whiplash treatment, but weeks later my head still feels funny most of the time. I'm getting used to thinking less, sitting still, napping more. When they took the plastic bumper cover off, they discovered the bumper bar was bent in a 'u.' 

7. No Zumba for You

I got subs for my Zumba classes the first few weeks, but every time I thought I was better, I'd rock out, and then my symptoms would return. My doctor, who initially said "it can't possibly be a concussion, you weren't hit hard enough," finally advised me to avoid intense exercise for 6-8 months.  I should have known this was coming. Way back the week Rita died, my iPod was the first thing to go. Since then it had been one little technical difficulty after another—the replacement iPod, missing speaker parts. As if I didn't have enough to grieve—I'd just gotten my business off the ground (and my abs are looking great). This was the final straw. Or so I thought.

8. 'F' is for 'For Goodness Sake, Make it Stop!"

In the midst of all the drama came the first report card of the year. There was not an 'A' to be seen. Finally, I called Kaiser and got the test Donald needed. On the plus side, he was diagnosed with ADD. On the minus side, he was diagnosed with ADD. At last, a clear answer to the doing-homework-but-not-turning-it-in conundrum. At last, my worries were confirmed: he's taken after me. Now I'm in ADD school, learning everything I can, and it's dawning on me where he got it from....

9. All the Little Things

Life is full of dramatic inconveniences. None of us can avoid them. I always liked to define luck as "when the bad things happen at good times" — i.e. the car breaks down in your driveway, not on the highway. There has been plenty of good luck among the bad, but I'm just exhausted from watching things fall apart. I washed the dirty drapes, seeking renewal, and they disintegrated. I borrowed Dave's keyboard for ten minutes and it died, as if I have the touch of death. But when the dog ate all the halloween chocolate and her benign tumor started bleeding all over the house, I found a way to stop the bleeding. Yes, I did.

10. But I did it.

Wasn't there a book in there, somewhere? I white-knuckled it to the deadline, writing for 8 hours at a stretch some days, avoiding FaceBook and socializing and even phone calls. And somehow, keeping my few remaining brain cells focused on the task at hand, I managed to get, with mom, to the part where we it send. Less than a week later, the book is already posted on Barnes n' Noble and Amazon. Talk about whiplash!

Now I'm totally post-partum and wondering what happened to my life before I agreed to let the bully book take over my life.... who am I again?