I found my belly

Quinny has the roundest, most Buddhist, best filled out belly ever and he knows it. He's big into having a food filled evening routine. He gets home from daycare around 5:45 and wants some snacks. He likes to hang out with me because I'm usually in possession of the salty ones. I am looking for chips and dip, or his and my personal favorite; pretzel rods. He'll take the whole stick right out of my mouth and munch a way. Being from Wisco I have developed a taste of dipping that pretzel rod in some port wine cheese spread. You put a big ol' hunk of that on the end and give it to him and you have a happy camper. After chowing down some snacks he'll get his dinner, which is fruit or vegetables (or both) and then a main course. He'll get that down, impatiently grunting through it and by that time we'll have dinner ready to go for us, which means he wants to eat some more. So, he'll then pick off our plates until we are finished with dinner. This results in the awesome beer belly referenced earlier.

He has gotten to the age now that he not only knows about the sweet bulbous but appreciates it. After dinner we have play time for an hour or so before he starts getting ready for bed and he has started lifting up his shirt a bit and caressing that globosity before patting it proudly with both hands. It's quite full of dinner making it hold it's shape, all full of nourishment. He has advanced his appreciation so much for this orbicular piece of the anatomy that he's starting to love mine, which is not the same and not nearly as cool. I'm usually on the floor at this time of night to be on his level and interact with him so he has started lifting up my shift and inserting his finger in my innie, which is met with a jovial giggle not unlike Santa's. He gets quite the kick out of this little experiment, which means he has moved on to Mom's. Last night he frantically looked for the dog's. Much to his chagrin, upon realizing the dog is naveless, which brought up peculiar questions from the wife about how dogs are born, he moved back to mine. Yes, you do turn into a bit of a weirdo when you add children to your household. (And for the record, dogs do in fact have umbilical cords and should have a belly button if you can find it).

And since I can't think of a logical way to transition from dog umbilical cords to babysitter I am just going the non-eloquent route and bluntly stating tonight social experiment 101 begins. We have a babysitter coming to put the Qster to bed while mom and dad go out - alone. When saying it you need to provide the proper context to give this statement its fair due. Think cherubs blowing horns, streamers falling from the sky, confetti being showered upon you, a champagne glass being thrust into your hand and glorious music beaming from the heavens. This is our first night out Quentinless. Really, it's an experiment to see if he can fall asleep with someone else putting him to bed and if we can enjoy ourselves, without worrying to death that he's okay, out on the town. I write experiment because we have a concert to go to next weekend and we first want to make sure an axe murderer isn't the newly hired babysitter. We are only leaving for a short evening out but enough time to test the waters. We are very excited. I'm sure there will be some updates in coming posts on how it turns out.

Here are a few shots of him attacking a banana and I do mean attacking. As in he outflanked the banana's position and put Mr. Banana to a horrendous death down the pie hole. Do you see that last one of "Whatta you looking at Banana? That's right I own this banana..."

Family Visit

We can't start the blog without giving a nod to the Vikings loss on Sunday. At least Favre is consistent. The Packers played terrible in the 2007 NFC Championship game, but by some miracle were in it and the game went to overtime. They won the all important coin flip and Favre threw an awful, just awful pass to center field that was intercepted. Three plays later the Giants kicked a field goal and went to the Super Bowl. The Vikings had 4 turnovers and 6 fumbles on Sunday and were somehow still in a position to win the game. On third down from the 33 yard line, a 50 yard field goal, they got a stupid penalty putting them in a 3rd and 15 situation, a passing down, and pushing that field goal to an unlikely 55 yards. Drum roll please. Favre rolls right and pulls a Favrey, throwing across his body to the middle of the field - late. A decision that probably leads to a pick 75% of the time. A no, no. A vintage Favre play. A play that was picked off sending the game into overtime instead of the chance for a long field goal. For all we know the kicker may have missed it anyway but Favre being Favre will shoulder the blame even though his teammates turned the ball over three other times including twice inside the Saints 10 yard line that likely would've put the W stamp on the game for the Vikes. So, the Vikings got all of Favre this year. The unlikely come from behind wins - San Fran comes to mind (last play of the game was a 31 yard TD), the automatic playoff bid and the low, low, low of losing by throwing an interception. You don't make the playoffs without him but you have to pick yourself up off the ground when he loses too. Enjoy the Favre. And for the record I woke up that morning and decided I was going to root for Favre, not the Vikes, because no self-respecting person could root for the Vikings, but for Favre. (By the way I think I would cut A. Peterson. Every time he touches the ball he fumbles. People call him the best back in the NFL? Laughable). I actually had a mass text typed out to send to all my buddies on that third down play saying how incredible it was old man Favre was going back to the Super Bowl, that I deleted and dropped my phone with a jaw dropping grin on my face when he threw the pick. Vintage Favre. Going out Favrey style. You have to love the consistency. I can't wait to take Quinny to Canton to see his induction. Five years, if he actually retires. He'll be 6. What a great event that will be for father and son.

