A week

Well, it's been a week. A -- what would I call it? A January week, but it isn't really very January here. We've had a few days where it didn't get to 40, but most days it does, sometimes into the 50s. (Today we're at 39, but it's forecast to get a little warmer.) No snow, no ice, no veterinary bills over $1000. On the other hand, there have been the usual bothers, some less usual than others. Let's just call it a week.

It was extremely windy last weekend (80+ mph gusts), and on Saturday night, after I said goodnight to the twins and fed the cats and was preparing to take a shower, there was a tremendous crash outside in back. I didn't want to know what it was, but knowing that I might need to do something about whatever had happened, I turned on the patio light and cautiously stepped outside. The wind was blowing like a son of a gun, and my eye was caught almost immediately by the strange dark shape hanging down onto the patio that wasn't there before. Our massive Siberian elm (a "trash tree" that tends to do poorly in windstorms), had dropped one of its branches RIGHT through one of the porch skylights. The branch had gotten stuck in the skylight, so it was just hanging there, a foot or so off the ground. Photos, taken the next day, don't show how truly creepy it looked in the dark.

I went back inside and said a lot of things to the walls and the cats, like "Oh shit, oh shit, OMG!" which woke up the twins -- or maybe the crash woke them up, but my comments encouraged them to get up and investigate. They went outside in their shortie pajamas and bare feet -- it was probably in the 30s -- and said wow, and that sort of thing, and then went back to bed. I went to bed too, because the bathroom window is too close to where the branch came down for me to want to take a shower, but I didn't sleep for hours, because the winds actually got worse. We had three or four nights in a row like that, but fortunately no other damage.

Now I have to do something about this, get the skylight replaced and all that. Of course it turns out to be an unusual skylight that Rocket Boy put in, oh, maybe 30 years ago, so how the heck am I going to figure out where to get a new one, and it's screwed into the wood with unusual screws that look like nails and you have to use a special tool to remove them and RB's not sure what the tool is or where in the garage it might be. But he wants me to get right on it! I did go up on the ladder today and look at it, but it's windy again (!!) and there's no way I can actually crawl onto the roof and measure the broken skylight, and the whole thing is so daunting that... I don't know, I don't know. I did text the guy who did a lot of yardwork for us last summer and asked him if he could replace it, but he said no, not his thing. So I'll have to contact someone else. Bleah.

The bulk of the week was calmer -- the twins went back to school on Tuesday and of course complained about that a great deal, but I'd kept them almost on schedule through the vacation, so it wasn't as difficult a transition as it might have been. I spent the whole week trying to get myself to take down the Christmas tree, and failing, but I did get all the ornaments and lights and whatnot packed up. It was just the tree that I couldn't seem to face. Taking down the tree is very complicated -- there are all sorts of pieces that need to be put away just so. The branches on each level (A, B, C, C, D, D, E1, and E2) have to be stacked together neatly and then have a wire wrapped around them, with a cardboard tag that indicates the letter (even though the letters are also marked on the branches themselves, but I knew those cardboard tags were important to Rocket Boy, so I couldn't leave them off). When I was taking the lights off the tree, I broke off several branches that the lights had apparently been stabilizing, and I was just feeling very unhappy about the tree and didn't want to work on it. OK.

On Friday afternoon the twins brought home their disgusting smelly gym suits and I set about doing a wash, so the gym suits would be clean for Monday. Toward the end of the wash cycle I heard some funny noises coming from the bathroom, but I ignored them. Foolish mom. Eventually Kid A went in to use the bathroom and discovered a surprise. "Mom! There's all this gross dirty water in the bathtub!" I sadly went in to see and found the bathtub half full of soapy water, with unidentified icky things floating in it. Also, the toilet wouldn't flush. I called Rocket Boy but he didn't answer, so I looked up the problem on the internet -- "Why is icky dirty water flowing into my bathtub?" It's a clog, the websites all told me, and you can't fix it yourself. Call a plumber. I remembered the name of the plumber RB called the last time this happened and looked them up, but Google said they were "Closing soon," i.e., at 5, and it was 4:58. So I called the plumber that we had to call after the first plumber didn't have a long enough snake to get at the problem, and they said they could send someone out the next day. At a little after 10 am Saturday, the plumber arrived, went down in the basement where the sewer pipe access is, and set to work.

I was embarrassed by how messy the house was -- funny how the house seems so much worse when you know someone's coming over -- so I decided it was finally time to tackle the tree. And while horrible noises from down in the basement rocked the house, I took the tree apart, level by level, and packed it all away in its big black garbage bag and then into its gigantic box. When the plumber left, around 1 pm, after charging me $215, the tree had vanished. I ran the dishwasher right away, and later took a shower. Around 5 pm I did a small load of laundry. Gurgle, gurgle, said the bathroom. Oh no. I couldn't look. Sure enough, the bathtub filled with dirty water once again.

This morning I called the plumber back and they're going to send someone out again on Monday (I said it wasn't an emergency). The twins and I carried all the Christmas boxes down to the basement. The only thing left (other than a million Legos all over the floor) is our circular tower creche thing, which we don't have a good box for. That's my goal this week -- find a box for it. And get the plumbing fixed for real. And figure out what to do about the broken skylight. And wait for the next disaster.