1 post tagged “water water everywhere”
Since the last time I bothered to post anything, all sorts of things have happened. They've been kinda piling up so figured it was time to actually get something in here before events began falling out of my head. Guess I'll just go in sequential order, seeing as how there isn't necessarily any connectivity between things.
6th: Some water appeared on the baseboards around our kitchen, leading us to believe that the dishwasher was leaking. Leaving town the next day, so no biggie, we'll figure it out when we get back. Nobody's going to use it while we're gone anyway.
7th: Kenny and I flew to Baltimore late in the evening to both visit my parents and acquire some transportation. I love my parents but being around them can sometimes make me very sad, so seeing them is always kind of a mixed bag for me.
8th: Spent the majority of the day with my mom, we wandered around eating and shopping. The car I inherited from my father (thanks mom and dad!) has this awesome feature on the stereo where you can plug in an mp3 player. How convenient, I already have an mp3 player! Only got to see my dad for 3 hours in the evening, since he gets home late from work and then gets up really early. I wish he would've taken off work for a day, but I honestly don't remember the last time he did that, I can't exactly wrap my brain around what it is he does (I know the grand scope, but have no idea what that entails on a daily basis) but I know it's a Big Deal.
9th: Woke up early and set off on a drive for Atlanta. Stopped at Cracker Barrel on the way and rented an audio book, which is this really nifty thing that you can do there. Basically you pay retail price for it, then you can turn it back in later to any Cracker Barrel and they refund you all but $3.49/week. Kenny and I discovered some time ago that listening to music doesn't help keep us awake in the car, it's just background noise after awhile, and since we already know all of it, our brains aren't engaged. Listening to Agnes and the Hitman helped make the time go by, not an achievement of classical literature but it's an entertaining book. By North Carolina, we were positive that Brenda was the one that killed Frankie, but didn't know yet how Agnes and Shane would prove it. We didn't make it all the way to Atlanta as we had planned, so we spent the night at an overpriced hotel in Greenville.
10th: Woke up early again (I hate when 2 days in a row can be started with this) and finished our drive to Atlanta. The plan was to meet up with our friends Isaac & Angela and visit the Georgia Aquarium, so we went to Isaac's sister's house (who, as can be surmised, lives in Atlanta). To our chagrin, I&A were still a bit hungover from their night before, so we had to wait a little for them to get ready to go. Waiting is no biggie, but we woke up early and could have, in fact, slept in. Oh well. :-) We made it to the aquarium, which was wonderful! It has 5 big exhibits, each representing a different variety of aquatic life. It was sooo neat, I could have stood in front of virtually any one of the exhibits for a long time. One of the coolest parts is that the biggest tank has this tunnel thing underneath it, so you can see all the animals in every direction. Imagine a bunch of people walking around looking up, of course everyone is bumping into each other but nobody seems to mind in that exhibit. Anybody that sees something especially awesome just points and goes "look at that!" to whatever person happens to be standing nearby; it's as though being in that tunnel fosters a miniature sense of community. To give you an idea of the scope of this particular exhibit, there's 3 whale sharks in there that are 20+ feet long...swimming around comfortably...with TONS of room. After the aquarium, we went to eat at an Indian restaurant in Little Five Points, which was good, and I ate some eggplant thing that I've subsequently fallen in love with and someday might learn to pronounce.
Walked over to a store called Junkman's Daughter, which I've heard about for nearly 7 years from various people. It's a neat store with a collection of random and strange things, but it didn't seem to live up to the hype (to me, at any rate). I managed to find two rat items though, which made me happy. :-)
The original plan was for us to spend the night in Atlanta, but I was starting to freak out a little so Kenny moved up our driving plans and we left sometime between 6 and 7pm.
11th: Made it home at roughly 2am, where we promptly passed out - to the annoyance of all 5 cats, I think, since they were trying very hard to convince us that they were starving. I'm really happy with the Kia that my parents gave me, it's a good little car and gets very impressive gas mileage! I'm currently trying to come up with a name for it, I've entertained a few of them but nothing has stuck yet. I'll keep the world posted on my forthcoming decision, of course.
12-16th: Two major things happened during the week and I can't readily identify an order since they were fairly simultaneous.
