Now, after all the additional stuff, we were still trying to prepare for our 9 day trip without the kids. This involves finding someone to cover for our 4 different jobs, plus getting coverage for the kids and all their activities. We are very blessed to have grandparents that enjoy spending time with the grandkids and don't mind keeping them occasionally for us to do special trips like this one. So, my Dad and Sarah kept the kids from Fri-Sunday and then Mom & Bill kept them from Sunday to Sunday. One of the things that I have to do before each trip is type a list of all their activities, directions, times, schedules, and things that need to be done along with our itinerary and any pertinent information.
But everything seemed to be working against us. With the kids being out of school, that kinda messed up the plans that I had for those days. I still had some shopping that needed to be done. But the biggest problem was that our internet went down the night of the flood. Dale & I spent probably 6 hours working on this problem . We both called Comcast several times, and they said that it was just our house, not the neighborhood, and that they would need to send a technician out to the house, but the earliest they could get there was Saturday morning(when no one would be here and we had already left!!). So, we had to go to the Comcast store (where they have an armed policeman outside the building!!) stand in line, and get a new modem hoping that would solve the problem, but it didn't. They gave me a defective modem!! So, Dale went this time and stood in line for his 30 minutes, and got a new one. It still didn't work. Then he had to go to the store and buy a new router, which ended up working. Honestly, I think I unplugged something to do with the internet when I had to plug the dehumidifier in for the basement to pull the water out. I think it messed the router up, so I don't think there was anything wrong with our modem to begin with. It was so frustrating!! I had SOO much to do and couldn't seem to do anything without the internet. We needed to pay bills before we left. We couldn't even get our emails, so my work emails were piling up even before we went on vacation. I decided that I am TOTALLY addicted to the internet, although I have no problem leaving it alone while on vacation. But I had so much that I needed to do to prepare for the trip. Thankfully, we finally got it fixed about 3 o' clock on Thursday, which gave me about 6 hours to catchup on half a week's worth of emails.
Then we were planning on taking our van to Florida. We were going with our friends, so naturally we wanted to make sure the van was in good shape and cleaned up for the trip. We had been having a noise since Dale replaced the shocks a couple of months ago. Finally, we had our friend Robert B come take a look who confirmed that it was a defective shock. So, then I had to try to find the receipt(UGH!!) and he was going to have to pull the shocks off again. He did that Thursday morning and found that we needed 2 new tires as well. After running around to 3 different places to get things taken care of, we had to leave the van. Needless to say, I needed a vehicle to go to a meeting at the office and run all the errands that I hadn't gotten to earlier in the week. So, Dale and I were sharing a vehicle while trying to get everything done, including going to Comcast. Then I got the van cleaned out and he got it gassed up and the car was ready that evening.
It was just a very stressful time. It really seemed like everything that could go wrong, was. Since I couldn't get on the internet, I sat down at the computer Thursday morning to finish the parent instructions. I tried to print it, and the printer didn't work. Then Dale called and told me we needed to leave the car and how much it was going to cost. Then I tried to print on another printer and it didn't work either. Then Jennifer got her poptarts stuck in the toaster and they burned. She couldn't get them out and was in a hurry for school, so I stopped my frustration and went to the toaster. I fought with it and finally got them out. Then I had to clean up the crumb mess made by the toaster. I went to get the broom and the whole thing that holds the broom and mops fell off the wall-completely!! I just rolled my eyes and let it stay in the floor.
We finally were able to start packing that evening and actually were in bed by midnight which is amazing considering all that went on that week.
Stay tuned to hear about the next week, which was GOOD!!
No comments:
Post a Comment