Plumbingly Disinclined

There it was, gurgling gleefully at me, traitorous and foul, our kitchen sink.

Perhaps I should start at the beginning: Justin is doing his clinicals. He is working in the ICU tonight. He is saving lives, I am using a plunger. ...Noah is screaming.

I am supposed to be at Bible study.

I thought this would be a long post, but starting at the beginning has summed things up better than I imagined. We tried to pulverize something that is apparently unpulverizable, the sink backed up and foulness floated in our kitchen. I was just going to let it go. I'm sure there is nothing the husband would like better than to come home after a hospital shift and unclog a growling sink that smells worse than my growling bulldog (but only just barely). However, once Noah threw his bottle into the fetid water, and I had to fish it out, we voted and decided that the sink needed fixing. (Yes, we vote in our house. But you earn votes based on height and the ability to take yourself to the bathroom. Ergo, while the boy has two votes and Hannah has one, Mommy has three bazillion, and usually wins. [Unless daddy is voting because he's a giant and gets four kagillion bazillion and two-thirds votes.] We don't vote based on math skills because Noah would pass me up in about six months).

I then sent a request out on facebook for anyone available, close, and plumbingly inclined to come save us before we had to start bailing. The replies included: I can be there tomorrow, two comments from sweet women that they themselves know how to unclog drains and could instruct me how (and you know this made me feel like a capable, intelligent, independent woman, who just happens to need to curl up in a closet and cry every now and then), and one bizarre statement that I should track all of the calamities over the next nine and a half months while Justin is swamped by school, so we can laugh about it one day. The sadist who left this comment, seemed to think we would one day understand how God's grace and provision had been all over us at this time. She is right. But I don't have to like it.

Finally, I got a hold of my wonderful, wonderful, wonderful father, who came over, plunged the thing out and got all factors flowing freely again. Did I mention he's great?

I mean awesome...

Like the great kings of old...

Just making sure I'm clear on this point.

Wisdom is often finding a balance between extremes. The extremes I was facing were a plunger, Liquid Plumber, and my ever-so-mechanically-inclined brain attempting to redeem the situation and dumping nasty water out the kitchen window all night.

I decided to make cookies. That seems like a reasonable compromise between the previous options.

Being chip-less, I settled on no-bake cookies. I pulled out my measuring cups, wrapped a bandana around my nose to keep out the stink (and so the five-year-old part of my brain could play Butch Cassidy and the Cookie Kid, shooting people with egg beater guns all night), and gathered the ingredients.

Then the final straw started floating down out of the sky and in eloquent camel-speak I humphed "NOOOoooo!!!!" Grabbing the oatmeal container, I gave it a little shake. It rat-a-tat-tatted like a disappointing maraca. Now, after twenty-nine years on this green earth, I have learned a thing or two (okay, I've learned three things total, that still counts). One of the things I know is what two cups of dry oatmeal sounds like in a cardboard Quaker can. It shooshes gently, like soft waves tugging at heavy sand. Two cups of oatmeal doesn't shake it like latin percussion. Not enough oatmeal makes that concerning sound.

In the words of Elrond, "And there will be no cookies for you."

The point is, I think I will take the Facebook sadist's advice and record things from this year, so one day, as promised, I will look back in laughter and think, "Remember the time I wanted to make cookies, but didn't have any oatmeal? God was so good then." ... Or something like that. Fair warning: this blog could get sarcastic.