And now the weekend. The good news is the sewer people showed up and will take responsibility for fixing the pipe. That means for a job of this size and the government doing it we should have a crew of 34 at the house this week tearing up the drive and replacing the pipe. That's 3 people to do the work and 31 to tell them they are doing it right. Oh, I forgot they need to rotate for breaks. At any rate we don't have to pay for it so that's good. We of course had our weekend home improvement project as our kitchen sink sprung a leak in the actual faucet portion causing water to drip back down the stem and into our cabinet. That would be great if we had an aquarium under the kitchen sink, but as it is we don't. So, my father-in-law, Poppa Steve to Quinny, was in town and we got a little bonding in, albeit uncomfortably on our backs wedged in our cabinet under the sink to replace the leaky, aging one. I think I'm actually starting to enjoy all these fix it moments. Carrie got an improved sink with more north/south space and we fixed the leak. Everyone was happy but my checkbook. I am turning into quite the Bob Vila over here and am nearing our next house can be a "fixer-upper" stage. I've seriously got down plumbing and with the recent sewer education, painting, and some electric work feel pretty good. I have a tile job looming so I may be venturing there. If I throw in some cabinet work we may get a whole new kitchen here soon.

Carrie's parents rolled into town in Florida style - in a convertible. You can tell all the visits to the island lifestyle have put a little palm tree attitude in them. They flew into Orlando and had a gorgeous mid-70 day to take the 1.5 hour drive across the mid section of sunny Florida. We had just gotten back from a walk with Quinny in his new wagon and Lucky getting his much needed exercise. We spent the afternoon catching up, playing ball and enjoying the sun on the porch. We got to visit some more the next morning before they had to take off to catch their flight. It was nice they got to see the little munchkin. He's pretty agile on his two feet these days running around. His new thing is getting the dog (or you) to chase him so he'll take a toy, like the pooch's bone, and start running with it daring Lucky to chase after him and is laughing all the way. Good fun for both. The dog takes quite a beating from poor Q who is really into hitting right now. Carrie got smoked with a flyswatter this weekend. I think we are entering the discipline phase. Is it too early for time outs? He's throwing things all over the place with herculean strength. Incoming! Geez, that was a sippy cup full of milk - those things pack a punch! I can't even tell you how many times I've been straight cold clocked with a remote to this beautiful face. I'm working on double bags under my eyes as it is, a black eye I don't need to add to the Halloween look.

He's turning into the human garbage disposal too. This kid could win a hot dog eating contest right now. No food is safe in this house. He went after a kiwi the other day. The thing was so sour he made a hilarious face, but pounded that thing down slice after slice. I broke a piece of string cheese in half and gave him his half thinking he'd bite off the end. No, not this kid. He stuck the whole thing in his mouth and started chewing. When Carrie's folks were here Nana Sue was feeding him some fruit and he crammed so much in at one time that we started making fun of him and when he started laughing melon was popping out of his mouth - whole pieces. There was too much in there. His belly is so big his innie has, and I'm not making this up, an outie. He popped his belly button just like Care when she hit full pregnancy threshold. He loves rubbing the ol' buddah too. It's so great. I can't wait until it gets a bit warmer and he can go shirtless. There are some awesome pictures coming down the pipe. Here are a few from the family weekend.

