Comedy of Errors

This weekend was one of those weekends.

First, some history. We have two bathrooms-- one in the master bedroom and the other off the main hall, which is used by Casey and any guests. A few weeks ago, when I decided to finally paint our bedroom with the paint we'd purchased a year or so ago, I noticed part of the wall was wet. Upon further exploration, we discovered that water was flooding out of our shower and onto the floor, soaking int othe wall shared by our bathroom and our bedroom. We tore out the drywall and checked for mold. Fortunately there was none, and all that remains is repairing hte drywall, which we haven't had time to do yet. Our house is 20 years old, though, so I guess we have to expect some problems. Like our toilets-- which flush but don't always refill. And our guest bathroom toilet has been leaking water. Jason just commented that he needs to lift hte toilet off the base and repair it. It's now something we really can't put off . . .

Yesterday, while I was on the phone giving my brother directions to our home via a detour (the main road was closed for freeway onramp work), Casey decided to unroll an entire roll of toilet paper, plug it into the toilet, and flush. I found him playing with the mush toilet paper, jammed in. It was gross. I guess one good thing that will come of having to take the toilet apart to unclog it is that it will force us to fix the toilet before we have any more guests use it. (Again, the "we" there is only figurative. I wouldn't know what to do with a toilet separated from the floor.)

Then, today, as we were getting ready to go to breakfast, we heard a loud ruckus coming from the laundry room. Turned out it was a 3 1/2 year old Maytag Atlantis. We shut if off. This is our second break-down in a year. And of course our warranty just wore out. It's useless to me. I was going to go to a laundrymat to finish the clothes but I never made it-- and I'll explain why in just a minute. I will be calling the Maytag service people tomorrow. Fortunately for me, my mother-in-law has a functioning washing machine, and she is going to wash Marcie's clothes for me this week. Hopefully our machine will be up and running in the next two days, and I won't have to rely on my mother-in-law to do the laundry-- but aren't I lucky to have her help?

So after the washing machine broke, we decided we could still be productive by finishing the rest of Marcie's room. That would require caulking (for those of you watching my spelling for me, I checked-- and it's correct to spell it caulk or to spell it calk), touch-up paint, emptying the closet shelves, and putting the crib together. I set off the caulk the moulding, and Jason went to dig the crib out of storage (also known as our garage rafters). But Jason couldn't find the hardware for the crib. So we looked. We searched high and low. We searched inside and outside. We searched cabinets and drawers and shelves and closets and pantries-- no sign of the hardware. And not the kind of hardware you can just replace by purchasing it at Home Depot, either.

So what are our options? Rely on the kindness of strangers to help us out, or purchase a new crib (at $300 - $500, this was not an obvious solution). (This scenario reminded me of our honeymoon, when we couldn't find Jason's birth certificate and he had no passport, so we flew to Los Angeles, just hoping they would be nice and let us on the plane to Mexico, figuring if they didn't, we'd just use our wedding gift money to buy tickets to Hawaii or somewhere we didn't need birth certificates or passports.) Bryan and Tram (pronounced Chum) to the rescue.

Bryan is my younger brother, and he and Tram have a two year old named Joey who recently transitioned into a bed. Lucky for us. They said they won't need the crib-- at least for the next nine months-- and we lucked out. So off we went to their place to pick up the crib. Only it didn't fit in the car. We took what we could, and then returned home-- Jason was to go back and get the last piece of the crib.

Once we arrived home, I asked Jason to mix the paint so I could touch up Marcie's room while he was gone. This sent us on another hunting expedition (how does one lose 5 gallons of paint?). Fortunately, Jason remembered pretty early on that there had been a problem with the paint and he had to throw away the can. And even more fortunate (perhaps that's the wrong word since it wasn't incidental), Jason saved a small tupperware container-sized worth of the paint. Which I mixed easily and used to touch up the walls.

So the crib is put together. Some of the items that will end up on teh wall are hanging. Jason is hanging the curtain rod as I type. There is still so much to do. I'm sure we'll get it done in the next week and a half. We can only do our very best-- even when it seems like the world has conspired against our coordinated efforts.