We have been cursed. Wilhemina, the Wiccan Wonder Witch, has placed the mother of all b-movie curses on us. We are begging you, Wilhemina, please pull the voodoo pins out of our Kewpie Doll asses and throw us some good karma. I swear that wasn’t my middle finger that I extended when you cut me off in traffic by the IHOP. Please believe me. I would never flip off a fifty year-old woman with bad hair implants and eye brows that looked like Sharpie-drawn, upside down V’s. For the love of Agnes Moorhead, even Endora on Bewitched only screwed with Darren for thirty minutes a show.
Thanks to my stupidity in flipping off this woman or just plain bad luck, my family has been hit by the worst stretch of bad karma over the last six months. Here is just a small sample of what we’ve gone through since the day I flipped-off Wilhemina:
1. The icemaker on our refrigerator sprung a leak and dripped/poured into the basement. I don’t know what was worse, the annoying leak or pulling out the fridge from the wall and discovering Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction crammed behind the fan motor.
2. Our garage door hydraulic system broke and will have to be replaced. A cable apparently snapped and busted a pulley, which in turn cracked open a rusting spring the size of an Anaconda. After examining the amazing number of gadgets that made the door go up and down, we’re probably fortunate that when it broke our house wasn’t catapulted into outer space.
3. Our dishwasher broke. We now have gunked-up dishes that have biologically morphed into new life forms because we can’t seem to keep up with the onslaught of dirty dishes and glasses. My new bff is a moldy, caked-on piece of dried beef and gravy named “Chet.”
4. Some deviant little psychopath threw a rock and broke the outer pane of one of our living room windows. Come to find out- it’s really expensive. Think root canal bill and multiply times two. It’s also possible that Iran has developed and deployed a nuclear warhead, albeit a really shitty, small one.
5. The shower head in our kid’s bathroom stopped doing what it’s supposed to do, spray tiny droplets of water down on our munchkin’s taffy-tangled hair. A cheap fix, but I still haven’t gotten around to buying a new one despite my displeasure of finding that both of my kids use my towel after showering.
6. I fell and sprained a calf ligament while ice skating for the first time. If only I had remembered what a horrendous roller-skater I was in my youth, I would not have spent the entire month of January hobbling around like Ephialtes in the movie 300.
7. My wife fell down the steps and broke a bone in her foot. Now this might not have been Wilhemina’s fault, but I’m blaming it on her anyway. Julie was carrying a basketful of laundry down the steps when she missed the last step and fell, nearly ramming her head through a wall four feet away. Never a graceful ballerina, Julie moved one step closer to earning her master’s degree at the Chevy Chase/Gerald Ford School of Balance.
8. Two more bricks fell off our chimney for no apparent reason. Do you know how disconcerting it is to be taking the trash out on a cold January morning and have a brick fall out of the sky?
9. Our male tabby kitten escaped from the house one morning while Ethan was getting on the bus. Fortunately, after having multiple nightmares about it getting hit by a car or picked off by a marauding neighborhood hawk, we learned that it had been taken to the Humane Society by a neighbor and was later adopted out to a nice family who desperately wanted a kitten (at least that’s the story I told my bereaved daughter).
10. Last but not least, our furnace motor stopped working on the coldest night of the year (-19 degrees). Twelve hours later and eight hundred dollars poorer, we were finally able to un-layer our shivering bodies. Note to Wilhemina… Even while wearing three sweatshirts and two pair of pants, fifty-two degrees is pretty damn cold.
So in closing, I’m asking you, Wilhelmina, to call off your curse gods. Cut me a little slack after six months of torture and I promise to keep that middle finger wrapped around the steering wheel.
