o happy day!

yes! the circuit breaker was replaced this morning by a good friend and co-worker of my hubby's who just happens to be an electrician. [read: no worries of my hubby getting electrocuted while trying to fix this himself!] the stove and oven are back on and everything seems to be working well again. the soup was cooked...noodles too!...and ready to eat by lunchtime. and now i'm busy this afternoon getting bubba's Bible bee quiz cards cut apart and onto book rings so he can start studying for the 1st ever Bible bee which will be in september. we are so blessed to have a local contest to be able to enter him in. it's so exciting! if you haven't heard of Bible bee you can go here to learn all about it and see if there's a local contest near you still accepting contestants. {our local bee is already full! PTL!}

God is good...ALL the time!

a bad day

Because you had a bad day
You're taking one down
You sing a sad song just to turn it around
You say you don't know
You tell me don't lie
You work at a smile and you go for a ride
You had a bad day
The camera don't lie
You're coming back down and you really don't mind
You had a bad day
You had a bad day

pretty catchy song there by daniel powter. i've heard it off and on quite a bit...especially last year on tv during nascar. it's pretty appropriate at times!

today was kind of a bad day for me. not super-bad. just annoyingly bad. maybe you know what i mean.

first, i got up a little later than i planned. i wanted to make a batch of my chicken noodle soup for lunch, and this takes a bit of time and effort. and i didn't have quite enough time to get it done for lunch. so i made the decision at about 11am to make the meal i had planned for supper at lunchtime and then we'd just have soup for supper instead. not a bad plan. and basically, lunch worked out okay...a little later than usual, but it was do-able. i nearly burned the chicken, but it still tasted good anyways. so after washing a bunch of dishes, i went back to working on the soup.

i was nearly done. the only thing i hadn't added yet was the noodles. i had a little extra time before we would eat, so i decided to let the soup simmer for a bit and would add the noodles later. my beautiful kenmore stovetop has a "simmer select" button that you can use to make the temp even lower...it's supposed to be especially useful for simmering soups. so i decided to try it. i pushed the button. (my soup was already on low heat...#2 on the dial.) i barely...really hardly at all!...moved the dial up toward #3 and...POP!!!!

the stove's lights, clock, everything just quit.

oh great. that's just wonderful.

turns out the circuit breaker {in the big gray box on the wall of the basement} for the stove tripped. and won't reset. so we'll have to get it fixed tomorrow. thankfully, that's the only thing on that circuit breaker. if only i had cooked the noodles in my soup before that happened! then we could have just heated up bowls of soup in the microwave. but no. no soup for supper.

i was so hungry for that soup tonight too!

well, at least today wasn't a total loss. the soup is currently in the fridge awaiting a working stovetop to finish cooking it on. and my husband set up the basketball hoop for bubba after they both had a bowl of cereal for supper. i think bubba's been asking to be able to "shoot hoops" for at least a year now. as for me, i had popcorn for supper. and i even shared it with my boyz.

i'm happy to be home

there's so much i want to blog about. i don't even know where to start.

our trip to new orleans was nice. i will wait and post more details about it later when i'm not so tired (and when i get my pics on my computer).

getting away for a few days was so good for us. i've discovered that our kiddos are really quite funny. i guess it's a whole lot easier to be entertained by our boys since i've had some time "off" from being mom, teacher, doctor, etc. so now a lot more of what they say and do seems funny instead of annoying or irritating. that's just proof that moms (and dads) need a break from their children every now and then.

shana has been blogging about uninvited mice. although i cannot compare to the horror of having mice in my house right now (thank goodness!), we did spot a rascally rodent in our garage a couple days before we left on our trip. T put out a trap with a little peanut butter on a piece of cracker and sure enough, the trap caught a mouse while we were away. hopefully, it was the only mouse living in our garage and we won't be bothered by any more.

well, it's good to be home. i'm even nearly done doing up all the laundry we had afterwards! woohoo! like i said, i'll be posting more about the trip in the next few days after i get my pics and thoughts organized. for now, i'm gonna go listen to an audiobook and knit!

adventures in home ownership

i haven't had a chance to blog this week yet. it wasn't my choice though. not really. i wanted to post earlier this week. we had a birthday party for bubba that i was going to write about and everything! then we had to vacate our home.

we had been noticing a noxious smell in our house. sewer gases. (fyi, we live in an old farmhouse with our own septic system.) so we moved in with my parents, thinking we'd only have to stay a night or two and then we have the problem solved and could go home. it turned out we stayed from sunday night to thursday! we checked the roof vents for the sewer gases and found they had iced over. not too uncommon with the kind of weather we've had lately (although this is the first time we've had this trouble since we moved in 5 years ago). with much frustration and a little help from T's coworkers--it's nice that he's got connections to a bucket truck or we'd never (safely) reach the vent that's up on the high roof!--we got them both cleared and then T and my dad put together some copper piping to hang down into the vent pipes. this will keep them from completely freezing over and should allow the gases to escape like they should.

you would think that would have solved the problem. right? well, it didn't.

so T got a guy who has a sniffer machine-thingy to come over and make sure it wasn't our LP leaking. he stepped in the house and, according to T, the machine didn't go off and the guy immediately said "that's methane" (i.e. sewer gases!) aaaaarggh!!!

so where was it coming from, now that both of the vents have been and still are clear?

T took him down to our basement and they looked around again. i think it was good having another set of eyes to evaluate the situation. because he found it! our big old cast iron sewer pipe in the basement that goes out the wall to the septic had a huge crack in it!

our cracked pipe

so that's where the smell was coming from! at least, after the vents had been cleared. T used some sort of plumbing goop or something to plug the crack and then wrapped the pipe good with duct tape. it should hold until we can get it replaced this summer.

thoroughly taped! and no more noxious gases! woohoo!

finally! so what caused this huge pipe to crack? T's theory: too much pressure from having the two roof vents plugged at the same time. so one problem literally led to the other. it only took T about 2 1/2 hours of taping to get this covered. (that includes time taken every 10-15 minutes to go upstairs for a few minutes of some fresh air). poor guy. i sure do appreciate all the work he put into getting our air cleared so we can be home again!

we moved back home last night and slept in our own beds. well, most of us did most of the night. cj spent a little time in our bed. i think he was having trouble adjusting to all the craziness this week 'cuz he didn't sleep well at grandma and grandpa's either.

so that's our latest adventure in home ownership. i hope and pray that we don't have any other household issues this winter. and maybe tomorrow i'll have time to post about the party we had!