The case of the missing poop bag, a lost key, and tug-of-war

I have (had?) a key. One little key on it's own little ring. I grab it when I walk or run. If I have no pockets, I clip it to the end of Kenzie's leash.

Today I had pockets. Plenty cold enough for a coat this morning. The key went into the pocket with the empty poop bags.

We set off jogging down the street.

Kenzie picked her spot to poo. It was bagged. Jordy picked his spot. It was bagged. We set out on the rest of our jog with both bags in the hand that held Jordy's leash. 3/4 of the way through our journey, I noticed only one poop bag was in my hand. I decided to go run the loop again alone after the dogs were inside, because they both seemed tired, and were about 30 minutes past breakfast time. We all walked up to the front door, and, my key was no longer in my pocket. ???

We retraced our steps, pausing at each place we pulled out poop bags to use, and could not see the key. The dogs were NOT cooperating with the search efforts.

I brought them back home and stuck them in the neighbor's yard so I could run and search myself. I found the missing poop bag, and picked it up, but did not find the key. Releashed the dogs, brought them into our yard, and began to formulate a plan... Kenzie would not make it all the way to my parents after already having a decent length jog. I could not leave either dog on a tether unsupervised. (They can get hurt on those things. Truthfully, I hate those things with a passion and can't wait until we never have to use them again other than when camping.) I sat in the sun but still shivered. I'd worked up just enough of a sweat to now be freezing cold.

Eventually, I decided to take just one look around the house at the windows in case we left one unlocked, which we typically never do, but thankfully we did. The screen wouldn't come all the way out so I had to shimmy up underneath it and backflip into the house. (Wouldn't you love to see pictures of THAT? It was ridiculous.)

Before scaling brick and vaulting my body through a window, the dogs were making great use of their time in the yard. Jordy has started a bad habit when we walk him without his gentle leader and he decides it should be play time. He tries to grab hold of the leash and play tug-of-war. We redirect him and discourage this. Tug-of-war is a challenge over a piece of property, and the dogs can't be allowed to challenge humans. (They are so big and strong, the rules have to be strict, or someone could get hurt. They have to be good citizens all the time.)

But that does NOT mean they can't play tug-of-war with EACH OTHER! That is perfectly allowed. Although, I prefer they not use Jordy's nice leash...

Me: Hey! Uh-uh. SHhhht. Shht. Halt! Kenz. Jordy. Drop it.
Me: Kenz!! Jordy! Uh-uh! No! Drop it! Leave it!
Dogs: Fine. We'll use a STICK for our fun game. :o) And when it breaks in half, we'll lay and chew our respective halves. Go climb through a window, lady. We're hungry.

Two days late....

I know, I know. I was supposed to be back here Monday. And it's Wednedsay. To offer a follow up on the hot water tank drama, and reveal if Easter actually happened. Cut a girl some slack. Monday morning, my little brother packed up his car and took off for a friend's cabin in Standish. He broke down in Bay City. I went to help get his car towed back home. My mother took a separate car up, and shuttled him and his girlfriend the rest of the way to the cabin, so they could still have their vacation with the group. (The car situation wasn't likely his fault.) Then when I finally got back, we scrambled to Lowes to order up a fence. Yesterday I spent the day cleaning up from Easter, visiting with the friend who gave us her dog so they can move to China and not have him stolen for meat, and then running out to a meeting for foster parents. This morning I woke up and the cold I caught got the best of me. I moved pretty darn slowly for several hours. This is the sickest I've been in a long time.

So. On to the good stuff. The plumber came on schedule. They sent a female plumber. So of course, it got fixed. (Hee.) She was familiar with this problem and knew the ultimate fix for it - an entire new gas valve. The gas valve is the portion of the tank that has the design flaw and thus the ventilation problem. She said she's never seen one of these get a whole new valve and break again. An hour and a half later, we had steaming hot water, and were very happy.

Easter went fabulous. The night before, my grandfather fell at the grocery store and broke his arm. The hospital coldn't set the bones. He needs surgery. So he wasn't feeling good. Everything else went smoothly. I even found time for cute little placecards for everyone.

Happy Easter, Internet!

