Are we having fun yet?

I wasn’t even going to blog about our rafting trip to Laughlin, but some funny “shit” did happen along the way so I think I must share.

First off, whenever Dale and I try to get out of town, it’s exhausting to say the least, the whole “preparation thing”, is such a drag. His line is and has always been, “I knew we weren’t ready to go, we should have been ready to go last night”. He always thinks he’s missing out on “having fun”. “I never have any fun”. Well I say having fun is “over-rated”.

So we are frantically “over packing” for our trip, who doesn’t do that, right? It’s Thursday night and we begin packing the van and our boat that we will trailer down to the river the next day. Dale’s life is sometimes like a “Charlie Brown” episode that keeps running over and over, “when it rains it pours”. I am making multiple trips into the garage gathering up “more shit” that he thinks we need to bring. I go out there multiple times and on my third trip I notice that our hot water heater has exploded. There is water shooting out of the top and running down the sides, the floor is beginning to fill up with water. I’m running around the garage saying “shit, shit, shit”, and moving boxes trying to get to the main water shutoff valve before the whole garage floods. In my panic I also went around the front yard and turned of my sprinkler system, I don’t know why. I did have some crispy plants when we got home, that kind of sucked!

I don’t even want to tell Dale about the water heater. So in a calm tone I go into his office and say, “the hot water heater blew”. “Jesus Christ”, the one time I want to get out of town, it’s always something! That’s his other “coin phrase”. For some reason when he gets in these “moods” it always kind of amuses me. I have to really keep a check on letting the laughter bubble out, but the “rain cloud” over his head just makes me laugh. It is almost like someone upstairs says, “lets “f” with him”, because his reaction cracks them up to. I usually get him to laugh in these “stressful situations” by saying, its another episode for our sitcom.

We buy a new water heater that we will install when we return back from our trip, that disaster is averted.

So we are driving down to Laughlin, it’s roughly a 1 ½ hour drive. We have had so much work done on this van, but we still don’t trust it. We are just coming to the crest of the last hill, and I say, “well the van actually did okay on this trip”. Five minutes later the van totally dies, so now we are stuck on the side of this “big hill”. “Jesus Christ, it always something” I hear Dale say. Again I can’t look at him, because he will see the smirk on my face and not be amused. “How can this shit always happen to me”, he says. It does seem like misfortunes do tend to “cling to him”.

We get the van going, have fun on our trip, well other than having two of our friends get caught in the current and drift downstream. Don’t worry we found them, unharmed. We made it home in one piece. We were absolutely exhausted, had to drag everything inside that we took. I told Dale, “having fun isn’t all its cracked up to be, is it?”