Purls O' Wisconsin

I know, I already have the express pass to hell.

Way back  in time when my sister was less psycho crackhead (well, less crackhead anyway....), George MIchael wasn't sexing himself up and passing out in Land Rovers, Michael Jackson was Awe. Some. and McCauley Caulkin was but a zygote.
You know you spent more than one afternoon painstakingly learning The Thriller Dance. The wolfish raised arms to the side part, the scrapey foot in front while doing the sideways head bop part and the impossible turn and step to your right while doing tiny little pelvic thrust maneuver. I was pretty good at it if I was one of the backup zombies where looking stiff and disjointed added to my overall performance.

And I seem to remember an entire, glorious, weekend spent at Nickie Patrick's house where she choreographed a truly awesome baton routine to PYT. Yeah, that song got pretty creepy in the 90s.....

I was a Wham! girl, though. I was all about Wham! and Culture Club, my taste in swanky gay Brits was established early on, surprisingly influenced by my father. In perhaps his one good parenting move he took me to Sears (god, remember when Sears sold record albums?!) to buy the Quiet Riot album I could not live without. As we stood there in line at the Sears in the Concord Mall  my dad flipped the record over and looked at the song titles. Loves a WHAT? Bitch? Cum on..WHAT? This was unacceptable! I was nine, I just thought they were lousy spellers.
He dragged me right out of the queue and back to the records to put it back. He was huffing and puffing at the salesman about how there was no way he was going to buy THAT for his little girl. There was a huge Boy George poster on display and I remember him saying "Who is that? Is she any good? Yeah? She's not dirty? Great, give me that poster and that album." The middle aged man happily picked them out and rang us up and 25 years later I still love me a big old nelly Brit.

But my sister was all about Michael Jackson. She had the yellow sweater poster, you know the one with the yellow bow tie? She used to sing Ben and Rockin' Robin all the time. She also had one of those cheesy Tiger Beat magazine faux scrapbooks and it was a prized possession. Interestingly enough, her next huge crush was Corey "wanna be Michael Jackson" Feldman! I guess she had a type, too.
 
Fighting wih my sister when we still had to live in the same state house was pretty much constant. She would pick at me behind my mother's back until I just lost my shit and then I would get in trouble. And she was quick to get physically violent and even though I was much taller and two years older, she was crazier and meaner. So I had to be sneakier to get to her, something that was rare because I was too quick to fly off the handle. But really, you would be, too if you'd been stuck with her.
She did something to me, I don't remember what it was, but I was obviously quite upset about it. Upset enough to search out all the leftover wallet size photos  from my third grade pictures, some scissors, and a bottle of Elmer's glue I took her beloved scrapbook to the basement one afternoon and set to work. I spent hours cutting out a pile of my heads from the picture packet and then carefully pasted them next to her beloved Michael in every photo where he was with a date and let it dry so the pages were not glued together. Then I cleaned it all up and put the book back where she had it and waited.
It took weeks for her to see it and lose her shit for a change, but they were sweet weeks filled with anticipation knowing that I was going to get her and get her good.
It was worth it. Honestly, it's one of the fondest memories of my childhood.

I'm sticking my toe in quickly with a random, disjointed post.

My basement flooded AGAIN on thursday night, Third time in just over a year. Joy. That water alarm was good, I was down pumping and it didn't even spread across the entire floor and was only about 1-2 inches where it did reach. Only loss is a really cute pair of shoes that i grabbed when the alarm went off. Oh, I am still fucking pissed, but you know. They are going to be fixing the sewer this summer so OMG what it my problem and all that. Stomp, hair flip, repeat.
Because one pump was almost enough, I ordered a second pump (while the basement was flooding!) and now a backup power unit and 2 larger hoses to pump the water out faster for WHEN this happens again. Because who am I kidding? It will happen again! So I should be able to pump out up to 5000 gallons per hour now.

The corner of the basement that the work crew dug out? SEEPING LIKE A SON OF A BITCH during the storm. I am so not amused by that I cannot even tell you. I hope fire shoots out of someone's ass for that.

The tv station that routinely scares the crap out of me with their doom and gloom forecasts got hit by lightning during the storms. So that makes me happy. Which is mean, but I don't really care. i did not wish it to happen, it's just a bonus.

