Storytime

Shocking - here is an actual post of substance!

So it was an up and down week.  It started on Easter Sunday.  I woke up nice and early and planned to make us some cinnamon rolls as a little Easter breakfast before having dinner with my parents later in the day.  Before doing that however, I set up to clean up the kitchen a little bit as it was a mess from Nate making his hrutka (Russian egg cheese) the day before.  I started running water in the sink to do dishes and then saw it was draining really slow - figured the disposal needed to be run.  I start running the disposal and now water is backing up into the other side of the sink - ew.  This has happened before, we get little clogs every now and then and just need to clear them, so I told Nate I needed his help and he came in to start attempting to de-clog the sink.

But this time was different - no matter what he did the problem just got worse and worse - and then we discovered that it was now backing up into the laundry room tub.  So, we figured out, it had been nearly 7 years since we'd had our pipes drilled out to the street, so we needed to have the plumber come out and do that for us.

We still managed to make a nice breakfast - we just ate on paper plates and conserved as many dishes as we could.  The front half of the house wasn't affected, so showering and what not was no problem.  We had a nice meal with my mom and dad and came home to catch up on TV shows I'd missed while singing for all three Triduum services.

Monday I called our plumber first thing and they were able to have someone out to the house first thing - which was awesome, but then I was scrambling to call my mom to get her over to meet them!  She was thankfully able to do so at short notice (we had given her a little heads up on Sunday anyway).  I had left a signed check for her to give them and told her to call me when they were done so I'd have the total amount - and also to know if I should go to her house for lunch or mine.

I worked and caught up on being away from my office for two days and waited and waited to hear from her.  And it was almost 11:15 and I hadn't heard anything yet - thought that wasn't a very good sign.  So I called mom's cell - she was en route to her house - but now my dad is over at my house (he was off of work and returning home from a routine doctor appt and saw they were still there, so had stopped at my house) because there was a snag - not our fault or anything we'd be paying for, but the plumber lost part of his auger in our piping.  So he had to go back to his office and get a hook and a camera to send down and try to find it.  Ok fine, we're not responsible for this piece to that's ok.

I met my mom at her house for lunch and am happily enjoying leftover ham and potatoes and then my dad calls.  He says to me "Well this isn't your day"  I'm like "crap.  What happened now?"  Apparently when the plumber sent the camera down he discovered an issue we will need to deal with sooner rather than later - part of the pipe by the street is starting to separate and if it collapses, we'll end up with water backing up and causing problems.  This is something that just happens sometimes due to age and especially with our rapidly changing MN climate - cold, hot, cold, hot, pipes don't like that.  My dad continued to tell me "The bad news is you're looking at possibly as much as $3500 for the repair - they're going to have to dig up your yard and worst case scenario, they may have to remove the tree from your front yard."

OUCH.

The more we talked though my dad assured me it didn't have to be fixed THAT DAY, we have time to comparison shop for quotes on this and that from my dad's best estimate, the tree is far enough back in my yard that it should actually be ok, he thinks the plumber was misjudging.  So, he said I should talk it over with Nate and let him know if we had questions and we'd go from there.

Uffda.  So Nate and I talked and agreed we'll get some other quotes on this and see what we can do this summer.  I have another plumber from a trusted source to call.  We also talked to Greg and Marie (our Praise Project director) because they just had this done at their house a couple of years ago.  I guess that is about what they paid too, so I am just guessing it will be expensive no matter what, but I'm hopeful it won't be too bad.

So yeah, it's ugly but we're just going to go one step at a time.

The rest of the week involved roller coaster moments - some of feeling abundantly blessed in my friendships, some of fear because of things going on at my place of employment (if you've seen the news you probably know why) some of self doubt thanks to something stupid with my fashion blog (I'm over it now though) and some of pure fun with Nate - a rare weeknight date night last night which was just too fun.

So there's my long story.  I don't know that it's terribly interesting, but I thought it would explain some posts I'd made earlier on FB to those who were curious.

ON WE GO.