Family Cleaning/Cutting/Chopping/etc.
Girl and I travelled a bit earlier this month, delving into the heart of Wisconsin and enjoying some down time at a Winnebago County forest preserve in Illinois. It was great fun, we did better physically than we might have expected, and it was our first adventure with our dog Buddy. And, we had an entire team of family that visited our house while we were gone, and they transformed the entire property.
Yes sports fans, you read that right! While. We. Were. Gone.
OMG they did a lot! As much as we’d like not to admit it, girl and I have a terrible time keeping up with the yard. A lot of it is our disabilities. Because of the myriad of past (and current) damage to the discs in my lower back, my spine is starting to fuse, most of my lumbar discs are bone on bone. In one way this is good, some of the pain isn’t as extreme as it was a few years ago, but there is a cost. I’m not flexible. I just don’t bend. I don’t twist. It’s not that bending and twisting are painful (they are) it’s simply that my body is very limited in what I can do.
While they were here as angels of mercy, they spent two entire days outdoors and another two days on the indoors. Coming home to a fresh deep cleaned house was a huge treat. It felt like coming home to an absolutely fresh house, probably because that’s exactly what it was.
Not so much
I know what it’s like to return home to the exact opposite of the treat we recently received. Once, with former wife #2, we went on vacation only to discover on our return that the neighbors had a terrible infestation of roaches. We’re talking waking in and it looked like the carpet was moving, except upon looking more closely to discover it was old tired tiled linoleum covered in roaches. Their house had been sprayed a few days after we left, and by the time we returned the neighbor’s roaches had moved and set up shop in our apartment.
It was bad. These roaches weren’t even always repelled by bright light, no scuttling away for these little fuckers. They just sat on the wall staring impassively. We had bugs everywhere in that apartment, it was only 4 rooms, but still, there was no escaping their malevolent gaze.
We bugged out and came back with a variety of armaments for our battle. We set out roach motels, we set off bug bombs (foggers), we used sticky tape, we sprinkled diatomaceous earth, we deep cleaned and made sure there wasn’t a crumb left for them to eat. In short, we pulled out all the stops.
The bugs went away, but sadly I remember those roaches much more vividly than the memory of the hike at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.
Death of a Salesman Water Heater
No bugs infested our home while we were vacationing in Wisconsin and northern Illinois, we came home to a house and yard that were much better than when we left. Like I have said, we are very fortunate to have family willing to help us.
We knew there could be a problem with our water heater, our family called us with that news when they were at our house working but had no hot water. We imagined they just weren’t patient enough, it takes a long while for hot water to get to our kitchen, but we also knew our water heater was getting pretty long in the tooth. We hoped beyond hope that the old girl hadn’t given up the ghost.
When we finally got home, just over a week later, we unloaded the best we could. In all honesty, we grabbed a couple of new books and our medicine bag and called it a day. After having camped for three weeks, and only getting a shower or two in that time, we were looking forward to getting cleaned up.
How bad could the water heater really be?
A new appliance for our home…
So, if you didn’t guess we got a new water heater. It works great too. I took an hour long shower yesterday, it never ran out of hot water!
But, we went a week without hot water before we could get the water heater installed. I was desperate enough that I took a shower with my camping shower and hot water we heated on the stove. It didn’t do much more than create a trickle of water, but it was wet.
And, the new water heater doesn’t sound like rocks banging against each other while it heats up, a problem the old water heater had developed. Better living thru technology I say!
Not too bad, but…
Living without a water heater for a week wasn’t great fun, but in the end it was far less imposition than what I put up with while I’m camping. There are a limited number of campgrounds with showers, and many of those cater to folks with RV’s, so just getting a shower can be an adventure when we’re tent camping.
In the end, it’s all just a relatively minor inconvenience. I learned long ago to clean up the best I can when camping and hiking. It’s mostly my hair that bothers me, washing your head is the most difficult thing to accomplish. We’ve tried dry shampoos, I resorted to those after my last back surgery, when I couldn’t get the incision wet. They work to an extent, but there’s really no substitute for a good shower.
In terms of imposition, I’d probably say it all equalled the time my worms ran away! But the worms were tougher emotionally…