The move of my craft cave to upstairs is complete and curtains have been sewn, it's pretty cute. I need to finish putting away some of my junk and then I will share photos.I know you want to see yarn porn. But I really like it up there and I know The Man enjoys not seeing my sewing machine sprawled all over the dinign room table. It's like we get a whole new room in the house. Sweet. I have many sewing projects up my sleeve but so far I made two valances and 5 pillows up there. Nice!

i finally tracked down the magical elixir of calmness for my damn cat and it should be here on Monday, well in advance of serious firecracker action by the neighborhood kids. Richard's Organics pet calm in the blue bottle.  Petsmart has it online.

I am thrilled to bits that I need to go to target tonight and all of my discretionary spending money has been spent on freak ass live in a bunker in Montana survival supplies because the city of Milwaukee cannot seem to handle the rain. it's a small thing to be pissy about in this economy, I know. But I do not like it when things come between my and Target..

And now i need a new crock pot. Because in the height of the flood I THREW MINE AWAY. It was not near the action. But it was dirty from cooking in it on Thursday. And I was too exhausted from pumping and panicking and being up until 9 am to do a proper panic clean of the rest of the house so I just picked up the dirty crockie and threw it in the garbage and called it good.
It seemed to make sense at 4 am.
My husband did wonder what the hell, but he was scared of me at that point and let it go.
 I see his point and don't blame him, but damn. I liked that crock pot.

So after thinking about it more and conferring with a buddy, while watching the carrying on in my yard I called the power company to ask WTF was going on.
There was a letter.
Sent yesterday.
It arrived today.
While this was happening:



it's a dude in a hole.
Oh my hell. it's just so ludicrous I am giggling away.

No warning whatsoever from the city or the power company.

It's a good thing they did not fuck with my flowerbeds.
 

Seriously, does this shit happen to other people in this manner?

Ok, so my street is due to be ripped up. Yellow trucks have been showing up for a few months spray painting shit on the road and sidewalks and stuff. They already did some sewer work in April. Surveyors have been around, they put all those little flags down. And then the brats up the street went around and collected yellow flags. Nice.

So this morning it's ramped up, there is a flurry of activity. Sawing into the roads, jackhammers. I looked out ad there is a MAN digging a hole in my YARD.  Um, hi, no one ever said they would be digging in my damn YARD. but whatevs. If they resod what they dig up I will have one really nice patch of yard with no clover. Sweet.

I go to hop into the shower and have just pulled down my jammie pants  and the water is heating up when someone bangs on the door. I was going to ignore it, but then I thought since there is a guy in  a hardhat in a  knee deep hole over the gas line, mebbe I should answer even though I look like complete ass. What if they have hit a gas line and shit?

They wanted in to replace my gas meter and move it from the basement to the side of the house.

I said NO. I need some warning, man and I really would have appreciated a letter or a call or something like they always do (aside from the time there was some Russian fucker who climbed my house and put in a new electric meter at 7 in the morning without knocking first) but I will let them in on Monday sometimes after 8 am, but not today.
He was nice about it, because he really had no choice and he knows they were supposed to call me or something ahead of time. he is going to come back on Monday, and NOT BEFORE EIGHT AM for crap's sake. And furthermore, where are they planing to put the new meter because I would rather it not be on the front of the house! He had the good grace to look chagrined and i wanted to say "That's right Sparky, how happy would YOUR WIFE be to have some dude show up and want to just waltz in and rip some shit up? Yeah, that's what I thought."

And then I went to get in the shower and realized in my haste I had pulled my pajamas up over my tee-shirt all the way to right under my boobs. So I had on a lime green tee tucked into pale pink PJ pants pulled up over my belly to give me maximum camel toe and making me look 27 years pregnant. Topped off with a yellow and white cardigan that I was trying to hold over the tee since I had no bra on and have the kind of boobs that are well past any hope of being free range.  And I fell asleep in yesterday's makeup and when i got up this morning I had raked my dirty, hair spray crispy hair back into a cracked out ponytail since my plan was to clean up the kitchen, throw together a pasta salad for dinner tonight and then hop in the shower.

I looked like a complete nutter.
Goddammit.

