Damn Teenagers!

It may be unfair to blame teenagers, but I figure they're the most likely culprit.

When J left for work at 6:40am, all was well at our house.

At 8:15 when a friend of M's got to our house to get a ride to school, we discovered the back window to my car had been shot out. I imagine it was probably teenagers driving by.

I called the police, and they were out within 5 minutes to take a report (wow, gotta love living in a small, relatively crime free town!).  The officer told me that I was the 5th report in 2.5 hours. I wouldn't be surprised if more reports trickle in as people leave for the day.

Not only are the destructive vandals, but they don't have particularly good aim. They missed their first shot, so I have a paint chip/slight dent a little bigger than a pencil eraser.






I go in a couple hours to have the damage fixed. The glass place quoted around $200 for the glass.  I'm annoyed about that, don't get me wrong. I'm also mad because my two race stickers are ruined, and of course won't be on the new glass.






My dirty dash sticker (which my friend has offered to replace. He had the contract to make the stickers in the first place, so he can easily make another one).

My Undead Race sticker.







Updated to add: When J got home from work, he got a better look at our truck, and saw that they'd tried to shoot out the windshield on it as well. We found at least six shots had been taken at it, so I'll have to get that repaired. When I called the police to amend my report, they told me that in Clinton and Roy alone, there had been 30 reports of similar vandalism.

Bed Switching

I am the worst mother in the universe. Why? Because my 6.5 and 4.5 year olds are still in toddler beds. Well, they were. S started complaining that her head AND her feet were touching the ends of her bed (whoops). I had been putting it off because I am still madly in love with Z's race car bed, but I finally admitted it was time.

Many moons ago, we bought a set of bunk beds for K & M. They were sometimes used together, sometimes apart. We recently decided to bring the beds together again, and have S & Z sleep in them instead.

S & Z's "new" bunk bed.

K's daybed

So, we bought a beautiful daybed for K off of KSL. I am really quite tickled with it.

M's new loft bed

Next, we built M a loft bed. Space is so tight in his room that we felt this would be a good use of space. J and his dad designed and built the bed. I did a good bit of the finish work.








Everyone seems to be pretty thrilled with the new sleeping arrangements except for S, who initially said it was ok to let Z have top bunk for the month of January, but found the actual practice to be quite contrary to her wishes.

Chicken Blog

I know that I got incredibly boring to just about everyone (yeah, all two of you) who read my blog when all I posted about was my chickens. I decided to start an entirely new blog where I can talk about them as much as I want.

If you happen to be at all interested in my chicken ramblings, you'll see a link to it on my "links" column.

I want peacocks now, but J says I can't- he'll have my committed if I try. Funsucker.

I *DO* have some golden laced wyandotte eggs in my incubator, and it looks like I have 7 healthy chicks developing. They should be hatching on Saturday. Woot!

Sugar Free January

I decided to do something rather drastic for January after discovering a few days ago that I had regained almost half the weight I lost in 2011. Yikes!! I have decided to go sugar free for the month of January.

Now, I'm not that meticulous, so I'm not being completely crazy about it. I know that sugar is added to many foods in surprising ways. I'm not too worried about sugar found in whole wheat bread, bbq sauce, peanut butter, or taco seasoning (?! Yep, there's sugar in there), etc.

I'm simply avoiding the obvious sugar foods- I am not eating any cakes, cookies, candy, soda (sob!) or ice cream.

Today marks the beginning of day three. I was kind of overloaded on sweets in December (hence my decision to do it for January), so I haven't missed that sort of thing at all yet. I DO miss my Mountain Dew though.

Foot Surgery

When J was a kid, he broke his right big toe while jumping on a trampoline (a trampoline injury you say? INCONCEIVABLE!!!).  Fast forward 30 or so years, and he's taken up running. That toe has always bothered him a little, but it has gotten much worse since the running thing.

He saw a podiatrist a couple weeks ago, who did some x-rays and said that it looked like there was a minor bone spur. He said J could try orthotics or have a cheilectomy done. J felt like he'd like a more permanent solution, so he opted for the surgery. A cheilectomy is basically just shaving the sharp part off of the joint. The doctor felt like J's case was fairly mild, and didn't see any other complications. We scheduled the surgery for today. Since he'd already planned to take all week off work anyway, it was very convenient. After scheduling the surgery, J noticed a sharp decline in his toe, and was feeling a lot more pain. I noticed he was favoring the foot more. I'm not sure why it suddenly got worse- maybe it was mentally accepting there was something wrong and not blocking the pain as much?

