- While taking a shower, I notice that the adjacent toilet is making large gulping sounds with bubbles rising rapidly to the surface of its standing water. A few minutes later there are four inches of standing water in the shower. "This can't be good."
- In a moment of high frustration, my daughter pours a bag of crayons over the dining room floor and then proceeds to draw with them all over the wood floor. This after we've just been charged over $1000 by our last landlord to resurface the wood flooring of our last house. Sigh. Thank goodness for WD40.
- My hands and face begin to feel like they are burning. This is probably the side effect of new medication. It's annoying. (It's lasted for about 24 hours now.)
- The children are tired. They are eager to see their father who is out of the city on business. They begin to fuss. Like dominoes, all three of them fall into a deep tantrum state.
- Blogger is down. My post for the day cannot be uploaded. Soon, my post from yesterday has also vanished. I realize that I have not backed up any of my 150+ posts, and could potentially be losing hundreds of pages of writing. I feel sick.
- My husband comes home. It's 9pm. I show him the shower and he decides to do the manly thing and plunge it. Soon the smell of sewage infiltrates the bathroom. We realize that excrement is flooding the shower. Nasty.
- The shower backs up into the sink and toilet. One bathroom down, one to go. Will it continue to work through morning? I'm praying hard as I go to sleep. We have only so many diapers in the house.
- I go outside to get a breath of fresh air as my husband calls our gruff property manager. She tends to make me nervous, being quite unfriendly. When I turn back to come into the house I notice a large black widow spider hanging next to the doorway. "Yup, that looks like a Widow all right," my husband agrees as he goes to get a spoon to smash it. I now have dead black widow guts all over the side of the house.
- Unsure whether to laugh or cry, I watch an episode of Saturday Night Live with my husband and go to bed. All too soon I will be awake again, facing a new day.
- Five hours later, I hear shrill cackling and I realize that my children are awake and up to no good. Time to get started.
- Yahoo! mail asks if I would like to use their new India servers. I decline. An hour later I try to log into my Yahoo! mail account. I enter the password correctly about 10 times. Yahoo! declines my entry into the site. I have been temporarily banished. Between this and Blogger, I am pretty frustrated with web-based services.
At last, things begin to turn around. I find the keys that have been lost for two weeks, in the pocket of a jacket that has been hanging in the closet for most of that time! Feeling super grateful.
My mother's flight to Spain takes off safely. Very, very thankful for that.
We remember that today is our day to bring preschool snack *BEFORE* dropping my son off at school, and manage to get the apple juice and muffins for 20. The key word here is 'before', rather than our typical 'too late'.
The plumber arrives to fix the blockage. My husband takes care of it. I might get a shower today after all. Our 23 month old daughter throws her arms in the air. "HURRRAAAAAYYYYYYYY!!!!!"
She is now curled up on my lap as I type, sucking her thumb and resting peacefully. Her brothers are happily at school and Blogger is working again. My post is still lost but I may have saved part of it in a document. I'll learn from this lesson - I'll back up everything from now on.
The plumber finds the source of our problem - an entire package of baby wipes flushed down apparently. My husband identifies two main suspects for the crime. They are 23 months and 3 years old respectively. We shake our heads and laugh out loud.
The weather outside today is dreary and overcast - grey clouds everywhere. Looking out upon the sea of grey, I think to myself, perhaps it isn't grey after all. Maybe this is actually our silver lining.
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