Tomorrow is the first day of school. I am in denial of this fact. I would like very much for it to be the beginning of August again, with a full month of lazy, fun-filled, no worries days ahead. But alas, it is today, full of grocery shopping for school lunches, getting binders and backpacks fully stocked, and making sure kids are in bed early enough to face the first day of a new school year.
The summer started off well enough, with a computer camp for my 11 and 13-year-old boys, each reveling in some great video game design instruction from Camp Galileo. Not exactly hiking and learning survival skills, but they loved it and I learned to navigate downtown San Jose a bit better.
Then in early July, my husband took the boys on an annual camping trip to Shaver Lake where they got to do some innertubing off the back of a boat. Way cool fun. And it left me, home alone, during the hottest weekend of the summer, to discover through the act of rug-doctoring the bedroom carpets, that we were destined to replace carpets with Pergo or some reasonable fascimile to squelch the incumbent doggie pee smell I just couldn't live with anymore.
Having already committed to giving up my precious school room (in a three bedroom house made for Barbies) in order to fulfill my sons' dreams of each having their own room, the addition of new flooring seemed to make sense in the scheme of things. Not being fixer-upper types, we enlisted the help of our local Home Depot to do the job of putting in new fake wood floors. After much gnashing of teeth due to bad communication from this outfit, we decided to fire them, knowing that the closest match to our current floor would slip through our fingers. But it felt too good to fire them for their incompetence. And to be able to sign on with the boycott to voice our disgust with Home Depot's support of the Gay Agenda.
Onward to Lowe's, which seemed to provide some good service and hope to get it done in good time. Unfortunately, what we thought would be a compliment to the current flooring turned out to be way too orange-y. Thankfully we learned this through a sample and not by having the floor installed.
On to MMM Carpets, who by then was our last hope to get the floors done by the time my brother and family were scheduled to arrive in late August. They had done our original Pergo, and I knew they would be a bit pricier, but by then I didn't care. So that was on the roster, and just had to work. Did I mention that my husband had taken his vacation to help orchestrate the flooring project and re-org of the rooms? We had been living in limbo with the bedrooms all this time. Not my comfort zone at all, chaos.
Somewhere between firing Lowe's and choosing MMM, we found another home project to tackle. A bad smell coming from behind our oven, which we assumed was a dead rat. This led to consulting many pest control outfits, who almost unanimously advised us to wait it out and the body would eventually decompose, leaving us with an intact as opposed to destroyed kitchen. Not wanting a destroyed kitchen, we were happy to wait it out and burn many scented candles. However, the ten days we were were told would take care of it turned into twenty and more, and before we ordered the new oven to replace the now eternally stinky one, there was a little mishap...
I came home from shopping for my husband's birthday dinner, opened the front door, heard a crash, then "Dad, Dad!!" and after considering turning around and fleeing for my peace of mind, entered the house to find Hubby fallen through the ceiling in the hallway, covered in asbestos popcorn and fiberglass fluff. Now we had another project to add to the roster--fixing my husband and the hole in the ceiling. The ceiling was fixed quicker than the husband, but thankfully the husband should eventually heal as well as the ceiling.
Fast forward to the oven issue, where the installer guy has just removed the old oven, I am armed and ready with bleachwater solution to stave off the offending smell and carcass, and it is discovered that there is no carcass to attack with said bleachwater. After some light head scratching, the installer guy explained that sometimes rats get into the oven itself and eat the insulation between the oven and outer shell. Sounded plausible enough to me. He rolled out the old, brought in the new, and soon there was a brand new oven where the stink had been. When I was putting the kitchen back together, spraying cookie sheets and baking pans that were sitting in stink for a month, I discovered a cookie sheet covered in oily smelly goo--smelling just like the "dead rat" that we had been plagued with for the last month. Oops. I guess I should have listened to my husband, who weeks before had suggested that maybe the smell had been from something inside the oven. Yeah, right, I'd said. Chalk that one up to a big "L" on my forehead, and a very gracious husband who resisted any temptation to hold that over me. Bless him!!!! A big dose of humility for this smarty pants.
So we have the new oven, a repaired ceiling, a still-sore husband, new floors, bedrooms for each boy, new bed for the 11-year-old, and a fine visit with my brother and family for the last week of summer.
Cost of our summer "vacation" --- a little over five grand. Our trip to D.C. and Philadelphia was a bargain compared to this summer. But hey--it kept us out of trouble, gave us incredible anecdotes, sympathy from friends and family, and a big heaping dose of perspective and realization of how greatly we are blessed to have the funds to do these projects and be really stupid once in a while. On with the year!
And I've successfully procrastinated getting ready for the first day of school tomorrow.
It's all true... I lived it!
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