Bang! Bang! Bang!

First, Ella:  her $1,000 surgery is scheduled for next week.  In the meantime, she has been bothering the place on her leg where they shaved the fur off of the cyst, so that the incisions they made to do a biopsy and then drain it haven't healed well.  We had go back and get what the vet referred to as a "cone of shame".  Ella doesn't like it, but she is very stoic.  Poor baby.  She's not thrilled right now.  Wait until post-surgery when she has to wear this thing non-stop for a week or more:

And... my truck's in the shop.  We had an appointment for the past two weeks for this past Monday.  On Sunday, the "check engine" light came on, and the truck began running really roughly, a problem it has had in the past but which I thought they had resolved last year.  Two days later, I'm waiting on the call to pick up the truck.  The "check engine" issue was a bad spark plug, likely due to a underlying problem with one of the cylinders.  To "fix" the underlying problem is major work - $1,800-$2,000.  Not doing it now.  Will just keep replacing spark plugs, hopefully once or twice a year until that doesn't work any more.  Meanwhile, the other "routine" work that was planned before the "check engine" issue will come to slightly more than $1,000 - just stuff needed to pass the safety inspection.  (One thing I wonder is how everyone in Maine keeps their cars "safe," given the cost to meet the inspection standards.  There are too many poor people driving too many older cars, so I know they can't be having $1,000 in work done on their cars every year.  There must be mechanics out there who will do a pro forma job and issue the stickers.  I guess I could look for such a mechanic, but our guys are good, trustworthy, and in the end, I actually do want a safe vehicle.  Still, $1,000... with a larger $2,000 problem looming in the future ... it hurts.)  And...

Yet another visit this week to Dead River, our new fuel company, the one that sold us the new propane furnace.  They have been unable to straighten out our billing since day one.  Having paid the $7,500 purchase price for the furnace, my next invoice showed me owing $9,000.  I've been into their local office (conveniently a block from our house) twice a month since August.  Finally this week their office manager got involved.  The result of her calculations: I owed another $800, which I paid (I do have a sneaking suspicion this may still be wrong and I plan to double-check her numbers.)  Of course, I am still waiting on a $600 rebate the company was responsible for applying for on my behalf.   A customer - at least, THIS customer - just can't win.

Anyway, maybe it's just the Bang! Bang! Bang! of these three big bills, but I'm feeling down.  Or maybe it's reading about what's going on in the bigger world. I need a sanity check.  I wish I could magically leave the U.S. and spend a week in 5 or 6 different countries so that I could "see" the U.S. from a different reality.  Living in the U.S. feels like waking up in a carnival "fun house" where you look in the mirror and you see 100 images, all distorted:  A mirror in which Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio are considered "mainstream" Republican candidates and Hillary "Wall Street" Clinton is referred to as a "progressive."  Students in a Yale fraternity turn a black woman away from a frat house party, openly saying, "white girls only."   An 8 year old African-American child is taken away by police in handcuffs.  10,000 refugees enter Greece in one week, and Trump earns applause for insisting we will forcibly remove all undocumented workers from the U.S. and build a fence between the U.S. and Mexico ("It will work," he says, "look at Israel."  Yeah, let's look at Israel!).  Ben Carson says the pyramids were built not for burying pharaohs but to store grain, and he wants to replace Medicare with a $2,000 health care savings account.  A doctor sends out a notice to his patients that he will no long prescribe birth control because he's a Catholic, and people I know and believe to be educated and reasonable defend that position.  A poll conducted in Israel finds that a majority of Israeli Jews believe that "suspected" terrorists should be executed on the spot, and the houses of their families should be demolished; the Israeli government approves 2,000 more housing units in  the West Bank and retroactively approves two illegal settlements - the same week Obama welcomes Netanyahu to the White House.  2015 is on track to be the warmest year on record, with record carbon released into the atmosphere, carbon that will continue impacting the environment for hundreds of years, even if we were to cease releasing any more carbon into the atmosphere today.  

I could go on, but I really just want to go back to bed, or go into a closet, wrap a coat around my head, and stay there.  Or take a long walk off the end of this pier (pic from Ella's and my walk 2 days ago):

At least I don't have a cone around my head.  At the risk of spitting into the wind, I will pray to the God of Abraham, who is the God I choose not to believe in, for:

Peace.