I took the world's fastest shower and then slapped on the Bare Minerals and dried my hair just enough to make it look on purpose and then went out to retriee my garbage carts and show them I'm not a complete whackjob, and also to make sure they KNEW where shit was since they kids had swiped the yellow flags. he said he did but that they would be remapping it anyway. The guy asked if I knew what kids did it, yeah I do..see the house that looks like the surveyor left it? Yeah, they didn't fark with the flags in front of THEIR house, now did they?

I have a feeling this will be a long summer.

I was sitting on my living room floor getting ready to watch the second half of The Lifetime! Summer! Movie! Event! starring Sarah Chalke (don't judge me!) and sorting through a pile of crapola that has accumulated next to my side of the sofa. I had a trash bag in front of me piling in the junk mail and a basket next to me for putting the things that just need to be put away. Library books, hand cream, nail polish, knitting implements.
Marge comes trotting in from the kitchen and drops something on the floor and stands there. I check the progress on the fast forwarding on the tv (I need to skip the first half of the mini series and they showed it all in one fell swoop) and look at Marge. I think "wow, that's a big ball of lint he brought me" Marge brings me things all the time. His dolly head, cat toys, nice bits of lint, anything he loves he usually wants to share with me. He trots in and drops them where I can see them and then hangs out with me for a while, then hops down and picks up his treasure and trots away with it. It's sweet, really. Usually.

"Wait. a. minute.....oh jesus..that lint has legs."
It's not as sweet when his treasure is something that used to be a living creature.

I don't like mice, who does, really? I'm not terrified of mice, I figure they are kind of a fact of life. I know they rule the detached garage (and we know they looooove sunflower seeds) and I think by having three cats it's a fair warning to mice that there is nothing in my house that will probably be worth it. Marge is not fast, but he is relentless once he catches something.  Erma is a grey streak of lightning and is cracked out around 95% of her life.  Elvis is probably scared of the mice but he is a very powerful and large cat and woe be unto the mice that he catches. He breaks them fast. And then shits in the middle of the floor.
The Man put the air conditioners in the windows last weekend and I was pretty sure I heard some squeaks coming from the one in the kitchen and hoped whatever was in it would choose to exit to the outdoors. Then the cats became a little bit obsessed with staring under the fridge, which is never a good sign.
I have been keeping my eyes peeled, but not freaking out about it. Mice don't freak me out too bad.

Unless they are dead, and then they really really bother me. Which makes no sense, I know.
So anyway, marge has dropped a very dead mouse about eighteen inches away from my foot and it sat there for a good fve minutes before I noticed it, until Marge started talking to it and trying to scoot it along the carpet and play with it.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!

I jumped up off the floor and got on the sofa and hollered to my husband who was already in bed for about a half hour. Somehow he has ended up as The Remover of Dead Things in this household. I have ended up as The Remover of Live Things and over the years I have had to rid our various living spaces of live mice, ants, dozens of small slugs from a concrete slab front porch in a student rental house (I used a slug-only spatula and flung them into the yard), the squirrel stuck in the pipe in the basement, spiders galore,  a 6 inch banana slug from the bathroom floor of a shitty basement apartment and last week I managed to catch a freaking BEE with my pink silicon tipped extra long BBQ tongs, open the kitchen window and release him back into the wild without breaking a wing. I know, I was amazed myself. It was a HUGE bee. Go bees.

 He has removed....mice. A mouse from the iced tea pitcher and one from the toilet in one hideous apartment, both discovered by me, both dead when discovered. Wet little slobbered on, broken back mice that we had to pry away from the cats. That one mouse I flattened in the middle of the night with a 3 inch thick Java language text after Marge had broken it but it was still running in a circle and screaming (much to the cat's delight!) and I took pity and ended it. It was perfectly flat, though. It was kind of awesome, in a hideous and grim way.
So tonight he came down, half asleep thinking I was telling him the cat had gotten out. And I was somehat agitated by the time he got down here. See, with a live mouse, you know they are going to run like hell. With a dead one, what if it's NOT dead and you get close to it and GOTCHA! it's not dead and it...umm...gets you?
That is my fear. Which is just ridiculous.
But he asked me what happened and I told him. And he laughed at me.
He laughed at me when i said I jumped up on the couch and called him down. He said I was becoming a stereotype (really computer programmer wearing shorts with dark socks and a Doctor Who t-shirt? REALLY?) and then he laughed as got a wad of papertowels and picked up a stiff little 2 inch mouse carcass and threw it away (OMG no, it has to go all the way to the outside garbage buggies! You can't put it in the kitchen trash!) came back in, went to the bathroom and chuckled while he washed his hands and went back to bed.

