12 years and 4 months later...

Twelve years and 4 months of marriage must be a timing where things start to fall apart. I should clarify….not our marriage, but the things we acquired in that time period. Right now my wedding ring is “in the shop” getting new prongs. That didn’t seem like too big of a deal. I decided to just get it done because I hadn’t been wearing it for fear of loosing a diamond and who knows what the price of gold will be in the next 5 minutes…..If I had known what was going to happen the next week I probably would've waited...


Then our 1978 John Deere hand-me-down lawn mower decided to quit working. Actually it stopped working last fall but I didn’t concern myself with it. I’m weird that way. I want my house spotless but the grass could be as tall as the roof and I probably wouldn’t notice. Jay started messing with it in one of his shop classes. They had it almost fixed (with a $100 part) but it wasn’t quite there. He had to haul it to a lawn mower repair man last week. We got the word on it Monday…$300 to fix it. She’s had a good long life and mowed a lot of yards….we have decided to part company with her. Still not sure what we are going to do but we do know we aren’t fixing that one.

In the meantime Jay had been borrowing one that had belonged to his Granddad. That mower makes Jay look like he’s riding Camryn’s tricycle. I’ve never seen such a small riding lawn mower. It makes me laugh to watch him on it. The afternoon he brought it home I heard it starting and stopping a lot. I knew that couldn’t be good….one point I saw him trudging across the yard with the gas can. Later on I heard it running again for mere minutes. I stayed in the house and out of his way. It turns out the wheel fell off while he was using it. I’m sorry I missed it. The only thing funnier than seeing Jay on that mower would’ve been seeing him on it when he lost a wheel.

Then last week the truck started making a funny noise. It went to the shop yesterday. One Million dollars later I thought it was fixed. Until we heard another noise last night (totally different problem than the one fixed that morning). Jay had the bus barn guy look at it and the U joints were bad. He replaced them for Jay, which we really appreciated!!! We thought we were set. Then Jay called this afternoon and said the truck was fixed but Tom noticed something else that was wrong that he couldn’t fix. I asked Jay if it was going to be expensive. He said “I’ll just have to tell you about it later.” I take that to not be a good sign.

I also haven’t mentioned the huge dent that he put in the bed of it at convention last week. On Monday when we were talking about it and the lawn mower and noise #1 Jay said “it was a rough week”. Oh and I almost forgot the ear part of his cell phone also stopped working last week. The only way he can hear people is on speaker phone . That’s not annoying. Of course he’s not eligible for an upgrade yet.

I’m at the point where all I can do is laugh. We will survive all of this, we always do. God likes to keep things interesting!!! It might be cheaper to tell Jay to go buy some goats….we’ll just stake them out in the yard. I also may get him a bicycle….it’s not that far to Miller….