It’s fall, and I don’t know anybody who’s feeling really GREAT right now, between the nose-sucking virus that is going around (I still have not recovered sufficiently from that), and the fact that oil prices have skyrocketed to the point where we all are going to have to start burning our junk mail to heat our homes this winter, AND it’s sinking in that the television is just going to be filled up with even MORE reality television shows while deserving writers have to go out on strike.

The war in Iraq costs $1.6 trillion, the sub-prime mortgage thing has gotten worse, and…for how long am I going to have to hear the news from people other than Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert?

So then comes into my spam-infested inbox a letter from my friend Mary Rose–and, well, despite the fact that it made me spit tea on my keyboard not once, twice, or three times but FOUR TIMES (enough to possibly short out my spam filter for good)…well, I needed the laugh.

And in case you do, too, I’m printing it pretty much in its entirety:

 

Thus said the Lord, Mary Rose’s family is not cutting the mustard in some way and I need to get their attention so there will be drought and they will have to take showers at the parish house and do laundry all over the town and fill up their water storage tank with 5 gallon jugs several times a day to flush toilets.  (Our well failed to produce water  and we have thus been without it for over three weeks now…we are contracted to have a new well drilled to the tune of eight thousand dollars….which we have to borrow from the bank.)

But apparently, Mary Rose, with her chin-up, optimistic pioneer spirit needed to pay even more attention, so came to her family a pirate who proposed an easement on 10 percent of the front of their property which is only 33 feet to begin with and the family had to spend much time with lawyers and planners and there was much sleep lost and much wailing and gnashing of teeth until they just told the pirate from Century 21 that they were sorry their lack of agreement put into jeopardy a project that took two years to plan, but that was just the way it was.

And Lo, when the pirates had gone, the Lord thus wanted more attention and as Mary Rose made her way with water to the basement tank, she noticed a plague of milkweed bugs on the cellar door.  There were so many and they swarmed as she entered the basement and she just at this point nodded her head and said to herself, ‘Well, now we have plague….that is just very fitting. (As I am typing this I was eating a little Milky Way bar and I thought a piece had dropped on my lap so I picked it up without looking and put it in my mouth and it did not taste like Milky Way….I took it out and it was one of the aforementioned bugs, still alive, that I pulled out of my mouth – NO LIE!)

It was on this same day that the lady bugs who were known to frequent the quiet corners inside the house during the winter grew in number so vast that they swarmed and took over the entire cellar. And alas the day which followed, the Internet for the family went out due to some problem with the router which has been a problem from the get go and there was a drought of cyber communication for several days.”  (Which is to be followed by the drought of money due to the well needing to be drilled as well as a field trip Danny’s class is taking for three days for which the cost is $280!!!   Are they kidding me?????)

Will it ever end????

So when the vultures arrived, you can see that I was not surprised.  Turns out they were going after something that had washed in on the stream water after a night of heavy rain which has done nothing for our well, nor have subsequent rain storms….despite the ending of the drought by flooding, we are still without flow of water!

I am now thinking we are into serious plagues here. And I keep asking “How many plagues are there? ” Because I am hoping we are done. Let’s see, I think there are 10 as we count them at Passover…we have drought of water, pirates, milkweed bugs, ladybugs, drought of Internet, drought of cash, and vultures…so that means we must have three more to go.

Then I was moving the computer and the phones in the rest of the house went out so I only have one phone that works.  I think that may be the eighth plague….drought of communication.

So then the next day a friend came to visit, and during dinner, he happened to mention that he had lice last month (thus explaining his hair cut).  But he thinks he got it from the youth hostel he had been at a few months ago which is…you guessed it , where he spent the night the night before he arrived at our house for dinner. OH MY!!!!

A plague of LICE. With my four little boys! 

So we are up to nine plagues, and I am sitting here trying to wait quietly. I know what comes next: I’m going to look out the window and see the raining down of frogs.