Shit Happens

Wow. Has it really been a month since I've posted?


Dude.


I have a little story to tell you so grab your barf bags and gather round, you're in for a treat.


One fine Sunday afternoon I come home after running a few errands, ready to finish my laundary and get my homework done. I was already feeling overwhelmed with the amount of homework and studying I had to get done that day so I was particulary anxious.


I walk into my house and see something on the floor in front of the bathroom door. I walk closer to investigate and realize that it was water from the toilet overflowing!


What? Did someone break into my house and try to flush a huge brown bomb down the toilet while I was gone?


So I open the bathroom door to stop the overflow. Bad idea. As soon as I open the door, brown water comes shooting out and starts flowing into my dining room.


WTF?


I look at the toilet and it is was litterly spewing shit. Shit water. Along with other things you find in a sewer. I was shocked. I knew I should turn off the water to the toilet but in order to do that I would have to wade through the shit water. And of course, without thinking, that's exactly what I did.


In my flip flops.


Gagging the whole time.


I turn off the water but it does nothing to stop the spewing toilet. Crap! Now what do I do? I stand back and just look helplessly as the water continues to saturate my dining room carpet. I need towells. Yes, thats what I need! So I throw off my flip flops and wash my feet off in the kitchen sink so I can run upstairs and grab my bath towels.


All of my bath towels.


I come back downstairs and by this time the water was creeping closer and closer to my kitchen table. So I drop the towels and have to move my kitchen table and chairs into the living room but in order to do that I have to move the couch and the automan first. So I finally finish rearranging my living room and get back to work at the matter at hand.





I try to create a dam the best I can with the bath towels. This seems to work for the moment and I was finally able to call a plumber and of course the soonest they could get there was in an hour.


An hour! My house would be full of shit by then! I hang up and start thinking, isn't there someway to turn off the water to the whole house? Maybe that will stop it. So I call my neighbor for his advice.


FYI: This is my next door, we share a wall, 50 year old single neighbor who likes to lay out in the back yard every time I do and periodically asks me out for drinks. (But that's a whole different story.)


Anyway...he's no help. I don't think he realized the magnitude of the situation, this wasn't just a little clogged toilet dude! Meanwhile the toilet is still going.


And going.


My towels are soaked, it's now leaking into the kitchen. I'm screwed. My landlord won't answer his phone, the plumber isn't going to be there for an hour so I call an emergency flood cleanup guy who also won't be there for 45 minutes!


So I just sit back and watch the sewer continue to make it's home in my house.


Turns out that there was a problem with the pipe outside my house. I live in a little subdivision of townhouses and the plumbing is set up so that each place has a pipe going directly from their toilet into the ground under the street & then combines into one big pipe that takes it out of the neighborhood.


The meeting point for everyone's pipes is right in front of my house soooo, when the main pipe got plugged, the sewer chose MY pipe, to MY toilet to MY house to use as it's exit.


So yes, I had the entire communitiy's poop in my house. And everything else they flush down the toilet. By the way whoever is flushing swiffer pads down their toilet needs to be shot. Just sayin.








Eventually the plumber got there and was able to remove the toilet and plug up the pipe to stop the sewer from coming in. My landlord finally got the message and came over after I had the flood guy and the plumber there working on the mess. He felt horrible, but he did stop and buy me donuts.


That makes everything better.


Thanks.


Anway so the past month I've been living in a construction zone. I got about 5 new roommates and they didn't even help with rent! The plumber dude, the flood dude, the carpet dude, the sanatizer dude, my landlord and a couple of construction workers lurking outside my house. They had to tear into my front yard and dig into the cement in my garage to get at the pipes.


Oh, and I forgot to mention that the flood seeped down through the floor and flooded into the basement too. Poop dripping from the ceiling.


Awesome.





So everything is pretty much cleaned up now, the kitchen floor still needs to be replaced but everything else is pretty much done.


Finally!


These pics are after the poop is all gone, I'll spare you any shitty pics.









Even though the bathroom is fixed, I don't go in there.


I refuse to use it.





It scares the shit out of me.

Hungry is to Food as This Post is to Intelligence

Ok, remember when I told you about my flower beds and how the hubster totally ruined them by planting the tall flowers in the front and the short flowers in the back?

Well, you all told me not to worry, that once all the flowers started filling in that nobody would even notice my awkward flower beds.

Well thanks guys but you were wrong.

My flower beds still suck. Not only are the tall flowers awkwardly towering over the short flowers in the back, but they are growing sideways!



Sideways!


Seriously, I had a fabulous plan for these flowers to be planted in the back, all bunched together to avoid the lonely one plant awkwardness as shown below.




When turning into my driveway every day and seeing these hideous inept creatures I can't help but think how fitting it is for Al & I to have these flower beds in our yard.



Just like these flowers look out of place among the other flowers, Al & I are totally out of place in our neighborhood. Most of our neighbors just avoid us, they try not to look at us as we are driving through the neighborhood. Of course there are a few nice ones like our neighbors to the left of us, but for the most part nobody talks to us.


Our very next door neighbor especially goes out of his way to avoid us. When we were in-active members of the prominent religion in the neighborhood this neighbor was assigned to visit us every month. Instead of actually coming inside, he would just leave brownies on our doorstep (which were always disgusting), but that was fine by us. I think the day that he found out he no longer had to visit us was a huge relief for him, now he has no obligation to like us.


