Happy Birthday, 98

98's birthday was last month, and I gave him tickets to Blue Man Group.   We didn't go until tonight, a month later, because this was the first 5:00 pm show I could get five front row seats for, and I knew I couldn't be trusted to stay awake for the 8:00 pm show.   It was: me, 96, 98, and two of 98's friends, let's call them Curt and Rod. They weren't twins, but if I had twins I would totally have named them Curt 'n Rod.  I am happy to report that I survived the evening without running away screaming, leaving them to take the train home alone spent the evening with four teenage boys. I love all four of these boys, and would run in to a burning building to save any of them but man, oh man, are teenage boys insufferable.

They argued about Pokemons (the plural of which 96 has reminded me more than once is Pokemon, but I say Pokemons because, well, I know it bugs him) and they argued about how long ago 15 minutes was.  They disagreed about 'Droid or iPhone.  They debated the merits of public vs. private vs. parochial.   They each knew stuff that the others didn't know, and they each had to make sure that all the others knew they knew this stuff they didn't know.   Do you remember Charlie Brown's teacher?   By the end of the car ride, that's all I heard.   That, punctuated with the random, "No, you're wrong," and "Shut up," and "You don't know anything."    Good to know it's not just mine.

The other thing I noticed about teenage boys: They havetohavetohaveto have the last word.   Every. Single.  Time.   The last word.  Spoken.  Has to be theirs.   And not someone else's.

See how annoying that is?

All's well that ends well, though. 98 made it home with a piece of spit-paintball-artwork from one of the bits.  As we were leaving I handed him a sharpie to ask one of the Blue Men for an autograph on the way out. The Blue Man did him one better, and swiped a bit of blue ink/makeup/whatever it is off his face and planted a cool thumbprint in the corner.  And the next time we go, we're going to count how many marshmallows that one guy ultimately crammed into his mouth.  Double digits, for sure.

Multiple Choice

I could really use some advice.  Seriously.

So, remember the Great Flood of 2010?   Because the creek behind my house was bringing so much of the flooding to the neighborhood, the city spent a fair amount of time hanging around my house, watching stuff.    They sandbagged the creek, the sandbagged my driveway, and we all got to be good friends.  The foreman, Charlie, had a peek at the cellar before and during the worst of the flooding and arranged for a plumber friend of his to install a sump pump for me, and an electrician friend to install a new outlet, since a pump requires its own, separate, grounded power source.  So that gets all done in the wee hours the day before that second flood, and the whole system worked like a charm.   Sure, I got a couple of inches of water during the second storm, but the week-old water heater and furnace, replaced after the first round of flooding, were unscathed. And dry.  I was immensely grateful, and made them cookies.

Well, the plumber that did the work is a city employee (who did the work on his own time, so no tax dollars involved).   But the only number I have to reach him is the city water department.   Thinking it was his cell phone, I called him on Saturday for a rather urgent plumbing ... ah, let's just call it a "situation".    More about that later.   So the city guy (who remembered the cookies) passed along a message, and the plumber called me Saturday and told me he'd be here on Sunday afternoon.   Well, here it is now Monday morning, and still no plumber.

And in case you're curious, here's the sequence of events:  I came home on Friday night to a wet downstairs bathroom floor and both boys denying any knowledge of a toilet backing up. This was just the first "hmm" of many this weekend, it would turn out.   The toilet flushes fine, but for lack of a better word, it's a little gurglier than usual. Then, on Saturday morning I went into the cellar to do laundry, only to find an inch-deep puddle, about 10 feet in diameter, directly under said bathroom.  With an appropriately audible "harumph" I cleaned this up, did my laundry, and went on with my day.

Ah, but now the plot thickens. The washer drains into a soapstone sink, which thankfully has a greater capacity than the front-loading washer, because when I returned to the cellar to change the laundry, both basins of the sink are filled with water.  Not overflowing, but filled 4/5 of capacity.

And the toilet that was gurgly but working fine? Not so much. Someone flushed and walked away, leaving lucky me to discover another wet floor and another inch-deep puddle in the cellar.  Thank you, FEMA, for that awesome shopvac.

No, I'm not done yet.  There's more.
 
So this morning I'm sitting quietly on the couch with Zoet, and we're watching Good Morning America (yeah, she thinks George Stephanopoulos is hot) and we hear a very distant ... can't quite place it ... barely audible woofing sound from ... is it outside?  Even Zoet noticed it, and I was curious.  It didn't sound like Daisy, our shepherd next-door-neighbor, and it didn't sound close enough to be a dog walking into the Fells right outside our window.  So I pulled a Timmy, and sent Lassie Zoet to find the source of the noise.

One of the boys was in the shower, which is directly over the downstairs bathroom, the aforementioned gurgly-toilet-bathroom. And the running shower was somehow causing air to bubble up through the toilet bowl: hence, the gurgling.  What's worse, as the gurgles continued, I saw the water level in the bowl rising.

