Category: Daily Life

Yesterday I decided it was time I had something done about our slow basement drain. It had gotten to the point where every load of laundry overflowed the drain and wetted the floor about three feet around.

RotoRooter came out and started doing their thing. In both directions they came up with mud.

This is a very bad thing because it means that, as I had long suspected, the "grey water" from our kitchen and basement really does drain to the creek and not to the septic system. It also means that the drain line has been breached somewhere, but I’m certainly not inclined to dig up the basement floor, our concrete patio, and many feet of yard to find out where.

Our option, as proposed by the RotoRooter plumber, is to install a pump that will take wastewater from the kitchen and washing machine and feed it into a drainpipe to our septic system. For two thousand dollars, thank you very much.

That would be all well and good, but my husband and I are not comfortable with the idea of suddenly introducing that much extra water into the septic system without clearing the idea with a expert (aside from the initial plumber, who said "it should be okay"). You can see how the costs start escalating.

Then there’s the issue of still needing a functioning drain for when the basement floods periodically. Or maybe the root problem there is trying to solve the flooding before it happens.

One way or another, the real drain is going to be on my savings account.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the day we brought Velvet home from the shelter. She’s the cat in the foreground, with tiny-headed Xena behind her.

Over the past year Velvet has morphed from a scruffy-looking cat who
had obviously had a rough life, to a sleek, shiny, well-fed girl. She’s
a beautiful cat with long legs, big eyes and a sweet face, who loves to
be petted and cuddled.

We liked her from the first moment we met her, even though she was wearing a red collar that indicated that she’d been known to bite (as if any of our cats don’t nip now and then!).

The shelter staff told us that she loved to chase and be chased by the younger cats, which was exactly what we were looking for in a playmate for Xena. What they didn’t mention is that she likes to start those games around bedtime. Fortunately, they don’t last long.

She has one other habit I’d wish she’d break. If I still believed in monsters
under the bed, I’d never sleep again thanks to her evening ritual of
scratching the slats that hold up our mattress.

Sometimes I catch her eyeing our aged cat, Velcro, as if she can’t wait for her to die so she can take her place on my lap. Velcro may be old and deaf, but she’s always quick to smack that idea out of Velvet’s head – literally. On the other hand, Velvet has taken to giving Xena long baths, which is so cute I almost can’t stand it.

I don’t know how to wrap this up except to say that shelters are definitely the way to go when you want a new pet (unless, like Schmutzie, you end up rescuing one directly). You want a cat now, don’t you? Admit it!

This weekend was marked by triumphs both great and small.

I started out on Saturday morning by sorting a year’s worth of junk mail and six months’ worth of glass bottles and jars, and taking all of it to the recycling center. They were having a special shredding event, so it saved me hours and hours of shredding my own junk mail. It was a lot of fun to lob the bottles one by one into the dumpster and hear them shatter. I recommend taking your glass to the recycling center any time you feel the need for a little anger management.

On Sunday I walked the half marathon. I prepared as best I could, with special socks, a bag that held two water bottles, and new capri pants that I’m sure I’ll use later for yoga class. Once I cut the tags out of the pants to make sure they wouldn’t start bugging me during the 13.5 mile walk, I thought I had it all planned out.

It turned out that the injury I didn’t anticipate was caused by the seams in the sleeves of my t-shirt. They rubbed the undersides of both arms absolutely raw and there was nothing I could do about it, short of removing my t-shirt and exposing my pale, sports bra-clad flab to the world. I chose to suffer instead.

The walk went quite well and although I’m sure my legs will be stiff tomorrow (my knees are pretty stiff now), I handled it better than I had expected. Admittedly, I was pretty quiet for the last few miles and I wasn’t inclined to hurry to catch up when I got left behind at the final stoplight. Still, it’s nice to know that I’m capable of walking that far, even if I never do so again.

At band practice we auditioned a guy who used to play in a band with my mom probably 18 years ago. It went quite well, we’re all exactly in agreement about what we want from the band, and he can even help us book gigs. [Clouds part, sun shines, chorus of voices swells.] He’s the guy!

Look for gigs to be announced soon. I think we’re finally on track to start playing out within a month or less. Hooray!

So how was your weekend?

