Outdoor Wednesday -- New Life

Okay, I'm still feeling deep guilt for my Farm Town addiction and lack of blogging lately, so I decided I'd better at least do Susan's Outdoor Wednesday. I'm hoping this will keep me in your good graces. Please make sure to visit Susan at A Southern Daydreamer because there are lots of OW participants!


Recently I bought some peach sunrise lantana, and boy are they beautiful when they're in their prime. Just look at those unique buds. Are they not exquisite? You can click to make the pics larger.



There's something so precious about a rose not yet opened to the sun...



The life of a magnolia blossom is so fleeting, that if you don't enjoy it while it's there, it will probably be withered and gone tomorrow.



I love watching a fern reaching out its curled-up arm, unfurling itself to grasp the sun's light...



And at the end of the day, when the sun dips below the horizon, it's time for the plants to rest and rejuvenate for the next day.








Pssst! If you love me, you might love my sister more. Go visit her at Jill's Believe it or Not, and tell her I sent you!

Don’t Forget to Flush…

…Or maybe you should just skip that.

I hate my powder room toilet.  You can’t lean back on it (and I’m a leaner) because if you do, the tank leaks.  You can’t flush more than two little pieces of toilet paper without it getting stopped up.  When you flush it runs incessantly until you lift the lid and poke at the floater thingamabob.

Jill was going to fix it for me recently, but you know what ultimately happens when she comes to visit.  We shop, we eat out and we nap.  So, she had no time to tend to my toilet issues, of which there are many apparently.

So instead, I began nagging Jimmy to fix it.  Nope, he was having none of it.  He rarely uses the powder room so for him it’s a non-issue.  Asshole.  I was told to just keep lifting the tank lid and doing my thing with the thingy.  Well gross.  I don’t like sticking my hand in there even on rare occasions.  If you think I want to do it every time I pee (which is often) you’ve got another think coming.

So I resorted to something you may find disgusting.  Not flushing every time I pee.  Now yeah, this could be gross, but with the amount of water I drink the pee is almost, well, non-pee.

So I did this yesterday.  After tinkle number 3 I flushed and ran out of the house to get Madison from the bus stop.  When I pulled back onto my street I see Mikayla in the driveway, waving frantically at me.  What the hell?  Is Publisher’s Clearinghouse here?  Did I win something fabulous and she couldn’t wait till I got in the house to tell me?

No.  Oh NO.  The toilet was overflowing and she couldn’t make it stop.  She closed the bathroom door and tried blocking it with towels.  All that did was make a virtual tidal wave when I opened the door.  Little did I know that my 12 year old daughter needed lessons on how to shut off the main water valve.  Stupid me.  This is obviously a skill every ‘tween needs these days.

So, I opened the door to something like this.

 

 

Okay, slight exaggeration, but not by much.

 

 

 

So Mikayla starts running for towels, I run to the garage for the shop vac…. oh crap… where’s the shop vac?  So now I’m frantically getting the steam cleaner ready while frantically dialing Jimmy at work.  No answer!  Typical.

 

Might I just tell you that one of these is not meant to pick up 349,000 gallons of water?  After emptying it 10 times I was finally able to get Jimmy on the phone.

 

 

Ah, relief will be on the way!

NOT!  He refused to leave work to come home and help me with this catastrophe.  I mean, whole-heartedly, I-don’t-give-a-crap-you-can-deal-with-it-yourself, refused.  I clogged it, I didn’t watch my pee flush before I left the house, it’s my fault and now I have to deal with it.  Never mind that I’d been nagging him over and over again about the faulty toilet for over a month.  Nope, it’s my fault.  Of course!  Excuuuuuuuuse me (insert Steve Martin impression) for peeing!

Abundant profanities came forth from my mouth, tears squirted from my eyes and, instead of seeing little bluebirds circling overhead, I had sharp knives twirling a merry dance.  Sharp Bloody Knives.  Yes, visions of husbandacide were first and foremost in my mind.

When I finally snapped out of it, I followed asshole’s Jimmy’s instructions on where to find the shop vac and proceeded to lug it in the house and plug it in.  It didn’t take long to fill that bad boy up and still, I wasn’t making a dent in it and my arms were shaking from pulling it along the sopping wet rug.  Thank goodness Mikayla was there to help.  We kept swapping jobs between the shop vac and the steam cleaner but still we couldn’t get the rug anywhere near dry.

Now I was stuck with visions of water creeping up the drywall and mold setting in to eventually kill us slowly.  I was also still stuck with visions of husbandacide but that’s neither here nor there.

Mikayla and I were exhausted and commenced calling Jimmy’s cell phone over and over again.  After all, it was after 4 p.m., so why couldn’t he just leave work and come home?  Damn Caller I.D.  Asshole Jimmy knew it was us calling so didn’t answer his phone.

I was now at the point where I was ready to turn that bloody knife on myself because I had hit the breaking point.  This was too much for one woman and a 12 year old kid to handle, so I did what any slightly insane woman would do.  I went and worked on my FaceBook farm.  Yeah, you heard me right.  I couldn’t do anymore.  I was done.  Wiped out.  Both physically and emotionally.

I needed stress relief, and I found that in plowing and planting, plus calling Jill to scream in her ear about my sucky lot in life.

