A Year in Review

2012 has provided us with one helluva wild ride. Then again, I don’t know that there’s been a single year of our lives—since J and were together, at least—that hasn’t been a wild ride.  That being said, the reason I started this blog nearly three years ago was to reflect on our lives—to find the positive and remember it through the hard times. I lost that once, and I never want to travel through that darkness again.

So, let’s take a quick look at some of the highlights of 2012—as featured on this blog or not—and then I’ll be ready to start thinking about 2013… although, if you caught me on Twitter last night, you know that I’ll only be making resolutions I know I can keep. Like spending more time on Pinterest.

In January, I mentally powered through an minor PA relapse. Writing about it gave me the chance to connect with other individuals who suffer from RA, PA, and Lupus. We traded notes on meds, exercises, shortcuts and foods.  I’ve been med free for quite some time now (since July 2009), and I can attribute most of it to J’s enforcement of a positive attitude and exercising Every. Damn. Day. Which, at first, made me feel like I was going to die. I hate freaking exercise.

In February, J and I took a weekend trip to KC and I started writing for Sprocket Ink! My favorite posts to write in the last year certainly had to be about the Hunger Games Haters and the Zombie Apocalypse. Also, last February, I began to take a stand against the teacher who was making Ant’s life a living hell.

In March, I first starting preaching the benefits of finding your Twitter tribe, and wrote an SI article that started the phrase ‘Hooker Powers’ amongst my friends. It was awesome.

April brought a declaration from J that I need to write about him more often, and Alex from Late Enough and I shared a mutual hatred of birds.  Also? The Bloggess released the funniest book ever.

May marked the one year anniversary of the tornado which devastated my hometown in 2011. Steph from Musings of a Sarcastic Mind  started #OperationPlayMore and I joined in. J was still on me to write more about him.

June brought vacation. Because there’s no better time to go to Disney World than when there’s a tropical storm. No lie! The rain keeps the temperatures down and the lines away. It was fantastic to know that it was 83 degrees in Florida while it was 106 in Missouri. Plus? We totally got to see a rocket launch and Atlantis make its way home. Also, there was the broken shower incident of 2012… I still hold Mike Holmes responsible…

July was hot. And unbearable. And tried to kill me, since June didn’t get the job done.

In August, I spent a week in Chicago sans-guys. Granted, it was for work, but it was awesome. Good food. My first official train ride.  

In September, which is one of the busiest months of the year for me (I know, I know… I say it about almost every month) we openly admitted to K’s OCD diagnosis—which had been a summer-long process, and to make me feel better, the Twitter gave me a vacuum. Again, this is why the Twitter is awesome! Okay, maybe it didn’t exactly happen that way, but close enough. Oh, and I totally copped to believing in ghostesses, and started a group with like-minded women who want to travel to ghosty places, learn to ghost-hunt, and drink. Mostly the traveling and drinking bit, I bet. Then Noa from Oh, Noa told me she wanted to come and investigate my house (she totally was a ghost hunter before) and I didn’t find it creepy at all.

October and November both are kind of a blur. I spent most of my time writing the grant. I also had some funny moments (well, funny for J, not for me) and Jesse took pity on me and sent me some Rock Star Wine! 

  

In December… well, I officially admitted I have let myself go (although I’ve been able to rectify a bit of that over the last week of vacation—I even gave myself a manicure on Saturday—a manicure!) and then… well, I think it was hard for many of us to get in the Christmas spirit this year—especially if we had elementary-aged children.  Each year, the four of us do something or make something to remind us of the Christmas spirit. This year, I’m happy to say we participated in #28ActsofKindness.

Why 28? Because there were 28 victims that day, at least in my mind. I don’t believe in monsters, but I do believe we have a massive gap in mental health care services in our nation today. I also told you that I am (still) waiting in the Common Ground.

And there you have it. Not an exceptional year, per se, but an adventure, nonetheless. Every day with these three guys (and Super-Sophie) is an adventure, to be sure!  I’m looking forward to 2013… but I suppose that’s fodder for a post tomorrow. 

What is(are) the highlight(s) from your 2012? And what are you looking forward to in 2013? 

And Then the Twitter Gave Me a Vacuum…

This will make more sense momentarily.

If anything, 2012 will be marked as the year that all the things in our house decided to break. All the things. If you’ll remember correctly, the dryer broke (and J tried to fix it himself, with it still PLUGGED IN), the dishwasher broke, I started sticking a pencil in the washer to combat the broken door sensor (maybe I didn’t tell you about that one), and the boys’ shower decided to flood the house. Oh, and there was the day in July that the air conditioner decided to break when it was 106 degrees. Cannot forget the air conditioner.

And this is how we know the Mayans were right. And the fact that global climate change is real and my air conditioner wanted to remind me of that fact.

I keep trying to tell myself that this IS better than 2010-2011—the year of the vermin.

