Today was not so relaxing.For one, and I know some of you will totally relate, why is it that kids -- I'm talking big kids, teenagers or adults -- will call when they're all upset and tell you all their troubles and fall apart, and thank you for listening, and then just leave you hanging there, never bothering to call back when the crisis has passed and they're okay? I must have talked to K four times last night between six and eight, once to hear how her life sucks and she's overwhelmed by everything and now even her computer doesn't work, and three more times to figure out that her computer was fine, but her internet connection had gone down. Eight o'clock, life stops while everyone watches The O.C (a truly terrible show.) So I expected to hear from her after nine with an update on the internet, but no. I was sure I would hear from her this morning, one way or another. Uh uh. About 2:00 this afternoon, I logged on to AIM to see if she was online, and she was. So her internet was back, anyway. Her away message was up, but she IM'd me when she got back around 3:00. Oh, she's much better today. The Internet came back randomly. Well, that's all nice, isn't it? Did she call you and put your mind at ease? She didn't call me either.
My car is still not ready, but since we have K's for a spare, it's not putting anyone out. It's just that I love my car. Later, perhaps.
My real aggravation, though, was this. I put in a wash this morning before R and I went out on a task or two -- she didn't have to be at New Job until noon -- and when we got back, I totally forgot about it until after she left. I went down to the basement to put it in the dryer and there was water everywhere. It took a few minutes for me to figure out where it was coming from; it was the humidifier/de-humidifier thingy on the furnace. I freaked. Called public service, since we pay them to have a service contract on the furnace, but they can't come til tomorrow. Called a local service company, but they couldn't come until next week. Damn! Would someone just tell me how to turn this off? (Last, I called the company that installed the thing, and the dispatcher said the service guy would call me right back. Did he call you? He didn't call me, either.)
I was thinking very slowly, but I realized that what I needed was a shop vac. I dug through the piles of crap in the basement and found the old one, which no longer worked. I jumped in the car and went to a local hardware store in town -- yes, we still have one of those magical places -- and got an inexpensive one and came home and put it to work. But the little pump thingy that was spitting out the water seemed to fill up and spill over as soon as I could get the floor dry. I had a time frame of two to four minutes to try to make phone calls and figure things out between vacuuming sessions. I kept looking for a cut-off valve, or an on/off switch. I unplugged it, but the water kept coming from someplace. Finally, I thought maybe I could adjust the setting on the humidity thermostat in the living room, and to my joy, at one end of the dial it says "OFF". That's for me, man. Two more rounds of vacuuming, and everything was pretty much dry. No more pumping.
So I guess I'll need to get someone in to fix it, but at least it's not urgent. I had visions of spending hours and hours and hours having to vacuum up little rivers of water every few minutes. R isn't even coming home tonight; she's going right to a friend's house after work and then into the city and staying over. The Hubs goes out for an after-work drink with his work buddies every Friday. I'm here by myself for some time to come, and it wasn't looking like a fun day for me. The water's stopped, emergency averted, but now I'm just spent.
Once it was resolved, though, I needed to get the hell out of the house, so I shoehorned some cartons into the trunk of the old car and headed for the Recycling Center. Much like the dump that is closed on Thanksgiving, the Recycling Center is closed on Veterans' Day. Arggh.
Speaking of Veterans' Day, I was much intrigued by this article, especially the part about when the oldest veteran of each American war died. My father would comment that as a boy, he always saw Civil War veterans marching in the Memorial Day parade. (That would have been in the 1920s and 1930s, and yes, he said, they all had long, white beards, as you would imagine them to have.) Somehow it makes history that much more real when you can connect it to actual people, put everything in the context of the lifespan of people you know.
(Someone said to K recently, "Why would anyone want to be a history major? All you do is talk about stuff that's already happened." And she said "I love being a history major! You get to spend all your time talking about stuff that's already happened!" Perspective, people, everything in life, we are once again reminded, is perspective.)