Blocks

Quentin received two presents for Christmas with a little building in mind. He received some oversized legos and a nice set of wooden building blocks of different shapes and sizes. He's not big on the building part yet, but he's an expert on demolition. Future career possibly? I posted a short video of him doing his thing. We stack, he kicks over. Last night he just dumped them everywhere and then sat down on the floor and began swinging his arms wildly in an attempt, successfully I might add, to spread the mess as far as one could. Hmm, maybe this wasn't such a good present after all. You don't want to be the "friend" that introduces finger paint to our house. So, last night we began the "clean up is fun" phase.

It's pretty easy to sucker a kid at this age. You just plaster a big old happy grin on your face, get to work and introduce some "YEAH's! and SAAAAWEEEEEET's!" coupled with a high five here and there and they think this new game is awesome. At any rate he did a great job picking every last lego piece up off the floor and putting it back in its little container. It took about 49 high fives and 25 minutes, but success none the less. I couldn't believe it. If we can just get him to learn how to mop the floors we will be in business.

On a parenting note we think we have bribed one of his teachers to be a babysitter for us. I'm not sure what the going wage is but Carrie asked her this morning and she said, "standard." So, I'm like $5/hour does sound pretty fair. We'll see you Saturday! Apparently, she meant $10, the going rate in America. Oh, I see. If you figure you go out for 4 hours (dinner 1.5 hours, 2 hour movie, 30 minutes to get there) you're looking at a pretty hefty tab. I mean you figure $30 for the movie, $50-$60 for dinner and throw in $40 for babysitting and you, after waiting a year plus to finally go on a date with your wife realize you can't afford it any more. B.B. King is coming to town and he brought Buddy Guy. For those not in the know - Seriously!?!? I mean these two really are the kings of the blues and they are not getting any younger (85 & 74, respectively). But let me tell you they can still jam on that guitar. My sheltered wife has never seen them and a treat this will be, indeed, so we must attend. On February 7th the babysitter will be making her debut. We've spent the afternoon scouring the web for nanny-cams hidden in a teddy bear so I know she's not stealing my change. That will make for an awkward morning Monday at school. I can't wait to see what will be on that tape!

Gator Sighting Confirmed

Quite a while ago Rachel was at our house and we both spotted our pet gator floating around in the pond out back. Since then we have had several people visit and ask/look for the gator but no one has seen it. Today at lunch Carrie let the Luckster out and our neighbor was out there fishing for the gator. He said he got a pretty good look at him and he thought he was only two feet long. I wonder if we should eat him. Gator bites are quite tasty - like chicken. At least we know he won't be a threat to Quentin because I know my all man son can wrestle a two foot gator with one hand tied behind his back. We may make it a pay-per-view event.

Speaking of wrestling I was in the Atlanta airport on Monday morning (holiday for some lucky souls) and I was coming up behind this guy that just didn't seem right. He was in a suit, neatly shaved head, purple shirt and extremely buff for being in a suit. I was coming up behind him and he had a tag on his suitcase that didn't look right (something to the effect of be humble but tough - odd for a suit) so I was next to him and took a long look and knew right away he was a professional wrestler. Now, it's been about 20 years since I've watched wrestling but this dude is all over the commercials. Later Monday night I get back to my hotel, in beautiful this time of year Dubuque, and turn on the TV and what do I see but this dude in the ring man-handling some other dude. So after a few seconds of research this guy is named John Cena. See link http://www.wwe.com/superstars/raw/johncena/. At any rate we're good friends now and if the sewer people don't behave I'm calling John to make a house call. He does birthday parties if anyone is interested. He can body slam you for $500 an event. Brett, I'm thinking yours is coming up.

