The Watchdog

It’s been one heck of a looooong day. It all started out when I attempted to start a load of laundry. I opened the basement door and started to go down the stairs and SH-ZAM!! There was a lake at the bottom of my stairs. Great. Just great. How was I supposed to deal with this? Especially with two little monsters running/crawling around upstairs. I quickly assessed the situation. At first I thought that the water was coming from the dehumidifier. THAT has happened before, although not leaving Lake Ontario on the floor. I open the door to the room with the furnace and water heater and some other things I am not sure what they do, but are big and noisy. The water heater!!! OMG! TONS more water around the bottom and coming out the top! And wouldn’t you know? It happened to flood the one and only cardboard box I had left to unpack and bring upstairs. Fine. I grab some towels, throw them down in fury and I do the thing I know best. I call Chris. Let him deal with this. Oh was I so wrong. “Are you kidding me? I am in class! The only reason why I am talking to you right now is because the teacher is not in the room yet!”. What? So now we’re in high school? Are you going to get a detention for talking to your wife about a broken water heater? A risk Chris wasn’t willing to take. He told me he would call the company and call me back. Quick! Before the teacher came! And then he’s going to put in his vote for homecoming queen too.

Chris called me back and told me that they would send “someone” out today to look at the heater. “what time?” I asked. “I have no idea.” Chris answered, “I have to go!” (click) Well, Mister Teacher’s Pet didn’t want to get caught on the phone, or get 10 points docked from his “pop quiz”. Argh!

“Hello!!!??” “HELLO!!!??” Omg. Someone is IN my basement. No door knocking, no ringing of the doorbell, just walking into my basement from my garage. Well, I guess I know that a burglar can just walk into my basement without my knowledge. Hey! He can even bring his laundry and throw a load in before cleaning me out of all of my expensive (read: cheap) jewelry and my stash of cash (HA! Good luck with that one buddy. I can’t even find where Chris has hidden it). I answer “Hello?” As I run down the stairs. It was the repair guy. Not a burglar. Too bad I cannot pull out my Jackie Chan skills….Yet..Let’s see what he says. “Oh...Looks like you got a leak.” YA THINK? I just stare and say: “ummmm..yeah, it’s seems to be coming out of the top mostly.”
“Yeah! It’s a leaker! You’re going to need a new one.” NO! Just fix this one..I don’t want to deal with this. “Do you have a piece of paper?” He asks. ummm..Then water heater guys proceeds to OPEN up a NEW roll of paper towel from my PANTRY downstairs, rip a piece of off and use it as stationary. Guess he won’t be needing that paper...huh.

I then have to go through the hoop jumping routine of calling the gas company to get someone out here to install a new heater. TODAY, because now I have NO hot water. “No, I am sorry, miss, I cannot find your account. Your address?” I answer. “Nope! Sorry! Your phone number?” I answer. “Uh, no. Do you have a recent bill?” I stare over at the “bill basket” that is so overflowing I cannot even explain it to you. It is my OCD husband who refuses to throw away any pieces of paper, so they accumulate in the “bill basket”. I am forced to swim through coupons, old bills, dated catalogues and FINALLY find a gas bill, but not before another incident. I slip in the remote for the dog collar. NO, the remote didn’t go off (sorry), but it slipped under my foot in such a way that it felt ALIVE. I felt as if I stepped on a MOUSE (Yes, so many flashbacks and severe PTSD). I let out a small and short scream over the phone. Again, embarrassing myself to no end and having to apologize for the representative’s now bleeding ears. At that point I think the rep felt sorry for me, as my children were whining, I was screaming and I’m sure her head was spinning. She said someone would be out today to replace the whole heater.

My parents have this whole week off, so they were thankfully around to help contain the kiddos while some of this was transpiring. After a while, around naptime, my mother offered up my father’s babysitting services to take me to out favorite coffee shop. Yea for coffee shops! I love this coffee shop called the Radical Roaster. Love the people, atmosphere, food, coffee..Need I say more? Is there more to life than that? Anyways, my mother offers to drive. “Geez, I hope I can drive your father’s car” (they had driven dad’s car over to my house). I get in the car and hope for the best.

OK. Hoping does nothing for my situation. My mother gives me whiplash and engages muscles in my body I don’t ever remember using in this lifetime. She claims that she is driving like this “because the gas pedal is sticking”. I have NO idea what the heck is sticking. All I know is that I am seeing the back of a certain truck all together too closely and I am thinking of where I can get one of those neck braces (and possibly get my doctor to prescribe me some good meds should I be in any pain or have muscle spasms after this little adventure). But I arrive at the coffee shop in one piece and celebrate with coffee goodness and good conversation. I was talking to an old friend, which was great! I love catching up with old friends, but there is also something about sitting in a good coffee shop and looking around at people you don’t know and listening to what they are saying.

