Le Danse Macabre

Would describe the weekend all too well. A little background....the kids have been showing cows at the Altamont and Fonda fairs since they were small. Liz was six the first time she led her calf of the year, Sonora, into the ring at Fonda. Last year the show schedule was scaled back to just Fonda, as gas money is scarce and Altamont is far away...(and there are other issues...if you show there you know all about it). Then, just for fun they entered Liz's Blitz cow back at Altamont for this year....just one cow, just to hang out with the kids who show and thus have some fun at the fair.

As soon as entries were made and the health work done, Blitz, who had just calved, came down with a 103+ degree fever and lost a lot of weight practically overnight. An antibiotic put her right, but not in time for truck in, which would be today. She will be all right and all but looks awful.

Okay, stuff happens. Everybody is tired anyhow and there is still Fonda in a couple of weeks. Maybe she will be fit by then.

Then we came in Saturday night to discover that a kid Liz has known since he was little, drowned in a pond while swimming with his brother. He shows calves for one of her best friends. Suddenly, cow stuff didn't matter so very much. Kids from the bunch that show together spent the weekend commiserating over the internet. I didn't know him, having scaled back my fair attendance as the kids became old enough to run the string alone, but that doesn't matter. Losing a kid is the worst thing there is. My heart goes out to the family and the whole gang at the fair. Not much of a year for the kids for sure.

Then comes the macabre part. As soon as Liz came in from chores yesterday morning her phone began to ring. It was Price Chopper calling the Barter and Donnan funeral home to find out where to deliver a meat platter. Strange, but things happen with cell phones. Then they called again. And again.

More people called for the funeral home. Where to park. When was this viewing or that? We tried calling them to get it fixed, but guess whose phone rang when we did.

By mid afternoon she estimated that she had received over thirty calls. Even the local telephone operator called to ask what the heck was going on. Liz likes to take a nap on Sunday. That was just not happening. Of course she could have turned off the phone, but there were friends trying to call over the tragedy over the weekend and she didn't want to do that.

Finally, I got on the Web and found a weekend phone number for Verizon. I won't discuss their weekend customer service operators, because this is a family blog. Needless to say we were not pleased with the disinterested response we got.

So I composed a kinda, sorta firmly worded email, which she fired off to the company. (Have I mentioned that I do firmly worded quite well and by this time we were pretty aggravated?) Within an hour the problem was fixed and the minutes that had been devoured by the misplaced calls were replaced on her phone.

And to be fair, it wasn't Verizon's fault. Someone at the funeral parlor accidentally routed all their off hours calls to Liz's cell.

However, it was a weekend of sadness punctuated by weirdness. Macabre is a good word for it.



***Update, just read the news...this is just a couple miles from us. Talk about weird.

And this from Jinglebob
I knew NY had issues, but dang! Just dang....