PLUMBING PROBLEMS

PLUMBING PROBLEMS. OMG!!! Where's Joe the Plumber when you need him?

A week or so ago as I was sitting on the couch, I happened to look up (silly me) and noticed a round, soup can size mark on the living room ceiling. I showed my husband and we decided we would examine it more closely the following week because we were getting ready to entertain out of town guests for a few days. I did notice that the location of the stain was under our son's bathtub and was pretty convinced it was a plumbing leak. Cleaning house and preparing food for the weekend took up a lot of my time and I soon forgot about it. Besides, it seemed small (HAHAHAHA).

Our visit with our friends was wonderful. We went to a local art museum, drank wine, and just enjoyed the company. After they left, I spent the next few days generally relaxing, and thinking (always) about what I wanted to get accomplished during the upcoming weekend. When the following Saturday rolled around, we cleaned the garage and did some stuff in the basement, which brings us to Sunday night at about 7:00.

We were tired.

I was in the living room watching TV and remembered the stain on the ceiling. I asked John if he'd like to poke at it with me to see what was up. He said okay and grabbed a compass (the kind you use for drawing circles and yes, we have those kinds of things laying around our house). He very gently poked at the stain on the ceiling with the long, pencil shaped end of the compass.

We didn't move any pictures below it. We didn't move the stereo below it. We didn't move the big screen TV, either. Why would we? The stain, as I said before, seemed small (HAHAHAHA).

The compass end went easily through the ceiling and out poured water. I repeat - out POURED water! I grabbed the first thing I could find (a votive candle holder) to catch what water I could while John hurriedly moved everything out of the way. Then he put the kitchen wastebasket under the hole and we went upstairs to track down the source of the water.

Well, the plumbing access to our son's bathtub is in the closet of my newly redecorated office and the closet is absolutely full. It's full of wrapping paper, tax documents, shelves of office supplies, etc. It's very organized, but it is FULL. So, of course, everything had to come out of the closet into the office. Then we had to cut the wall to make the plumbing access hole large enough to expose the leak. Naturally, we couldn't do this without taking out the lower shelf and removing the support brackets from the wall. What a pain.

John looked inside the hole. Then he looked at me. Then I looked inside the hole. Then I looked at John. Down we went to cut more holes in the living room ceiling to accomodate the draining of a whole lot of water!!! The ceiling was mush. Parts of it just fell down. Apparently, the leak had been there for awhile and a lot of people taking a lot of showers over the weekend left a lot of standing water just saturating the living room ceiling.

A friend of mine once told me "water always wins". To a degree, he is right. The water went where it was going to go and did what it was going to do, leaving a destructive path.

But this time, I'm going to win. You see, I was going to redecorate the living room at some point anyway. It'll just have to be sooner rather than later.

And besides, I found out what that round, soup can sized mark on my living room ceiling was and it's not there anymore! Yep - I win (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA)!!!

Manners be Damned!

Not too long ago, I visited a website where there was a discussion about manners. It was generally agreed upon that we, as parents, have the HUGE responsibility of teaching our children about manners and making them thoroughly understand the implications of displaying manners (both good and bad) throughout their lives.

This, of course, got me to thinking about my own parenting on this subject - had I done my job; now that the kids are grown, are they practicing what they should have learned; are they reaping the benefits I promised them they would; you know, second guessing myself, as we moms will FOREVER be doing. The memories that came to me had me cringing (because, you know, kids will be kids) and chuckling (because, well, kids will be kids). This one memory stands out in my mind because it had me both cringing and chuckling at the same time. I hold onto it as validation that I somehow did okay in the manners department.

Not too long ago, my family asked me where I wanted to go for my birthday dinner. I had some Chili's Restaurant gift cards that were going to start decreasing in value before too long, so I thought we could use them up. John, our daughter, her boyfriend and I went to the restaurant, and our son joined us on his way home from work. He came in wearing his ballcap, which he wore all day working outside.

Now call me old fashioned, but I just don't approve of men wearing hats indoors. I think it has something to do with being able to look someone in the eyes and easily identifying them or something. Whatever the reason, removing one's hat indoors is one of those good manners I hoped I had successfully taught my kids.

Anyway, I turned to my son and quietly asked him if he would remove his hat.

He said "Mom, you don't want me to take my hat off".

I responded, "yes, I really do".

