Well, if you took the time to read The Saga of the Fridge then you know at least a part of the excitement that has been going on at our house this last little while…
John and I are doing pretty well for the most part. Neither of us has been sick for time being, but we both found ourselves in a bit of a depressive rut for a short time mid-February, but we’re better now.
We have been having quite the adventure with our house, to say the least. There have been some house troubles for the last few weeks that, on one had make us glad we’re not home owners, but on the other hand makes us wish that we were home owners.
First off, our hot water in the bathtub has decided not to work, it only comes out in a drizzle, but only in the tub. It doesn’t matter how much you turn the knob it still just comes out in a little stream. All the sinks in the house seem to have good pressure when the hot water is turned on, just not the tub. Which I have decided is the worst place of all to have no hot water.
I haven't been able to get the shampoo out of my hair for almost two weeks now. It's pretty gross, itchy and frustrating. Who has time in the mornings to stand in the low pressure wash and wait for all the shampoo to rinse out? I know I don’t.
We’re working on fixing the issue, but it’s hard when the only plumber you really know lives in a different state, and happens to be married to the landlord. He suggested that we change the valve… Yes, he was just that descriptive. What valve? The valve stem that opens and closes off the water flow from the knob? Yep, we changed that. Twice. That’s twice in one week, and still no change. Is there another valve I should be looking at? --- Yeah, so no help there.
John does work with a few plumbers. They also suggested that we replace the valve. When John told them he did that the plumber suggested that we try blowing out the line. - Which really means take out the valve stem and turn the hot water back on and let it blow across the tub and get everything wet if you’re not ready with a protective shower curtain. - We were ready and didn’t get the bathroom all wet.
The water blowing out of the line seemed pretty powerful, like there was no blockage. We did get a bunch of rust out of the pipes though… you should have seen the bottom of the tub. Also, the water was a nice brownish color, I’m pretty sure that isn’t the color the water is supposed to be. When we put the stem back in and added the knob, guess what…That’s right, STILL NO HOT WATER PRESSURE.
And that’s where we have been for the last week with the water. It’s very, very frustrating. All I want is clean hair and a hot shower but I can’t have one.
This week’s suggestion from the plumber’s at John’s work involve checking the water heater for build up, degrading hoses and floating plastic. That should be fun. When he got home from work yesterday he pulled out his wrenches and tried to unscrew some pipes from the Water Heater, but guess what… They didn’t budge. After some light cussing and frustrated storming around the house he decided that that project will have to wait until Saturday. I’ll let John handle that.
With all the extra time I have been spending in the bathroom I have definitely decided that it needs a new paint job. I’ve chose yellow. I can’t decide if I want to make it “Canary Song” or “Mimosa” both seem to work well in the bathroom lighting. I think I’m leaning towards “Canary Song” because it’s a little more bright and cheerful than the other one. Now I have to prep the walls. I bought myself a nice new scraper and some plaster for the holes. This was going to be my project to work on while DH is at work in the evenings.
BUT… the painting has been put on hold because…
We had to buy a new fridge. You can read the entire Saga of the Fridge HERE. Needless to say that this last Sunday was a bad day.
Sunday started out pretty normal. Other than my knee hurting (which it seems to do a lot lately.) John’s mom had called the night before and asked that John come take her to church in her ward. (She had total knee replacement surgery at the end of January and though she is pretty mobile she still needs the help.) And I had finally finished the Relief Society Newsletter for March and I needed to go to our ward so they could get passed out for the month… So we both got up and got ready for church. I somehow managed to give myself a steam burn on my hand from my hair dryer and my wet hair. I think the leave in conditioner I have been using is kind of crappy. It causes my hair to steam while I blow it dry… I don’t think it should do that.
When the time came we went our separate ways to church. (Yes, I actually went to church by myself. Yes, you did hear right, I do make the Relief Society Newsletter now.)
I only made it through sacrament meeting… It was SO boring. It was High Council Sunday, but our poor high council fellow never really got a chance to speak. His son was the return missionary speaker he brought with him, and the kid took the ENTIRE meeting. The beginning of his talk was good, but then it just kept going and going and going…I was bored and lonely, and by the time sacrament meeting was done, so was I. My knee was killing me and I just wanted to get out of the building. After passing the Newsletters to a member of the Relief Society Presidency I went home. I took an anti-inflammatory pill and found my heating pad and crawled onto my bed to not deal with anything… and that’s when the fridge started making that horrible humming noise. I got up and checked on it, but there was nothing I could do so I decided to wait for John to come home and we’d see what we could do about it.
After a while John did come home and we complained to each other about the fridge and decided that it was probably the compressor going out and we just needed to buy a new fridge.
