Fay-be-Gone

We had been considering ourselves super-super fortunate — we didn’t have a tree crash into our house, we aren’t in a flood plain (maybe in a 1000 years, but right now our house is on a hillock in an elevated section in the west part of Tallahassee), we didn’t have to drive in this mess… when we heard a loud crash, which was part of our guest-bathroom ceiling falling in.

(The guest bathroom is “my” bathroom, sort of — we are a bit territorial that way. Except now that there is a giant hole over the bathtub, we are Sharing the other bathroom.)

Well, I had been wondering what the third thing was. You know how things come in threes. There was Sandy’s car, then there was the microwave oven/kitchen fan (far too boring to blog about), and then This.

I may have brought this on by finding the $120 FM traffic receiver that goes to my GPS, which was actually never lost but was just camouflaged among the the 8,000 other cords I had placed in my new glove box, all tidily rolled up, perhaps too tidily.

These cords are all black and about the same length, but one of them conversationalates with traffic conditions in big cities (n.b.: that would not mean Tallahassee) and has already saved my bacon on one trip by asking me if I wanted to avoid a traffic jam (yes! I did want to avoid a traffic jam, as a matter of fact) and steering me out of Atlanta through what a friend who lived years in Los Angeles calls “surface roads” and what reminded me of several scenes in The Bone Collector, but it worked and that’s what counts.

(Nota bene #2: I have never placed gloves in a glove box.)

Or maybe I made this happen by figuring out that my iPod’s butt-hole (as I think of its syncing port) may have gone slightly off-kilter when I landed full-force on top of my iPod during a bad fall while running in Provincetown, and if you have to fall anywhere and any time, it might as well be P-Town in May.

I have had trouble syncing my iPod ever since then (I also tore up my elbow, but who cares about that), and more than once had to coax pins back into place with a sewing pin. Then I decided to try to ease the interface board more centered to the butt-hole by gently but firmly pushing it with a strip cut from an old hotel room swipe card, and that has worked beautifully. So the iPod couldn’t be “three.”

Continuing the “I don’t want to bore you” motif, I won’t tell you all about hurricanes and deductibles in Florida, except to say I am glad we are fiscally conservative and I never liked blue in that bathroom anyway. But I am very, very glad the ceiling chose to fall in two hours after my shower, because the plaster and nasty stuff that rained down might not have so much have scratched me, but just the sound and surprise would have given me a heart attack!

So, my apologies for not giving you a savvy link-roundup or astute insights into our latest writing workshop. Even after a bracing glass of grape-flavored nerve medicine, I still feel rattled. Crawling into the ceiling with a flashlight, this appeared to be the only damage, and compared to what others have experienced, it’s not very much. But I resent that this storm has crammed its hands into our wallets. Fay, be gone, good riddance, don’t let the door hit you in the butt!