Now, I'll interject a pertinent fact here. You see, my son has been blessed with a wonderfully thick head of hair. It's not kinky, curly or unruly, he just has a lot of it. And although he keeps it short, it can still be pretty massive.

So, off came the hat and you know what? He was right! Wearing the ballcap all day while he was working left an indentation in his hair.

It made his head look like an HOURGLASS!!!!!

Trying to contain my laughter, I whispered, "you can put your hat back on".

Manners be damned, I just couldn't let my son sit in a crowded restaurant with a head shaped like an hourglass, even thought he seemed quite content to do so.

Now, I realized several things about my son that evening. One of them was that he is a very confident young man - willing to be seen in public looking ridiculous. And I got a pretty warm feeling knowing that he was willing to do that just for me. How cool is that?

Fortunate? Yeah, I'd say so.

TAKE MY MONEY - PLEASE!

I spent several hours over the weekend walking. I did not walk along the usual serene, tree-lined streets of my small town neighborhood and my thoughts were not of the pastoral nature I experience during those neighborhood walks.

Instead, I spent several hours walking through one of our local casinos, stopping quite frequently to make what I kept hoping would be a lucrative investment. You see, my mother always told me to listen carefully and play the slot machines that call your name.

Well, as you can guess, every single machine seemed to call my name!

After spending a significant amount of money on these “talking machines”, my thoughts were brief and decidedly NOT pleasant, but I’ll share an important one of them with you anyway: I can’t believe I actually spent good, hard earned money to be an idiot!!!

HELLO - MY NAME IS MUD

Okay. I don't even know where to begin with this one! I owe my husband, John, - THE most perfect man in the world - a very deep, sincere, heartfelt, SERIOUS apology. So he gets the idea of just how truly sorry I am and how bad I feel, I'm going to try to do it justice in this very public forum so the whole world has the opportunity to see what an ass I was.

You may know from my previous post that I am in real estate to varying degrees. One aspect of my line of work, and my favorite part, actually, involves demolishing houses to free up buildable land. If the sellers leave a bunch of stuff in a house I buy, I hold a garage sale to make a few extra bucks. After the sale, I call Habitat for Humanity to come in and take what they want (building material, fixtures, windows, etc.) to sell in their ReStores to raise money for their projects.

A few years ago, I purchased such a house. This time, John and I took a few of our own items to sell in the garage sale. One of those things was, at my husband's insistence, a box of shelving brackets - black ones, black with woodgrain ones, off-white with oak trim ones. For some reason, we didn't take any of the rods they go into or any of the shelves that go on them. Just the brackets!

Fast forward two years to the events leading up to last night.

I spent the last few weeks redecorating our home office. I painted the walls a pleasant lightish green to provide a nice contrast to the black blinds, black pottery switch coverplates and, of course, black shelves that belong to those black shelving brackets we tried to sell in the garage sale! The room was almost done. John put the blinds back up, he put the new light fixture up and not only did he hang the rods for the shelving, but he carried the shelves up from the basement, too. All we needed were the brackets - the BRACKETS!!!

John looked for them in the basement. I looked for them in the basement. I insisted they were in a pink shoebox. I knew they didn't sell in the garage sale. I also really didn't believe that I would have left them there, knowing they had matching parts. But they were nowhere - NOWHERE.

Well, John went to work the next day and I went shopping for new brackets. I went to our local hardware store, where in the past 20 years I have always, without fail, gotten what I needed. Until now, that is. They had single-slotted brackets, like I needed, but only in white, brushed brass and brushed chrome. The only black brackets they had worked in double slotted rods. Option one: I could buy all new double slotted rods and the matching black brackets; Option two: I could buy the brushed finished brackets and spray them black (this wouldn't work - I needed 12 and they only had 10); Option three: I could keep looking.

So on to Aco. They only had white and a rather industrial looking chrome. Yuck, No Thanks. On to Home Depot. And on to Lowes. And on to...................Apparantly they don't even make our brackets anymore ANYWHERE!

By this time, I was pretty frustrated. I checked the basement once more and decided, rather angrily, that we are going to spend the winter clearing out and organizing the basement because even if the brackets were down there, we wouldn't be able to find them anyway.

Just about then, John came home from work and made the mistake of asking me how my day went. I told him how I struck out at the hardware stores. I told him that I KNEW he made me leave those brackets at the house to be demolished. I told him that I couldn't believe all the things HE'S allowed to keep in the basement yet he MADE ME get rid of those brackets. I went on and on and on, well you get the very ugly picture.

