Things aren't perfect

This post is heavily edited for content, as I sagely had the Mrs. preview the piece. Not that any of it was awful, but it was, as Lisa said "more appropriate for our scrapbook' then public consumption.

Lest you need a reminder that things are not always golden in the Slapinions household:

I cannot stand the baby at this moment. While 90% healthy now, she is spoiled from all the attention she received and kept me up most of the night.

Naturally then, my work phone rang non-stop at 8 o'clock  on a Saturday morning. The lousy thing about that Nextel - well, except for being REQUIRED to answer it, which is and always will be the 'worst' thing - is that the voice mail is obnoxious. Get a message and it will alert you, loud and clear, every couple of minutes until Christ himself returns to shut it off.

And then someone was knocking on my front door . . Sigh.

Meanwhile we spent all evening/night/most of the morning with no heat on the ground floor, and it was a pretty cold night too. I assumed the thermostat had gone kablooey, as I couldn't see anything wrong with the furnace. Then I had a sinking suspicion and looked at the 'on/off light-switch'  breaker on the side of the furnace. The switch was shiny and new.

That furnace is older than me. Nothing on me is shiny and new anymore, much less something on a device that spends its time in the basement. Sure enough, one of the kids (Smiley????!!!!) had flipped it off. A second later we had heat again.

&^&^%$#

I had managed to farm off the two oldest late Friday eveinng, for all the good that did me. My sister Katie helped them pack their things, and I went upstairs to find her stuffing a comforter set into a plastic bag.

"What the hell are you doing?" I said.

"Packing YaYa's sleeping bag," she said.

"That's not a sleeping bag, that's her whole bedset," I said.

"No it's not, she said that's her sleeping bag"

"I don't care if she said that was a bleeping battleship, have you ever seen a sleeping bag like that? YaYa! Quit messing with your Aunt or you're gonna stay home and go to bed!"

[Just a few hours before she had watched me pick carefully through our full garbage can looking for a $10 bill I'd lost; sure enough I found it.

Kiddingly I roared to her "Did you throw this away?"

She looked at me with distaste. It should be noted that YaYa has a reputation as . . well, part Scrooge when it comes to money.

"Dad, the day I ever throw away money is the day the cats fly"]

She also thought to 'treat' us to a 'snack' of pretzels that she dipped in yogurt and left out to dry. I tried them, and they weren't all that bad. "Oh good," she said. "I was worried. I guess I'll try one now"

Later she also admitted to spilling yogurt all over this keyboard, which was SO much fun to clean up and just VASTLY improved typing. Why, it's like a game - how many stuck keys can you find in a given sentence?

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Oh, btw I just discovered we're out of toilet paper; guess how I know?????

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I have to go, the baby's bawling. &*(&@#