Maybe I should not have mocked him so harshly about the bunnies?
nah, that shit is still hilarious.

I just went to the library to return a heap of books. Many of them were books I thought I had taken back, but forgot. Whoops. My fine was a very, very shameful $18. I know it is ridiculous. But hey, I support my local library! With the money I could have used to buy the new Charlaine Harris! Boooo!

When I got home I looked at my spiffy canvas Milwaukee Public Library bookbag and realized there was a grizzled up, dried hairball puke stuck to the front of the bag right in the middle of the dome of the Central Library.

That is just fantastico.

Did some yarn dyeing and some knitting at Alterra:

The pattern is Speedway from Anni Designs at Etsy and the yarn is Kraemer Sterling and I call the color Peony after the Indiana state flower. I dyed the yarn yesterday using Wilton's gel color and citric acid. You know what is a dumbass thing to do? Pull a lot of miserable Canadian thistle around 6 thorny ass rosebushes and then stick your hands in water full of citric acid. That will put you right on your horse! i was still too lazy to grab gloves, though so i just kept sucking air through my teeth every time I stuck my hands in the water.

I cast them on in honor of the Indy 500. I don't watch it, but since I am a Hoosier by birth I wanted to do something silly. The coffee shop was nice today, but they were playing some odd music that possibly involved zithers. It was more atmosphereic than catchy, or even, um...enjoyable. I thought someone might ben playing a computer game for awhile until I realized that was really the music today. interesting. They usually have good music there.  And I refrained from writing "douchelord" in cursive in the dust on the back of the Range Rover that nearly plowed into us when we were parking. We were backing up to pull into one of two side by side spots when he whipped in and got the spot next to us. Dude, it's a Honda Civic, we only needed one spot  so there was no need to get all parking bajiggity about it and rush in there. You could not have waited 10 seconds? Really? I know you were driving a seventy thousand dollar car, but there is no reason for such staggering dicketry.


I pulled a ton of weeds yesterday, put down newspaper and laid down mulch. On Saturday I did stuff, but I can't remember what! I think it involved a lot of knitting on my Clapotis, or The Clap as it is known to me. The man spent a lot of the day playing games on his laptop because I installed 4 gig of RAM for him on Friday afternoon and he was thrilled to bits.

Marge is feeling much better, see:

He was quite poorly on Thursday and Friday, I thought it was just spring hairball issues, but their food was recalled this week. It was Nutro, by the way. Check the list. if you use them.  However, the exact type we opened up for them last week was not on the list and he was the sickest he has ever been in seven years and none of them wanted anything to do with that new bag of food. And they LOVE nutro. Well, they are little pigs and love most food...but they really love Nutro. And would not touch it. Marge was the only one who was sickly, though.
Here is a bonus shot of his Margeness, I know he has many fans:

His ears get folded back sometimes when I give him head scritches and he doesn't seem to mind it, they stay that way for a while. It looks hilarious. He was half sleeping here, no flash was used since I try to not blind him at close range.

 

     Sometimes The Man makes a fashion choice so bad, so unacceptable, that I have to intervene. I let a lot of things slide. On any given day he is wearing one tan sock and one white sock. Sometimes with shorts.
 
     And while I am bitching about his clothes let me also say that his closet is from hell, I don't go in there. When I find his shit piled up in my office, I scoop it up, open his closet door and shove it in and close it as fast as I can. I know for a fact there are brand new clothes in there, in packaging, unworn because he "can't find it" because the "closet is too small". I have taken every shred out and organized it about 4 times in the past few years and guess what? I'm done with that. Because I am not his mother and I am not the goddamn maid. Believe it or not, this current system of piling and heaping is better than his old one which was that he found a lampshade once, turned it upside down and used it to contain his socks and briefs. A LAMPSHADE!!! What in the holy hell? If his closet was in any sort of order, I think he would be much better off with his clothes since he would know where things are to begin with.