1. Rats have moved into my wall. We knew that something had taken up residence in our outside storage area, so we cleaned it out and discovered a nest of rat babies, plus a hole where the rats were presumably using as a passage to vacation in my walls. I can't bear for anything to die (even the progeny of wall-eating critters), so I made Kenny leave the nest there in the storage room. I figured we had a 25% chance that they'd move the nest outside, and a 75% chance of them moving it into the wall. I did NOT beat the odds on this one. We're working on making our home increasingly less hospitable to rodents, which I think (hope?) is working. Once there's been enough time for the babies to become reasonably mobile, we'll start setting humane traps and release them in the woods faaaar away from our house. There's a good section around a mile away (and across a major road) and I think the rats would be very happy there. I know I would be happy with them there. :-)
2. Not using the dishwasher and solely using the sink did not fix the leak problem, so then we figured it must be just somewhere vaguely under-the-counter-y. Discovered an irritatingly large amount of mold behind the baseboards, plus the sheet rock was so damp you could leave full hand prints in it. I'm no expert, but that did NOT look good. Kenny's dad agreed to come over on the weekend and help identify/fix whatever was icking up the corner of my kitchen. Dishes were piling up in the sink, and although I'm an admittedly laid back housekeeper (cat hair is decorative!) it was starting to really get on my nerves.
17th: My friend Steve drove up to visit! I met him through FFXI, but if I really get attached to someone then I consider them a real-life friend even when I haven't seen them in person, and for me he's one of those people. I'm not good at entertaining, but I -am- good at sitting around my house playing video games, so we did a fair amount of that. :-) All three of us also went to see Iron Man, which gets off to a really really slow start but turns out to be a good movie nonetheless. We ate at Cilantro, which is my personal favorite Indian restaurant, and I found that eggplant stuff again although I still can't pronounce it (sigh). I was shocked that Xiao Wen did not immediately run from Steve and even walked up to him and licked his hands, this is as yet unseen behavior from Xiao Wen - he's generally scared of everyone. Even my pet-sitter never saw him a single time (in spite of spending a lot of time in my house over the several days we were out of town). I haven't got anything sleep-on-able in the 2nd bedroom yet, so poor Steve got stuck on my sofa in the living room surrounded by curious cats and uncomfortably close to mildewing walls, I feel kinda guilty about that but what can ya do. Next time he's here it'll be much better, I swear.
18th (part 1): Xiao Wen woke us up early (Mom! Dad! Momdadmomdadmomdadmomdad!) so we trooped downstairs to feed him and the other cats before they began gnawing off their own legs in desperation. I was craving french toast, but I managed to burn it a little so it didn't so much curb the french toast desire and I am, in fact, still having it. Sigh. The guys politely didn't mention that my french toast was horrible, but I'm sure that in their heart of hearts they were thinking "next time we should just go to IHOP." Steve left early-ish to head home (boooo) but I've extracted promises of future visits so that's okay. :-)
18th (part 2): Chris and Lisa (parents-in-law) came over to help figure out what was going on with our water problem. First hole in the wall revealed nothing... nor did second hole in the wall... but finally by third one the leak made itself apparent. A copper pipe had a little teeny tiny itty bitty hole in it, which was spewing water down the inside of the wall. After shutting off the water to the house (which is surprisingly easy), Kenny and I went to Home Depot to buy leak-in-copper-pipe-fixing-stuff. In the meantime, Chris put in a new desk for Kenny (which is extremely cool and which I am sitting at right now). $60 later, we came home and the guys used all the nifty new stuff to fix the pipe. Reconnected the water and the leak didn't reappear, so life is good! Right? Not quite. Chris is coming back next weekend to show us how to put in sheet rock (by us I mean Kenny). In the meantime there's this mold problem to deal with, once Kenny gets home we are bleaching the bejeesus outta that whole area of our home. There's box fans on the wall right now to dry up any standing water that we might have missed, and I keep running around with Oust to kill the mold smell. At least I know that in a few days, this problem will be behind us. :-)
18th (part 3): Kenny usually goes to bed first, and this night was no different. He was happily passed out when, 30 minutes later, I went upstairs... and discovered that the tank of our toilet was overflowing. A lot. There was water all over the bathroom floor. Seeing as how it was midnight and we were both in our sleeping outfits (read: naked), didn't seem like much we could do except flush the toilet and then cut off the water before it had a chance to start refilling. We sopped up all the water, remarked on how we have the world's worst luck, and went to bed.
19th: I'm off today, but Kenny's at work... he's going to buy a new umm... I don't know what it's called. All the contents of the back of a toilet. As far as we can tell, the part that cuts off the water (that's supposed to know when the water has reached an appropriate level) bit the dust. I'm just glad it happened in between when Kenny and I went to bed, otherwise it might have gone on for a loooooong time and we'd have slept through it. After only 30 minutes there was an overwhelming amount of water, I cannot imagine 7 hours. Water still seeped into the floor of the bathroom and spread to the downstairs ceiling, so I've got wet lines running all through the ceiling now. Hopefully those will dry out reasonably well, but once we get the kitchen wall rebuilt I guess we'll borrow a ladder from our neighbor and fix the popcorn stuff on the ceiling. There's already a couple spots I needed to fix from where the A/C unit leaked last year... this house has a water problem theme.
Anyone know how to do a home exorcism? I am totally up for it.