We had a nice weekend at home watching Favre win yet another game with a 4 touchdown performance. That's fine as long as he follows that up with a 4 INT game this week. No one really wants to see the horned one win another Super Bowl anyway. Why doesn't he retire Saturday before the not really important NFC Championship? I hear the third time is the charm. Along with watching the games we of course had another house issue. The weekend wouldn't really seem relaxing without having to fix something. Carrie pulled down on the ceiling fan cord to fire it up because it was finally warm enough that we needed a breeze. The cord fell out and the fan didn't start. Well, that thing was pretty ugly anyway and the last remaining artifact from the old homeowner regime. It really did need to be replaced. So we spent Sunday afternoon replacing the ceiling fan, which was a success but took two people leaving Q free to roam the house for about 90 minutes.

By the time I climbed down from the ladder he no longer had pants on and you couldn't see the floor in the living room, bathroom or our bedroom. He destroyed the bedside lamp; shade, bulb and lamp itself casually chucking it on to the floor. He lost his pants because I guess he's too skinny (oxymoron?) to keep 24 month pants on. All the Kleenexes in the house were on the floor. Toilet paper? You guessed it - on the floor. He got into the toolbox but we did get off the ladder for that one. We figured running around with a screwdriver and hammer wasn't that great of an idea and worth getting down for. He was quite cheery during the whole event. On more than one occasion he held the ladder for me, which was great. I think it will be fun when he gets a little older and we can hit each other's thumbs with hammers working on a fort.

Here is a pic of Q sporting his flannel while hanging out on the porch on Monday. I think we are going to take another crack at our lawn as we failed miserably last summer. We just feel he actually be able to play in grass as opposed to whatever we have in our lawn.

Blow Out w/ the Sewer People

The fair people at the local sewer plant are apparently not too concerned about leaking some good old fashioned raw sewage into this great state of Florida as I called them and got the "We'll be out sometime this week" response. Who knew the city sewage folks and the cable guy had so much in common. That would be sometime between 7 am and 5pm Monday-Friday. Don't worry sewer guy we'll be here waiting for your awesome scheduling system. As the days trickle by and so does our open sewer line I wonder what kind of damage we're doing to the environment. I guess the good news is Quentin isn't potty trained yet. We called to follow up today and due to the quality handling of our taxes the state is shut down because they're just irresponsible enough to figure out how to shrink their work week a few extra days a year by having to close for furloughs. Hooray! Today is January holiday. It's that special time of year when you just get the day off because the thermometer almost achieved 70. So, who knows what the next steps are. With the ridonculous (short i) costs involved I don't think we're going to be making the first move. It's a pleasure to see our tax dollars put to no use at all. Let me add a bit of perspective. Carrie tried to return a book to the library today. Of course it's closed on a Friday due to budget cuts. And around here closed really means closed. They actually locked the book return depositories. So even outside the library the depositories are closed. What a crock! That's your city providing all those great services. I'm voting down party lines the next election. If you are currently in office I'm voting for Mickey Mouse. After all he does live here and manages to stay open 365 days a year.

Speaking of sewer we had our first blow out in quite some time. Quinny wasn't feeling well and these days if you turn your back for a second some sort of surprise will be coming your way. Well, we did and when we turned around there were some chunks on the floor. It was assumed he tossed his cookies, but upon closer inspection those were definitely not cookies. He actually had a blow out and a big one. We had to bust out the dog "mistake" cleaner that was buried deep under the sink to clean that one up. It actually might be a first. I'm just happy I wasn't holding him because that would've really put the exclamation point on a fantastic week or the Packers season.