However you choose to spend this day, have a safe and happy one, and I hope you are surrounded by people you love.

xoxoxo

Scraggley

I'm seriously overwhelmed. Not a single room of my home is clean right now. I have a broken closet door. (Possibly two - unless the other one just came partially off the track again.) If the previous owners of this house ever show up again to try to paw through the mailbox I may have to take aim and shoot. It may not be so sweet of me to say so, but they were/are animals. I have not met a single neighbor on the entire street that cared for them one bit. I believe every single one complained directly to them or to the city at one time or another, at least once. The best story of all was when I finally me the legal owner of the house behind us. (She had two renters in there, whom we knew and absolutely loved, but they moved out, so she was cleaning up the yard and I went to say hello.) She said that these people NEVER ONCE cut their lawn, and what grass they did have was taller than a six foot man's kneecaps. They used to gather in the backyard, blare Arabic music, and dance together in the tall grass. Of course this story didn't surprise me after hearing so many others and seeing the condition of the neglected and abused house. But it was at least funny. Most of the stories were NOT funny. Like the youngest girl sneaking in and out of the windows and breaking piece of the window frames, because she weighed 400 lbs. The stories the inside of the house told were worse. Holes in every door and every doorframe from huge brackets for padlocks. Holes in every single wall standing. A kitchen cupboard charred from an oven fire. Urine infested carpeting. (Which was torn out immediately, before we even started working on the house, much less moved into it.) The most famous neighborhood story was a time an abmulance had to come to the house. Many believed the elderly mother had fallen very ill, as she was known to not be well anyway. What actually happened was her daughter got angry and pushed her down the basement stairs. Can you even believe it?

Anyhow. They were evicted and the house was foreclosed upon. They were not left homeless. It was a scheme from the beginning. The eldest son of the family got his name on the title, refinanced this house to the hilt, used cash from this house to build a much larger house in Macomb Township, and then they just stopped paying on this house until they had to move out. Then they all moved into the Macomb house and presumably live happily ever after. Many of them are on Social Security. It's a sad and irritating reality. We bought the place about a year or so after they left. The water lines had been blown out and winterized, and the utilities shut off. We could not be sure if things like the hot water tank or the dishwasher worked. As the luck with this house would have it, they did not. My parents bought us a dishwasher for our Christmas gift in 2007, and after washing dishes by hand for almost a year, I was as grateful as a human can be for anything. The hot water tank we struggled along with for awhile during the initial work on the house. (It was broken, but would heat a small amount of water. You'd get half a bathtub full before it came out ice cold, and it never got hot. Lukewarm at best.) Aaron was working down in Ohio so I made do with what I had.

We finally installed the new tank in August 2008, and had piping hot water for the first time. I could take a real bubble bath. It was blissful. Four days ago, there was suddenly no hot water. Oddly, the pilot was out. We relit it. It was reluctant to get going again. We got one more tank of water, and it was out again. Same deal repeated - relit, got one more tank, and it went out. Only then, it wouldn't even relight.

A bit of research showed that this is a common problem with this model. A short bit of reading and a call to Whirlpool revealed that Whirlpool has a "workaround fix" for this known design flaw rendering this particular model tank useless after 7 - 12 months on average. We paid $20 in overnight shipping for the "free" parts. Aaron spent almost four hours working on it the day the parts came. The parts did not help anything. Further research on the Internet revealed that these workaround parts have not worked for most people, and when they do, it's only for a short time, then the tank is useless again.

Whirlpool and Lowes have both known about this problem for FOUR YEARS. And they still sell them. One site on this problem had 40,000 hits.

We got a hold of Whirlpool once more and told them we were just taking the tank back to Lowes for a refund. They suddenly sounded interested after not being very helpful for several days while we bathed in water boiled on the stove and swore we'd never, ever, ever, buy anything made by them again. To know a product is bad and not recall it might have some sort of legitimate explanation. To continue manufacturing and selling a product for four years knowing it's defective is nothing short of criminal. And that's clearly what they've done. Lowes has offered full refund of purchase price for those willing and able to drain the tank and transport it back to the store. But why they are still purchasing this model to sell is beyond my understanding.

Whirlpool offered to send a plumber to our home. What this will achieve, I have no idea. There is a ventilation problem in these tanks. I am unclear as to whether they think this plumber is capable of magic, or plans to rebuild the entire tank, or plans to replace it (which I doubt.)

