Remodels and Organ Removals

My friends, I have been horridly remiss (among many things) in keeping this blog up to date. While that has been the status quo around here since the blog began, I had real instant ions (I came back through on a proofread and was like ‘the fuck?’ I wrote most of the beginning of this on a tablet–yet another victim of overzealous auto-correct but who the hell knows what it originally said? Not me. Maybe you do) and plans for more regular posts that were derailed by insidious outside forces.

Okay, maybe insidious is a bit of a stretch, but when misfortunes come at you from all sides like they’ve been at my house, it begins to feel like you’re being attacked by some unseen nemesis. It’s gotten so bad that my normally logical brain started thinking about the Evil Eye and feeling superstitious enough to start hanging amulets.

It started with a pain in my side. I would very occasionally experience a muscle cramp-type pain in this spot when sitting in the car, but I never thought much of it because it would go away again and not come back for weeks. The pain started morphing into a stabbing type, and one night after a super delicious, super greasy dinner of tacos and fried tortillas, it morphed into HOLYFUCKSOMETHINGISWRONG pain. I almost went to the hospital, but the internet assured me that it was just my gallbladder pooping the bed and likely wasn’t an emergency yet. A trip to the doctor a few days later confirmed that, yes, my gallbladder has taken an early retirement and will need to be evicted from its high-rent apartment. 

Jokes on you, you little jerk

In the three weeks (!?!?!!) it took for my Dr. Office’s asshole referral department to get back to me with just a name and phone number of a surgeon that I had to call and arrange everything myself with, our house flooded.

“Flood,” might conjure more water to mind than there was, but water was under the floorboards of most of our music room, in the laundry room, and in the kitchen. That night I had just grabbed my violin to go back into the bedroom for a little night practice when I noticed a weird sound while walking into the hall. Then I noticed water squishing up between the boards. We turned off the water and spent all night cutting holes in the walls to find the leak, pulling up floorboards, and throwing all the towels we had at the flood like confetti at a parade no one really wanted to attend.

We found the leak in the main water pipe connection in the wall between the laundry room and kitchen, and also found that what was now a river had once been an unnoticed  stream for quite some time. There was so much black mold growing in all the drywall. So much flooring and trim were soaked and ruined, as well as all of the bottom kitchen cabinets. Our kitchen cabinets (entire kitchen, really) had been an eyesore since before I even moved in almost 7 years ago, so I wasn’t crying for them so much as the awful timing.  Pulling out floorboards, drywall, and literally everything from the kitchen left my home looking like a war zone. That’s not hyperbole; I know what a war zone looks like, friends, and my house fit right in.

Spot the child!

Building, repairing, or changing anything in this house is stressful at the best of times because of the work crew; my hubs and his grandfather, Jim. Jim was once a scientist in the Army Corps of Engineers, and I have yet to be able to successfully imagine it. Jim does not operate in a scientific way. When presented with a problem, instead of logically puzzling out the absolute best solution, he commits full-tilt to the very first whimsy that pops into his mind. Often, this results in many things requiring repair that hadn’t before, and inordinate cost. I once told him his work method was like that of a wrecking ball, and he laughed.

“Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.” Yes Jim, but not the whole dozen and not the Fabergè for maths sake!

Hubs is a logical man and this behavior makes him suitably crazy. He tries to steer Jim into a better course of action, but it’s a lot like guiding a charging bull. Most projects I have to leave the house for because I can really only stand a half hour or so of shouting at a time.

I’m officially sold on yearly repainting of the ceiling

While they were working on drywall and plumbing and stuff I have no experience in, I decided to use our surplus of kitchen paint to tackle our bedroom–another of the craphole rooms in the house that have been sucking my soul. (Basically Lulah’s room is the only room in the house that doesn’t look like hobos squatted there for years and then vacated, and that’s only because we had a timer ticking down on the renovation of that room. Once that turkey was done, we would be SOL if we hadn’t finished fixing it up) Painting our bed had been on my to-do list for a long time so I went ahead and checked that off too. I think we died of paint fume poisoning that night while we slept, but got better.

In the middle of all this fun, this happened. We lost power before it even started raining.

The power outage from the hurricane lasted a full night and day, but was only a slight nuisance. We couldn’t really get any work on the house done, so Dustin plugged the TV and XBox into the generator so I could play FallOut 4 all night. Having no power was kind of a blessing, really, because I wouldn’t have allowed myself the RnR if real work could have been done.

Tomorrow the granite for the kitchen counters is getting installed, and I’m really going to be cracking the whip over us to get the thousand tiny little details wrapped up that are still unfinished that probably wouldn’t bother my husband but is seriously doing damage to my peace of mind. It’s been tough, as my energy level has been Pbbbbbllt for almost the last two months has been nil. In order to avoid any pain (and I assume exploding this bum organ) I’ve been on a very low-fat diet. At first I was having trouble figuring out what to eat aside from bowls upon bowls of raw vegetables. Many days I was only eating around 600-800 kcal. Eventually I got into the swing of things, figured more foods out, and am feeling a little less dead. Only a little though.

I can’t wait to share some “after” photos with you guys, but I just wanted to let everyone know where I was! The surgery is Tuesday, I hope to update around the end of next week.Wish me luck!