On a more positive note we do seem to be making some progress in the sleep department. We let him go this morning with his 5am wailing wake up call and miraculously enough he went back to sleep after 15 minutes and didn't wake until 6:30. I almost feel like he can be trained after all. We are hoping we can replicate that kind of success tonight. If we can sleep in until 6:30 on the weekends, well, I don't even know what that kind of positivity will do around here. We might be able to thaw out the whole state with such an abundance of warm and fuzzy feelings. By the way did anyone notice that Florida, as in that pointy state in the south, broke the top ten for best public education? At the time I assumed I was reading the National Enquirer but it turns out a legitimate publication has listed such southern educational powerhouses as Arkansas, Florida and West Virginia in the top ten. States not in the top ten? That would be any state outside of Ohio in the Midwest. Pay your taxes up there! I guess now that we moved down here our state is using our tax dollars so wisely, investing in education, that we don't have sewer workers and can't keep our libraries open. Libraries really aren't that important for education anyway. Books? Who needs em'! We're top ten in the country in edumacation! With this kind of success we may never move.

We're looking forward to a nice weekend of home improvement. No, no we're not fixing no stinking sewer pipe, but we are going to turn the "Florida" room into Quinny's personal toy box. Many, many posts ago I said we felt bad because we didn't have any toys for him to play with. Do you know how people tell you to be careful for what you wish for? Well, that would be me. Check. Lesson learned. We have toys coming out of every orifice this house has, and more and more keep opening up daily (see sewer post) so we need to reclaim our living room. It should be nice for both him and us and frankly we really don't use that room currently. (Sadly, it was a poker room when staying up past 10 pm was still common place). Times, well they do change. We'll post some pictures. Well, we will if it turns out looking nice. I leave you with a picture of Grandma teaching Q how to climb the stairs. I'm not sure if that was helpful or not. We just doubled the square footage we have to track down our little Dennis the Menace.

Investing

I just want to start by saying I got my payout for the NFL season today and I made a 135% on my initial investment. To put that in perspective today one of our banks went under with our money in it sort of my like my sewer pipe breaking. In the end all you are left with is well, you get the hint. So, my bank can't even invest wisely enough to stay in business but I managed to more than double my investment in just 17 short weeks. Imagine what would happen if the NFL season was year round. It's a good thing we used Quentin's college fund to invest. He now has double the money and that man room I've been dreaming about just got a flat screen. Sometimes the sun does come out even in frigid Tampa.

Enough about that. No one wants to recall how the Packers D couldn't show up for a single series and their season is now over. Granted it was pretty exciting fashion, but ended all the same. Sadly, I must move on... I haven't gotten to daycare too often lately, because we were on break and Q was home a lot of the time. I finally made it in there to meet his new teacher. The first thing she says is, "He's our best sleeper!" I seriously almost dropped her right there in front of the children. Listen lady, I have clients too and there are just some things you don't say in front of them and telling no sleep daddy for the past year plus how awesome his kid sleeps at daycare is a recipe for moving him somewhere else and taking your paycheck with him. Sheesh! They have them sleep on mats on the floor. Hmmm. Should we get rid of the crib and buy a nice $4 mat and blanket for our son's new bed? I'm not sure how child services would feel about that but if it turns him into a 12 hour a night sleeper I'm willing to risk it. In all seriousness though, they are clearly drugging him.

The Qster is going down nice and easy without a fuss consistently around 7:30 pm. That's just in time to catch TMZ. Carrie loves that show. However, according to the literature, of which our child has definitely not read, he is supposed to get 12 hours a night. That should mean he gets up at 7:30 AM. Laughable. In his short life that has never happened. He's getting up around 5 every day, which would be great if we had cows. We don't. We have a dog nearly as big as a cow, but a cow he is not. Now, this is better but we are still walking around like we both got punched in each eye. As in we have giant dark circles where our skin used to be. Carrie has an advantage, she gets to wear makeup. For me? Well, they frown on that sort of thing. I just walk around with the "you should see the other guy" attitude. He was sick Monday and Tuesday so he had to be held out of daycare. So he whined a little bit more and it puts you in this limbo situation of should we take pity on him because he's sick or stick to our guns and let him cry it out? There has been enough tears shed in this house to solve all of Florida's drought problems in the last three months. So who knows if we are causing irreparable harm or if we are simply doting parents. Someone should write a book on this parenting thing. No, I mean a useful one.

