My troubles began about three weeks ago with the death of a mouse named Caramel that cost us $75 while we were on vacation a few months back because our do-good mouse sitter, Melissa, took Caramel to a pet store vet. It was the right thing to do, of course, because Caramel had itched herself raw, and we’re only bemoaning the fact that our $75 bought us some nasty medicine that we used numerous times to not cure what turned out to be an untreatable case of mites. Or something else likewise itchy. In fact, we tried two other medicines and I’m quite certain Caramel the $75 mouse actually cost more like $125 before she died. She was a nice mouse, though, and had suffered more than she should have.
Shortly after we buried Caramel in the backyard, the window installers showed up to install three windows, two of which were replacements windows, and one of which was supposed to be LARGER than the existing window and also turned into a bay window. The installers installed the two small windows and had just taken the molding off the big window when Mark realized that the new window was not LARGER than the existing one, and it wasn’t a bay window. The fact that the company already had spent half of our money for the installation of all three windows was just as annoying as having to convince the salesman that he indeed owed us the installation of the LARGER window at the originally quoted price. He said it would take a while for such a LARGE-R window to come in because such had to be special ordered. The molding, meanwhile, is in the garage, and the existing window looks terrible.
The next day, we realized that our ferret, Hoppie, wasn’t hopping any more, and, in fact, was rather lethargic. I noticed a lump on his back end, but just in case it was just a bad case of gas, we took him to the vet who verified that Hoppie would hop no more. We took our pal home all choked up about our loss and the $110 we were charged for the vet to agree with my diagnosis and put Hoppie to sleep. We buried Hoppie in the backyard near Caramel.
The next night we took Dusty to get his distemper shot only for the vet to announce that he had fleas. Some $160 later, I had an arsenal of chemicals for all the other critters in my house that likely also had fleas.
The roller on my vacuum cleaner stopped rolling the next evening, and after I’d taken out nearly 12 screws, I suddenly discovered that the rubber belt I thought I’d find slipped off the roller was, well, there wasn’t one. All I had to do is remove the string that was wound around the roller itself, hit the reset button and I was back in business. After reassembling the entire vacuum, of course.
Our old, reliable, sturdy, heavy-duty Weber natural gas grill was next to fall apart, because one evening as I let the lid make it’s familiar thunk, I heard a “urrch!” and turned to see the base of the grill leaning backwards and a new pile of rust on top of the deck. We finished our burgers, shut off our beloved grill for the last time, and went off to the local specialty store to find grills costing upwards of $1,500. We passed on all of those and headed to Home Depot where, much to our relief, we found one for “only” $350 that could be converted to natural gas. We loaded up this heavy, heavy box, spent 20 minutes unpacking the parts and pieces only to find the lid of our grill severely dented. After loading the parts and pieces into the car, we returned to Home Depot, and watched a fork lift operator remove another box from way, way up in the store. We herniated the second box into the garage and the parts and pieces into the house. The 45 minutes suggested for construction became 2 hours, and the conversion to natural gas involved another trip to Home Depot and one to the hardware store for a pipe cutter, a pipe flange, some special white tape for wrapping fittings, and to buy a converter for the converter. It was near the end of the installation that we realized our new grill cooked via infrared cooking, which meant we’d be cooking without flames. That and hearing the wimpy “thump” when the cheesy aluminum lid was shut was so depressing we put on the grill cover–which I affectionately call the grill condom–and we ate sandwiches for dinner.
The next night Mark retrieved the world’s most expensive tomatoes. They came from the two $30 tomato plants that he had watered day in and day out over the entire summer. Within days of eating his “fairly tasty but tiny” tomatoes, we had a frost and his tomato plants died.
We had a pretty good thunderstorm after that, and the storm fried the Macintosh G3 computer that Mark had purchased from a college salvage store. It held many of my recent photos, none of which were backed up anywhere. Thanks to Mark’s coworker, Mark Bunce, the computer was replaced with an IMac that Mark B. had in his home and no longer used. In return for such a gift, he said simply that he liked chocolate chip cookies. It turns out our baking soda had lost its lift and my cookies were flatter than a road kill. I think I still owe Mark B. a lot, including some better, fluffier cookies.