     So he and clothes are just a ridiculously DUMB combination and over the years he has just come to accept that until some GENIUS begins marketing garanimal’s to 30-something computer programmers, he best run it by me before he leaves the house. He does this not because he gives a crap, but because he finally realized that other people do, and after a few Sunday morning trips to the grocery store it dawned on him that sometimes the cashiers treat him like he is special. Really really special. And also to avoid mockery by me, he once wore a tan shirt and pants to work because he thought they matched They did match, they matched perfectly. That was in 1998 and I still giggle about his zookeeper outfit.

     This afternoon he failed to do consider his outfit or ask me if it was OK. After lounging around in my snowflake flannel jammies for what I REALLY hope is the last time until October, I went upstairs to get dressed and make the bed. I heard the door close and the whine of the weed whipper began outside. I sorted laundry, opened windows to get some air moving around, slapped on some makeup, and finally pissed off the cats by trying to make the bed around their sleeping piles of catness. Then I headed downstairs, I paused at the landing to look outside and open the window and saw the man in one of those outfits. My husband is medium tall at just over 6 feet. I am a shorty at umm....let's call it 5' 4"-ish. I think we have the same inseam, but he is tall in the torso. So t-shirts are an issue. Being a fat girl, I am all about finding things in the correct size and I know he needs x-tall, or even xx-tall, so that's what I get him. But every now and then he sees a novelty tee at Target or somewhere and gets it. Today's tee was ACDC, and it was coming up short. SO to compensate, he had pulled his shorts, his jersey knit "only for riding the exercise bike or sleeping not to be seen in public" grey shorts with the shirt. and to keep his tummy from hanging out of the too short shirt, he had hiked the shorts way the hell up there. From the 2nd story window I could plainly see that he was lifting and separating his downstairs business as he walked across the back yard.
 
I slid down the top window and called out until he heard me. (yay ipod) "Hey, can you come inside for a second?"

"Why?"

"I want to talk to you, just come on in."

"I'm busy, can it wait?"

"I just need two seconds, come on in.” The neighbor is also doing yard work and our houses are probably 12 feet apart, so I am trying to keep it down, you know?

” But I AM BUSY."

"Yeah, but I NEED to TALK to you for just a moment, so can you please come inside the house?”
 
Stomping and grumbling and sighing ensued, but he came into the house only to be told he had to change clothes. " But whyyyyyy?"

"Because that shirt doesn't fit you anymore and those shorts are just...you aren't fit for public consumption."

"SO? I am just doing yard work!"

"Look, I am just letting you know that you might want to reconsider that look is all. You would rather I told you now than before you chatted with all the neighbors if something was wrong?"

"yeah, so what's wrong?"

"that shirt is just too short for you."

"I know, that's why I pulled up my shorts!"

"And when you pull your shorts up so high it puts a spotlight on your junk."

"What?" he bends over to see, putting slack in the shorts. "I don't see anything, I think it's fine."

"It is NOT fine! Seriously, you cannot wear those shorts outside for longer than it takes to run a bag of garbage to the buggy!”

He went and grabbed another shirt, one that is just TOO small for him in every way and came back out.

"THAT IS NOT ACCEPTABLE!! OH MY GOD!!" There was a good seven inches of middle showing with that choice.

"God, you don't have to yell." came the hurt reply as he pulled the shirt off over his head. "I don't know what was so bad about what I was wearing.."

"Well, then I cannot help you Ballzack the Magnificent!”

"Do not ever call me that again!"
 
He did find something to wear that is somehow not squeezing his junk and showing off manbelly, but gawd, should a thirty-four year old man really have to work that hard to do it? And in the process, he took ALL of the dirty clothes out of the laundry chute and left them laying on the basement floor so when I went down to throw a load in to wash, I just screamed with rage. Which also means I think he is wearing shorts from the dirty clothes now. That's just gross. Seriously.

I loves me some lilacs.

And I also love crispy cotton!


and here is the stump from the big, big tree we had cut down in the backyard at the beginning of april.