Then there's the dog hater neighbor who calls the cops on every single dog in the neighborhood. When we first moved in we thought it was just our dog that he was targeting but no, we found out that he is well known as the dog-hater dude.


He's retired and stays at home all day with nothing else to do but leave notes on our door and spy on our dogs. When Bain was alive he would call me and tell me exactly what dog was misbehaving and what their individual bark sounded like. I swear he would sit in his yard with binoculars and watch our dogs all day long.


Get a hobby dude.


Oh, and yelling at your wife is not a hobby. I swear they've got to be the two most miserable people. I have to fight the urge to take Dozer over to poop on his lawn.


And I'm not even going to get into the neighbor that came to visit us one day to tell us we were basically throwing our lives away and going to Hell. After Al had his say to this guy, he has never come back.


Thank God.


Living in our neighborhood reminds me of those stupid analogy questions on the SATs.


TALL AWKWARD EVIL FLOWERS are to THE FLOWER BED as POOBA & ALBERT are to THE NEIGHBORHOOD


But we've lived here seven years now and are pretty happy people so it must work for us.


Maybe those tall flowers aren't too bad after all.

Big Pimpin'

My mom's family is very close and practises what Alex would call ridiculous traditions. We get together to celebrate birthdays and Christmas. Gasp! Who would ever do such a thing?

Absolutely ridiculous.

Well, one of those crazy traditions is a little get together we have every summer at my mom's house to eat good food and play water balloon volleyball.

Water balloon volleyball?

That's water balloon volleyball. My niece Kelsi is a little new to this water balloon thingy and didn't quite get it. I'm like "Kelsi, you have to open your eyes in order to play! I mean seriously!"

Apparently she didn't hear me.

Logan was so happy to be in charge of getting new balloons to the players. He felt pretty important, after all it is a huge responsibility!


This blonde beauty is Charlie, she was being so cute with my nephew Brolan! She also helped get the balloons to the players and did a mighty fine job.





Brolan is getting so big and is just a doll! He is so happy (as long as his mom is around) and giggly and dimply and just a joy to have around!

Since I'm Brolan's favorite aunt, he ALWAYS wants me to hold him. Seriously I can't get this kid off me! I am just that great of an aunt that babies just flock to me.

I'm like the fricken Pied Piper!

It has nothing to do with the fact that I feed them treats, it's my personality. It just comes naturally of course.





I think his mom must deprive him of anything with sugar because when he had a taste of my koolaid his inner sugar demon came out. I was innocently holding my drink in my hand when this kid would grab my wrists and with all his strength, pull the cup to his mouth spilling most of the sugary substance on his shirt. This kid is strong, I was helpless and had no choice but to let him drink from my cup.

His mom wasn't very happy with me.

I was like "Dude, it's not my fault you deprive him of such delicious sugary substances, do you see the look in his eyes? It's the sugar demons I'm telling you, you've got to tame those things!"

My brother, Brolan's dad, agreed with me of course.

Brolan wasn't the only baby there, I was so excited that I got some great pictures of these cuties! This is my cousin Jenny and her daughter. Look at these darling piggies!





And my cuz Rachael with her daughter Charlie and her 3 month old daughter Brittana.





And of course everyone knows my baby Logan. Yes he's a baby and yes he is mine even though it was my sister who actually pushed him out of her vagina. He always tells me that he wishes I was his mom. It's true, would I lie to you?



You're right, I would lie to you. He loves his beautiful Mamma.





So, like every Marsden get together it was full of smiling faces and group hugs.



My mom did a wonderful job of putting together the party, isn't she the cutest? And of course her beau Bobra was there too. We like Bob so much that we call him Bobra, at least me and Lindee do. He treats my mom like a queen so we let him hang around sometimes.









And look at my baby sister, she is all grown up with a boyfriend who shares the same name as my hubster Albert. For those of you really dense people, Albert is not my hubster's real name, it's Alex. You thought my husband's name was Albert this whole time? You are so gullible I swear!



Here's Alyse's Alex, not as cute as my Alex of course but I may be biased. He is pretty funny and makes me laugh. Look at this face, don't you just want to pinch his cheeks off? Yeah, thought so.



They made a pretty mean water balloon volley ball team. They only dropped the ballon 22 times out of 22 water balloons. Here's a great shot of Alyse's behind.





The highlight of the day for me was when my long lost neighbor Nicole came and stole me away. I haven't seen Nikki in like 7 years. For real.



We grew up living next door to eachother since we were 5 years old. Oh the stories I could tell! Mostly of me going to her house and, being the clutz that I am, breaking pretty much everything I touched. Yeah, I was that annoying neighbor kid.

Or sitting on her comforter that we were not aloud to sit on. Her mom sewed the comforter herself and declared it a "butt free" zone in hopes to keep it nice and fluffy.

And making Nikki play the Sweet Valley High board game that I loved so much and that she absolutely loathed.

And eating Ramen Noodle soup full of shredded cheese....yum!



It was so good to see her and it brought back so many memories.



And being the big pimp that I am, I just wanted to say,

"Hey boys, Nikki's single! I could totally hook you up!"

(I am SO dead.)