The next day Mom called and said that her freezer was peeing all over her floor and leaking into her basement. Unfortunately, I had enough other things going on in my life just then that when she showed up with her 2 plastic bags of freezer food to keep in my freezer and 2 plastic bags of refrigerator food to put in my fridge, I attributed her leaking fridge to a dead freezer and nothing more. It didn’t occur to me until she called the next day—saying that the water was still leaking into her basement—that the line she’d paid a plumber to install to the back of her freezer so that she might use her automatic ice maker for the first time in 18 years, was likely leaking. I took a long lunch, shut off the valve to her ice maker and suggested she call the plumber. When she started writing down what she was going to say to the plumber, I called the plumber myself and was given the choice of having the same person that installed the line originally return to fix what he’d done, or I could return at 7:00 that evening to meet another member of the plumbing company. I chose the latter, and by 8:30 p.m., the new plumber had installed a new line into my mother’s freezer that could not be run over by a little old lady with a propensity to clean behind her freezer. Yes, the leak was due to my mom rolling her freezer over the wimpy white tubing the first plumber had used to hook up the water line to the back of her freezer.
The next day, I returned to take Mom to a doctor’s appointment, only to arrive 5 minutes late and find that she had gone without me. I had no idea where her doctor was located, had to use my key to go into her house, find her phone book and get directions to a building perhaps three minutes away. As I waited in a separate room to talk to the doctor about mom’s memory problems, it suddenly occurred to me that I was the one that had forgotten about her appointment until the last minute and was late.
At home, I found Mark finally willing to use the new gas grill, and he’d just put burgers on when his oldest, Willi, called, to say she was a few minutes away with a Boca burger in hand. A few minutes turned into twenty, which was long enough for our burgers to turn into black charred things which, if left outside overnight, could have been used as hockey pucks.
My sister, Aby, called later asking how things were going with mom and I told her that when she got a call that mom was going to arrive on Bus #22 in St. Louis in a half hour, that it’ll be her time to take over. I also told her about our new pet, a fancy hamster that is round as a ball and pushes our hands away and attempts to bite us when we pet him. We’d named him Little Buddha because of his shape. Big Grumpy was perhaps more fitting.
Shortly after I talked with Aby our phones stopped working, but it wasn’t until I went to call my brother on his birthday, October 3, that I discovered this problem. I picked up the phone, ignored the fact that I couldn’t hear a dial tone, dialed his number and, well, I never heard the phone ring. Or anyone answer. I spoke into the phone anyway, said it was me, I was calling to wish him a happy birthday, and that, I’d try another phone. The phone rang a few moments later, I picked it up and heard nothing, but said, “Well, if it’s you, Lloyd, I’ll call you back on another phone in a sec. If it’s not Lloyd, well, hm,” and I hung up. I found my cell phone in my purse. It was dead. I found Mark’s cell phone in his car and had enough battery to finally call my brother. The next day, Mark unplugged the phone and plugged it back in again, and we were back in business. Go figure.
Last Sunday, Mark and went to Grand Rapids to help my dad rake leaves and to go see Holly play in a lacrosse tournament for Alma College. In the parking lot we ran into a student Mark knew from Alma College, who said Holly was out playing right now for a team that was short on players. We trotted off to the field, and before we could even find a seat on the bleachers, we were waved at by #12 in white. We waved back and said, “Go Holly!” I zoomed in with my long lens and snapped away as I followed #12 around the field. In less than five minutes she scored! We cheered and jumped up and down. The game resumed and less than 3 minutes later, #12 scored again! Mark was beside himself. Dad patted Mark on the back. We watched in awe for another couple of minutes and #12 scored a third time! Mark asked where the scouts were, and said, “I’m going to make millions on this kid.” We were quite excited when we saw Holly afterwards, until Mark said, “Amy’s got some great photos of you scoring three times,” and she said, “I didn’t score. I was on the black team. We lost 1-15.”
