DuoLingo Streak: 24 Days
Tuesday. Today ended up being quite the disaster of a day. We started the day with me getting up at four thirty in the morning to work with Jeremy on sorting out our flight schedules for next week. I was up for about an hour before getting back to bed and sleeping a bit more. I had a snuggly Liesl which made it easy to fall back to sleep.
When I finally got up, I worked for a bit in the office. Loads and loads of coordination between people today. I was hoping to get to video game today so had turned on the Steam laptop, but it took all morning before I was actually able to get to it.
Dominica discovered the sink was totally backed up this morning. I was in my office and could hear her fighting with the sink. She kept running the garbage disposal trying to get it to go down, but it never did. She eventually brought me in, found some Draino, and had me Draino the sink. That did not work so after a few hours I Draino’d it again. Still nothing. The water did not budge.
So both sides of the sink are full of dirty, rotting food water and Draino that is going absolutely nowhere. Just great. This is how we wanted to start our day.
We spent loads of the day working on travel arrangements and plans. What a long day. We had to change days, flight routes, and all kinds of plans to get everything to work. It took all day before we had things worked out and submitted. Now the final plan is that I am heading out to Phoenix on Friday and back to Dallas on Monday morning, super early. This will give me just a few hours to see the girls at home before I have to drive down to Austin for SpiceWorld 2017, which starts on Monday night. Thank goodness a good friend of mine was able to get his hotel changed from a single to a double and I am able to stay with him. I would not have been able to have gone, otherwise. Jeremy is flying early on Saturday morning directly to Phoenix (instead of coming to Dallas first as we had originally planned) and leaving Phoenix to fly back to Rochester just twenty five minutes after I fly out on Monday the ninth. That makes it really simple for the two of us to get to the airport when it is time for us to leave Phoenix.
It was, overall, a really rough day even by mid-afternoon. Once Liesl was awake, she and I played XCOM for a while. That went okay. At least I got a little bit of a break. It was not all that much of one, though. But it was something.
This afternoon when the Draino had sat for hours and the water had not budged, I went out and tried running the garbage disposal. This, to my great surprise and chagrin, caused the two sinks full of nasty, dirty, acid water to come pouring out from under the cabinets onto the floor where I was standing! Dominica had been talking about getting in a plumber as it was, but I had been hoping that we could avoid spending money on that today, for obvious reasons.
What a mess. I ran to tell Dominica to call a plumber, then ran back to see what I could do to fix things. I found that the pipes had come apart under the sink and I was able to hold them together. I sent Liesl to get Dominica to come help me. We managed to stop the water from continuing to flow out, cleaned out under the sink, mopped up the floor, and called Mr. Rooter to come out and take a look at our disaster. They said that they could be there in under and hour.
We cleaned a little and I played just a little more XCOM before the plumber arrived. He was there for a while. He fixed the sink, fixed sealed, rooted it out, drained it, ran a camera, and discovered that our pipes are broken somewhere around eighteen feet from the drain valve in the atrium and that tree roots are growing into them. So we have pipes that are not continuous, not level, and the ground is slowly washing away. The estimates are about eight thousand dollars if things go really well and we only have to fix ten to fifteen feet of plumbing and seventeen thousand dollars if we need to have things fixed all of the way to the public drain point. This is a disaster. At least, for the moment, we have some drainage.
Early this evening both Jeremy and I got our tickets for Phoenix. Things feel “real” now. There has been a lot of stress waiting for things to fall apart or not to go as planned and now with tickets in hand, a condo ready for us, and everything in motion it feels a lot more solid that we are really getting on planes in a few days and meeting up down in Phoenix to really get this new adventure underway. I am sure that this is way bigger for him than for me. I’ve been in Phoenix for more than a week already and have been involved in the project for more than a month at this point. But for him, getting the tickets in hand is the first real sense of things actually moving forward that he has had in all of this time, other than two one hour phone calls that he has had. Jeremy also put in his notice at work today, so his first really concrete step has been taken, as well. A major day.
I had promised the girls that I would play Bean Boozled with them tonight. This is the Berty Bott’s Every Flavour Beans game taken from the Harry Potter books, so we are doing this as part of their school and bedtime reading activities to help get them excited about reading. We set up the Lumix on the school room table and the girls and I went through all of the bean flavour sets on Liesl’s first self hosted video. We all had a lot of fun and the video is really cute.
Doing the game together on video was a really good idea. It was more fun to do and now we have a great memory of it that we can share.
Dominica and I were both feeling like we wanted Domino’s pizza tonight. We have not done that in a really long time. More than a year, I would expect. So we decided that between this being a really long, stressful day and having some major reasons to celebrate at the same time, that we would just go ahead and splurge on some pizza. The girls both liked that idea, they ask for Domino’s every so often.
I did just a little bit more work before the pizza arrived. Then, once it was here, Liesl and I set up the fourth Pink Panther movie, Revenge of the Pink Panther from 1975 and watched more than the first half of it while we ate our pizza. Liesl loves, and always asks for, Pink Panther plus Domino’s Pizza Daddy/Daughter movie nights. We’ve done this many times and she always loves it. It is our special treat that we do here in Carrollton.
After the movie, the girls both played some video games for a while and then both settled in for some YouTube videos. Dominica spent the whole evening working on a web design project that she has been stressing over. It is going pretty well, in reality, but she is trying some new stuff and is learning to deal with clients and expectations and timelines and that stuff is a bit much for her so she needs extra time and support. She is working with some new technology, as well, and needed some assistance.
Tonight is another reading of Harry Potter night. This is our third night reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and now that we know that I am leaving for certain on Friday night at eleven twenty we can budget our time to make sure that we are able to cover the chapters that we need to cover by the end of the week so that we can just finish the book before I have to leave to go to Phoenix. This is going to be a long time away and we don’t want to leave something like this unfinished.
Tomorrow, in theory, is going to be a quiet day. Knock on proverbial wood. We have our travel plans sorted out. We have our tickets. I’ve been doing light work for the office, making notes and lists and plans and so forth. Jeremy is busily wrapping up his final days in the office, he will be likely tied up handing over projects that he has been working on. Dominica should have much less stressful design work to tackle. If all goes well I will be able to kick back and spend some time with the kids and mentally prepare myself for a crazy upcoming two weeks of nonstop work, design, business, strategy, planning, and world conquering. So much to do.
Three days left before I leave for Phoenix.