Playing With Fire

Yesterday I finally had time to clean the house.  When I tried to fill a bucket with hot water to mop the floors, there was none to be had.  I narrowed down the issue to lack of gas getting into the house through the regulator outside.   We have discovered in the past that it is located too close to the downspout at the corner of the house, so if we have lots of rain, where the gutters run over or the downspout splashes up  (which happened Wednesday) and then cold (down to the teens Thursday night) it freezes and blocks the incoming gas.  Sigh.

I heated water on the stove and poured it over the regulator, and checked that it was unfrozen by testing the gas burners in the kitchen (we use them just for emergencies, or the pressure canner - which doesn't work on the induction range).  Things looked hunky-dory, so I turned off the gas to the water heater, waited the requisite 10 minutes, then lit the pilot light.  After a couple of minutes, I smelled hot/melted plastic, and all of the smoke alarms in the house went off at once.

This completely freaked me out, so I turned off the gas again and had a small-ish meltdown.

I had another slightly larger one once I determined that my house was not on fire and the smoke alarms finally went off.  This issue, which will likely require us to hire someone to replace the regulator, and possibly the water heater, is just another one of the things like the drilling rig sitting in my yard for weeks on end that is slowly killing my soul.

I'm no longer sure that I love living here, or that I never want to leave.  I often feel isolated and overwhelmed, neither of which are warm fuzzies.  Not to mention that January has arrived, with its dark, cold, gray days.  Maybe when the sun shines, and the green returns I'll feel differently?

There are good things going on too, or I would be in a permanent fetal position in the back of a closet somewhere.  Things like my youngest falling in love with Basketball.  She had her first game bright and early this AM, and although her team lost, JP said she was hustling up and down the court.  And just look at her jump!

Hoop Dreams

JP played on the basketball team in High School, and intramural basketball in college. He has been disappointed now for many years that we have not had the space for a basketball hoop. He made sure that basketball space was worked into this house, and the hoop is something he ordered well before we moved in. It has been taking up room in the garage in a giant box since I hauled it out here in April or May. The concrete pad in front of the garage was fully complete this morning, so after my success in building a storage shed over the weekend, I decided to tackle putting the thing together.

If you don't count the time I dropped a socket wrench on my toe, or the episode where the girls were playing "family" with the 4 rubber washers and one of them mysteriously disappeared, everything went smoothly right up to the end. The finishing touch with this hoop was to fill the base with 400 lbs. of sand. The manual shows a man pouring it in using a funnel. No problem. The only sand at our friendly neighborhood hardware/lumber store, however, was play sand (filtered, washed, packed together and more expensive), and I only bought 300 lbs, because I was afraid I'd break the van. Luckily JP was home at this point to help me, because we literally shovelled the sand in with one of the girls' sand shovels, scoop by scoop. It took over an hour, but that didn't prevent JP from trying it out in the dark! Basketball is now J's new favorite sport (passed up mini golf, which was a hit last week), and she can hardly wait to get out there again with a ball...it does her Daddy's heart good to hear that!

Of course, while we were playing with sand, the girls occupied themselves doing what they felt the concrete is best for...riding bikes...

and sidewalk chalk pictures.

I particularly like this one that J did. She says it is the sun yawning and stretching before it goes to bed at night.