Need more hours per day pls-k-thx

I’ve been trying to get my stash settled on Ravelry. And may I just pause for a moment here to say serves me right, because how many times have I thought, Gee, my stash is SO out of date on Ravelry, perhaps I should…NAH! I’m going to do something else instead!…and now I’m finding it verrrrrrrry slow going as I go through everything saying, “Oh, I used that all up…” “That picture is terrible, I need a new one…” {upload… upload… uplooooooad… please wait, upLOADing…}

Of course, what really slows me down isn’t so much that, as everything else.

Sunday, my husband was trimming a tree in front of the house. In an feat of such sheer improbability that my mind is still boggled, one of the limbs fell in such a way that it broke the water main.

Let me say that again. It broke the WATER MAIN.

Now, you may be saying to yourself, WTF?! Aren’t those usually METAL?

Why yes, yes they are. Except that ours had, oooooh, about 1/2" of PVC at the very bottom that had been exposed by twenty years of erosion. This is where the improbability-factor enters, because seriously…what are the chances that a target that small would take a direct hit from a limb that shouldn’t have fallen that direction in the first place?!

Of course, this is not taking into account my husband’s raging PVC curse. The man cannot do anything in the yard without smashing PVC. It’s just a given. He touches a shovel, PVC will explode, somewhere in the yard. In fact, he’d already broken the main drainage pipe from the backyard that weekend. HAHAHAHAHA, we all said. There’s your PVC curse at work again, dear, HAHAHAHAHAHA.

Yeah. So. Approximately 60,000 gallons of water roared from the broken pipe while my husband frantically tried to turn off the main valve down at the street – which was, naturally, jammed. Eventually he got the water turned off and he looked at the damage and said, “OK…uh, I think I can…hmm…no, it’s…welded with…uh…”

I waited, confidently, for him to say, “OK, I know what to do.” He’s a handy guy, and given his looooong history of breaking PVC, well. I just naturally assumed there is no PVC he can’t fix.

So you can imagine my surprise when he looked up and said, “I have no idea how to go about fixing this. I think we’re going to have to call a plumber.”

My first thought? ON A SUNDAY ARE YOU MAD?!?!

That right there is when they show up, write “$1,000” at the top of the bill and then say, “OK! So, what am I doing for you folks today?”

So we went without any running water for about twenty hours. It’s amazing, really, how irritating and difficult that was. Really gives you pause to contemplate how close we are to disaster, here in our comfortable suburban homes. Take away our running water, and we’re just…lost.

I can’t imagine what would happen if everybody lost their running water all at once…but I have a feeling it would get ugly, fast.

Anyway, so, much of Monday was spent dealing with the plumbers and the no-water issues. When they got the water fixed, there was then the matter of getting the mud out of all the faucets. SEE, the main was gushing for quite a while before the shutoff valve finally gave way before the husband’s brute force and profanity – it gushed both all over the yard, and into its own pipes a bit…spraying a nice blend of clay and other stuff into the water supply of the Den.

Nice.

This morning, I went with Himself to the hospital to do all the prep work for his CT scan. He’s been having some pretty nasty abdominal cramps lately, off and on, so to eliminate the possibility of partial blockage or other things that could kill you, they’re doing a scan.

I went with him because he is incapable of dealing with insurance forms in any way, shape or form and probably would have signed something that resulted in another $28,000 bill being dropped on my HEAD thank you very much wanted me to.

And in a few minutes, I’m picking up Boo Bug to take her to an ear specialist because she is abruptly losing her hearing. Tests at the pediatrician’s office showed that her ear drum simply isn’t vibrating the way it should, possibly due to way too much fluid being in there. Sigh.

I feel like a truly terrible mother, because after the obligatory ohmygawd, is it permanent, will this hurt, what on EARTH do you DO about that?! moment, my very next thought was, Oh crap, bet THIS is going to cost two arms, a leg and an interest in the hot place.

Tomorrow is the CT scan itself, and the early-release day for Captain Adventure, who has been a real…ahem…challenge lately. He’s got one of those strongly expressed personalities, which is a nice way of saying he is a stubborn little @*&^@ who does exactly what he pleases when he pleases and pfffffffffffffft! to anybody who doesn’t like it.

He got hungry Saturday, and rather than come bug me about it, he just went to the freezer, found some chicken nuggets, piled about twenty of them into a bowl, stuck them in the microwave, and punched 1-5-0-0 and then hit start.

Fortunately, I heard the bowl rattling and my inquiring mind wanted to know who was doing what. I can only imagine what chicken nuggets nuked for fifteen minutes would have ended up doing in there…also, I’m so relieved he didn’t put a fork into the bowl while he was at it.

So pretty much at this point, I’m looking at Thursday before I’ll get back to my stash on Ravelry. Argh.

I need more time in a day. Or, I need to be able to get by on less sleep. Either way. It’s getting extremely frustrating, this constant inability to get any headway on things.

It’s not exactly a new problem, of course. I am seldom sitting around bored without a thing to do. It’s usually pretty much the opposite, where I’m doing things and worrying about the things I’m not doing and rushing hither and yon to handle-it-handle-it-handle-it.

On the other hand, though, these last couple weeks have been brutal. Time goes by too fast, and there are simply too many things to do.

These are the days when I sit back and think, rather sarcastically, Yeah, uh-huh, and you’re going to take on a full-time OUT OF THE HOUSE job?! Lemme know how that works out for ya…

To which I must reply, Yes…I need to get a full-time job, so I can REST…

Anyway, must go and get the Deaf One from school and hie her over to the verrrrrrrry expensive ear specialist.

Yippe-i-ay.