Now, John is a very patient, introspective man. So he listened to me rant, and rant I did. Then he went to the basement and looked through every box, checked every miscellaneous hardware pile and literally searched every square inch looking for those brackets.

Well, guess what he found? Yep - the brackets. ALL OF THEM.

I was so excited.

Then I felt so bad. I had said some horrible things. I was so totally wrong. I will be going to hell over this, I just know it.

We started discussing how I could make it up to him. His ideas were simple, primal really, and I was humbled. I asked him if he could ever forgive me for being so mean to him. Of course he said yes, because he is, as I've said before, just a saint, but he wasn't opposed to me continuing to try to make it up to him. I honeyed up to him like I haven't in a long time.


-----Insert the hottest part of your favorite romance novel here-----


Afterwards, as we were lying there in the dark, I said, sheepishly:

"I'll be feeling bad about this til the day I die. Do you forgive me?"

John: "Yes I forgive you. I already told you I did."

Then he grinned and said: "Would you like to yell at me again tomorrow?"

Fortunate doesn't even begin to explain my life.

BEEP BEEP - "NICE ASS"

Sometimes I enjoy lying in bed in the morning and just thinking - about things I have to do that day, how I'm feeling, things that make me chuckle or otherwise feel good. If I find myself thinking negative thoughts, I can usually change that line of thinking if I doze off again for a few minutes. (That somehow changes the energy or something).

One morning not so long ago, I began thinking about the very productive and profitable run I had as a licensed Residential Builder. As a woman, it was quite a challenge to break into the man's world of home building. You see, I'm a petite woman, and therefore limited in physical abilities compared to my male counterparts. For this reason, and others I'm sure, I was sometimes an easy mark for the brawny, macho guys I often encountered (I could tell you LOTS of stories). But after finding some really nice and quite helpful people to show me the ropes, I spent the past 7 years building (and selling) enough houses to pay for college at Big Ten Universities for our two children.

Anyway, on this one particular morning, my thoughts went to the day I was doing a final walk-through on a house I was set to close on the next day. As I was inspecting the property, I noticed that the bulb in the front porch light was burned out. I went to my car and got a spare bulb, but all I had to stand on was a small 1 gallon bucket of drywall mud (about the size of a paint can maybe).

Now the house was on a very busy main road and a lot of people saw me teetering on the small bucket, reaching up as far as I could to change the light bulb. As I was struggling, two guys in a pick-up truck drove by and I heard BEEP BEEP "NICE ASS"!

As a mature woman, my first thoughts were "Oh Grow Up!!!".

Then I thought: 50 + years old - nice ass - YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.

After that, I hopped off of the mud bucket and finished my walk-through with a smile on my face and a more confident bounce in my step.

Boy, when you reach a certain age, it doesn't take much, does it?

MICRO CENTER - Customer Service Alive and Well!

When I decided to start blogging about my life experiences as a wife, mom, etc., etc., I made assurances to myself that I would not become a whore with regard to products, facilities, services and the like. So not too long ago, when I wrote about my less than desirable experience shopping at all of our local computer stores, I had no expectations, no ulterior motives; like Sgt. Friday would say, "Just the facts".

Well, interestingly enough, of all the stores I visited that day, and thus mentioned in my writings, Micro Center contacted me to offer their help in my dilemma of "the software I couldn't use". Now let me emphasize - THEY CONTACTED ME. I WASN'T UPSET WITH THEM. I DIDN'T COMPLAIN TO THEM. THEY SEARCHED FOR ME. THEY FOUND ME !!!!!

After only a few e-mails, Albert, from Customer Relations, figured out what equipment I needed to run the software I purchased and made sure I received it. No muss, no fuss. Just good old-fashioned customer service. It's hard to remember the last time I received good old-fashioned customer service.

Of the millions of people out there, I WAS IMPORTANT!!!!! That's how Albert made me feel - like all that mattered to Micro Center, and him, was that I receive the product compatible with my needs. So again I have to ask, how fortunate am I? And at the risk of sounding like a product whore, how fortunate all of you out there could be by shopping at Micro Center. Instead of being the ultimate computer store, its motto should be "ultimate computing - ultimate customer service".

Thanks again Albert. Thanks again Micro Center.