There was nothing we could do about that so I decided that it was time to get dinner started. I was trying out the new recipe for the week: Mom Evans’ Chicken Enchilada Soup (the recipe will follow in another post since I don’t have it right here with me.) Basically you take some chicken stock, onions, garlic, and crushed tomatoes and boil it all together for a while. Once it’s boiled down a bit you put it in the blender with some fried tortillas and puree the crap out of it… Well, you can go a head and call me a moron because I didn’t think to let the soup cool before sticking it in the blender. I didn’t think that putting on a lid and starting that sucker up with hot soup in would cause it to explode all over the kitchen and me. Ack! I was so angry. I’m sure I must have screamed or swore or something because John came running to help.
So now I had the fridge-humm burrowing into my brain, my knee was killing me, and I am covered in hot soup with a steam burn all along my forearm, watching the liquid tomato drip down the walls. Let me tell you, I was done. My blender was now broken, I had plastic bits in the soup still remaining in the bottom of the blender. There was red liquid streaming from the bottom, reassuring me that the bottom seal no longer worked, and the lid didn’t quite fit any more. What a party. The soup in the blender got dumped and the entire blender got thrown away.
Dinner was almost an epic failure… but there was still half a pot left so I added the chicken and the cumin and
I used the left over chicken from the Fajita’s I made not to long ago. (I just shred all the left over fajita chicken and throw it in a freezer bag. That way it is all ready for your next Mexican dish that calls for chicken. Then it’s a cinch to just defrost it and throw it in. No extra cooking. Yay! Don’t forget to label your freezer bag though… it isn’t fun to pull something out of the freezer and wonder “how long hast that been in there?” … and “what was this?”)
After dinner, the discussion got back to the fridge and it was decided, that since I had just gotten a pretty nice bonus from work that we would just buy a new one. That is NOT what I wanted to spent my bonus on, but how often in life do we really get what we want. It was quite amusing in the fact that we had gone to the Home Depot just the day before to get another stem for the bathtub faucet (damn tub) and for no reason other than being on the way to the paint department to grab a few more colors of yellow, we walked through the appliances and looked at the fridges. We looked at the big fancy fridges that I’d like to have some day, and we looked at the more reasonable fridges that would be more fitting for two people with no kids, and we looked at the clearance fridges because really, that’s probably what we were going to be able to afford. So by Sunday night we already had some good ideas of what kind of fridge we wanted, and what we wanted to pay for it.
That night I called my mom and told her my woes and asked if they would come and empty my freezer for me the next day. The orange juice was getting squishy.
At work the next day I’ll admit that I accomplished nothing. I perused the internet for fridges, Lowes, Home Depot, RC Willey… I priced them and looked up shipping and delivery and it seemed that no one would be able to get us a fridge until Friday. A week without a fridge?! That was not going to work for us. John called his dad and asked if we were to buy a fridge if he’d be willing to put it in his truck and bring it home for us and then maybe we could get some guys from the Elder’s Quorum over to help us move it in. He said yes, of course, because he loves us, but then he said to try two different places in bountiful and see what the could do for us. I called one of them and asked “Can I have this delivered to me tomorrow?” and they said yes. I told them what I wanted and they said they had what I needed so that was the store I was going to. I bought my fridge that afternoon from Charlie Fuller’s Appliance Sales. The store was pretty small and the selection isn’t that great, but I got just what I wanted in a fridge at just the right price. He even gave me a discount since he didn’t have the stainless steel and I had to get a white one instead. He did say that if I wanted to wait until the end of the week he could get me a stainless steel one, but I sad “no, I’ll take the white one.” I was in and out of the appliance store in about 15 minutes. And I had to do this all by myself because John was working at the Jazz game that night and stuff needed to get done.
After the fridge came on Tuesday and we got back to work on Wednesday the guys at john’s work grilled him about the fridge and how much we paid and where we got it from, and apparently I did a pretty good job. I got a great price for the fridge and the guys were impressed. I guess I’m just an independent woman who can get things done, and either their wives aren’t, or they refuse to acknowledge it. John told me a long time ago that one of the reasons he loved me was because I was a capable woman who could do hard things. This way he would never have to worry about me being stuck somewhere with a flat tire be cause I could fix it. He tries to change his story now and tells me all the time to let him do stuff, but that’s just the way I am.
Now it’s Friday and it has been both the Looongest and shortest week I’ve had in a long time. I’ve worked some extra hours to make up for the time I took off on Tuesday so that makes for some pretty long days. John has had Jazz games this week on Monday and Thursday and there another one tomorrow, so even though I complain about my long days there are days when John doesn’t even get home from salt lake until after 11… and those are looong days for him. The younger, pre-pseudo-migraine/pre-mononucleosis John would have been able to handle these long days and lack of sleep pretty good, but the new John doesn’t cope so well. We’ll see how much longer he keeps this second job.
That's all for now. I have rambled on too long for now.
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