Busy Days

As Jack told my mom on the phone this morning - we're just having one of our busy days. ;-)

And really, we kind of are. I was vacuuming, doing dishes, laundry, etc. The house really needed a cleaning - once over type of deal. It always makes me feel a little bit better to pick things up. Clutter does bother me, even if I am an "organized pile" type of person. Once the piles aren't organized, I get bothered and it is classified as clutter. :-p

Yesterday was an interesting day. We've had a week where the temperature was as long as -25F with the wind chill, but for the past 5 days or so, it's stay up closer to +20-30F. So, when my toilet and bathtub started acting funny - air escaping, not draining properly - I really didn't think it was frozen pipes or anything.

But(!), yesterday, morning routine involves a shower, and I decide to start laundry too. Well, silly me, the rinse cycle apparently started while I was rinsing shampoo out of my hair (irony, you are not funny), and since the pipes decided they were on strike that morning, the water had nowhere to drain to. It decided to flow back up my bathtub's pipes.

So, suddenly I am standing in very cold water, blueish-blackish water, because it has nowhere else to go. It also tries to come up through the toilet I think, but thankfully not so much. I had to hurry out of the shower and turn off the washer so it didn't dump two washer load full water into the tub. As it was, my tub filled to within a few inches of the top. Gross!

I called the city, they came and checked the pipes, supposedly the drain flow was pretty low, so they did some kind of "courtesy" cleaning, and hopefully this will be the last of it. Hopefully it isn't something blocking the pipe on my side of the sidewalk, or else it will be my cost, even though the city owns the pipes.

Of course, the water drained slowly over the day, and I have the ring of disgusting goo around my tub to prove it. For those with strong stomachs, you can click here to see it. Blech!

Now, it's time to clean that up so I can take a shower. We've done some valentines for Jack's class this morning. He's been practising jumprope for a fundraiser at school. He read a selection of poetry last week for the kick-off of Black History Month. They are celebration African-American Authors during the after-school program, so a number of kids chose readings to recite at an assembly of sorts. I guess Jack even went first. :-)

Next week, he has Thurs/Fri off, and I would like to take a trip somewhere, but I don't know if we can. I need to get my taxes done and look/make a budget. I have to plan for a trip to Florida over spring break, and I would like to go out to LA soon to visit Lael and Katrina. Of course, there's also the plans for improving the house that I would like to do too. I got a piece of snail mail the other day from some heating/cooling place in town that's running a special where you get a new furnace for $500 if you purchase some cooling unit, or the other way around, I forget. I just know these next 3 months are the crunch time for those businesses, so I'd like to take advantage of that if I can.

Okay, better finish because Jack's wanting to play a computer game. Of course, the library has better games, lol. Oh well. As soon as we have something other than dial-up for my desktop computer, he can play online games. Add that to the list of things to do too.