Crystal Graham: It comes in threes

It’s never good when you start your week off with a one-two-three punch.

Unless it’s good news.

Like when someone unexpected calls you first thing on a Monday morning with great news – something you never saw coming.

But when it’s the other way around …

Well …

Kind of like my start to this week.

Like everyone else, I know that we all deal with our fair share of life problems. And you can’t avoid them – they will catch up to you sometime or another.

I’ve even heard the saying that how you deal with life’s little emergencies says a lot about you.

OK.

In my case, that’s not a good thing.

Because … well … life would just be so much easier if things ran smoothly on a regular basis.

I admit … I’m not good at dealing with household issues … like water pipes that explode for no good reason, a hot water heater that’s impossible to drain, and worse yet, a tree that uproots in the middle of a heavy wind storm.

All which have happened to the Graham household in the last little bit.

But this week, in particular, it wasn’t water pipes or a hot water heater or even heavy wind for that matter.

It all started when I left our home office for a few hours.

And our Internet connection went down.

That happens … usually for an hour or two at the most. But hours on top of that, we realized it was time to start considering our alternate publishing sites.

None of which are ideal.

Especially when we had an afternoon cookout in the works.

But … hey, we can deal with that.

Even I handled that pressure with the utmost dignity.

Well, sort of.

It would have been easier if it didn’t feel like a furnace in our humble abode.

But it did.

A check of the thermostat showed the temperature just above 80 degrees inside – and outside too for that matter.

I clicked on the AC … and waited.

And waited.

And realized the problem was that hot air was pumping through the house.

So not only were we without Internet access (kind of essential to an on-line newspaper) … but we were literally, cooking with gas.

So maybe I wasn’t handling this bit of news too well.

When these things pile on, you certainly think things couldn’t get any worse.

You know what I mean … as silly as it seems, it just seems like the end of the world.

I called my mom hoping she might lend me some support … make me feel a little better.

“You know,” she said. “Usually things like this come in threes …”

I wanted to say ‘thanks a lot mom, really.’

But I didn’t have time to dwell on it.

I had to get off the phone pronto.

I could see the smoke even from a distance as our dinner on the grill burned to smithereens.

“Well, at least the third one wasn’t so bad,” she said.

Ugh.