Cooking Post: The Ubiquitous Breakfast Burrito

YUM...

Do you know what we haven’t had in a long damn time? A cooking post. Okay, you likely see cooking posts all the time, but we’re talking about a cooking post from ME… which are few and far between and the world’s easiest things to make, because really? A girl can have limits to her talents.

Do you remember when I told you that I was scared of fast food? I still am, but there’s one thing from McDonald’s that I just cannot live without. I bet you know what I’m talking about, if you’ve ever heard me wax poetic on the benefits of tortillas and cheese in every meal. It’s the damn breakfast burrito. I love those things. I know they’re awful for me; I don’t want to know what’s actually in them. They. Are. Delicious.

Experiencing Technical Difficulties… Please Stand By

We thwarted the last week of June by running off to another state on vacation, and while I briefly hoped that our awesome vacation meant that the bad luck June always brings would be over, I’ve now come to realize that by being gone, we were just delaying what the last week of June had in mind for us-- until the first week of July.

You know it’s hot outside when I start speaking in 65-word long run-on sentences, FYI.

Although, perhaps, I knew deep down inside that I was going to have to pay for those days by the pool, the mild temperatures, and the relatively pain-free drives.

If you’re unfamiliar with how June tries to kill me (okay, maybe not kill me, but certainly annoy me) each year, read this, and this, and then this. Prior years have been even worse. June is my Thebes month.

This year, I’ve been bitten on the leg by a pit-bull (in my own yard), I’ve been stung by a wasp (and had to go on Allergic Reaction Deathwatch 2012), I’ve been attacked by the world’s largest moth (the vermin trifecta!), and I attempted to fix a broken shower with no success. Also, our washer decided to break down (how dare the 12-year-old appliance require maintenance. Sheesh!), but that didn’t make the blog, because I fixed it.

When in doubt, shove a pencil in it. That’s my motto. I bet I could have fixed the shower, if I had any place to shove a pencil into.

This week alone I’ve dealt with broken wifi, an unexpected loss of 3G service in our area (this makes blogging difficult) and massively hot temperatures. All of the creatures in the wild are so hot and thirsty (moderate drought now with burn bans—marching towards water shortages and severe drought throughout the summer) that they keep coming up to our house in an effort to get inside.

Then Ant got sick with a nasty cold. And then sicker, with an amazing cough. And now we think he may have picked up vaccine resistant pertussis in the House of the Mouse.

Then the air conditioning broke last night. It’s currently 99 degrees, and slated to get even hotter this afternoon (104). The heating and air guys promise to show up sometime tonight. Yeah, tonight.

So the tales of our awesome vacation and the associated pictures? Yeah, that’s going to have to wait. If I were to brag right now, the universe would up the ante, I’m sure. Plus, I’m busy having a very warm pity party for myself right now.

Do you have an unlucky month? Are you currently affected by the drought, the power outages on the east coast, or were you flooded out during the tropical storm? Are you starting to think that maybe the Mayans were on to something?

HGTV Has Taught Me Nothing

My phone is on vibrant when I’m at work. The consequence of this is when I get a call on my cell phone—usually from K—my coworkers know as soon as I appear to be talking to myself in my office, they should perk up their ears if they want to hear something humorous. Yesterday was no exception.

K only calls me with crazy concerns. There was the superhuman spider—who wouldn’t die as K threw shoes at it from across the living room. Then there was the time he was certain a bird had pooped on Super-Sophie’s head, and wanted me to come home to clean it off. Yesterday’s conversation (as heard by my co-workers) went a little something like this:

What do you mean it cracked? What kind of cracking sound?

Tell me what you mean by leaking? Is it dribbling or spraying?

Is it just in the shower, or all over the bathroom?

Could you fill a cup in less than a minute? In fifteen minutes? In an hour?

‘I don’t know’ really doesn’t help me.

Do you actually hear water in the walls, or water moving through the pipes?

As I quickly packed my laptop, one of my co-workers came in and said, “So, going home to staunch the flood?”

Yep. That’s exactly what I was doing. The water faucet in the shower had cracked when K turned it, and after he failed to make it stop in the first THIRTY minutes, he thought his mother might have better luck.

As I was driving the three miles home, I was trying to call J—who is more inclined to make a difference in any kind of home repair situation, but I knew that getting in touch with him was likely not to happen, since he had a crazy day planned at work. After several failed attempts, I figured if I could keep things under control until he got home in a couple of hours, it would be a good save.

I don’t fancy myself any kind of handyman, but I’ve watched HGTV, people! I’ve seen the home repair shows on PBS. I figured I could, at least, keep everything under control until J got home.

Once at home I spent the first two minutes studying the downstairs immediately surrounding the boys’ shower. Holmes on Homes has shown me what water damage looks like. I didn’t see any. There was, however, water in the boys’ bathroom. K had decided that showering was more important than our plumbing emergency, and had just moved his operation to my shower. I started throwing towels down.