Even with all the sleepless nights he's so very cool. Every day he becomes more like a man. You can see him grow up. He now shakes his head no while waving a finger like no, no, no. That's great. Back talk at 1. It is pretty funny though. He's got a ton of attitude in him - clearly from his mother. You should see him get mad. He's still pitching and can really throw a heater. I got smoked right in the dome the other day. This morning he woke me up by straight cold clocking me with the remote right in the nose. I guarantee he gets in tons of trouble in the very near future for throwing things. He broke a glass bottle at daycare chucking it last week. As in, "I'm finished!" Yup, that's the baby way of slamming a bottle (beer) and slamming the glass (bottle). This house doesn't believe in BPA so glass all the way. Those are the consequences.

Stock up on your oranges because Florida is only growing frozen ones this year and strawberries and blueberries and any other berry you like. And under no circumstances is Favre allowed to win the Super Bowl as a make me gag purple wearing, well, you get the picture. He is allowed to lose one tragically. Here is a pic of junior with his new wagon.

Brrrrrrrr!

The first post of the new year. I'm slipping! I was up in Minneapolis at a sub-zero conference for fundraising. We received a great deal and now I know why. We never broke 8 degrees in any given day and had two that I'm not sure broke 0. Yikes! The good news is the hotel had a series of skyways that let us get to all the restaurants and venues without ever having to step foot outside. If you don't mind being a gerbil, Minneapolis is an excellent place to winter. Flying back to Florida on Thursday night and finding out the highs for the weekend were in the 30s didn't make me feel any better. This morning when I let the dog out the temperature was 34 degrees (actual) and even the dog didn't want to go out. He ran back to the door after doing his business. When it's too cold for the dog you know people shouldn't be living in these climates. We need to invade Cuba or something and keep migrating south.

We had another fun housing experience this weekend. I came home on Thursday night and was looking forward to spending Friday in the office. When I am gone on a trip I have power cords with all my IT equipment I shut off to get off the grid for the days I'm gone saving pennies a day on our electric bill. I got up to my office and flicked both power cords on and the power immediately died. I figured I must have blown a fuse. It turns out the whole house was out so I wondered if I really screwed something up. Well, our area of Tampa was in a fairly major blackout due to the weather. We don't have furnaces, so we need to run our air conditioners with a heat pump for heat. Our homes are not insulated because generally, it is a comfortable 75 degrees out. So we are pumping heat straight outside if we have to use it. All this extra power strained the grid and caused a shortage of electricity causing an outage that lasted nearly the entire day. We didn't get ours back on until the late afternoon. So we spent Friday at the office in a far away Panera. We lasted there until enough people with the same problem came in and crashed their network. At that point we moved to a Holiday Inn parking lot and Carrie and I worked out of our car for 30 minutes before getting the stink eye from an employee and deciding to throw in the towel.

Saturday only got better. We awoke to a hard freeze and we were very much looking forward to a hot shower. Carrie wanted to go in first because it's not easy to entertain the Q monster long enough to get an enjoyable shower, so I was watching him so she could get her 10 minutes of peace and quiet. After about two minutes the shower turned off. I was thinking how impressed I was with my environmentally conscious wife. Carrie, such a tree hugging hippie, is always thinking about water conservation. It turns out we were doing a load of laundry at the same time and the tub backed up while she was in there. Sometimes it pays to come in second. I make a few phone calls and decide that yes, I can fix this. Uh-huh. I can tell by the look of supreme confidence on my wife's face and that she already has the yellow pages in hand with a finger suspiciously near the P's. Hmmm. After a trip to Lowe's and two hours I did manage to fix a sink but had not improved our back up issue. I did undo the tube from the drain that the washer uses. (That's foreshadowing)!

