I try again. I’m almost asleep when Mac gets home. Mac says he will reheat the leftovers, so I go back to bed. I try to sleep, and I hear Ada crying. I go out since Mac took Jay downstairs. She says her head hurts. I give her Tylenol. She says she wants to eat, so I warm up food. Then she changes her mind. I warm up food for me since I’m up. We discover Ada has a fever. Mac gives her a bath. I feed Jay.

By then, I have my mini second wind. So I read a little while the kids watch tv. I rock Ada. Ada throws up. Mac puts Jay to bed. Then Jay sneaks out of bed and tries to hide behind my chair to watch tv. I put Ada on the loveseat. I go to rock Jay, but discover that he needs a diaper change more than he needs rocking. I do that. Mac puts him back to bed.

I settle on the sofa to sleep in the living room with Ada. I’m almost asleep when Ada wakes me up because she doesn’t feel good and wants to lie by me. She’s hot again. I give her more Tylenol. She finally falls asleep. I put her back on the love seat. I settle on the sofa.

I’m almost asleep when I hear three loud beeps in my kitchen. I ignore it, but decide to investigate because nothing should be beeping in the kitchen. The front of the fridge says my kitchen is 188 degrees. And that my freezer is set to -88 degrees. I open the fridge door. That feels cool and the light comes on. I open the freezer. The light comes on, but it doesn’t feel any cooler than the fridge. It should. I move everything in the freezer to the deep freeze in the garage.

Now, I’m awake–still–hoping that I’m not taking a chance on the stuff in the fridge.

Oh, and the plumber has made two trips for the dishwasher, replaced the pump, and it still doesn’t drain.

Why I even post about this non-event? Because my co-workers in South Dakota are under a blizzard warning. Blizzard at the end of March. Not only that, they are getting sleet first, so layer of frozen ice followed by a blizzard at the end of March.

Non-weather news: The piece that holds the handle to the freezer onto the door of the freezer broke into a million pieces^*, and our bed sprung a leak. At least I can still open the freezer door, sleeping in the living room until the bed is fixed will be all slumber-party like, and our room needed a spring cleaning anyhow.

*About 10

I started it this morning after packing Ada in to take her to school. We were already running a little later than I like to leave because she spilled her milk all over her pants. The car started fine and then it just died. It didn’t sputter and die. The engine quit and everything went black. When I turned the key, nothing. Mac went out there while I was taking Ada to school. I’m not sure why, unless he heard me explain to Ada that the car was broken and that was why we needed to get out and into the suvvy. He tried it and said it clicks when you turn the key, but still, nothing. I didn’t hear any clicking when I tried it right after it died.

Battery? Please? I don’t want yet another car repair bill right now. Blah.

I had really strange dreams last night about lobsters and a guy who wanted to be a murderer but he was limited to his options by being wheelchair-bound. He just stalked people instead, looking all creepy.

We have left it unplugged. I’m going to plug it back in as soon as I post this. Hopefully it will stay off. Auto-start was not a feature that was listed in the specs of this dryer. If it does it again, we can add it to the list of things in our house that is breaking.

*Our dryer gives an estimated count down of minutes until it is done drying.

And a dryer that won’t dry the clothes that Mac brought back from the laundromat a little damp. It has been 1.5 hours on high, and they are now just getting dry. We are checking the vent.

ETA: Mac went out to dig into the dryer vent. There was some lint, some twigs, and oh, a big spider. He decided to attack it with the hose. Now there is water in my laundry closet because, you know, the vent leads inside to the dryer. Heh.

I took out the cracked pan of lasagna, and touched a hot spot with my arm. I of course, exclaimed “s**t” which James then repeated about three times.

Quote Mac: “Maybe if we open up a bottle of wine, things will get better.”

In other words, they didn’t fix a single thing, and I still have a washer that might do one load a day if I’m lucky. They said they can fit us in on Wednesday^***.

My husband, being the wonderful person that he is, took a ton of laundry and Ada and went to a laundromat. James and I are going to stay here and do a few more chores–including baking my husband the oatmeal raisin cookies he asked if I had planned on making again.

*The water isn’t getting stuck inside the bin with the clothes. It is getting stuck inside the washing machine with the pump. However, this is a brand new pump, and it makes me wonder if something is wrong with the circuit board that controls the pump and tells the washing machine that it needs to drain.

**The water doesn’t fill up inside the bin, it flows through a container that holds the soap and the soapy water then goes into the bin. Unless the machine is broken. Then it just drains all the soapy water out and does nothing.

***We talked about just going out and bringing home a new washing machine. However, this one is still under warranty, so it isn’t costing us to fix it. It is just taking too much time to fix it. And I’ve read so many bad things online about this particular washer, including the fact that there was a class action lawsuit against Whirlpool on account of its craptacularness. I wish we had known it before we bought it.

In the meantime, I have terrible, horrific throat pain, and I’ve been having chills and a fever since Sunday night. I had two episodes of almost passing out yesterday. One time was while I was making Ada a glass of milk. I told her to go get daddy while I crawled to the sofa. She ran to the bedroom and then came back and said “daddy is sleeping.” I guess I should have told her to wake him up, but it didn’t matter. The dizziness passed only to happen again that afternoon while I was taking a shower.

Just having my throat swabbed and having them look down it doubled my pain. Mac is picking up Ada from Raintree and then picking up my prescription Ibuprofen to try to get the swelling down in my throat. In the meantime, I get to lie in bed almost wanting to cry everytime I need to swallow and going between feeling freezing cold and hot and sweaty.

Oh, and a small section of the ceiling in the shower decided that it wanted to fall down. Seriously. My house is falling apart. We get to add that to the list of repairs that have plagued us the last few weeks.

Last week just wasn’t my week, and this week isn’t looking good either.

We now get to add an electrician to our list of repair bills, and I am hoping that it doesn’t spread any further, or we have an electrical fire that burns our house down^**. We set the breaker to off until we can have it looked at.

*The outlets for the washer and dryer are on their own circuit, and are still working at this time.

**Yes, I knocked on every piece of wood in my house after typing that.

The washing machine repairman came, I explained what was wrong, he took a quick look and then put in an order for a new motor and pump. Our issue is the pump, which is apparently a problem with our washer type. The other problem with our washer type is that Whirlpool had the genius idea to make the motor and the pump one piece, so we cannot just replace the pump. They realized the error in their ways, and now make them as two pieces, so we will have a new motor and a new pump put in the washing machine, and if one goes out in the future, we only have to replace that one. It seems these days that things are made poorly, but I don’t exactly think that is the case. I don’t place the blame on the engineers or the producers. I blame management. They are the ones that want thing out quickly, as cheap as possible, and the first thing that is cut out or goes down hill is quality assurance. The same can be said for software development.

In the meantime, I have to MacGyver the water out of the washing machine before it will run properly. Hopefully these pieces come quickly. The good news out of this is that it is all under warranty, so we will not pay for any of this. This repairman has visited us three times–the washer, the dishwasher and the refrigerator. I told him when he left that we will see him when the dryer breaks.