On Monday night, Mom called and asked me when I was going to tell her what the doctor had told me. After I re-explained the game plan, she complained that her hip was killing her and she’d not had a chance to tell the doctor about it during her appointment because I had taken up all her time talking to him. I suggested she ask for another appointment with her doctor, or to go to Ready Care to get referred to a physical therapist. I also said that next time I’d stay home because being late for her appointment was stressful.
On Tuesday, a waffle maker Mark recently ordered arrived in the mail. He’d gotten a Belgium waffle maker and wasn’t crazy about the thick Belgium waffles, and, besides, he said, we’d both grown up with the smaller, flat waffle maker. The model he chose for a mere $40 also could be used as an electric grill when the inside was turned inside-out, so to speak. Mark had started some grilled cheese sandwiches, and it was while I was on the phone with my mom that I saw the cheese oozing out of the sides of the grill on onto the kitchen counter. The sandwiches looked like they’d been pressed in a vice.
Two days later, Mom said a light bulb in her kitchen had gone out and since I said she couldn’t get on ladders any more, would I come out and replace it? I went via Soldan’s, a local pet store I frequent, and took Little Dipper because she enjoys sniffing up and down the aisle. I was loading up on the soft Beneful food Little Dipper can chew with her last remaining six teeth, when I looked down and saw that she had peed next to the Beneful display. When the owner discovered they were out of paper towels at the checkout counter, she called over the PA system: “Could someone please bring up some paper towels for one of our baaaad customers.”
After doing mom’s light bulb, I returned home to find an email from a friend saying he couldn’t find my photos on Flickr. I’d used Flickr earlier in the week to submit photos to The Nature Conservancy photo contest, and I was thinking that if my friend couldn’t find them, The Nature Conservancy folks probably couldn’t, either, and my entries were likely not actually entered. I soon discovered I hadn’t set up the permission so everyone could actually SEE my photos. The contest deadline had already passed.
On Friday I got new tires because Mark said my old ones were like bald on the side and I was risking his life every time I drove him somewhere. I suggested he walk next time. My new tires cost $335, so imagine my delight when I woke up Saturday morning and discovered one was flat. Over one thousand pumps of my bicycle pump later, I drove back to the tire place, where the owner greeted me with, “Hey, weren’t you here yesterday?” Indeed. It turns out the valve insert wasn’t screwed in all the way and hence read zero PSI, and the tire had deflated itself.
On Sunday morning, right before the MSU – U of M game, our aquarium pump began pulsing as if breathing its last breath. Now we wouldn’t want to replace the pump with the exact same size, and almost $40 later, Mark had a new, “more powerful” pump that blew so much air into our aquarium that we had to install two long skinny tubes with holes in them, called bubblers, to spread the bubbles out so our fish didn’t start bouncing around inside the aquarium.
On our family chat last night, I learned that somebody is stealing information from my sister’s professional organization web site and using it for her own uses. This somebody is 25 years old and claims that her family and God are on her side, which is a tough combination to overcome in spite of the fact that what she’s doing is cheesy, lazy and wrong. We’re going to fix her, though, by sending her dis-organizational tips; see if she’s dumb enough to pass those on to her readers.
To wrap things up, I got a note from a potential agent that said she was sorry that she couldn’t represent my work at this time, and then pitched her own web site and suggested I follow her on Twitter. I have a better idea. I happen to have a giant box labeled “infrared grill” on the outside that I intend to address to her. I’d love to be there when she opens up that box and my mom pops out.
Today starts a new week and a new day, and I’d turn over a new leaf if they all weren’t falling off trees and dying. In fact, the week will start with a call to my mom’s doctors to see how things are coming along with her referrals. Next, I’ll call the window people to find out if they intend to install the third window before the snow falls. And while I’m in a good mood, I might just call that 25-year-old and give her a piece of my mind. Thing is, I don’t think there’s much of my mind left.
Amy, without bad luck, you didn’t have any luck at all!! Knowing all the characters made your story frustrating and funny at the same time. I have checked your wed-site before and enjoyed what I read but this takes the cake! I hope you have a place that would publish this–you had me laughing out loud- especially your wrap-up. Keep up the good work!