With cankle action!
It's a big stump, it was a big tree.
I miss it, but then we have on of those windy days and um..yeah, soooo worth it to not have that literally hanging over my house and creaking. *phew*

it's lawnmowing season in Milwaukee! I don't get much spring allergies and I love the scent of fresh cut grass, so this makes me happy. Your mileage may vary!

This handsome boly is orangecat who lives with the crazy lady behind me. He decided to make my acquaintance last week and hopped up on the bench next to me while I was havign a lovely read in the lovely afternoon sun. He seems to be quite the warrior and I have always thought he was a girl until i saw that he has the most enormous cat balls I have ever seen in my life when he was hanging out with me. Well, I mean I am sure they are always the same size, not that being in my presence made them enormous. Just I am used to neutered cats, or less burly manly cats or something.
I did NOT feed him, in fact our lovely meeting came to an end when I caught him fixing to poop in the rose bed and yelled at him to go poop somewhere else and then chased him away.

We did end up needing a new water heater. it's up on concrete blocks. it is nowhere near as nice as the top of the line one we had to buy last year, which is sad. But there is no room to cram a tall one in one blocks, so it had to be a shorty so it had to be cheap as was explained to me by the plumbing guy who wasn't nearly as tickled as I was by the imagie of short and very fat water heaters. They would be really wide because of all the extra insulation, too wide to fit through doors. Who knew?. But other than that and my residual bitterness, basement flood 2009, early spring edition is behind me now. Oh and we did look into tankless models and that cost for installation would be probably three grand or more. Just for the plumbing jiggerypokery.
Hot showers are ahead of me! And I looooves me some hot showers.

So, it figures that last night The Man went to check his email and had to reboot the computer because it was frozen. And it just did not come back. I went in there kind of flustered and said "let me do it!" as if my ability to poke a button with my finger is so superior that the computer would spring to life. It did not.
This morning it did start right up for me. And then hung and then died. And then refused to boot all day long. After hours of troubleshooting and researching new computers I gave it one last shot, it failed. So I kicked it.
Then I bought a  new computer. I still have this laptop, but I enjoy having two computers so the man and I can keep our computing separate. Because he sometimes has bad luck, terrible luck with electronics. He once installed something on my computer ten years ago and it required trips from several of his hardcore geek cronies to sort it out. The plan is that he gets this laptop and I get the new one. This one is 9 months old and his current one is 10 or more years old and belongs to his company. The desktop that died? Was seven years old, which is a nice long life for a computer. I worked in a computer lab in college and while I am no expert, I am a decent troubleshooter and am not afraid to open the case myself. I have installed new fans, more RAM, and a new video card in addition to taking apart my old laptop to take it's hard disk out to keep after it went tits up. I googled for hours and every symptom was indicative of physical hard drive failure.
I have been rooting for him to get a new laptop for years and he won't accept it. But he agreed to take this laptop if I got a new computer, which makes me feel pretty greedy, but he is still getting a computer where he can code until his heart's content.

So of course when he got home from work we went in to see if we could get it going or pull the hard drive to try and get a few things off of it and it booted right up.
It let us get the itunes library and other important things off of it and onto the external drive. it didn't die. It just keeps on not dying. No freaky whirring noise, no flickering, no freezing.
WTF computer?
But by now the new one cannot be canceled, and even if it could be the desktop is clearly not stable,  so we will be a two laptop (well, three counting the decrepit work IBM) household soon. And um..one of them might be pink...

 

So this morning I slept in, because I have been running a bit low on sleep for a few days.
I got up and boiled some water to wash the dishes.
Then I decided while the water was boiling to take care of some personal grooming. If you are under 30 years old, then avert your innocent eyes. if you are over 30, or near it, then you will get this. Being 35 I can attest that being in my thirties is not too bad. I feel grown up finally, and all that. But then there is facial hair. Oh, it's an embarrassing and delicate subject. There are hints in your twenties. Every nw and then you will spy a one inch long hair on your neck and think "where the blue fuck did that come from?" and you pluck it out and stare in horror and wonder who else saw it while it was growing to be one. inch. long?
Then you find a few, shorter, but still, it is more than one.
And eventually you may need to turn to waxing, or nair, or whatever. Being that I am pasty ass white with pasty ass hair, laser is no good for me. It is attracted to pigment, and uhh..i have none. So this morning I spread a lovely layer of nair over what we can call "my problem areas" which basically gave me a fine handlebar mustache and soul patch made of Nair. It did it's thing I washed it off.
Then I had a lovely IM chat with my best bud while doing a little weed whacking in the eyebrow area with some new tiny wax strips from Parissa. They worked fantastically, but they leave my skin ferociously red. And my eyebrows are pure white. And the nair leaves my skin red for a few hours after I use it. So I have crazy oompa loompa eyebrows and what looks like a rash in the shape of a 70s porno mustache.

