I'm going to give you a timeline of events that have taken place over the past month or so:

Around June 15th: my mom and my brother drive down to Texas in order to spend time with my sister and her kids.
June 18th: it is decided that my sick aunt in North Carolina is going to move back to Minnesota in order to essentially die. It is determined that she will be staying at our house. My mom has tentative plans to start driving for North Carolina on the 23rd.
June 22nd: aunt is rushed to the hospital. It is not good. Mom rushes to get on the next available flight, leaving my brother and the car in Texas.
June 23rd: my aunt dies. Mom does not make it in time. One of aunt's wishes is to be buried in Minnesota, so my mom and our pastor drive all the way up from North Carolina with the dead body in the back (their car breaks down along the way.)
June 25th: with one of the cars down in Texas, and my sister not comfortable driving across the country with two small kids as the only legal adult... my dad flies down in order to drive the car, my brother, my sister and my nephews up. They stay in my room.
July 1-2: visitation, funeral happens. We get through it.
July 7th: my mother and father drive my sister and her kids back down to Texas. I get my room back (I've spent maybe two nights sleeping in here since then, I'd wager.)
July 10th: my mother and father drive back up from Texas, and arrive home on this day... which means that finally, life can resume in its normal order.

July 12th: one of my sister's closer friends--and my mom's friend's son--a marine in Afghanistan--is killed. I knew him--can't say that we were close, but he used to come over to our house a lot with his family. He was pretty scrawny (although, he was 12 at the time... but still), and I can't really picture him as a Marine. In any case, my sister and him were really close (and apparently she was his power of attorney too...), and I know that it's hard for her as well as the rest of the family. So all around, it's pretty terrible.

Now the plan is this: my mom (who... to recap: drove to Texas, only to fly to North Carolina on moment's notice, drove back to Minnesota with a dead body in the back, then drove to and from Texas again) is now going to fly down to Texas in order to pick up my sister and her kids... who are going to drive straight back up here for the funeral, merely a week after getting the hell out of here and trying to move on after the first funeral.

July 13th: I wake up and turn on the news to see my neighbor's house on fire. No one is hurt, which is good, but... still. Of course this would happen.

...

And so, the end result for me is this: we have three pretty terrible and tragic situations that completely suck and I wouldn't want to happen to anyone... we put them all together into a very short time frame, and now I can't help but find the entire ordeal just a little bit comical.

This might make me a bad person, I don't know. Or maybe it's just my way of coping with this sort of situation (I suppose it has precedent, too... which I guess I shouldn't get into in order to avoid making this any darker... forget I even wrote this). But this is all weird, right?

It's the fire that really gets me. I mean, logically, it has little connection to us (I don't even know if we know the family... it's one of our backyard neighbors), but given what has happened... it kind of seems like God's twisted idea of the proverbial cherry on top.

It's WEIRD.

This seems weird, right?