Let me start by saying that so far, our Summer has been an absolute whirlwind. Mostly not in a bad way, just lots of crazy busyness. Whew!
It started a week before school let out when my wonderful SIL and her hubby came to stay for about a week. It was so great to have them here, as they live in ID and we don't really get to see them much. They arrived on the Saturday that my upstairs neighbor's water heater ruptured and caused for it to rain in my bathroom and hallway. LOL Welcome to the neighborhood! The trip for them, however, was not as much fun as it should have been since they seemed to have one problem after another with their Jeep. The long and complicated mess ended with them having to have one of my other SIL tow their Jeep back to Elko from Winnemucca to hang out at our place until Alex can get it fixed. They had to go back to Fallon and get a friend from ID to come and pick them up to take them home. Much later than they had originally planned. But thankfully they are back home safely, and the Jeep is in good hands.
About 3 days after Siddie and Ryan left, my Auntie and nephews came to stay for a little over a week. We checked out museums while they were here, spent some time at the park, and blew up a Pyrex baking dish. And broke a window. I should probably start with how I blew up the Pyrex since that's the first of a series of strange chaotic events that occurred while my Auntie was here. The night prior, I baked a delicious Wacky Cake and left the leftover portion in the Pyrex on the back burner of the stove. In preparing to cook the beautiful giant artichokes I paid an insane price for the next evening, I accidentally turned on the burner under the Pyrex dish instead of the one under the artichokes. We noticed a strange smell and that the Pyrex dish was smoking. Realizing what I had done, I grabbed the dish and went to put it in the dishwater in the sink (yes, I really was going to do that). At this point, my Auntie stopped me and pointed out that it would be much safer to set the dish on the back porch in case it exploded when it started to cool off. I agreed and turned to walk to the back door only to have the dish in question explode violently in my hands. Yup. Covered me in glass, blew it clear into the living room, under the stove, under the table, and, you guessed it, all over those beautiful artichokes which were now rendered inedible. Yay. So no artichokes for dinner that night. A couple of days after the Exploding Pyrex, my curious 5 year old son decided to see if he could bounce a rock off the cement in our back yard. Yup. And right through his bedroom window. While I was standing in front of it stripping the sheets off his bed to wash them. After I finally calmed down, I called the rental company, who would not, by the way, pay for the window (thankfully our renter's insurance did) and was instructed to cover the window with something to keep people from getting hurt on it (???) and call someone to fix it. I reached under the sink to grab a trash bag (the first cover I thought of) only to find that everything under my sink was VERY wet, due to the fact that the sink was leaking. I called the rental company again. While I was outside with my Auntie duck taping trash bags over the broken window (thankfully it was a double paned window and he only broke the outside pane) the maintenance guy showed up. Not to fix my sink, but to (finally) look at my ceiling where it had rained from my upstairs neighbors apartment more than a week prior. He poked at it, looked at my sink and told me he would be back the next day to cut some holes in my ceiling and assess the damage, and also to fix my sink. At 4:50pm the next day, he called to say he wouldn't make it, but would be by at 8:00 a.m. the following day. Okay. He came in, cut a 12x12 hole in the ceiling in my hallway and in my bathroom, and fixed my kitchen sink after 2 trips to the Home Depot and several hours. Haven't seen him since. I had to talk to the rental company today because I thought we had a gas leak (turns out we are just smelling the rotting insulation and wood through the holes in our ceiling) and was assured we are a priority this week. This week?
In the midst of all this chaos, we did manage to mark 5 or 6 things off our Summer Bucket list, and start some others. And laugh. We have to laugh. Or go crazy.
