When it rains...

It's been one of those weeks.
If something could go wrong last week it did.
Monday and Tuesday were relatively uneventful. I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out what belonged where with all the crap I brought home from the store. I had a pile that covered the entire floor of the room where it was all dumped.

Wednesday was when things started getting interesting. My friend Jayne called and offered to help me finish moving things from the store on Tuesday and to help me get at least the main floor of my house back in some semblance of an orderly living space. We spent most of Tuesday getting the last of the store stuff moved and that cleaned up. Wednesday morning she came over and we headed to the furniture outlets down in Naperville to look for chairs for my living room. We were going to redesign that room to make space for Grandpa's big table that had been at the store. We needed to replace the big sofa with two smaller chairs. After shopping all day and getting some ideas we came back here to empty the room and reassess the situation before making any final decisions. The very last piece of furniture that needed to be taken out of the room was the old coffee table. As we were taking it out the front door she catches the heel of her boot on the threshold and twists her ankle. It swelled to twice its normal size in about 5 seconds so I helped her to my car and rushed her to the emergency room. We also had half our children in different places all over town so I had to go do pick up duty after leaving her for x-rays. It wasn't broken but is severely sprained with torn ligaments.

The rest of the week was spent doing my best to get things put back together as best I could. I also finally managed to get my store PC hooked up in the den. But it was quite a battle to get the internet to work. We have a wireless network here and I don't have ethernet access in the office. So I had to install a wireless card in this PC. Initially the old one from the old PC didn't work so I went to Best Buy to get a new one because I thought Vista was the problem (isn't Vista always the problem?) But they talked me into a USB wireless thing. It worked but it was buggy and kept dropping the signal. So I went back and got an internal card. I installed it and it wouldn't complete the install process and kept crashing. So for shits and giggles I tried the old one again and lo and behold it worked! But then the printer went offline and took an entire day to get to work again. I had a brief panic attack yesterday when I first started the PC up it wouldn't boot. It kept going into recovery mode. I ended up getting it to boot long enough to uninstall a program that I think was causing the problem and so far today it is fine.

I also had a ridiculous argument with a cell phone salesman that ruined my Friday evening and in the end it was pointless. I'm not going to rehash that again because it just raises my blood pressure and pisses me off all over again. I will send out a general warning to everyone though. Don't buy your cell phones from anyone other than the official store. Those places in the malls, especially the kiosks, are professional scam artists. They will tell you all kinds of stuff and it will all be a lie. When you call them on their lies and try to make them accountable they will lie again and in the end you are screwed and there isn't anything you can do about it.

The icing on my shit cake this weekend is that we now have no water. The pressure has been slowly decreasing over the past few days. I called a plumber Saturday and he came took a 5 minute look at it, charged me $70 for the service call and told me he couldn't do anything to help. I left a bunch of messages and pager calls to the well company that drilled this new well in '05 but they had no one on call over the weekend I guess. Saturday and Sunday morning we had enough pressure to flush first floor toilets and take one shower per day (yesterday was my day!) but no laundry or dishwashing. This morning we don't even have enough to fill a coffee pot. I'm waiting now for them to get here to hopefully fix it.

I've also had little annoying things like my dog Shadow keeps puking all over the place. I'm going on the assumption that spring has uncovered a whole host of yucky disgusting things for him to eat in the woods and he is now paying for it. He wakes me up at least once or twice a night to go outside. I also had an almost flat tire last night when I came out of rehearsal. Luckily I noticed it and drove directly to the gas station on the corner and put air in it (in the rain). It looks okay this morning but I'll have to take it in sometime today or tomorrow. I don't want to get stranded in Batavia late at night after a long rehearsal. Luckily I do have Steve's car in the garage if I need it, I just don't know if he left me any keys!

Last night was the first night of "tech week" for the play. We have rehearsals every night this week and the pressure is on. I'm getting nervous. I'm missing cues. I'm forgetting lines. I wake up in the middle of the night and feel like I'm going to throw up. But I know all this nervous energy will make for a fabulous show opening night (Friday!)

The well guys just arrived. I'm hoping they get it pumping again and I can just wash this week out of my hair and start fresh.