Forgive us this day our daily rant:

(1) The hardest part of homeschool. It is not teaching math or science to the older grades. It certainly isn't teaching a kindergartner to read, which is a delight start to finish. What is the hardest part of homeschool? Keeping the house tidy. Imagine summer vacation when kids are in and out all day, and leaving stuff all over. But summer is easier (at least here in arid UT) because when they come in they're dry as a bone. In the autumn they track in dry leaves and leaf skeletons. In the winter they track in snow on their wet boots. In the spring they track in mud. And they do it all day long. And they leave out toys, and they leave out dishes, and if ever I even need to do something like bake a birthday cake (happy birthday, Macklin!) then school has to come to a grinding halt and they make even more messes.

I love them, and I love homeschool. But this is the hard part. Not curriculum or organization or anything else. It's keeping the house liveable.

(2) Many years ago when Emma and Christian were wee and my bigger nephews and nieces (who are less than 10 years younger than me) were in their early teens and experimenting with vegetarianism or veganism, I remember all being gathered at some family meal event. It might have even been Thanksgiving, I don't know. And there's this lovely serving platter of food (who knows what it was? soup, stew, casserole, it doesn't even matter) and I said, "Can't you just pick out the meat? Isn't it vegan then?"

That has come back to bite me in the butt so many times in the last 13 years. So allow me to post this as a Public Service Announcement: Using meaty broth in a dish, or cooking with meat, taints everything in the entire dish. We can't just pick out the meat and eat the rest. Having had meat in the mix makes It—whatever It is—inedible to someone who doesn't eat meat.

I can't believe I was so naïve once that I didn't know that. But I still encounter people on a monthly basis who are equally naïve and think the same thing.

Adventures in camping...

...preparation! Have a big extended family camp planned for this weekend, have been looking forward to it since last September or so. We haven't even gone camping yet, and we've had a day.

1. Emma's ankle (lightly sprained yesterday) is quite swollen today and she can't walk well. Hard, because this is a *hiking* camping trip. So one of us will need to stay back at camp with her during all activities, she obviously can't hike.
2. Washing machine was making a bad noise this morning. Called repairman. He fit us in today.
3. Went grocery shopping.
4. Took Suburban in for oil change. Cars were parked trickily in driveway. Though I was backing out carefully and slowly, I nudged B's little Mazda w/ Suburban. Suburban is strong. B's Mazda rear passenger door is dented all to hell.
5. Steady streams of water down into our basement, and we knew not why. Repairman warned us we'd leak a little when he took apart the washer. Cleaning up basement with every towel we have.
6. Leaks didn't stop though washer was put back together. Blaine (thankfully working at home today!) sees that as quick as we're wiping the floor, something is puddling up.
7. Repairman returns. Diagnoses a broken drain hose. (No prior leak or evidence of leak, the very act of fixing the washer broke the washer.) Repairman doesn't have a hose. He orders one.
   
8. Every towel in my house is soaking/dirty, and I cannot wash them or even spin them out.
9. One of B's two jobs wants to talk today about how things are going, and whether he'd consider dumping the other job and working full time there. Good day for "quick" negotiations before we leave. The other job has just these "few quick things" that must be done before we can go.
   

T minus two hours to departure, and I've gotten no camping prep done today because I've had a few other things going on. Neither Blaine nor I have even showered yet.

Because whining about it will fix it.

So the young men and young women at church are doing an international dinner tonight. Christian was in charge of calling all the people at church who have lived (or served missions) abroad and asking them to contribute some food or other.

When he asked me, I turned him down. Playfully.

He reminded me this morning. Argh, it wasn't even on my radar; when I jokingly said no, I guess I mentally erased it. So last night I made for dinner the thing I need to make for this international dinner. Tonight I get to re-make it, and make our family dinner which is something completely different. If only I'd remembered, and switched the two nights, I could have made a double batch of tonight's dinner and sent half to the church. I wouldn't have to spend the next three hours cooking two dinners.

I'm so totally frustrated. I hate cooking dinner as it is. I'm not in the mood to do it twice, and to re-cook what we had last night. I want to scream.

So of course, I'm sitting in here typing away instead of chopping onions. Makes perfect sense, right?

EDIT: Darned if, despite my whining, the spanish rice didn't turn out perfectly! Yum.

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Now playing: Oasis - Don't Look Back in Anger

That's what cruise control is for.

<vent>

I hate erratic drivers. The ones that blow past me in a 30MPH zone going 45 (cops where are you?!) and then, once I've gotten to the highway where the speed limit is 65MPH they're out there toodling at 50. Then I try to pass them and they speed up momentarily to 75 or something so I slide back in behind them, and they drift back down to 50.

