I'm beginning to feel like that Lil' Abner character, the rain cloud guy. My Chevy, it seemed, was under a recall shadow. So was my wife's. I liked mine so much that I had them put a crate engine in it when it shot craps. That was costly, but less than a new car. And it still had the cheap shitty ignition that would turn off at inopportune times and kill you by shutting down the airbags and everything else.

It's still not fixed.

The parts trickle into the dealers at about three a week. Maybe they're waiting for everyone to die off so they have fewer ignitions to fix.

My wife's is fixed, but she still can only use the ignition key with nothing else on it. Seems they're not sure of their fix.

Then my front tooth developed a problem wherein my body was trying to reject it. It requires a post, implant, temporary tooth, amazingly equal to cost of a crate engine for an HHR Chevy. Almost to the penny.

The house needs painting. The ceiling has leak stains and bad places where several rains tested it and found it wanting. The soffits around the guttering are crap. Today I had the appliance guy (who I'm getting to know well--we're on first name greeting) over to look at a leak in the dishwasher. He found it easily. A rust hole. "Look here. it gushes right out on the floor."

A new one is coming from the appliance store. Sometime next week.

I was out cutting vines away from the gutters before I cleaned them, and cut right through the TV antenna cable. Looked just like a vine! I tried to strip and tape it, but something having to do with "impedance" impeded any chance of a picture. Guy came to fix it. Not Bill, the appliance guy. An impedance guy who also knows fixit stuff like bad soffits.

The hay is still uncut. Too much rain the last few days. Raining right now.

A sculpture bull I'm working on gave me fits and I had to cut a leg off, start over. Had to pay the vet for horses' shots (about as much as a dishwasher) and the lucking John Deere mower needed repairs at more than the new dishwasher.

Telemarketers call and blather on, the ones who get through caller I.D., and I tell them bad word bad word. They want money for every conceivable thing. Highway patrol fund. The home for blind mice. Drugs.

BUT. This week, BOOM, during all the shitstorm, I got a story accepted. Shortly before that, another story was selected to be in an anthology of Best New Writing of 2015. And Killer Nashville allowed me into their guest blog string. And, at the sculpture opening, early in June, we sold a couple sculptures at the gallery, plus another one sold even before the show started.

Don't get me wrong. I'm grateful. Whiny, but grateful. For the writing and the sculpture that's selling. For beautiful days and happy old dogs and elderly horses that thunder up to get their grain in the afternoon, for coffee in the morning, the BLT's my wife gets me and which I eat while watching House of Cards season II, for the AC that's still working (shhh, don't tell the fates about that, it takes three units to do the house and the studio, and somehow, they're working) for the eventual slowing and maybe even shutoff of the streak that has been trying to make me crazy. I fooled it. I already am crazy. As those who know me will genially and emphatically agree. Luck. Rhymes with pluck. And luckily I have some. It runs low now and then, but dammitt, it's there.