Where were you when I needed you???

I studied the situation through dribbles from the faucet and a fine spray from the handle. The water leakage wasn’t torrential by any means, but by now it’d been going for about an hour, and the bathroom was wet. I was fairly certain he’d broken the handle, and not the actual shower components or the pipes, so that was good, but depending on what part of the shower handle he had broken, it could require us to rip out the wall to replace.

I needed to figure out what part was broken. I also needed to be able to stop the water flow. The outermost part of the handle needed to come off, and I needed two screwdrivers and a wrench-like thing. Don’t ask me what it’s called. This is where I summarize another thirty minutes of searching in the world’s messiest (and most tool-laden) garage—it’s J’s world, after all—and tell you that finding tools that I really can’t describe in a tool chest system of J’s that I cannot understand, was…. Interesting. Finally I was equipped with an undersized Phillips, a flathead, and some pliers. That’s was as good as it was going to get.

Back in the bathroom, I was trying to decide what piece of the faucet/handle needed to come off first to begin the disassembly process. Figuring the very front/top piece would be a logical place to start, I attempted to pry it off. It wouldn’t budge. A dozen years of soap or water or something had that thing STUCK. K, who was back now to provide me emotional support, suggested that we just rip the whole thing off. I had no idea what to do next, but the one thing I knew in my heart was ripping anything off of anything else did NOT sound like a good idea. I attempted to remove some other pieces (with more success) but was unable to loosen or budge the front piece which was barring me from actually removing anything else.

It was certain now, though, that the water was not leaking in the walls (I could see about two inches around the shower handle unit in the wall). But I couldn’t get the handle to budge, in order to get to the metal piece that regulated water flow, and therefore couldn’t get it to shut off.  Plan B was shutting water off to the house. I remember how J had to do this at the old house to fix the kitchen plumbing, and that main water shutoff had been in the basement and nicely labeled. We don’t have a basement in this house and nothing is labeled.

In other words, where the hell should I start?

I checked the garage, the storage area attached to the back of the house, and even the attic. The only thing left was the utility closet with the water heater and furnace. I checked in there, and had an idea what was return pipes and gas lines, but couldn’t really identify a water shut off. There was no spicket-looking thing like there had been in our old house. The only thing I had left was an unlabeled black lever—buried in the wall of the utility closet, behind the furnace and the water heater—basically out of my reach, unless I wanted to climb over the furnace. K was following me, and since he is much skinnier than I am, I charged him with climbing in the utility closet to turn the unidentified lever, and threw him some gloves (thank goodness I could find those in J’s tools) to keep the fiberglass insulation from embedding in his skin. He made it to the back of the closet, and attempted to turn the lever.

It wouldn’t budge. We tried some more, and got it to move about twenty degrees. That was it. It wasn’t going to work. We tried to move it back to the open position, and it wouldn’t budge that way, either. Then K and I decided to take out some aggression and beat on it until it moved. Finally, after another 30 minutes, we got the damn thing moved back to where it started.

Now I had thirty more minutes until J got home, for the love of God. THIS is when he returned my call. I laid out the story for him, and he told me two things: 1) the main water shutoff for the house was likely buried somewhere in the yard (“slab construction means you usually had to shut the water off at the street level, Sarah”) and I should just wait until he got home.

Where was Holmes or Bob Villa when I needed them? And why the hell would anyone bury the main water shut off for the house in the yard???

So, I moved to water control in the bathroom. I had most everything cleaned up and controlled by the time J came home. And do you want to know what he did as soon as he got there and shed his work clothes? He went into the bathroom, assessed that the top/front of the shower handle wouldn’t pop off, and ripped the thing off the wall.

I shit you not.

He then grabbed the pliers, and shut off the water. He then picked up the small piece of plastic that had fallen off the handle when he wrenched it off, and said, “That’s your cracked piece. I’ll run by the hardware store, and pick up a new one.”

J spent twenty dollars and ten minutes fixing something that had plagued me for two hours. I decided that all I was doing for the rest of the evening (because it was well into evening now) drinking a beer and watching cable movies.

All of this to say two things—watching DIY projects has done nothing for me. Don’t fool yourself. When confronted with a minor water emergency, these shows won’t help you. I think this realization is even worse than the confirmation that the House Hunters show is staged.

My second point—lots of these things have been happening to us as of late. After all, it’s June (and we all know what that means for me). So, I’m taking a little mental break from blogging (and life, in general) next week. Don’t worry—I have guest posters lined up for the coming week—thanks to my lovely fellow writers at Sprocket Ink-- so you won’t be left unattended.

I’ll be relaxing and avoiding any type of fixing of anything during that time. Also? I won’t be watching HGTV. 

Oh, HHI, I don't know how to quit you.