When I see a dog in my yard, a big dog,  a familiar dog....but it is free range. And pissing on every.thing.
And then I see the caretakers for the empty house next door pull in. I throw a sweater over my jammies and run out there to catch the people to let them know they need to check the basement for water damage. I pass them the info for contacting the city, I ask if they are family or a service and find out that, sadly, the lady next door has Alzheimer's and is unable to be on her own anymore and they will be getting the house ready for sale this summer. We discuss the damages from last summer, we make small talk.
The dog comes over to me and is clearly a complete sweetie of a dog. But she is big and I am scared. I go home, and she trots along next to me.
Living so close to a busy street i worry for her. Or I worry that some kids will taunt her and hurt her.
So I grabbed one of The Man's belts and a bowl of water and head back out and look for her. I see her up the street and she comes running as soon as I call "come here puppy!".
I slip the belt through her collar and then slip it over a shepherd's hook in my yard and give her the water. Then I call animal control  on the cordless phone outside and it goes like this:

I have heard so many birds chirping in the past few days, kids are playing outside, little yappy ass dogs are barking at everything, and Sunday evening I woke up from a rainy afternoon nap and came downstairs to make some tea and I thought I heard things moving in my basement.
It sounded like things were bumping into other things down there...wait, what?

Because they were....FLOATING. yeah, I got the poop again.

But not as much as last year. WTF is going on when I can think "Oh, whew, i only got 7 inches of sewage!"? But that's what we got.

Cliff's notes:
5:30 i heard things in the basement and went to see what was going on, saw things floating past the steps. Stand there gobsmacked for several minutes.
5:35 trying to remember how to breathe
5:36 calling WE for emergency service to cut our power off before the house catches fire, threaten to hit The Man when he says he is going down to unplug things.
6:15 power off, things unplugged, WE guy goes down there with The Man and cuts the gas to the water heater and we turn off the furnace in case the water keeps rising. It was just lapping over the bottom step at that point. Then the guy puts our power back on. YES!
6:30 using the hot water we still had, the hubs scours himself in the shower and throws away a really nice pair of jeans when he gets out.
6:45 the hubs runs out to fetch a new cat box and litter,  becuase for some reason the cats still need to poop. Whatever, cats.
8ish remember to call the city sewer backup hotline. They say they will send an inspector. Oh I have heard that before.
11ish I bought a new humidifier from amazon to be overnighted to me by Tuesday (3.99 for overnight, love the prime memebrship)
11:40 speak to a city employee checking manhole covers on my street who makes it very clear that they are overflowing and he is trying to find the blockage. I tell him our water is going down quickly now and he says a crew will be back later as there are other emergencies.
Keep checking and think the water is receding, by midnight it is down and I just hear gurgling coming from the drain.

