Well, it’s currently 105 degrees here, making the days feel like they are dragging by. Sleep has been uncomfortable, so I haven’t been getting much. We’ve had a lot going on lately and it’s cause me to majorly slack off from the site as of late.
Bad luck always seems to comes is threes…and we were certainly hit with the space of a few weeks. The first was the outflow pipe on the kitchen sink clogging up. I think I mentioned this at some point in the last two months, but I can’t remember. Anyway, the pipe was draining really slow all of a sudden. Over the course of two and a half weeks, we went through: 2 bottles of Foaming Pipe Snake,1 bottle of commercial grade Foaming Pipe Snake, 2 small bottles of Liquid Plumber (with the plastic clog remover),1 bottle of Liquid Lighting Drain Opener,3 large bottles of Main Line Cleaner, and 2 large bottles of Liquid Plumber.
Nothing worked and it got to the point that nothing was draining. I couldn’t even run the dishwasher, so we resorted to paper plates and plastic silverware. Finally, my husband went to his parents to borrow his dad’s commercial-grade pipe snake, and his dad came over to help him run it. When they took the cap off the access line, a whole bunch of foul smelling goo came out. It took a while to run the snake through because the the clog was so bad. We think there might still me a broken pipe under the house because we keep smelling something, but my husband has been able to get under there yet. We have to set off bug bombs a day or so before crawling under there.
A little over two weeks later (right before vacation), I noticed that the water heater had been making an obscene amount of noise. It sounded like it was fixing to blast off to the moon. I mentioned it to my husband, and he took a look at it. The overflow valve had finally worn out and it was leaking…a lot. He turned the water off & started looking up prices on heaters. He wasn’t off for another day, so we spent the next day without hot water. The following day, after about 3 hours of looking, he found a water heater at Sears. We hate to give them any business, but it was well withing our price range and it was highly rated by Consumer Reports. After he picked it up, his grandfather came over to check out the floor under the old one since it had a lot of water damage. We all took turns holding a hair dryer over floor (wood) to dry it out before we did anything with it. It was sagging a little, so they shored it up as much as possible without having to crawl under the house. It didn’t take long after that to get it in.
Since then, the floor has sunk a little more, but we are hoping that once my husband has a few days off in a row that he can get under there to take a look. Hopefully it won’t be too hard to fix, and we do need to re-level the rooms.
Most recently, only about two weeks ago, the AC went out. We noticed that the compressor wasn’t kicking on at about 2 am. It was a Saturday, so we knew it was going to be hard to get anyone out. My husband went to work and my daughter & I went to the store to pick up some extra fans. We lasted until about 2 in the afternoon before it got too hot. We went over to my parents and spent the night. My husband was able to find someone to come out very early the next morning (Sunday) to take a look at it, so he stayed at the house. A friend of ours let us borrow a small window AC, so he put it in our daughter’s room & ran it all night.
The repair guy showed up the next morning. He said we had plenty of freon, which we immediately questioned since it had been over two years since we had it filled up last, & that we needed a stronger capacitor. He had one with him and put it in. The unit was running, so my husband swung by and picked me up to help him get the house cooled off faster, and then planned to pick up our daughter later that evening.
After stopping for lunch & getting some other running done, we came home to find that it was still well over 90 degrees in the house. He immediately called the guy back to get him back out. I went to the store to pick up water and some snack, while my husband brought a few chairs around to the front. We ended up sitting outside mos to of the evening since it was a lot cooler out there then in the house. The repair guy finally showed up around 10:30 pm and said that the freon was out, and didn’t know why since it was supposedly full that morning. He asked it someone else was out to look at it because they may of let it out. He had been the only one there, so he either let it out himself or he purposely misread the gauge. The guy didn’t have any freon with him, so he said he would be back in the morning, which he was. He filled it up and kept making excuses. We definitely won’t be having him out again.
Since then, its been mostly quiet. My mom has been dealing with a medical scare though. She noticed a lump in her arm right after we got back from vacation. She didn’t think much of it at first because she assumed it was a side effect from the cortisone shot she got in her other shoulder (torn rotator cuff). When she realised it was growing at a rapid rate, she went to the doctor, who in turn sent her for an MRI. She had a huge runaround at the MRI place. The first day, no one couldn’t operate the machine and wasted almost three hours of her time. The second day, she stormed out because the girl behind the desk was being extremely rude. They went to a different one the following day, and had no issues.
The doctor ruled out that it was cancerous since there didn’t appear to be any blood vessels running in or out of it. They won’t be able to tell her what it is or what caused it until it’s out and biopsied. She is scheduled to had it removed on Thursday. She has been really freaked out about the whole thing, especially with what runs in the family. It was a huge relief for her to have cancer ruled out. Once that is out of the way, she can get back to concentrating on her other shoulder.
I’m hoping to try to get caught back up on things before I get totally immersed into FenCon prep. There are a few posts that I noticed either didn’t post for some reason or vanished on me, so I’ll be trying to get them back up. I may also have a few steampunk-esk crafts to write up. Once FenCon is out of the way (the end of next month), I’ll be in the home stretch of prep for the Beckham Spirit Fest. I”ll have some more info on that a little later.
Leave a Reply