Worst Luck Ever

I am a pastor's wife, and with that title comes the statement that I do not believe in luck. I don't read horoscopes and I never had a rabbit's foot on a key chain. However, there comes a time in one's life when you find yourself wondering if some cosmic force has aligned the stars against you so that everything you touch goes horribly wrong and you grasp the realization that you should not waste that dollar on a lottery ticket because you will not win. Ever.

The Rev. and I had such good intentions, really, when it came to doing a little home improvement over the weekend. Popcorn ceilings were scraped clean; horrid wallpaper was removed; paint was put on the wall and I only got a little bit in my hair. The turn for the worse came when we primed and textured the ceiling in a bedroom. We returned to discover that the drywall paper had bled throuh the texturing and would require not one, but two coats of primer. While I worked in the bedroom, The Rev. worked on installing drywall in the dining room. Not only did he need my help to repair the absolutely wretched patchwork that was completed by the previous owner, he soon discovered that the tape he used on the drywall caused two lovely humps to form in the wall. Our aggravation was compounded by the fact that every vertical service in our home is textured in some stuff called "orange peel." It has a slight pebbly texture, and it requires twice as much paint to cover it. That meant two more trips to a certain home improvement center for paint.

"Look at this paint for the kitchen."

"What's wrong with it?"

"It is too light."

"Well, did you tell him the right color?"

Insert stink eye here.

"Well, we can't finish painting tonight. We'll have to go back to Home Depot tomorrow."

Insert stink eye here.

"That breaks my rule."

"What rule is that?"

"That we limit our trips to that place to two."

"Do you want paint?"

Insert exasperated stink eye here.

We painted as much as we could, however, there was still some weird residue on the wall from the wallpaper glue (yes, we washed them before we painted) and it caused the paint to roll off the wall and back onto the roller in little crumbs. We decided to just get one coat on and then go to bed. It would have to look better in the morning. Before we retired for the night, I decided to wash some clothes. The washing went off without a hitch, but when I put the clothes in the dryer and pushed the button, nothing happened. Nothing.

New Year's Eve afternoon I worked while The Rev. drove around town looking for a laundrymat to dry our wet clothes. We were expecting company that night, and my hopes of having a painted house, not thrown into the discombobulation and chaos of "do it yourself-dom" were as fried as our dryer. The bedroom was not finished, all of the furniture for that bedroom was piled into the other; I had two humpback whales in my new wall, and the rest of my kitchen had one coat of textured paint on it. Not to mention that I was finding construction dust in every nook and cranny of our house. And while painting the dog decided that she couldn't have paint on just one side of her body, she needed it on the other and on her ears.

I cooked an enormous pot of black eyed peas for New Year's Day. I did it for tradition, not for luck, but I did eat two helpings.