It was only at 8 p.m. that Jimmy finally walked in the door, wanting to know why I wasn’t face-down on the carpet sucking the water up through a straw (or something like that) while simultaneously pulling off a Roto Rooter on the faulty toilet.  I’ll spare you the nasty details of the rest of our “conversation”.  These things are sometimes better left unsaid, and left to the imagination of the reader.

I will tell you that I went to bed last night listening to the sound of Jimmy running multiple vacuums and fans and, I didn’t feel the least amount of guilt about it either.

Today the carpet is pulled up from one side of the room, folded over chairs with fans blowing on it.  Luckily, it’s basically dry and this is just a precaution.  The wet padding has been cut out, rolled up and disposed of, and later today I have to trek to Lowe’s to buy some new stuff.  Oh, the joy!

So keep this story in mind the next time you pee and flush, and stupidly think it’s safe to walk away.  Never walk away.  Just don’t.do.it.

*Side note:  Mikayla just clogged the damn toilet!!!!!*

*Side note #2 (pun intended): I’m moving far far away.  Possibly some third world country where it’s not taboo to poop in the woods.

 

Go visit Jill, yada yada yada.  Love me, love her, yada yada yada.

Random Crap Tuesday

Before I even really begin, I want to first take a moment to apologize for my horrendous blog reading and commenting this past week. A couple of posts ago, I told you of a new-found addiction. Facebook's Farm Town.

I wish I could tell you things were getting better, but this application has me in its grip. My neighbors are doing it, my Facebook friends are doing it, my sister is doing it, and (gasp) now my brother is giving it a whirl! It was stunning enough when I saw my bro on FB last week. He's just not the social networking type. But when he asked me to hook him up with a farm? I nearly crapped myself. My father actually showed an interest in having a farm too, but he said he would only raise dairy cows. Sorry dad, entirely different application.

I am so gripped in this damn game that I find it hard to fall asleep some nights, wondering if my crops are ready to harvest, imagining how I might change the layout of my farm. I dream about when I'll finally get 300,000 coins so I can buy a white farm house.

This is what my farm currently looks like. You can see the back of my farmer head there. Unfortunately, my computer screen is so tiny you can't see the entire farm in one shot.



I need help. Serious help. Do NOT help me. I'm untreatable at this point.

Speaking of my new computer, it's so adorable! It's like the VW Bug of laptops!



So anyway, it took some convincing, but I finally got Jill to come here this weekend with the girls. First, let me say that Alexa looks so much better right now. Obviously the poor kid was being poisoned with too many medications. For a long time she was no only too thin, in my opinion, but her face looked sunken-in. Within 2 weeks time though, she's put on a few pounds and the gaunt look is gone. Hooray! Not to mention that her behavior has done a 180.

Saturday, we did our usual thing. Ya know, eating out when we don't have the money and then shopping when again, we don't have the money. But we ate cheap. About as cheap as you can get. Golden Corral.

Oh yeah, this places oozes class.



There's just something about an unlimited buffet that both grosses me out and excites me to no end.

While we were out doing our thing, Jimmy was out doing his thing. Deep sea fishing. He got up at 3:00 in the morning so he and two of his coworkers/friends could get on a 28' boat and drive 80 miles out into the deep blue. A twenty-eight foot boat. Eighty miles out in the ocean. You'd have to pay me multiple millions to get my ass out on a boat the size of a dinghy just so I could catch fish. Shit, I can go to the fish market and I only have to drive 10 miles and, I don't even need Dramamine.

Okay, so it's a manly sport and I just don't get it. But it was a first-time experience for Jimmy and he enjoyed every minute of it.



There was probably enough testosterone on that boat to fuel the whole trip there and back.

At least he took in a decent haul. A few nice size Mahi Mahi, a few grouper (my favorite!), red snapper, and some other weird named fish I can't recall.


Sunday Jill insisted that we all trek to the local beach with the kids and the dogs. For this, I convinced Jimmy to come along. Jill wasn't impressed with the beach because it's on too much of a slope and the waves were just a teeny bit too big for her girls to enjoy. Mine on the other hand had a blast. Strudel, same as last time, hated the water. Cannoli wasn't nearly as enthralled by it as Jill always makes her out to be.

You're probably expecting pictures from our weekend together but sadly, I don't have any. Why? Because the happy fisherman took my camera without even telling me and then proceeded to leave it at his friend's house. He is officially never allowed to borrow a camera of mine again. The last time he did, it was on a business trip to Germany and he left it on the plane, never to be seen again. Next time? He can get himself a disposable Kodak.

But oh how I wish I'd had the camera, because after the beach Jill offered to bathe the dogs in the kiddie pool. Well, she was down on one knee, giving Strudel Doo a good scrubbing, when suddenly, Strudel tried to escape and Jill lost her balance. She fell face-forward into the pool, but no, her head didn't get wet, because her ginormous boobs hit the water first and acted as flotation devices. Oh my word, if only I had this on film for all of you. Video would have been perfect so you could see her flailing and yelling, "Help me! Help me!" I swear I nearly peed myself.

Over the weekend Jill said, no less than three times, "Can you plug her in for me?" In normal- person- English that would be, "Can you buckle her in for me?" These are the things Jill is famous for, and the things about her that make me adore her more and more every day. Don't you wish you had a stupid silly sister?







Pssst! If you love me, you might love my sister more. Go visit her at Jill's Believe it or Not, and tell her I sent you!