So here we are, in a house with an upstairs shower that empties into a blocked downstairs toilet and a downstairs toilet that empties directly onto the cellar floor. (So no shampoo-rinse-repeat today, boys. Today you can take an if-you-really-took-a-shower-why-is-the-soap-still-dry shower.)

I am reluctant to call the city department again to try to get ahold of the plumber I was expecting to see yesterday, and in the meantime, I have found the name and number of a actual plumber who did actual work for us a couple of years ago.   So do I ...

A.)  Wait for the first guy?  And if so, how long do I sit in silence?
2.)  Call the city again and have them pass along another message?
C.)  Call 2-years-ago-guy and hope he remembers us and can come out?

Please advise. Quickly.

Valentine's Day, 1996

It seems to me I'm always mentioning how I find treasures rifling through drawers and files while I'm looking for something else. Today's tale is no different, except I don't recall that I was particularly looking for anything.  I just recently stumbled across the little card I used to tell Tom I was pregnant with Agent 96 on Valentine's Day, 1996. And even with the evidence in my hand, including the positive pregnancy test, which today still shows the [+] (and no, I'm not going to show you a picture of it!), I honestly have no recollection of doing this. I recall the card; in fact, when I was putting together photos for his memorial I wanted to include the card, a small, die-cut tiger.  A little secret between us was that I called him "Tiger", and he called me "Kitten". Eww, I know. What worse, when 96 was born, we called him "Tigger" sometimes. (Remember that rattle Zoet chewed up? It was 96's Tigger.)

Quick, get the insulin.

I remember giving him the card for Valentine's Day in 1996, I just don't recall the whole "I'm having a baby" spin.  How does a person forget something like that?

Usually, events with the second child take a back seat to the first: 96's baby book is complete, including the first day he sat, unaided, in a grocery cart (5 months) and his first fat lip (during the April Fool's Day blizzard in 1997); I sold 98's baby book in a yard sale, factory seal unbroken. The photos in 96's first year album are labeled; I don't even have a first-year album for 98. Of course, I famously have both boys' umbilical stumps in a carton in the attic. They are in the jeweler's boxes my engagement ring and wedding band came in.  Suffice it to say, saving those little belly buttons had me off raisins for a while.

Back to Agent 98. It's hard to imagine a memory burned more strongly into my synapses:. There I was, 40 years old, in the upstairs bathroom: 6-month-old 96 (who was still nursing full time, for the record) in one arm, and there, in my other hand, another [+].

"Tom ... can you come up here for a sec?"

No Snow Days Allowed

One of the early lessons we learned on Kwaj was that a person could, indeed, survive a full year, a complete trip around the sun, without so much as a single snowflake. Four years, in fact. I have made it my life's plan to experience another such existence, but alas, this plan shall have to wait a few years, probably until the boys are in college. But I predict a warm climate for this blogger's retirement years.

Why would I have days like this ...

... or this ...

... or this ...

or this ...

... when this ...

... qualifies as a snow day in San Antonio, Texas?  I kid you not: a snow day. A classes-cancelled, government-offices-opening-late, honest-to-God snow day. Can you see my nephew Isaac inside that heavy winter coat? No? That's because he's in a sweatshirt! For the record, he doesn't even own a winter coat. I own three: dressy, everyday, and a one just for snowblowing. Blowing snow blows.Unlike the Inuit, I don't need fifteen words to describe it. I only need four: It belongs somewhere else.

I have no use for snow. I don't ski, or skate or play ice hockey or make snow angels. I don't make ice cream out of snow.  My nose gets red and stays red the rest of the day. I look like I've been crying, or I've had too much to drink when I come in from the cold.  I really like hot cocoa, but I can make that a summer drink: I'll just turn my air conditioning on full blast. Yeah, that'll work.

Give me a good tropical  downpour any day of the week. It took some getting used to -- that bath water that fell from the sky on Kwaj. I can recall a dreary November day, the first day of the rainy season there in 1998. Maybe I had the a/c set a little too low, because I was kind of chilly. I looked outside before we left the house on our errands (as always on foot with the double stroller; I used the bike with the trailer as little as possible) and bemoaned to the boys, babies at the time, the grey and bone-chilling kind of November day I was so used to and was surely unconsciously expecting. I even took off my usual flipflops, trading them in for  socks and sneakers. Then I opened the door, and the warmest, humidest solid block of air I had ever felt knocked me backwards. Especially during the rainy season, you had to have at least a couple of sets of clothes planned for the day, because you knew you'd get rained on at least once. You had to plan photography ahead, because you had to give your camera 20 minutes to adjust from the dry 70's inside the house to the humid 88 it invariably was outside. The lens would instantly fog over, like eternally living in your bathroom after a hot shower. 

But by golly, it didn't snow once. And we lived to tell the story!