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Power Outages, Flat Tires & More!

What a crap week! I'm so glad it's over! The crap part started Tuesday night at 7 PM. It was a beautiful, hot summer evening. I had chicken on the grill, Phoebe playing upstairs with her friend from next door (it was too hot to play outside), I was straightening up the kitchen and putting a salad together to go with the grilled chicken. All of a sudden, the lights in the kitchen go out. I look over at the ceiling fan in living room and it was turning off. WTF???? I look outside and the wind is really kicking up and the sky is getting dark. I go outside to put down the patio umbrella and notice the gas grill fires were blown out by the wind. No point in lighting it again, it was so windy. I call the girls down and told her friend she should go home. I'd watch her walk next door it was so windy. I would've walked with her, but Phoebe's freaking out that there's going to be a tornado. I try explaining that we know what to do if that happens, but she's still freaking out. I get the chicken put away in the fridge, get out all the candles, and start Plan B for dinner. Tuna salad sandwiches. Then we did have some fun. When the wind died down, I lied to Phoebe and told her there would be no tornado. I say lie because I really couldn't promise that, but the calm "Mommy knows what to do" routine wasn't working to ease her mind. So we ate dinner and played cards. I taught her how to play War. She loved it. Then she didn't want to go to bed in her own room. Not because of the thunderstorm, but because her night light couldn't be on. We still had no power. So I let her sleep in our bed and came up to read a book in bed myself. Tom was still on his way back from NYC via train for work. He got home around 1 AM. Phoebe might have fallen asleep a little before that. She couldn't fall asleep. The whole time I'm reading, she's tossing and turning. When I got tired around 11 PM, she was still up and I told her to stop kicking her legs around, because now I'm trying to sleep.

The power came back on at 5 AM. The central air conditioner turning back on woke me up even though it's on the opposite side of the house because I was sleeping that light. I set the clock to wake up in a hour and went back to bed. An hour later, I go to the gym to work out on the elliptical machine. Halfway through the power goes out again for 5 minutes. I wasn't about to start over. It took enough energy to get me there in the first place.

I'm on my drive to work and I get a flat tire (yes this does get worse). I call Tom, who was home on a conference call for work, and tell him I need him to come change my tire. The wonderful man he is, he immediately came to my rescue. I canceled my chiropractor appointment that morning because of the flat tire, and managed to get Phoebe to school in time for the special program they had that day where they hired someone to bring in all kinds of cool animals. Kind of a traveling petting zoo. She knew they were coming, and I was glad I didn't disappoint her.

I went to the car dealer to find out I need 4 new tires, my front brakes done and I already knew my driver's side headlight was out. Let's not go into how much that cost me.

I had never been so glad to get to work. After work, the cable modem wouldn't give our LAN/router a DHCP address. After several reboots I got Tom's laptop to work directly connected to the cable modem, so he could take his conference call with his MBA project group at 9 PM. In the process, I burnt the microwave popcorn I was making because I forgot about it when Tom called me to come into the study to look at the Internet connectivity issue.

So right now, my house still smells like burnt popcorn, the cable modem needs to be restarted every time you put a new computer on it, and we have a dinner party tomorrow night. Thank goodness I don't have to cook, as one of Tom's classmate's daughter is a chef and she's cooking for us. I just need to take care of coffee, drinks, and get the house to smell normal.

Believe it or not, I'm feeling much better today. I feel like I've been at the bottom and things can only go up from here.... Right?

BTW, I'm not the only one having a hard time. My SIL got laid off this week. Poor kid. It was a really crappy job, though and she was already interviewing to find a new one. I think that's why she ended up on the list. They knew she was looking elsewhere already.

Comments

Shal said…
sounds like a normal week here... lol... glad to hear you all made it!!!

I hope you have a great weekend!

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