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My insane week
Sep. 18th, 2008 09:45 pmToday was Kiera's birthday; she turned five. Saturday is Molly's birthday; she will turn eight. Sunday is their party -- yes, we make them share. Also, when I bake Kiera's cake, I mix up batter for a cake that would normally be baked in a large rectangular pan and bake half of the batter in an 8x8 pan, twice, one on the 18th and one on the 20th.
We had a new front door put in last year, but it needed to be finished. (It's a wood door so it didn't come pre-finished the way a fiberglass door does.) Also, our patio door was in really bad shape -- the seal between the panes of glass had broken and there was this weird scaley stuff growing between them, where you couldn't get it clean. The screen door was borderline non-functional, even with copious amounts of WD40 applied to the track. Back before spring I talked to my favorite set of handypeople to discuss finishing the front door and replacing the back. They called in mid-June to suggest a week in early July, but that was when we were going out to Boston. They called in late July to suggest a week in late August, but that was the week we were going to the North Shore. So when they called and suggested this week, I said that we'd take it, even though this means we're dealing with living in a construction zone during the week of birthday madness.
On Tuesday, I went to Home Depot to buy the patio door and the door hardware and so on. They had what I needed and everything went very smoothly until I was ready to check out. When you buy something big at Home Depot, they write up an invoice and attach it to your name in their system. The guy's computer would not let him attach my name to it. The salesperson was not new (he'd worked there for five years) and he was not stupid; I could see what he was doing, and he appeared to be doing everything right. The system WOULD NOT WORK. He tried a whole bunch of workarounds, including creating a new file for me under my cell phone number and deleting and re-creating my file, as well as logging out and back in, rebooting his computer, and switching computers. Nothing worked. For forty-five minutes. Finally the person at the service desk who does tech support gave it a try, and it worked exactly like it was supposed to even though she was doing the exact same thing the sales person had been trying to do. When Rob and Vicki the handypeople showed up to pick up the door, they went through more or less the inverse problem (created by the weird way in which it had been written up).
On Sunday, I drove my grandmother to church, and found out her prescriptions hadn't been delivered on schedule. Her pharmacy is closed on the weekends and in order to get any information at all, the pharmacist from the affiliated pharmacy had to call people's pagers and wait for call backs to call me back, which resulted in me waiting for hours in my grandmother's apartment. I'd neglected to bring a book, though at least she gets the paper so I had the Sunday Star Tribune. On Monday the problem was still not straightened out so I did another round of calling and waiting for people to call me back. It turned out that everything had been delivered to the retirement community where she lives, signed for at the front desk, and then stashed in the office. No one could find them because they were inside a larger cardboard box.
(My mother handles the vast majority of the random crises that crop up with my grandmother, but I was the one on site on Sunday, and we've discovered in the past that handoffs can create confusion. Something that's funny to me: when I tell people that I am calling on behalf of my grandmother, it's like their brains automatically discard the "grand" part. Doctors, pharmacies, anyone like this will very consistently refer to me as her daughter, and to her as my mother. Providing backup eldercare for one's grandmother is apparently Just Not Done. Society considers this the daughter's job: ergo, I must be a daughter.)
Today, I baked Kiera's cake, and then decorated it with a (poorly done, because I'm not very good at cake decorating) picture of DeeDee, one of the Doodlebops. I noticed that the cake looked kind of flat, but Rob had been pounding with a hammer and I figured it had fallen a bit. When Ed got home to make dinner, he looked at the eggs and said, "Huh. Doesn't that cake call for eggs?" Why yes. Yes, it does. Had I put any eggs in? Why, no. Fortunately, since I'd mixed up a full batch of batter and baked only half, I had a simple option: I cracked one egg into the remaining batter, beat it with the mixer, and baked it up fresh. Ed cooled it in a shallow icewater bath and I re-did the decorating.
