Stormy Days

Today is a lovely stormy day, we have a fire
burning and it is raining off and on. The air
as the temperature drops becomes more and more
crisp. It is a nice day to be in the house.

My daughter asked that on my blog I share a week
before Thanksgiving that was the "No good, very bad,
terrible week. I can tell it and laugh because no one
should ever have a week before Thanksgiving week like that.

When we lived in our other house, we had fixed it up room by room.
The last room though that we redid was the kitchen. I said, I am not
going to redo anymore kitchens because it seems like I get one
the way I like and we move.
We started redoing our kitchen in the summer that year and by
November it was finally finished. I love white cabinets and ours had
white cabinets and we had granite counter tops. My favorite kitchen.

On this November day, the kids kept telling me that something was wrong
with the fridge because water kept leaking out of it. I thought that maybe ice
had fallen out or something and it was just melting. Finally when I stopped
what I was doing I walked into the kitchen and water was running down the side
of the fridge. I thought" wow, that's odd," so I grabbed a chair and looked up on top
of the fridge and the whole top was covered in about a inch of water. I grabbed
a towel and started wiping, then as my eyes traveled upwards, I saw that water
was leaking out of the ceiling. Then as I looked more the whole ceiling was sagging.

I thought" Oh NO! We have a leak in the attic." I called my husband at work and
he said "he would be right home". When he got home, he did the weirdest thing,
he walked in grabbed the ceiling stuff and started ripping it down. Now I was a bit
shocked because he doesn't do things like that and he kept ripping until the
whole of the kitchen ceiling was gone all the way to the place where the kitchen table
sat. He just kept ripping and dropping it on the floor, I just stood there open mouthed until
it was all gone, he said," I needed to see how much damage was done."

Now with the ceiling gone the cold air was pouring in from that attic and it was
going to be cold that night. The kids were all small so he said, " I have to go
get something to put up there to keep the cold out. So he left, and as I looked around
the kitchen was a total mess with wet wall board, insulation and junk all over everything.
I just grabbed trash bags and started cleaning so by the time he got back at least
it didn't look like such a mess. I am telling this all nice and calm but I can almost bet
you I wasn't nice and calm, I bet there was some yelling involved, but lets go on.

He worked on it until he stopped the cold, what had happened was the weekend before,
he went to drain the cooler and get it ready for winter and the drain got stopped up and
drained into the kitchen.

It was late when we got to bed that night. When about 2:30 in the morning we hear this
groaning and crying on the front porch. It sounded so scary, so we both got up and went to the
door and there is this really old dog on the porch. I give her some food and water, thinking
she will be okay. I got back in bed and she starts this horrible howling. So I got up
and put her in my laundry room. About the time I get in bed she starts howling again.
I get up and go in the laundry room and I see that she is blind and deaf and scared
and very old. I stay there with her so I think she is okay and get back into bed
and she starts again.

My husband decides that he will get one of our animal carriers and put her in it and put
her inside his truck in the garage. So we can't hear her. So we sleep rather fitfully.
The next morning he decides that he will just take her to the dog pound on his way to
work. The dog howls all the way to his work. The dog pound is closed. The dog howls
in his truck at work until he finally gets someone at the dog pound and takes the dog
in.
He goes back to work, works all day. That night on his way home as he is going up a slight
incline he notices a cat on the freeway behind him and he thinks to himself, " Now where
did that cat come from." He doesn't say anything when he gets home.

That night I go all around the neighborhood looking for our cat. I can't find her. I search
and search but no cat.

We have Thanksgiving and come home and still no cat. Then the next morning I have crying kids
crying about the cat, so I take them and we go to the SPCA and look for our cat. She was always
a very nosy cat and she climbed up inside the truck somehow and he drove with her all the way
to work, she stayed in the truck the whole time he was at work and didn't get out until he started
up the incline.
My husband keeps having this nagging feeling about the cat on the freeway.
He took our oldest son and went to the freeway and the cat he saw was our cat.
He picks up the now dead cat and comes home. I have 6 very sad kids, so we
come out here to bury the cat and have a funeral.

Everyone said a few words over the grave. We go home and I have been
doing laundry that day, as I come in I realize there is water coming out
of my bathroom. I walk in my bathroom and the sewer is coming out of my shower
all across the bathroom floor. I go in and stop my washer and wait for the water
to trickle down and clean up the terrible mess that is now in my bathroom and bedroom
carpet.
We call the pumping company to come and pump our sewer. Which thankfully the
guy comes out and pumps part of it just so we don't over flow and he is going to come
back the next day and do a better job. I think one of the things that
got to me was the guy who showed up to pump the sewer, didn't wear gloves.
It still creeps me out.

So that is the story of the terrible, horrible, no good Thanksgiving. When we
built this house10 years ago, we were hooked up to the sewer and no septic tank. I am so glad.
I always feel so sorry for the people who have our old house because when Thanksgiving
rolls around, you always have to have that done.

I hope you enjoy my story, I found no matter how bad something might be
at the time right now, time makes it not seem so bad.
Have a great Saturday.
Kim