I know you’re all waiting with bated breath to see how the minor civic and domestic issues I mentioned earlier this week have been resolved. In brief:

Neighborhood Parking
All of the neighbors gathered on Monday evening to find out the results of the parking survey. Everyone said that they don’t want the entire street to have restricted parking; however, they wished that the guy on the corner would stop parking so close to the intersection. City officials plan to start by asking him nicely and proceed to put up "No Parking" signs on his block if that doesn’t help. My husband and I were the youngest people at the meeting by at least 15 years in his case, 25 in mine.

Drooping Cable
Believe it or not, I actually got an e-mail back from Time-Warner Cable. It said to call the same number I’d called yesterday. D’oh! However, I pressed a few dishonest menu keys and managed to make my way to an actual person. They’re not coming out until next week to fix the problem, but it’s not that big of a deal.

Band Auditions
Yesterday we auditioned a keyboard player (who basically talked his way into an audition, as we weren’t actually looking for a keyboardist), and another lead guitarist. It was kind of nice to have keyboards to fill in the sound on certain songs, but I’m not convinced that it’s worth dividing our paltry earnings by 6 rather than 5. The guitarist impressed us by – gasp! – actually having learned the songs he told us he wanted to play. His tone was a little Dokken-y on everything, but perhaps that’s fixable. No decisions have been made yet.

Aren’t you glad for that thrilling report? I think I need to work on having more interesting adventures.

So how’s your week going?

It might be spring, it might just be my mood, but this week feels like a great time for me to address things I’ve been procrastinating about. In the past few days, I’ve canceled my old cell phone, written a press release for my community service organization, renewed my magazine subscriptions, and paid all my bills.

All I had left on my list was a call to Time-Warner Cable to let them know that their cable that leads to my house has come loose from the pole and is sagging uncomfortably close to my driveway. It’s low enough that I could probably hop up and touch it.

You’d think it would be a simple matter to call them up and speak to someone. Ha! Hahaha! Instead, it’s Voicemail Hell. I went through the menu over and over, entering my phone number four or five times. Once I was given the tantalizing option of speaking to a customer service representative, but when I selected it the system swung me back into the menu loop and never offered that option again.

I finally sent an e-mail. I’m not holding my breath until I receive a reply.

Cooking played a fairly significant role in my weekend. I made cheesecake and Asian cabbage salad for a dinner with friends on Sunday. I also prepared a batch of pickled jalapeños that I can’t wait to try tonight.

On Saturday, my husband and I met up with some bloggers to see "Iron Man," which was AWESOME! I think XO’s review says it all.

Tonight we’re going to a meeting at City Hall to discuss parking on our street. Apparently someone’s been complaining. The city sent out a survey and now we’re having a meeting to decide if our street should be bedecked with No Parking signs. As my husband and I are on the "Hell, no!" side of the issue, we are very keen to go to the meeting and make sure that we’re not going to have a daily hassle on our hands where studio clients and friends who overflow the driveway suddenly have nowhere else to park.

So that’s my exciting weekend and Monday night. How’d your weekend go?

A couple of nights ago, I was interviewed via Google Chat by Logtar as part of his project to interview all of the bloggers he knows.

It was fairly late, so I didn’t get back to him with all of the links I should have. In case anyone’s curious, the orchid-growing blogger in Iowa that I mention is Blondie.

Oh, and here’s the American Copywriter blog. I’m kind of glad I re-read that part or I might have forgotten that today is Coffee Morning. Incidentally, Coffee Morning is now organized via a Facebook group and not on that blog.

The dinner meetup mentioned at the end of the post was great. I’d never had Colombian food before, but my arroz con pollo with fried plantains was delicious, as was the empanada I had as an appetizer.

As you can probably tell by my stilted writing this morning, I’m tired, brain-fried and thankful that it’s Friday. I have a Mother’s Day post in the hopper for ACORN’s I Remember Mama Voting project. Until then, have a speedy Friday and a restful weekend.

On Saturday, we met up with another couple and spent an exhausting day at the flea markets in White Cloud and Sparks, Kansas. (Seriously, click the link. It’s the web page equivalent of the flea market itself.) We had fresh-squeezed lemonade and gyros, but forewent the Indian tacos and funnel cakes. Naturally, we bought an enormous bag of kettle corn on the way out.

Here are a few of the treasures we chose not to purchase:

This figurine gave me the creeps, so I had to take a photo. Don’t look too long – she might steal your soul.

Here’s my husband and my friend, Robert, posing with a mannequin that I was really tempted to buy, but not for $125. The mannequin was disturbingly thin, with visible collar bones, ribs and vertebrae. If I’d taken her home, I’d have bought a box of Twinkies for her to hold on her lap with her one arm.