The good news is that the door looks beautiful, the patio door is coming along nicely, and Rob replaced the leaking faucet today so we have a sink that doesn't leak water all over the floor (it dribbled water out the side of the handle when you turned the water on). But this week is kicking my ass. I am so tired right now.
We had a new front door put in last year, but it needed to be finished. (It's a wood door so it didn't come pre-finished the way a fiberglass door does.) Also, our patio door was in really bad shape -- the seal between the panes of glass had broken and there was this weird scaley stuff growing between them, where you couldn't get it clean. The screen door was borderline non-functional, even with copious amounts of WD40 applied to the track. Back before spring I talked to my favorite set of handypeople to discuss finishing the front door and replacing the back. They called in mid-June to suggest a week in early July, but that was when we were going out to Boston. They called in late July to suggest a week in late August, but that was the week we were going to the North Shore. So when they called and suggested this week, I said that we'd take it, even though this means we're dealing with living in a construction zone during the week of birthday madness.
On Tuesday, I went to Home Depot to buy the patio door and the door hardware and so on. They had what I needed and everything went very smoothly until I was ready to check out. When you buy something big at Home Depot, they write up an invoice and attach it to your name in their system. The guy's computer would not let him attach my name to it. The salesperson was not new (he'd worked there for five years) and he was not stupid; I could see what he was doing, and he appeared to be doing everything right. The system WOULD NOT WORK. He tried a whole bunch of workarounds, including creating a new file for me under my cell phone number and deleting and re-creating my file, as well as logging out and back in, rebooting his computer, and switching computers. Nothing worked. For forty-five minutes. Finally the person at the service desk who does tech support gave it a try, and it worked exactly like it was supposed to even though she was doing the exact same thing the sales person had been trying to do. When Rob and Vicki the handypeople showed up to pick up the door, they went through more or less the inverse problem (created by the weird way in which it had been written up).
On Sunday, I drove my grandmother to church, and found out her prescriptions hadn't been delivered on schedule. Her pharmacy is closed on the weekends and in order to get any information at all, the pharmacist from the affiliated pharmacy had to call people's pagers and wait for call backs to call me back, which resulted in me waiting for hours in my grandmother's apartment. I'd neglected to bring a book, though at least she gets the paper so I had the Sunday Star Tribune. On Monday the problem was still not straightened out so I did another round of calling and waiting for people to call me back. It turned out that everything had been delivered to the retirement community where she lives, signed for at the front desk, and then stashed in the office. No one could find them because they were inside a larger cardboard box.
(My mother handles the vast majority of the random crises that crop up with my grandmother, but I was the one on site on Sunday, and we've discovered in the past that handoffs can create confusion. Something that's funny to me: when I tell people that I am calling on behalf of my grandmother, it's like their brains automatically discard the "grand" part. Doctors, pharmacies, anyone like this will very consistently refer to me as her daughter, and to her as my mother. Providing backup eldercare for one's grandmother is apparently Just Not Done. Society considers this the daughter's job: ergo, I must be a daughter.)
Today, I baked Kiera's cake, and then decorated it with a (poorly done, because I'm not very good at cake decorating) picture of DeeDee, one of the Doodlebops. I noticed that the cake looked kind of flat, but Rob had been pounding with a hammer and I figured it had fallen a bit. When Ed got home to make dinner, he looked at the eggs and said, "Huh. Doesn't that cake call for eggs?" Why yes. Yes, it does. Had I put any eggs in? Why, no. Fortunately, since I'd mixed up a full batch of batter and baked only half, I had a simple option: I cracked one egg into the remaining batter, beat it with the mixer, and baked it up fresh. Ed cooled it in a shallow icewater bath and I re-did the decorating.
The good news is that the door looks beautiful, the patio door is coming along nicely, and Rob replaced the leaking faucet today so we have a sink that doesn't leak water all over the floor (it dribbled water out the side of the handle when you turned the water on). But this week is kicking my ass. I am so tired right now.
