The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Whine warning! Whine warning! Look out below! Whine warning!

I was feeling sorry for myself last Friday because I had to miss a party with a bunch of my friends, simply because I live so far away. There was too much going on this weekend to be able to fit in a 2.5-hour roundtrip drive to the city. Saturday, however, the kids and I attended a homeschool get-together. That involved four hours of driving, and it was a very long day, but it was time spent happily with dear friends. Right now, it seems sad to be out in the country, so far from friends. The drifting snow is going to reinforce that feeling over the next few days, I'm sure.

Friday I got a phone call from a customer, and followed up with a phone call to the employee who'd offended the customer. It was not a pleasant situation with either phone call, and I thought I was going to lose the employee then and there. But I decided to chill out, check with my boss on Monday, do some more follow-up, and then make a decision. It was stressful to work it all out, and it took a significant amount of time. I am not a good team-player; I'd rather just handle things on my own than try to get other people to be responsible and own up to their duties. It seems, though, upon further investigation, that the employee may have just been having a bad day, that she is actually doing a bang-up job, and that there were just some personality conflicts between the customer and the employee. Not saying that everybody involved did what they were supposed to do, as they were supposed to do it. But after this afternoon's phone calls, I think it's all smoothed out and will work. Whew!

We woke up yesterday, on the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, to find snow. Lots of snow. So all the priorities got shoved out of the way because of the need to shove snow out of the way first. Shoveling and the cold weather had messed up my back and neck last week. The lovely D.O. straightened my spine on Thursday, alleviating much pain, and here I was headed out to the driveway to mess it up again. Ah, but it had to be done, and everybody else was gone.

Then I went over to church to get some milk for breakfast. (Our fridge isn't big enough, and a nearly empty fridge sits at church, so we store some of our groceries over there rather than getting a second fridge for the house.) Oddly enough, I started splashing as I walked into the back of church. Splashing? That's a sound that belongs at a beach or in the bathtub. Splashing when walking is not a sound that belongs in the fellowship hall of church.

After some sleuthing, I discovered the gurgling and bubbling noises were coming from a radiator in the coat-room. I didn't even know there was a radiator in there. After quite a few phone calls, one of the trustees began helping as best he could while still at work. One of the men in the congregation showed up to turn off the furnace at church and shut off the water, both of which were necessary to halt the small waterfall that was spreading its puddle throughout three rooms of the building. I ended up trying to take care of the mess. After an hour and a half of sopping up 10 gallons off the hard-floor, the puddles on tile were small enough to evaporate, and the puddles on carpet had been patted partially dry. I was ready to go home and get on with the day that I had planned to start 3 hours earlier.

I fetched the one kid home from his job. He volunteered to tackle the dishes and the kitchen counters. I headed to the laundry room with a huge load of sopping wet towels, just dying to head off to a warm shower as soon as the washer filled. Kitchen-Boy and I discovered the same thing at the same time. There was no water. When the helpful guy from church turned off the water so as to stop the waterfall in the radiator, he also shut off water to the parsonage. Oy! I was so grimy and so very cold, and I really wanted a shower. And I needed those towels washed and dried so that I could take them back to church and use them to clean up more of the mess.

So I went over to church and tried to figure out the maze of water-pipes coming and going through water softeners, rust filters, water heaters, furnace, church pipes versus parsonage pipes, outgoing pipes versus incoming pipes, and which valves did what. That took a lot of staring and thinking and deciphering. Finally figured out which valve I had been told to turn, shut it off, and turned back on the main water valve. Sure enough, we got water to the parsonage. Also sure enough, the off-valve was the wrong one, and the waterfall resumed pouring water onto the tile floor and carpet I'd just finished drying off. So off went the main valve again, only to leave the waterfall Depleted-But-Still-Running for another 15 minutes. Yuck -- more puddles!

Husband came home and discovered that there is no way to turn off water to church without also turning off water to the parsonage. He did, however, try shutting off water to the church furnace, and that worked. We could resume use of toilets, showers, sinks, and washers at home. Hooray! Matt said it sounds like I was on my way to hypothermia. Wet socks, wet shoes, wet jeans, in a 45-50 degree building for over an hour, not noticing the cold, and then (once I was back into a warm living room) really really noticing how chilled I was. After 20 minutes in a hot bath, trying to get rid of the chill, my face was still cold. But eventually that hot water sure did knock the cold out of me.

The repairmen showed up later. Apparently the pipes froze in the frigid weather last weekend. That explains the cold section of church and the below-freezing temps in the pastor's study. These points were on the same pipe-line, beyond the location of the frozen pipes. Funny, the church had been told that this radiator had long ago been disconnected from the furnace system and supposedly had no water running through the pipes. Hmmm, erroneous information, it seems. Well, the repairmen will be coming back with bypass valves so as to get heat back to the study again. While they're here, they're going to install a valve so that church's water can be turned off without shutting us down at home. That would be the silver lining of the dark cloud!

Still recuperating from the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad yesterday, I bailed on dinner today as well as the weekly errands that were supposed to have been accomplished yesterday. Instead, we went to Pizza Hut for Maggie's Book-It treat and ate at the buffet. Other people were smart enough not to head out into the blizzard, so we fools had the restaurant to ourselves. Then we stopped at Aldi and picked up a few groceries to manage to finagle our way through to my next trip to the big city. My husband even bought me Valentine roses. And you know what was best? He asked me first if I'd be offended by his purchasing flowers. At Aldi prices, I was okay with it! So there are flowers brightening my table. Things are looking up.

Spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get a little cleaning and schoolwork accomplished in spite of messing my neck up again. Rachel says my headache sounds like a migraine. It's bad, but I thought a migraine would have to be worse than this. Luckily, the Deacon called and set me to the task of hunting through Dr Korby's file cabinets for something the sem requested. That gives me an excuse to make a doctor's appt: the wonderful man who straightens my back is 4 blocks from church. So tomorrow afternoon the doctor can make the owies go away again. And then I can play with Dr Korby's file cabinets and revel in reading and skimming his writings until I find the necessary paperwork. Again, things are looking up.