Do you ever think to yourself, "Boy, I wish I’d bought some collectible pins from the movie, ‘Dick Tracy,’ back in 1990!" Well, at White Cloud they had a whole box full of them.

By the end of the day, I had a killer headache. I think it had a lot to do with the amount of mold I was exposed to throughout the day. Cool vintage wallpaper, though.

More antique doll creepiness. I should have taken a photo of the entire doll because her arms, legs and body were weirdly elongated. You could picture her creeping up on you while you slept and strangling you with her long limbs.

This is the one thing I did buy: an interesting old hat. Once I remove the daisies, I think it’ll make a cool stage hat, despite the fact that it’s a bit too small for me.

Once we got back into town, we had a huge dinner and beers at Granite City Brewery. I was so beat that I was asleep by 9:45 p.m. It was a blast, though, and I’m sure we’ll go again next year. You should come with us!

We had a huge storm on Thursday night that fried one of our two
incoming power lines at the pole around 1:30 a.m. Friday morning. My
husband said that the winds sounded like a freight train roaring past
the house. I slept right through it.

If I needed any proof that I’m an Internet addict, it came yesterday in the form of the power outage, which affected our modem, my office, the TV, the stove, our garage and studio, etc. It also knocked out power to our refrigerator, but our house is wired so weirdly that I only needed to run an extension cord about three feet away to get it running again.

I had already taken the day off from work on Friday and was planning to go to Coffee Morning, get my oil changed, etc. Thanks to the power outage, my car was trapped in the garage, so I didn’t get make it to any of my planned appointments. The lack of Internet access practically drove me insane. I don’t know what I would have done without my mobile phone.

I called the power company at around 5:00 a.m. and they were supposed to get the outage taken care of by 8:30 a.m. They didn’t show, so I hauled my laptop more than a mile on foot to Einstein Bros. Bagels, only to discover that they didn’t have wifi. What kind of coffee shop doesn’t have wifi!?!

The only silver lining in that whole scenario is that I had fun taking photos on the walk back. It’s really hard to photograph a squirrel, did you know that?

There was always the option of pulling the garage door opener emergency release cords, but every time I’ve ever done that, I’ve had to have an expensive service call to reconnect it, so I was hesitating in the hope that the power company would eventually arrive. Around 2:00 p.m. I gave up and freed my car.

When I got home from my evening activities around 8:00 p.m., I was getting seriously irritated about the lack of repair, so I called the automated system again. I got a message back saying something to the effect of, "We see that your meter is running, so you’re good. KTHXBYE!" Aaaagggghhh! That’s why I reported a partial outage!

I called again to try to clarify via the robot system. They finally came and fixed our power at 12:30 a.m. after my husband and I had already gone to sleep out of pure boredom. I went out in my frumpy pink robe to make sure the workmen knew what the problem was, but they’d identified it already on their own.

So now I’m back, folks! Today I’m spending the day in White Cloud, Kansas and its neighboring town, Sparks, at their giant annual flea markets. I may not buy much, but I’m planning on taking lots of pictures.

What do you have planned this weekend? If you’re local, did you make it through the storm okay?

Yesterday evening I did a four-mile walk at a local park with a group of women who are in training for the Breast Cancer 3-Day.  I can tell I have a fighting chance of getting in better shape now that I’m out and about a bit more. I just need to walk like that every day.

I think I’m going to continue doing the training walks, at least until they start getting crazy long. A Librarian has also offered to walk with me in our neighborhood, so I need to get a schedule worked out with her.

On Sunday, I have the March for Babies walk. I could still use some donations to reach my $200 goal (hint, hint). Many thanks to Laurie, who donated the first time I brought it up.

As I mentioned over the weekend, all of this is leading up to the KC Tourwalk Half-Marathon. I picked up some tips about doing long walks from the Breast Cancer 3-Day gals, so I think I’ll have the right socks and supplies to make it through okay. Best of all, my friend LuAnn is going to be walking with me, so the miles should fly by.

My ultimate goal is to start walking as an alternative to driving. I live within easy walking distance of my grocery store, Blockbuster, Einstein Bros. Bagels (where my husband loves to eat breakfast), and quite a few other places I go regularly. With gas prices approaching $4 a gallon, why shouldn’t I save money and get some exercise at the same time?