The plumber comes and surveys my neighbors to the left, the neighbors to the right and wonders why our "release" isn't visible. Apparently, they chose to bury ours. There is an extra charge for that. Well of course there is! "I'm going to have to do the 'pull' from your second story roof unless you want me to remove a toilet and do it from there." My equipment is kind of dirty, though so your house will get trashed. Oh goodie! He went on to tell me he would have to "guess" correctly on our three toilets or charge me the same for each one until we eventually hit the jackpot, so to speak. This larger than life conversation all taking place outside where the actual temp is 37 degrees and feels like 30. Did I mention the Badgers are inside, warm and toasty, on the big screen man handling undefeated ranked number 4 Purdue? But, who wouldn't rather be freezing with the plumber running up what appears to be a never ending tab.

Long story short, too late! This guy drags probably 100+ pounds of equipment up on to the first story. He drags another ladder to get onto the second story and brings all this stuff up another ladder. While he's doing that my across the street neighbor backs out of her driveway and I'm standing right there doing jumping jacks because I see it from a mile away right before she backs into the plumber's pick up truck. Sheesh! Smack! She smokes him. Poor plumber guy, unbelievably poor me, and crazy lady that doesn't look behind her when backing out all meet in the 30 degree street to spend some more time not getting warm while the Badgers increase their lead to double digits early in the second half. Do you even have the time to read the rest of this story? Lady more or less destroyed her back end to her awesome mini-van - that's God telling you to upgrade to a non-mini-van vehicle, plumber guy is unusually calm. I'm taking nitro to help with the heart palpitations.

After two hours outside with plumber guy he informs me we have run our 75 feet of paid drain clearing and if that didn't solve the problem there would be an extra charge for every 50 foot increment from here on out. Cha-ching, cha-ching. I feel like a slot machine to the plumber industry. We run all showers and triple flush toilets with TP in all of them simultaneously. Quentin was very helpful with the TP and flushing. I was a bit queasy wondering if Q had flushed a football or something and that's why we were all here. Everything looked good. No back up issues. So we're walking back to the truck congratulating each other on a job well done when we see something in the driveway. Is that? No, it can't be. Upon closer inspection. Yes, that is poo water in the driveway. Remember that tab running? Ya, like a sieve. As we uncap what is the city sewer city, we think, he drives the point home. He says, "Now just so you know everything comes out of this pipe." Okay, because I was pretty sure those weren't Christmas truffles rolling down the drive. Upon uncapping I see what I believe to be an animal. He tells me it's a horse tail. I'm thinking what in the hell is a horse doing in my sewer? No, no he says, it's a tree root that looks like a horse tail, hence the name. Gotcha. I am getting a pretty decent plumbing education, but then I am also paying out of state tuition prices for the pleasure. The entire pipe was filled with giant Mr. Tree Root. He said in another 2-4 weeks no water at all, or anything else, would've made it down that pipe and our house would have had a quite nasty experience of true back up. I now have a 3 1/2 inch hole in my sewer line that is conveniently located under my concrete driveway. Awesome! That tab is still running. So we have to call the city on Monday to see if it is truly their pipe and if it is they will need to fix it. If not, well that tab is going to seriously soar as we are looking at tearing out the driveway, digging up the pipe, replacing it and then repouring the drive.

Remember the washer? After all day of freezing and running up enough miles on our credit card to get a free flight we turned it back on around 6pm to finish the laundry. It just happened to be during the drain cycle and we found out out the hard way we didn't reconnect the drain tube. That was a 10 gallon on the floor mistake. We will, unequivocally, remember that bit of knowledge next time. And that my friends was the nail in the coffin for our glorious Saturday. So relaxing these weekends are down here in sunny Florida.

As I reflect on this sub-freezing adventure in plumbing I remember my trip to Lowe's where I was going to man-up and solve my plumbing woes. I spent $42.39 to "fix" this problem. I would say I came up a smidget short. For the record, I'll be returning the "snake" I bought. We need the 42 bucks after yesterday. So, instead of trying to save a little water and help out good old mother nature I encourage you to survey your yard and cut down all the trees for they really are the root of all evil. Oh, and this blog is about Quentin. Remember Quentin? He was the one that unrolled all the toilet paper to help with the test flushing. Well, here is a picture of Q. Enjoy!