Yes. I snoop. I spy. It never hurt anyone, or at least it hasn’t ever KILLED anyone that I know of..Well, maybe like Russian spies or something like that, but never coffee shop spies. Never.

I am sitting at a table and I hear two guys talking. These two gentlemen are probably in their mid sixties to seventy and are facing toward the large plasma screen above the fireplace. They are sitting behind me. This is when I wish I had a small tape recorder because these two men made my day.
Scene: Fox News is on TV. They are showing a reporter who is outdoors.

“Where is that guy? Eh. He’s wearing a terrible coat.”
“Yeah. The wind is blowing all around. All the leaves are on the trees.”
“Who does that guys think he is wearing a winter coat? Eh. In that terrible color. Eh. Where is he you think?”
“Ohio.”
“Ohio? Are you serious? Eh. He’s in Pennsylvania. Gotta be.”
“I like watching Hardball”
“Ah Hardball. Now, There’s a show. Eh, I don’t care about these other stupid things they got going on now.”
“Yeah, like the show with the circus colors.”
“ Eh. The circus colors.”
“Yeah, the old lady switches between the show with the circus colors..One of those ‘entertainment shows’..Oh! Entertainment Tonight. Then she’ll let me switch back to Hardball.”
“I couldn’t take that with the circus colors.”
“No, I hate it. But she doesn’t listen to me. You seen Chris lately?”
“Oh, Chris. Yeah, I seen him.”
“How’s his eye?”
“His eye thing?”
“Yeah, his eye thing.”
“Eh. It’s some ‘reservoir’ thing with the lenses. Ah. I don’t know. Had dinner with him. Up there on Route 9.”
“By Brooks Brothers?”
“Yeah, the plaza up there.”
“Was it good? What’d you have?”
“Eh. It was ok. I’m fussy. I just had some shells with marinara sauce. Brenda had some chicken thing and Chris had some fish thing. Eh.”
“But he’s ok with his eye?”
“Eh. Ah. It was a torn lens of some sort because he wasn’t ‘filling up the reservoir’ with the liquid or something. Do you know that his lenses fill up his whole eye. Even the white parts?”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Eh. I don’t know how those kids do that. Get them in and out like that without hurting themselves. Eh. He sometimes gives his eyes a rest with his glasses.”

And on they went. I could have stayed all day listening to Gramps and PapPaw. If I stayed long enough they may have figured out politics or something. I don’t know. I wouldn’t put it past them.

So mom asks to have some drinks to go and off we went. Mom hands me to drinks and I get into the car. She DID NOT put her tea into the carrying device properly and I spill tea like a river down my leg and into her purse. Good thing she’s laughing. She cleaned this piece a few days ago and you never know which way it’ll go. I thought I may have been adding the car to my list of things to mop up. My mom starts the car and we’re off again whiplashing around, only this time, I am under strict instruction to NOT SPILL DAD’S COFFEE. That’s kinda hard when you are on a ROLLER COASTER. I put my thumb over the hole in the lid and OMG SCALD my thumb. But I did not spill the coffee. It arrived in perfect condition, like my new water heater!

Ps..Guess what I found under the water heater. If this were properly placed and not LAYING ON IT’S SIDE it would have sounded like a smoke alarm (oh god: refer to ‘Smoking Cars’) to alert us to the water. Probably would have saved me doing 17 loads of laundry to clean to towels used to mop up Lake George.

Comments

[Jared]

I'm going to have to support Chris on this one. As a full time employee and part-time student, there are times when, for the sake of all of our futures, we can't be on the phone when the teacher comes in. And if we are, it ends FAST! My wife once had a crisis (some lady in the building we are on-call for needed help getting to the hospital) and she was IMing me and asking me to call or what to do, and I'm trying to keep up with my scatter-brained statistics professor! Its not a matter of being a teacher's pet, its a matter of not letting them picture you on the phone in their ever-so-important class while they're subjectively grading your papers!

[Hot Heeled Mama]

But a busted hot water heater and a ocean in my basement?!?!? HELP! I am not MacGyver! I cannot fashion a knot out of steel wool to super humanly stop the leaking and I had NO IDEA who to call. I know, I know. Typical. But I didn't even know if it was the freaking furnace or the hot water heater..Or the stupid UVA humidifier in the system that busted out of some sort pipe. And the kids? Holy cow. Leave them one minute and they are sticking fingers in places no fingers should be, or beating one another over a monster truck. I need a nanny stat on days like these.