My life is a WHAT?

Let me tell you what I've been doing since my last post.

 I've sat in the house and have watched it snow. 

I've done the usual mundane household chores, tromped through the snow drifts and mud to carry out the trash and bring bills in from the mail box--not too much excitement here.
Oh! Except for the day we awoke to discover that during the night a vehicle (obviously traveling way too fast) left the road and plowed through our front yard taking out some ornamentation and bushes.

After the fact it really wasn't too exciting, just annoying and aggravating. I wanted to drive around the neighborhood looking for a car with evergreen boughs stuck in the grill, but I decided to ignore my moment of inner rage and play the cards dealt me. So I went back in the warm house and am still ignoring the whole mess.

In between the three or four different snow storms we've had in the last month, we've been making repairs to our truck and RV. I've been watching the bank account decline rapidly as thousands, yes you read that right, THOUSANDS (with an S) of dollars have been spent on the two items we own that are an important imperative part of our livelihood. We are in one of those situations where we can't afford to and we can't afford not to get the needed work done.

When we got home from Seattle, we had to start repairs on the camper. One of our front jacks quit working so we had to tend to that right away. Cha ching. Then we made some repairs to the truck. (Did you know an exhaust manifold can shrink when it gets hot? Well it can, just in case you ever wondered about those kind of things.) Cha ching cha ching. We started major work on the camper after that, replacing a weak and inadequate suspension system. (Did you know that when an axle breaks lose from the frame while you are traveling down the road, your tires will wear out really quickly? Makes sense doesn't it?) Cha ching x 3!

By the time this repair was completed, we were broke but glad to have the rig back in order again---or was it? We pulled it out of the shop and drove only a few blocks before we realized the brakes, which were not working great before, were even worse now. I won't go into all the technical stuff but if you know anything about trailer brakes, you'll understand that hubs wear out and need to be replaced, and now was the time for that. Ugh! CHA CHING AGAIN!

Parts had to be ordered so we pulled our beloved home on wheels back to our home behind the destroyed evergreen bushes. Note: Some melting of snow and a solid day of rain happened while the RV was in the shop. That made for a nice mix of mud, ice, and snow in our drive.

Are you ahead of me here? Yeah. Twenty-four thousand pounds of "rig" wound up stuck in the muck.

We had to call a tow truck to get us out of our own driveway. (Thank goodness for Good Sam roadside assistance!) We couldn't just leave it there because we had to take it back to the shop a couple days later and more snow was in the forecast. All we needed was another three foot drift to bust through to get it out of there!

 

What a mess!

It did snow more, but because we borrowed a relative's driveway free from mud and drifts, we were able to get the camper back into the shop with no problem. The breaks repaired, we asked our knowledgeable and super nice trailer guys to look into another area where we have been suspecting more frame issues. (By now we are on a first name basis--Dee & Jeff)

Just to take a peek into the area...

 took some dismantling.

Sure enough, there were problems. Major problems. Again I won't put you to sleep with the details, but I will say that whoever designed the put-together plan for our camper must have gotten his engineering degree out of the $5.00 bin at Wal-Mart, and the assembly line worker who did the construction  must have been smokin' some wacky tobacky.

Now my camper looks like this.

 

CHA CHING CHING CHING!!!

Major problems sometimes require major surgery.

We are broke has turned into we are hopelessly in debt.

There seems to be no end to stress inducing circumstances. There are more, I assure you. I'm simply trying to keep my post short enough for you to read in one day. I've asked myself--What's up with life lately? Although I'm not into mysticism, superstition, or anything like that, I think I might have discovered at least one explanation for these pressing and oppressing circumstances in a fortune cookie I had with my lunch a few days ago. The little piece of paper tucked inside the hard cookie read...

Your life is a dashing and bold adventure.

Well there ya go! 

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read it. I think I did a little of both. I've never thought of my life exactly that way. An adventure? Maybe. But dashing and bold? For some reason those words encouraged me. They reminded me to view my circumstances from a different perspective--again.

Dee and Jeff are not finished repairing our fifth wheel, and I'm not finished pondering my good fortune. God is at work in all my circumstances and in my adventures--my dashing and bold adventures.