Things Fall Apart

I believe I've broken just about everything that can be broken.

The lawnmower you knew about. That still isn't fixed. The up side is that a least I don't have to mow the lawn. The downside is that my folks are paying my cousin to do it, which is nice, but I feel bad about the money they are spending. We took it to the shop two weeks ago: Turns out you can't put gas with ethanol in it into a lawn mower. It destroys their engines. Who knew? Gas is gas, right? Well, apparently not. Lord only knows when the mower will be fixed.

Then my air conditioning went out. I called the landlord, or more accurately, I called the property manager employed by the law firm currently holding my house in receivership. She sent a very nice young guy out to repair it. Turns out the filter needed changing and I had placed a piece of furniture over the intake vent, causing the thing to freeze up.

Next I had a "leak" from water pipes under the house. Or so I thought. I called the property manager and she sent out a pair of plumbers who crawled under the house and clunked around. Within about ten minutes they were on my front porch, smirking. They had "fixed" the leak they told me. I asked how they did it so quickly. They told me they turned off the hose in the back yard. Yeah, I'd left it running. Just a little bit, but enough to flood the yard over the course of a few days.

Now my washing machine is leaking and I was almost afraid to call someone to fix it. If the current pattern holds true it's almost certainly some dumb thing I'm doing ... or failing to do ... that's causing the leak. And it costs $125 just to get the guy from Sears out here to look at it, whether he actually does anything or not. I called, however, and made an appointment for two years from next Thursday or something like that. In the meantime, I will just move anything susceptible to damp away from the washer and soldier on.

Seems like I've been stepping on my own tail a lot, doesn't it?

Grayson recently returned from his first week at his dad's new apartment. That first week without him is kind of lonely, but I know he's having a good time with his dad, and, as I learned last summer, I'll get used to and even learn to appreciate the "Me" time. Nevertheless, it was good to have him home, and we had a nice weekend, just the two of us. This week our task is to go through Grayson's STUFF and choose a couple of boxes worth to send with him to Gray's next week. That will provide Grayson with some toys to have at his dad's – now that he has a room of his own – and clear some space in his room at our house. He doesn't even play with more than half the stuff in there, anyway. I could probably make it disappear and he'd barely even notice.