He had the surgery done today. He opted to have the deeper sedation so that he wouldn't wake up partway through the procedure. The doctor said it would take about 45 minutes. It ended up taking a bit longer. It turns out things weren't quite as simple as the x-rays showed. I will now explain in laymen's terms what they found and what they did. I'm totally doing this because all of my many readers (ha ha) would prefer it that way, and NOT because I can't remember the technical terms.

They found he had a flap of cartilage loose, and flapping around. This would cause some trouble. They ended up cutting it off, and drilling around the bone to encourage growth of new cartilage/scar tissue. There was also a minor bunion repair, and the bone spur was significantly larger than originally thought. He also saw some signs of arthritis. The doctor stressed that this wasn't a permanent fix, but it should make for a dramatic improvement for a good long time.

They have a pain pump somehow inserted into the wound (maybe as an IV or something? His foot is all bandaged up, and I've been instructed not to unwrap it, dangit). The pump gives a continuous flow of a local numbing anesthetic. If he starts to feel pain, he can press a button and get a bollus (or extra boost) of the numbing medicine. A home health care nurse will be coming by Friday to remove it.

So far, his recovery has been great. He's just hung out in our room, watching tv. He's threatened to get a bell so he can ring the bell to get my attention/annoy me. He's been a great patient so far, willing to stay down. I guess this means he's in more pain than he's letting on, as inactivity drives him right up the wall. I'm thinking that by Thursday or Friday I'll be having to bungee cord him down.

Dear ShopVac

My Dear Shopvac,

I just wanted to write you a letter of appreciation for all of your hard work. I know that I haven't always given you proper appreciation. I know I wasn't happy with you when we discovered that it was you who helped my toddler hide my keys. Having that open hole was just too much temptation for a 2 year old, and she crammed the car keys in there, and you remained silent on the issue.

However, you really, really helped me out on Friday.  Friday morning, I jumped in the shower first thing in the morning, and noticed that we ran out of hot water much sooner than I would have expected. I wondered if the kids had messed with the temperature dial (this happens at least once a month), and made a mental note to go check on it. Unfortunately, the morning was crazy, as we had an extra kid in the house, and I had a 8:45 meeting to get to after I got S dropped off at school.

I went to my meeting, got Z dropped off at Grandma's, and went to a Realtor Christmas lunch. There, I won a month of MLS dues paid for. Yay! I got the kids picked up from school, and got home around 2, about 7 hours after I'd left for the morning.

M goes downstairs because he's starting to go through video game withdrawals, and hollers up that there's water downstairs.

Crap.

I get down there, and sure enough, there's an inch or so of water pooled by the basement steps. It's only gotten about a foot of the way into K's room. I open the door to the utility storage room. I discover that the pressure relief valve/pipe is POURING water. Fast.

Crap crap crap.

I hurry and turn off water to the house to end it quickly. I call J, upset. Unfortunately, he's now in a carpool at work, so he can't just take off and leave work early anymore.

I grabbed you, dear shopvac, out of the shed. Empty all the crud out into the garbage can, and then haul you downstairs and get to work.

I had to empty you of water at least 10 times. I lost count after that. I was feeling lucky that it seemed that only the utility room seemed to be flooded, except that tiny part at the bottom of the stairs. I'm also feeling lucky that J and I had mostly gotten that room cleaned out around Thanksgiving, so there wasn't much on the floor. I begin to realize that water keeps coming out from under the wall that separates the utility room from the freezer storage room.

Uh oh.

That storage room has NOT been sorted through in a while, and things were getting very bad and out of control there. There was tons and tons of stuff on the floor. I was afraid to go in there, but I eventually got up the courage.

Hooboy. This is where most of the water went. About 3/4 of the room has water on the floor. Luckily the area around the freezer was totally dry.  I got the kids to help me take all of the cardboard boxes out, and I continued to suck up water.

By the time J got home from work, the floors were mainly dry, and I was trying to empty out the cardboard boxes. He looked at the water heater, and declared it to be an easy fix. He ran to the hardware store, and had the water heater fixed within 10 minutes.

We'll lose a lot of books and some papers.  There's also some lost photos, but nothing too valuable or important. A lot of our outgrown kids clothes got slightly damp, but I've sent them through the wash.

Yesterday, J built me a new set of shelves to go in the freezer storage room. I plan to sort through everything and throw away and/or donate a lot of stuff. Anything that will be on the floor will be in a rubbermaid tote so that it'll be safe it we ever have another water incident.

I feel very lucky because we didn't lose anything important or valuable. Plus, we've been married 16.5 years, and this is the first time we've ever had any kind of water/fire/sewer/wind disaster.

Christmas Stockings

This is our mantle and our Christmas stockings. I made mine, M's and K's completely from scratch. I had some help with the other three.

I think my very favorite is K's. She thinks it's unfair that hers is soooooo much better than the others.