One Thing Leads to Another

What would you call a voodoo doll that makes bad things happen to your home? A voodoo dollhouse? I've been seriously wondering if such a specific form of black magic exists - imagining that someone with a vendetta has fashioned a cloth-and-stuffing replica of our little pseudo-Victorian house, and has been inserting long hatpins into it with frightening regularity.

Either that or it's just a regular ole voodoo doll - with one huge pin stuck directly into my wallet.

Because things have just been falling apart, failing unpredictably and just generally costing us a lot of money for the past few months.

I won't bore you with a laundry list, but a typical example was two days ago...a couple of guys came to install a new dishwasher to replace the 16-year-old one that hadn't run properly for the past month. When the One-Who-Spoke-English pulled out the old appliance, he found a nice section of our subfloor had rotted out due to some hidden leak. Naughty dishwasher!


And so Esteemed Husband and I will wait for what's left of the subfloor to dry out for the next week or so before we can attempt to patch up the floor...and we explain the unbelievable concept of "hand-washing" to our children. All the while, the sparkling new dishwasher hangs out, unattached by the breakfast bar, taunting us.


The day before the dishwasher surprise, a surprise of a different sort -- when a worker from Verizon shows up completely unannounced at our front door, to install a new line I need for work. "Install" as in "install in my bedroom."

Now maybe you are the kind of person who makes their bed neatly every morning and doesn't leave (stacks of laundered) undergarments artistically scattered about the bureau tops. But I am not that kind of person. So, while my husband stalled the installer at the door, I ran about the bedroom, hyperventilating, throwing various unmentionables in the nearest drawer...shovelled a pile of dirty clothes into the bathroom...and then ran and hid myself -- because I was wearing what amounted to PJs at 1 o'clock in the afternoon. (So, yeah, I'm that dreamy combo of messy and slovenly.)

From my hiding place in the laundry room, I hear husband and Verizon Man pulling our bed away from the wall. The phone jack is there? Behind the big old sleigh bed that hasn't been moved since Bill Clinton was president?

I suppose I should be happy that neither Husband nor VerizonMan were fatally mauled by the dust Woolly Mammoths (um...see...there was more dust than your typical dust bunny...get it?) that were disturbed by the bed moving.

And that glass of juice I knocked off my nightstand in 1994? When I was all whacked out on Vicodin for a kidney stone? Turns out a large portion of that spilled juice pooled under the bed way-back-when. Science lesson du jour: crystalized orange juice takes on an appearance not unlike a bloodstain after 12 years. Half-expected Mr. Verizon to call in CSI to take a sample.

(But later - Oxyclean and it's gone! And, yes, I am available for product endorsements.)

Anyway, here's where I stop - before I go into a tirade about our recent string of computer failures and internet outages, or launch into a discourse on the extraordinary high cost of orthodontia.

But now you know why I haven't been blogging much lately.

On the other hand, kids are: Back! To! School!

Maybe things aren't so bad after all.