The water heater (that just had the heating element replaced last fall) gave up the ghost and went to a better place sometime between 11:30pm Monday night and 4:00pm yesterday afternoon when I discovered ankle-deep water in the main room of the basement. Where many boxes labeled “Important Papers” and “Books” are also located.

The Husband is also currently out of town until next week (attention internet perverts–I do have a gun and am not afraid to shoot you on sight).

Seriously Internet? I am SO glad we are renting our house.

As a side-note, after yesterday afternoon, Owen can now say “Oh Fudge” (comes out “Oh Budge”) with remarkable feeling. Am glad that is the only new vocabulary he picked up after I discovered the lake in our basement.
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Now for the portion of our show where I try to break my arm from patting myself on the back so vigorously: In spite of all things water-related going on at my house, I still managed to finish and send the tax forms from 2005 (don’t ask unless you would like to be amazed and awed by my spectacular talent of dragging my feet) AND work through and submit on time the 2007 taxes at 10pm last night after I realized that I had my husband sign the wrong tax form before he left on his work trip. Inspiration struck as I was sifting through the IRS website for an extension form as I realized that I could submit everything online and sign electronically, bypassing the problem of my husband not being able to sign a new form until next week.

I tell you, sometimes it’s really wearing to be this much of a genius all the time. This coming from someone who had to double check that their fly was really zipped this morning because it felt a little drafty during my trip down the hill from parking lot to workplace.
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Posting might be a bit more sparse than usual around here until the first part of May. We’ve reached that fun part of the semester known fondly as “The Final Panic” also known around my house as “Oh Crap, when’s that final project that was assigned the first week of class due again?”, so I’m a little buried in all things educational for the next two or so weeks.

Don’t worry though, I’m sure to come back with some mighty entertaining stories as Owen has decided that he needs to change into Jo-Jo the Dog boy everytime we go out to run errands. Any time another shopper gets near us, Owen growls loudly enough to earn a sad pitying look at me that says “Oh you have one of those children”. Plus, I’m sure that given the way things go in my life, I’ll have at least one story of another major appliance dying/pipe bursting/my father-in-law discovering that the backyard is over an ancient Indian burial ground when he tills up my garden next week.

It’s always something around here.

First off, I just want to mention this site. We played around with it on Friday and I laughed and laughed and laughed at some of the submissions. What’s that? I’m easily amused and need to leave the house more? Yes Internet, you’re probably right about both of those points.

Last week was just busy. I had things going for school, work and design stuff too. That and the end of February is when my mother’s birthday occurs, which is usually a hard week for me as well. That almost sounds like my mother is dead, right? She isn’t, but sometimes I often wonder if it wouldn’t be easier overall if she were. Which is probably really really terrible and awful to say (or in this case to write), but it’s the truth.

Let me give you the short version of the story so that maybe you’ll understand a little bit better. I am my mother’s only child. My parents divorced when I was very very young. I’ve never asked either of them when exactly they got divorced because it was always an extremely touchy subject, but from what I can piece together actually happened when I was around 2-ish. I lived with my mother most of the time and there were times when it was really really rough. Other than the fact that we were often extremely poor, my mother suffers from depression and anxiety and made things…complicated. I finally made a conscious decision at 14 to move to Idaho and live with my father’s family because quite simply I had had enough.

Fast forward to the present. For one reason or another (and I’m still not really sure of the exact reason or reasons) my mother has not spoken to me in almost 14 years. I couldn’t even pick up the phone to call her if I wanted to because I have no idea where she is. The last address and phone number that I had for her aren’t hers anymore. She has no idea that I’ve graduated from college, that I’m married and that she has a grandson.

Understandably this is an area of my life that I don’t talk about very much, even with my husband. Some of it is because, yes, it is a very sensitive area and the hurt is pretty much always raw right below the surface. Some of my reluctance to want to talk about my mother is because I don’t even know the words to describe how I feel about it all. For a time in my mid 20’s, I really thought that I had come to terms with it all, but it took having Owen and becoming a mother myself to understand that no, what I had really done was just to push all the feelings down so that I didn’t have to deal with them anymore.

The really crappy thing about repressing things? No matter how hard you think you’ve pushed something down and away (it’s gone! never to come back and bother you again!) is that until you finally realize that you have to deal with it, those repressed things keep coming back again and again. I have tried therapy a few times to see if that would help but it doesn’t seem to work for me. I just have to pull things out, examine them and come to conclusions on my own and on my own time.

Wow, what a Debbie Downer of a post this has turned into, right? I didn’t mean to be so dark and gloomy for the start of the week. Last week, I was fumbling through, sad, tired and tearful. This week is looking up. February, my least favorite month of the year is over and we have moved on to March. There are buds on the trees and Spring is coming quickly.

What a wild start to the week! We had a massive wind-storm (think gusts of like 75 mph and you’re there) that knocked out power for most of the city and started 18 different fires (one is still burning and as of this evening had burned almost 2300 acres). The power had been flickering on and off Sunday afternoon, but finally went off and stayed off at 4pm, so we beat a hasty retreat to my in-laws who live an hour away and had power and most importantly heat! It wasn’t looking too hopeful when we came back into town yesterday afternoon and the thermostat in the house showed a nice brisk 48 degrees Fahrenheit for the inside temperature of the house, meaning that the power had stayed off and was still off. I didn’t want to drive all the way back to my in-laws, so we went and killed time and ran errands and lo and behold when we returned at 5pm to check one last time, the power was back on and our house was all nice and toasty.
The only casualty so far has been our city-issued regulation garbage container. Seriously internet, how does something that’s almost as tall as I am (and weighs almost as much as well) disappear? I’d blame the crazy neighbor kid next door, but I’m pretty sure that for once, this isn’t his doing. Garbage day Thursday and I’m totally going to scope out the neighborhood and see who suddenly hit the Garbage Lotto and puts two city-issued garbage bins at the curb and I am totally snagging one of them back. Possibly after dark because although I may talk big, I’m not quite brave enough to snag what may very well be my own garbage can back from someone else’s place on the street in broad daylight.

Other than that, life is good. My saintly mother-in-law has once again offered to take Owen for two nights (she totally acts like it’s the best thing ever when I let him come over for a sleepover. Little does she know that I feel pretty much the same way too), so I am totally going all out while the Chief Mess Maker my darling offspring is away and getting both the kitchen floor and all the hardwood washed (yeah, ask me about how I feel about sticky sticky unfrozen icy pops being spilled all over the hardwood–I’ll give you a hint–NOT GOOD AT ALL) ’cause I like to spend all my childless free time frantically cleaning. It is nice to be able to enjoy the floor staying clean for at least a half hour after I finish instead of the usual routine where you can’t even tell that I’ve vaccumed 10 minutes after the vaccum gets put back in the closet.
I think they’re going to have to call in a HazMat team when we’ve got more than one kid making the messes around here.