And I honestly don't even believe they're speeding up out of spite. I think they see me preparing to pass them, they glance down at the speedometer reading 50 and with a jolt they speed up, and then they mosey back into their cigarette or coffee or distracting thoughts or the song on the radio and coast back down to 50.

I use my cruise control function extensively so that I don't have to think about my speed, I can focus on the road and the other cars and not have to worry, "Am I going too fast? Too slow? Keeping a more or less steady speed?" Seriously, I let the car do the speed part for me. I set it exactly on the speed limit (*angel*) and I don't have to worry about hidden cops with radar guns. Or annoying the other drivers around me with my constant speed fluctuations.

Grr.

(It'll take the shine off my halo a little bit when I tell you my speedometer is off by 5MPH, so when I set cruise control at 55MPH I'm actually going 60.)

</vent>

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Now playing: Oasis - D'You Know What I Mean?
via FoxyTunes

The luxuries that are necessities

Our ability to heat water, as a list:

1. Last week: Blaine walks downstairs into furnace room, and goes splish-splash. The water heater was leaking. It's a relatively new thing, the last time we went down all was dry, but it had been going on long enough to soak some things at floor level and do a little damage to the wood crib we were fixing to give away.
2. Time to shop for a new water heater. We've always wanted tankless! We both used them in Japan and they rocked. *research research*
3. Despite good experiences in Japan, installing tankless water heaters in a house like this, with hot water needs sprawled all over (two baths, kitchen in opposite corner, laundry room sort of in the middle, future plans for another far-flung bathroom) would not be economical, nor would it be able to give us the "endless" hot water supply the promotional literature claims.
4. Friday night: We decide on tanks. Two of them, 40 gallons each, connected in series. Which means that the cold water goes in first, and then the hot water output of the first goes into the cold water intake of the second. So in the best of circumstances, like first thing in the morning, we have 80 gallons of hot water. (Our old heater is 30 gallons, so 80 feels like an ocean.) In the worst of circumstances—after a long day of laundry and dishes etc.—we should still have 40 gallons because the one heater will preheat the water for the second heater, cutting down heat time.
5. We find a willing neighbor. God bless Brandon Hendricks, seriously. He grew up doing HVAC and has installed, in his words, "hundreds of water heaters." Including his own in the house he built for his family last summer. He said, and I'm not joking, "I'm tired of working on my house. It will be a nice break on my day off to work on your house instead." Is this man not a candidate for sainthood?
6. Today, 8:30 a.m. Blaine runs to hardware store to buy one thing Home Depot didn't have Friday night.
7. 11:00 a.m.: We take out crappy old 30-gallon water heater. Good riddance! Emma and Christian drain it bucketful by bucketful.
8. Blaine and Brandon make two more trips to the hardware store.
   
9. 2:30 p.m., the serious work begins with the vent, which needs a little upgrading since it will now be venting two water heaters in place of one. Here's where it gets really interesting. :D
10. The vent is in pieces in an old chimney, not even connected to each other. (Thank heavens we didn't all die of carbon monoxide poisoning, since it wasn't being properly vented!) It takes them the better part of a day, like six hours, to pull that vent apart in pieces and drag it out.
11. And then the new venting won't go in.
12. Several hours of panic ensue, in which we try to divine why the brick chimney winds and turns this way and that, and give up hope of ever getting the venting installed. There is serious talk of breaking through the walls on two floors to feed the vent up, and serious talk that that's the only way the original venting was installed.
13. After a few hours of hand-wringing (my hands more than anyone's) B makes a little two-brick size hole in Christian's bedroom, and miraculously finds The Blockage that is preventing the venting from fulfilling its duties. He clears out a brick and some thisnthat and with a hefty shove of a PVC pipe (venting what?) and some tugging and shouting, the water heater vent goes up!
14. Just as it is getting almost too dark to work, the men are on the roof doing the bird-proof cap on top. Voila! A regulation, code-compliant vent from basement to roof, and almost no crumbling interior walls I can't afford to fix!
15. Moments ago: Blaine and Christian have just finished carrying down the two massive water heaters.

I suspect running the pipe and getting it all functional will still take hours yet, and it's 10:18 p.m. But there's no more talk at least of ripping the house apart to install vent, and about this I am grateful and relieved. I've got my fingers crossed that I can take a hot shower tomorrow, and perhaps run a load of dishes in the dishwasher tonight. Though I'm not holding my breath about that last one.

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Now playing: Marty Robbins - Cool Water
via FoxyTunes