Monday morning was spent on the phone with the city fuckers who have since decided that my line is clogged and I need to have it reamed out., my alderman's aide Sherman (he sounds like a nice young man), GE to ask about my washer and dryer (they said to let them dry and then plug 'em in and see what happened) and various other calls. We decided to not put in an insurance claim since we don't want to be cancelled. Then we went to Lowe's and bought supplies to get down there and tackle this mess.
We bagged up all the cat litter, the pantry foods in boxes that dind't get wet but felt damp (the canned goods will be going too, but the boxes would start molding so they went yesterday) , most of my NEW and UNUSED christmas ornaments, most of my fabulous new Halloween decorations,  a few laundry items that were on a low shelf (the purple sweater I knit last summer). there is hardly anything down there, it took around 8 contractor bags. Then we sprayed clean water around and I shop vacced for several hours. Then I used a garden sprayer with a strong bleach solution and sprayed everything down and put fans . Then we got cleaned up and my sweetie took me to the Sonic drive in for a watermelon slush and a corndog. Whoooo-eeeee!
It was hard work, this morning my everything hurt. And it was gross, I won't lie. The backup didn't leave a lot of stuff behind but one of the litter boxes dumped and oh, that is NASTY.  I sucked and sucked with that shop vac, the one we bought last year when The Man still thought there was something we could be doing. But we dug in and got it over with. I guess we paid attention a little bit last summer!
Around midnight last night I watched a man in a truck pull up and sort through all my trash at the curb, he took all the brownie mixes. He took the dripping dehumidifier, he took all of my cardmaking supplies. I know 4 of those bags had litter boxes dumped into them, who the hell takes FOOD from a pile like that?!

This morning I follwed the advice from GE and gave the washer and dryer a shot. They work. I'll be damned. Niiiiiiice.
With three fans going the floor was nearly all dry by the afternoon when w set up the new dehumidifier and I will do two more bleach treatments on the dry floow so I can make sure I am covering the whole area, I am debating calling a company to come down and spray biocide, though. And I will be having my drains inspected to see if this is our problem and to see what we can do from inside the house to make this shit stop happening.

I'm still pretty pissed off and I'm not done bitching at the city about this, 5 of my neighbor's got backwater at the same time, all about the same amount and it all went down at the same time. Went down by itself, except for the guy who was pumping it out as it happened. If only my drains are clogged, how would we all flood together? And if my drain is clogged, how did it drain out so much water so fast once it began to go down? But all in all, i think we are taking this in stride, it's cleaned up for less than $500 (including the new dehumidifer) and it only took one day. Hopefully the farking pilot will light tomorrow or the next day and I can take a really long hot shower again soon. If not, then we will suck it up and get a new one and add it to the claim I plan to file against the city.

Life goes on, and hopefully it will be dryer as spring carries on!

ahhhh, my favorite part of the weekend. The Man has crawled up to bed, I just finished the latest Jim Butcher Dresden novel (really good), Marge is at the other end of the sofa and I have some truly crap tv cued up on the DVR (a BBC documentary about men who want to have sex with their cars. Last weekend I watched the women who want to have sex with buildings) and a big ass mug of tea. I will probably work on my sock in progress, maybe do some work on my neglected Hey, Teach sweater, or finish the dishrag I knit half of at the movies on Friday night when we went to see I Love You, Man at The Times.

I have to confess, last month I made a frivolous purchase. I drink a lot of tea, I bought a 1 quart electric teakettle about a year ago and I love that thing. It does not have as much character as my pink stovetop model, but it is lightning fast and that counts for a lot. There was not a thing wrong with it. Except one quart is sometimes not enough boiling water all at once. Sometimes I need to fill up my mug of tea AND a hot water bottle. So last month I bought a new one,  a 1.75 quart one. And I confess, I have really felt kind of silly ever since. There was not a thing wrong with my old one aside from impatience. As i was standing there in my kitchen and the injustice of havign to boil a second pot in less than 5 minutes was just too great for me. By the time the shiny new one arrived 3 days later I felt silly, I thought I might send it back to Amazon. But I plugged it in anyway, wanting to see if the cordless part was nice. It is nice, and it boils a whole lot of water very very fast. And I like it just fine, though feel chagrinned about why I felt it was such an emergency.
Until tonight, possibly 4 weeks after my great kettle tanrum,  when I could boil enough water to fill the hot water bottle and make a soothing mug of vanilla rooibos tea latte in less than five minutes was necessary and I didn't have to choose which one to do first I remembered why it felt so urgent. Ahhhhhh.

And now I will go watch a middle aged man make out with his 1974 VW Beetle as he polishes it.

The Ermlette in all her cuteness made herself at home today up on top of the wheelie bins that hold my stash. I have two lined baskets up there for overflow and well, yarn I just like to look at and touch.
She is staring at the floor because a reflection from my camera flashed and she is obsessed with shiny things. We can entertain her for hours with a flashlight, and anytime something reflects sunlight on a wall or the floor she goes insane trying to get it.