Earlier this afternoon I walked out the backdoor to take a small bowl of kitchen garbage out to the compost pile. On my way I noticed a largish beetle-type bug on its back on the patio table, arms and legs waving about frantically in a futile effort against the smooth glass to correct itself. On the way back from the compost pile, I picked the Boy Wonder's frisbee and ever so gently slid it underneath the beetle and flipped it over. The insect immediately jumped to the ground, began making some kind of clicking/buzzing noise and flew away.


I don't love insects, beetles in particular, and ordinarily I probably wouldn't have bothered to assist any bug in its travails. Today, though, I've decided I need to improve my karma.


In the last two days, things have been going horribly wrong. It started with little events like the digital camera's memory card failing and the oven not heating at all (it used to just heat unevenly and only at great length). Then the laptop began to fail during my weekly back up and the dishwasher started to leak enthusiastically.


Then we moved onto bodily harm. Walking out to feed the dog I twisted my ankle whiched caused me to rather painfully hit the ground, spraying both dogfood and water all over the actual dog. She was pretty puzzled, to say the least. Last night I cooked up a few cheese sticks in the small auxilliary oven thinking that they would be a nice little "appetizer" for dinner. The Boy Wonder began choking on his first bite, a terrified look on his face as he struggled to make the stringy cheese either go down or come up. I sprang to my feet, took him in my arms and chopped him squarely on the back as I reached into his mouth and began pulling cheese out of his throat. He's fine, just a little scared (less so than his parents, I think).


I'm usually one of those people who is blessed by a ration of good luck, augmented by a large serving of privlege and garnished with hard work. My youngest sister, on the other hand, seems to attract all kinds of karmic lightening bolts - she actually came out of a store once to find that a small anvil had landed on the hood of her car as if she lived in some kind of live-action episode of the Roadrunner. But yesterday she called me jubuliant at having received a large check in the mail that she hadn't believed would actually arrive and learning that her oldest daughter won a lottery to attend a very nice, affordable and popular neighborhood pre-school this fall.


I do not believe that life is a zero-sum game and I am very pleased for my sister's good fortune. So why do I have this strange feeling that things are going to be a lot different from now on?