Kevin drives the bus when our sports teams travel, so he was gone the first half of mid-winter break as our varsity teams played in a tournament in Pasco, Washington. He left Sunday night after church and we didn't see him again until Wednesday night. The kids and I had a good time while he was gone (see prior posts) and while I was looking forward to him being home, I was MOST looking forward to heading to the coast for a marriage retreat Thursday afternoon. The plan was (what was supposed to happen) ...
I spent most of Wednesday getting ready for our house guests (particularly for a baby that I knew would be crawling around) which included steam-cleaning the carpets. Kevin was to arrive home Wednesday night and we were going to get up Thursday morning, finish packing, get kids situated for the sitter and carpool with some friends out to Westport. Once there, enjoy a day to ourselves, hopefully find a good seafood restaurant, then spend Friday afternoon and Saturday morning learning about ways to improve our marriage. Sounds good, right?
What really happened...
Kevin DID get home on schedule Wednesday night! However, once home, and with one flush of the toilet, we discovered something was seriously wrong with the septic and/or plumbing as all the toilets and bathtubs started backing up and filling with water from the septic (can you say EWWW!?). We'd known there was eventually going to be a problem with a sinking slab of concrete in the back yard. It was slowly but surely pulling wires and pipes, etc down as it sank. It was one of those projects you keep putting off because it is pretty labor intensive and not much fun to tear out concrete.
Anyway, instead of getting a load of laundry in for Kevin and repacking, all the water in the house was shut off and Kevin and Raymond dug until about 1am Thursday morning so the suspected problem could be confirmed. Lots of prayers that nothing more serious with the septic system itself were going up at rapid intervals. Since water was off, that night and all day on Thursday, it GREATLY affected what could be accomplished. This included, but was not limited to using the toilets and sinks for any reason. I won't bore (or disgust) you with the details of how we coped during that time. Once the problem was determined late Wednesday/early Thursday, digging stopped and I tried hard not to cringe at the amount of dirt that had been tracked in on my freshly cleaned carpets. (Digging in dirt is apparently dirty work).
While they were busy outside in the wet and cold, I was inside trying to get a fire started in the fireplace. Unfortunately, the house filled with smoke because the new pipe was apparently not sealed and the smoke detectors went off. SO...we opened the doors to the the cold, wet night and aired out the house. No more fires in the fireplace until we can see about sealing that chimney up, which is is bummer, because we just got it in place and able to use and I LOVE having a wood burning fireplace...so warm :) Alas, back to the REAL tragedy...
Digging complete, we all went to bed, tired and my thoughtful husband decided to treated us all to breakfast (and use of their facilities) at McDonald's the next morning. That's when we discovered that a window in the suburban had been left down and had taken in a lot of rain...did I mention it was pouring rain off and on during our excavation? Which is why I had been trying to start a fire...So that was quickly cleaned up and off to breakfast we ran! Thursday consisted of cancelling the day's planned departure and replacing the damaged parts and yes, it took ALL day. Sometime that day we noticed one of the goats was seriously ailing. He hadn't been eating for a few days and was now rather lethargic and leaning up against the barn. My apologies to all you animal rights activists, but we can't afford to call a vet every time something is sick or dying around here so we hope for the best and deal with whatever the eventual outcome is. In this case, I was hoping the poor thing would die before we left, if we left...at that point, we still didn't know if we'd make the retreat. Kevin did go out and take a look at him, but could see no signs of injury, etc
Thursday passed with lot of work on Kevin's part and a lot of unproductive waiting on my part. There really is NOTHING you can clean without running water! Or at least that's how it felt... My amazing husband was able to find and fix the problem with minimal expense albeit many seriously hard man hours. We had running water again sometime Thursday evening so now the name of the game was clean (again) and laundry (again) and get ready to head out to the marriage retreat Friday morning.
We did manage to get there and thoroughly enjoyed our time away as well as the sessions on marriage we were able to attend and as luck would have it (or God would bless it) we had a couple of really great seafood meals - A beacon of goodness in a rather dreary few days! Home again Saturday evening and prep for Sunday had to begin...it was a pretty normal Sunday with Kevin gone on the bus route until around 2pm and needing to head back to the church for choir practice at 4pm. Unfortunately on this particular Sunday, not surprisingly, the goat finally died and Kevin and Raymond had to bury it. It was almost laughable that it was this Sunday, following the misadventures of the previous week... but we didn't laugh, not quite yet.
So as I write this, Kevin made it safely to choir practice and I am sincerely praying that nothing more will happen to him today or the coming week, for that matter. He was only home for just over 48 total hours this week and of those hours, at least 30 were dedicated to fixing one problem or another; the rest, to sleep. I truly am blessed to have a man that is capable of fixing just about anything. I just hope he won't have to for awhile!
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