Grrr--- Don't read if you don't want to hear complaining

I have been having and interesting day today, and I feel too tired to want to deal with it.

It started out yesterday with my landlord telling us that he was going to come over in the morning to work on the leaking bathtub upstairs, and would need to turn off the water for a time. "Yah, its going to be at least 30 minutes. We have to take the part off and then take it to the store and see if they have a replacement part. I don't know if they will, cuz it's a 50 year old part and most of the stores I've been to don't carry them. So it might take a long time to get the water back on." He made it seem possible that the water could be off all day. What fun. But I can deal with it. It could be an adventure.

So we have been prepared with buckets of water and whatnot since 8 o'clock this morning, waiting for the landlord and his help to come and fix the leak. (The one he has known about for about 18 months!) By 8:30, I had seen no sign of them and was getting Steven ready for a shower, when I looked in on him and he was crying bloody tears! Well, that really scared me. I picked him up, and the crying stopped, and I didn't see him bleeding anywhere. So I wiped off his pink tears and called the doctor and made an appointment. I was able to see a doctor at 10.

Still no sign of the landlord or help when I left home at 9:30. At the doctor's I learned that if you have enough irritation from goopy eyes, it can lead to a little bleeding. So it turns out that it wasn't really serious, just really scary. Steven has an ear infection and congestion (the congestion he has had since Friday and is getting better) so we got some medicine and came home.

We did stop by Wendy's so we could have a picnic in the backyard in the shark tent. When we got home, the help was here. Had they started working on the plumbing while I was gone so to be less of an inconvenience for me? No. They hadn't started to work on the plumbing. They were doing all sorts of other things- painting a door frame, and I don't know what all else. It is now 4 o'clock and they finally turned off the water. 8 hours after he said they would do the work. 5 hours after I told the landlord that Ian would really like to have the water on when he got home from work. "Well, if you need some water, the outside tap still works. He can use the hose and take a shower out here. Everything will be just fine," says the landlord.

And then, to add to the irritation, last week I was out in the yard trimming back trees and trimming the rosebushes and pinning them back. I hadn't fully trimmed the bushes because I wanted there to be a lot of shade in the back yard. And lots of roses. I just went outside, and discovered that the help had seriously trimmed back my roses to half of what they were. Stupid men. Why is it not trimmed until it is all dead? Now the landlord says, "Mike, if you have any questions on what to trim, ask Deborah." Not when Mike started. Not before Mike got to the rosebushes. But when Mike is 3/4 of the way around the back yard, and waaay past the rosebushes. Rahhh!!!

Update: its 4:30 and the help just told me that while it was really easy to uninstall the part, they picked up the wrong piece from the store and have to go back to get another one. Yay for me. My next question is whether or not there will be any water on when I get back from play practice tonight sometime after 10. (I'm leaving in about 45 minutes to go there.) I'll let you know how it turns out.