No One To Tell

It's 1:00 am. I have no one to tell at this hour of day, but I finally went through our pictures and cleaned them out. It feels great! I'm down to about 1.75 GB. That sounds like a lot, but I take a lot of pictures. We got a mid-range fancy pants camera when Maddie was about one year old because I had approximately zero pictures of that child with eyes opened or heck, even looking in the general direction of the camera. Never have I regretted that purchase. I love it. I do take too many pictures now though. Most of them are bad and should be thrown out. I set it to take multiple pictures per second and often do. Now we're down to 1.76 GB and we started at 5 GB. That's some major progress! If only I could get rid of 65% of the junk in the basement in three hours. Now that would be the definition of heaven, wouldn't it?

You Know You Have A Problem When...

your kitchen sink looks like this...

I've been going through pictures on the camera memory sticks and found some fun stuff. In November Brian was out of town when we had a serious problem with the kitchen sink. Like the bottom ring that screws tight to hold the ring you see in the sink seals to the pipes below. I found a massive puddle of water in the cabinet and just touching it, the ring fell down the pipe.

Usually in this situation I call up Brian at work. Home Depot is just a block or two away from the office. He picks up the part and brings it home. Then he ends up installing/fixing/gluing/cutting/sanding/replacing whatever needs attention. Of course, he had just left town. Not wanting to go a week without a kitchen sink I hauled my own darn self to the store and pick up the parts, upgrading so I could actually plug the sink and fill it with water which I haven't been able to do since we remodeled and got a cheap one two years ago. I got it all installed with no trouble, but not before Ben had his fun looking through the hole and pretending to be a sink monster.

Sometimes Right Isn't Always Popular

The work crew is gone. The basement walls have taken a beating. Our savings account is crying. There is a very fine layer of pulverized cement silt covering every single surface on all three floors of the entire house. We do believe we made the right decision though. I asked the foreman before they left and took all my money if they got any water out of the walls. He said they had drained water out the corner area, which is where we had seen the most problems so far. Brian also said when he inspected the walls last night that there were two cinder blocks that had begun to crumble (the acid in the sitting water eats the cinder block away). I had been offering up the weirdest prayer since Friday when we signed the contract to have the work done. I just wanted there to be a real problem so we could have some confirmation that we had made the right decision in spending that kind of money. In some odd sort of way, I felt real good that our foundation wall was crumbling in chunks and they drained water out. We didn't waste our money and we caught the problem well before we would have had to remediate any structural damage. Thank heaven for blessings that come in the weirdest of ways. Brian's summation of the situation was to say, "Sometimes right isn't always popular." Or in other words, the right choice wasn't what we really wanted to do. It was hard on us.