Murphy's Law

I don't believe in Murphy's Law.

I don't believe in Fate.

I don't believe in Jinxing someone.

But you know, gosh darn it, sometimes I have to wonder if there isn't something conspiring against military wives. Your husband goes TDY (tour of duty) or deploys and BOOM ... everything goes wrong at once.

What is WITH that?

I left Hannah home with Joni when we took JB to board his flight for America on Sunday. I left her home because she has hand-foot-mouth-disease. And no joke, while we are waiting for him to board his flight, Isaac starts acting very lethargic. And shortly thereafter, Abigail has crawled into my arms. By the time we got home and an additional two hours had passed, Sidge was sporting the same 102+ fever that they were.

So now I have four sick kids.

But that's not all.

Houses here in the Azores have these propane gas tanks outside of them. (They look sorta like the ones in the picture above except they are green. I should have taken a picture of our's to be more accurate but that would require more work than I currently want to put forth.)

Anyways ... these tanks ...

It's how we get hot water and gas. You are only supposed to have one turned on at a time. This way, when it runs out, you switch it to the other tank and you call your local "gas man" who comes by and replaces the empty tank while you still have hot water out of the other tank.

Only, for some reason, both tanks were on. This meant that they were both being worn down equally which meant we completely ran out of hot water and "gas man" Fernando couldn't come until the next day.

This happened on Sunday. Same day JB left.

Today, we returned Joni to the airport. Not a happy time for us. I left the two sickest kids (the girls) home with my Mom. On our way to the Commissary to pick up some diapers ...

... oh .... I must digress to tell you that I went to buy Hannah diapers last week but they were completely out of her size at the Commissary. I nearly had a mini break-down. Joni was with me, and I said out loud, "That's it. I'm done. I just want to go back to America NOW." A few moments later we went to the deli which was currently deli-meat-less and then tried to buy some garbage bags which didn't exist.

Creamy peanut butter? Nada.

Jelly? Forget it.

I kid you not.

Okay but back to my story.

I'm on my way to get diapers when the passenger window of the van just goes down. All ... the ... way ... down. Thank goodness it wasn't raining. And thank goodness it wasn't totally freezing.

But hubby is gone and window is broken.

I drove to good ol' Sam at the Auto Shop on Base. He managed to get window to stay up with a pencil and a piece of wood and told me to come back tomorrow so he could permanently raise the window and hold it in place until we get back to America and can get the parts needed to fix it.

It would take him longer to get the parts then we have time left on the island.

So I drove home with my pencil and piece of wood, walked into my house, and the phone rang.

It was my great friend Rebekah. She had knocked on her own window above her kitchen sink to get her boys' attention outside and broke the window. And cut her hand. And she needed stitches.

I told her I'd be right over.

Left the kids with my mom and went outside only to discover that our front gate was open. I know I had closed it and since this was the third time in two days that this happened, I admitted that the gate probably had something wrong with it that was causing it to open randomly.

Put that on my list of things I had to try to figure out while hubby was gone.

Along with the door handle on the sunroom door that is totally broken.

But an open gate meant a missing dog ... again.

Not to fear. Whenever I leave the gate open Scrubs goes across the street and gets his buddy Sky. Sky is a one year old Husky who can jump the gate to his house at will. Whenever he gets bored, he jumps his gate, jumps our gate, and comes into our yard to poop and play with Scrubs and then leave whenever the action at our house dies down. (I've talked to his "Mom" about this, but so far, nothing has changed, and quite honestly, it wears Scrubs out so I've decided to just let Sky visit when the spirit moves him.)

Anyways, anytime our can't-jump-the-gate-dog-Scrubs sees our gate open, he gets his buddy Sky and they go to Buzius together around the corner where they pee on everything in sight and just smell everything and anything they can until I find him and shoo him home.

Scrubs was gone again.

Shooed him home.

Went to Rebekah's. Took her oldest three back to my house. She took baby, we wrapped her wound, and she went to the Base for four stitches.

And that's where I'll stop ...

Did I mention I only managed four hours of sleep last night?

I need a nap.