Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Welcome to the Murphys

Murphy's Law: 
"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong"

Over the weekend, The Peanut graduated from Word of Life Bible Institute. She completed the two year Bible course offered. So, we set plans into motion to go up to see her graduate :)

My parents and my sister planned to come, too. They arrived on Thursday and then we caravan-ed up to Schroon Lake, NY together.

Wednesday...the toilet stopped working.  I reached into the tank (gross!) and found out the chain and the flap thingy were broken.

Thankfully we had purchased a new toilet to match the new sink, so Army Guy replaced the toilet on Thursday, rather than replacing the chain/flap.

I needed to do laundry on Thursday if I was going to be gone over the weekend. So, the washing machine decided to not drain. I got lots of error codes, but not clean clothes. My Army Guy and I worked with it off and on (while taking care of other tasks - see paragraph above and below) and I finally got my clothes clean.

The children were in charge of vacuuming the floors on Thursday (so grandparents could have clean floors to walk on) and the vacuum decided to make nasty, loud, horrible noises. Time out to play with vacuum to see if I can make it work (yes, someone had vacuumed up a zip bag).

Friday was a good start, we stopped at the mall and used our Joann's Fabrics coupons and went to Ollies for other bargains. And then we hit the road :)

Saturday we got on the road in decent time, but half hour up the road the van overheated. We limped off the road and found a place to pull in. My dad and Army Guy went off to find help. *sigh* it might be a cracked head. Nothing can be done on the van on a Saturday and we are not in a metropolitan area. No rental cars available nearby. Army Guy found one an hour and a half away (yeah, right!) and then went with my dad to see if there was on at the airport in the last city we passed through.

FOUR hours later (sitting in a little restaurant with a teenager, a preteen and a young one) we finally got back on the road with a four door sedan rented at the airport. I am SO glad that my parents were along and the guys could take care of issues.

We still have to deal with a minivan sitting many hours away. May it not cost more than we can afford to fix the thing up...our reserves seem to have been eaten up by car repairs over the last couple of months already!

So, we missed having supper with The Peanut. We did see her for a few minutes before her practice, and then later after Baccalaureate. My sister got to see a bit of how campus had changed from her days :)


Sunday, it rained. Graduation had to be held indoors and we couldn't all get tickets, so some had to sit in an overflow location and watch a video feed.

Not only did it rain, the afternoon brought a lovely three hour power outage to the town. Dark clouds and no power in the Inn *sigh*

Monday we all crammed in the four door sedan to make the (long) trek back to our house and our GPS decided to play tricks on us. It took us off and right back on the interstate, so we didn't believe it the next time it tried to get us off the interstate and we went (way) out of our way.

We came home and found that the other toilet was leaking (guess what the Army Guy did today?).

This will be a weekend of family memories to remember...and may we not have a repeat any time soon!

BTW, This Guy really liked the quilt that I made for him :)

1 comment:

Linda in Calif. said...

Oh my! You have to laugh not to cry at all the things that went wrong! God Bless you - (I think you need it! LOL!!) I found you from your comment on Patchwork Times. I wanted to thank you for the suggestion of owning more than on Purple Thang. I don't know why I never thought of that! I'm off to buy a couple so I don't have to search for it when I'm in the middle of sewing.