Just my Luck

For someone that doesn't really believe in luck, I've been having a bad run of it lately...

Driving home from my in-laws on a windy Sunday afternoon, we lost the cover to our driver side mirror.

Yup, we were coasting down the freeway and barely a half an hour away from our house and it just blew off. Pouf! Gone with the wind.

We circled back once to look for it to no avail... At this point, we had been in the car for three hours and with a restless almost-toddler in the back seat, we just headed home.

Oh well.

We had a good laugh about it since a few weekends ago the drive side mirror was completely taken off our other car. We were at a lovely dinner party at our friends' house. We arrived late so rather than taking the extra two minutes to straighten the car and get it six inches from the curb as opposed to ten, we just parked and hurried in.

Much to our dismay, someone racing down the street must have pegged our mirror and broke it clean off. We stumbled upon the parts as we were heading back to our car later that night. Since then, my poor husband has been taking it into work with the mirror DUCT TAPED on as we waited for a new mirror to come in.... "You know you're a redneck when..."

We no sooner schedule to take that car into the shop than we have our little incident this weekend.

Okay, fine. I'll fess up. The cover on our mirror didn't exactly just fly off. A few months ago, I was backing out of the garage and didn't realize how close to the wall my husband had parked the car the bight before. As I fleeing, the mirror got caught on the side of the garage door and may have "encouraged" the cover to come loose. We've actually just been lucky that it's stayed on this long...

Oh, and I checked. My car's 10 years or 999,999 miles warranty does not cover minor owner "uh-ohs". I looked it up in the owner's manual...twice.

Also when I called this morning, they asked to "inspect" the mirror before replacing it for free. The nerve... Since it is so painfully obvious that the mirror was previously involved in a driver-related mishap, I would rather not shamelessly lie. It's just not my style.

After a teeny fender bender (not my fault) this past Thanksgiving that resulted in THREE different visits to repair the initial damage, fix a faulty warning light, and finally to replace all the seat belts in the backseat, we've become bosom buddies with our friendly local collision center.

You know it's bad when you call the auto repair shop and you're not only on a first name basis with them and ask about your kid, but they also have all of your info right at their fingertips.

I once had a similar relationship with another auto body shop while in college and grad school. I was never in any major accidents or hurt any people. In fact, I mostly backed into inanimate and/or stationary objects. The one that my best friend still talks about to this day is the huge dumpster in our apartment parking lot that I hit. It could have eclipsed the sun, but I still managed to not see it... sigh.

But, I figured those days had ended along with having martinis instead of dinner and $2 drink night. No, I did NOT drink and drive. That's bad. These things usually happened the next morning as I was rushing to work (late), still sleep-deprived (hung-over), and not paying attention (busy brain-storming excuses to tell the boss lady about why I am late).

With St. Patrick's Day being this Saturday maybe my luck with change for the better. If I'm lucky....

photo by Yellow Mellow