Reality Check Please?

Hi Carolyn,



Well I feel like a fair part of a lifetime has passed since I was last here at Wormhole Electric.


Yes,  we are back in the true north cold and frigid again and no I'm not adjusting well at all. However, this has truly been an epic winter - and is still with us here as there is a heavy snowfall warning out as I speak/blog - and railing and wailing about it will just make me part of the huge chorus, so enough of that.



The airport part of things was just fine this year. No blizzard to greet us as we popped out the terminal doors to grab a cab. Once we were all settled in for the ride to mid-town Toronto at my LSBH's sister place where we stayed that first night back, the ominous pieces began to fall into place.


 The cabbie hadn't even put his car in gear before he started making small talk about the coming storm. For two people who hadn't worn socks for the last five weeks this was horrific chit-chat, to be sure.


Well, he was  frickin' right. The next morning at sunup a glance out the window was like looking into a big bunch of Kleenex. The storm was supposedly just hugging the lower Great Lakes and we figured we could pop out of it once we got north of Tranna.  

 It didn't turn out that way and the usual 3 hours from our abode to the airport was a white-knuckle adventure of about twice that length. A good deal of it was in the shadow of phalanxes of snowplows, too. I used to be an absolute four season gonzo road-tripper, but I seem to be losing my mojo for this particular kind of  rip-roaring adventure.




The homestead looked just fine from the outside as we approached. Once we got in, though, I discovered that the super-cold-snap had popped a couple of water lines in the furnace and storage room area in our absence. Curse that automatic thermostat that I had set low for the time that we were away. Little did I realize that doing so was just playing into old man winter's hands.  The first welcome home gesture was to flip the water off so that the leakage could be halted. That nice hot shower and the other accoutrements of north-American uber-civilized living were shelved until a plumber could be found.

 

 

 

 

Well, the cold snap had snapped up all the plumbers. Broken water mains, water lines and such were epidemic in these here parts as I have subsequently discovered. We did get one a few days later, and he looked pretty bedraggled, too. But we got the water thing fixed and I've decided to let the saturated drywall  simply dry out before I remove it. It's a fair bit of a mess though.

 

 

 

 

 

Once we got that initial item behind us we got in touch with the kitchen folks who were originally slated to begin installing our new kitchen upon our return. There was a fire at the cabinet factory and our kitchen install has been bumped back at least 4 weeks. Karen and I looked at each other upon hearing this and realized that we only came back this early to be there when the install was to originally take place.

We had been keeping tabs on the weather et al from down there and were half considering sucking up the rescheduling our flight thing fee and staying a couple more weeks. The  irony was not lost on either of us.




Anyhow, my LSBH has determined that since at least half of the main floor is inoperative this is the time to repaint the other adjoining rooms.

She's really excited about the prospect. I'm the ladder jockey, though.


I'm quite capable of droning on for hours about such domestic minutiae  but I know they are the same for us all in varying degrees.



Okay, enough about this end. What's shaking in your part of the tree?



Don



All images sourced from Google Images

Fig. 1 - digitaljournalist.org
Fig. 2 - dailykos.com
Fig. 3 - workersatyourservice.com