Now the worst case scenario, we welcome the plumber, who is receiving a paycheck for coming here, which supports him, his family, and the economy. This problem is certainly not his fault. He confirms he can't fix it. We drain the tank, take it back to Lowes, get a refund, run to Home Depot, buy a GE tank, come home, and install it. We'll have water by noon tomorrow either way.

However, I've not washed my hair since Tuesday. I'm looking scraggley, and I am seriously low on patience and grace. 20 people are coming for Easter dinner on Sunday. I haven't even grocery shopped. I'll be back here Monday if I survive.

The day's drama part duex.

So. I found those credit cards in less than five minutes, thank you very much. I guess the improvements in organization have really made a difference. This is a much needed boost of encouragement to keep going and finish making the house perfectly organized and easy to maintain before I go back to work. Assuming of course that I go back to work. Soon.

I found the cards, got online, registered and activated the new account number, and paid the $6.82 full balance. The due date wasn't until April 6th, but I couldn't see that until registering the new account number. So all was well. Until, I went on to pay the other credit cards.

And there on a differend card was a charge for Macafee. $42.39. We haven't had Macafee in over a year. Thus began the long drawn out process of calling and explaining to someone in India that I do NOT have a Macafee account, and someone has used our account number.

It turned out to not be fraudulent. It was a mistake, but not a case of stolen credit card numbers. They put through some sort of "auto re-enrollment" for our service that ended over a year ago. Nobody could explain how or why this happened. They seemed rather puzzled by it. But it's fixed. And now, at 11 am, I can go start the millions of other things I wanted to have done by lunchtime.

Please let me go back to work soon. This staying at home stuff sucks. If I had a baby here, it might be a whole different story. But it's just me and the dog. And a whole lot of organization to do. And floors to clean. Etc. etc. Today is also cat box day. See you all tomorrow.

Race against the clock.

And for today's drama, we have a credit card issue. I hate drama. And being that I went through the whole identity theft thing years ago and know the panic and fear involved, I really hate any issues relating to credit cards, bank accounts, etc.

It really all starts a few weeks ago when I casually opened an envelope containing two new Citibank cards, replacing our old ones. I thought these were just cards to replace ours when they expired. This happens on a fairly regular basis, and I thought nothing of it. I stuck them in the office, somewhere, and forgot about it.

About a month later, I got a call from a weird number with a 904 areea code. I ignored the call, googled the number, and it was Citibank's fraud line. Panic swept over me with a blanket of paralyzing fear. I called the fraud line back, and while looking at my account summary online, asked why they'd called. The woman was eligible for nomination to one of those Darwin awards. Completely stupid. She eventually said, "well, we're contacting you today because you have a $6 balance." WTF? I asked if the balance of $6 that she saw there showed past due. It did not. I informed her that I was looking at my account on the screen at that moment and it showed a zero balance. She was confused, fumbled around a bit, and I told her I'd call the 800 number and see what I could find. She was happy with this idea because it offered her a chance to avoid anyone expecting her to really think and so advanced problem solving, like read notes on an account.

I called the 800 number. By this time, I'd also noticed that the main screen online also told me that my card had been called in lost or stolen. Not so, I thought. It's in my hand. The guy who answered was far more competent than the looney in the fraud department, and he read through the notes, found out why it was hotlisted, and explained it had nothing to do with me, per se. They had a group of hundreds of accounts that were somehow "compromised." Coincidentally, this same thing just happened to our debit mastercards at the bank.

But here's the thing. Because I'm so responsible and organized and have kept the office sparkling since I last cleaned and organized it, I have no idea where I put the new cards. And, the payment (which apparently is $6 total) is due on either the 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th. It always falls on one of those days. Today is the 2nd. If that bill is due on the third, and I don't get the new account number registered today, it will be late. I'm never late. I'm disorganized as heck these days, but I'm never late.

So today, I'm on a quest to dig up those darn cards that I stuck somewhere for safe keeping. Wish me luck.

Wordless Wednesday

Okay, I know this is supposed to be wordless, and these here are words, but I don't want y'all to think I'm loopy and forgetful when in fact I'm just behind in life. I was supposed to put pictures up last Wednesday for Amy, so she'd feel better about her bird's nest. Those pictures I spoke of? They live on an external hard drive, where all my photos should live. Well, life gets in the way. I haven't pulled out the external hard drive to back up the year of photos on this computer much less to pull the pictures I had in mind to show Amy. Next week.... Hopefully....