PPM

I'll be upfront. This is plainly a Poor, Pitiful Me post. Nothing interesting here, no fabulous projects or cool thrifted stuff, just some complaining.

This is what my laundry room looks like right now. Yes, that is dirt you can see below the metal floor joists. Suffice it to say, we're not exactly having the best few weeks ever.

In the last three weeks, there hasn't been a single day when one of us hasn't been sick. Maren started it the first Monday back to school after Christmas break, then The Mister was hit with the flu for the remainder of that week. Porter was sick on Sunday and then Monday afternoon Maren came home sick again and spent the remainder of the week on the couch, ill with not one but two strains of the flu. On Sunday I woke up sick and the next day, Monday, Porter woke up with it too and we're still suffering. I don't think Porter and I actually have the flu, just a really nasty respiratory/sinus infection. And I have a big canker sore, can I whine about that one too? Compounding the illness is the issue that I haven't had a decent night's sleep in weeks. While the kids have been sick they've been up multiple times per night, and guess who they want? I feel like a zombie. A hacking, sniffling zombie.

And then there's the issue of the basement. Two weeks ago we noticed that our sump pump was going off repeatedly, all day long. The Mister ventured down into the crawl space below the house to check things out and found it wet. We called the insurance and a plumber, who found that the pipe leading from the sump out of the house had a crack in it, so the water was leaking right back down. Because this was behind a wall, we're not sure how long it was leaking but it was long enough to completely rot the subfloor in that corner of the room and cause mold to grow. The day after the plumber arrived, a recovery team came in to get everything dried out and to remove all the moldy and rotted materials.

Once they finally finish (which will likely be sometime next week) we will have to get a reconstruction team to come and fix it all. They'll have to put in new drywall, retexture the walls and repaint, put in new subfloor, remove the remaining vinyl flooring and install new vinyl flooring. I think we're looking at another 2 weeks or so of work once they can finally get started.

In the meantime, I have no washer and drier, which I realize is not an emergency-level crisis. Plenty of people live in places with no W/D and survive just fine. For crying out loud, we didn't have one the first 2 years of our marriage because we lived in an apartment so it's not like I'm not capable of hauling my clothes somewhere else to be cleaned. Having sick children and being ill yourself doesn't make that task particularly pleasant, however, and I'm lucky to have plenty of friends who have offered the use of their washers, for which I am truly very grateful!

I realize that everybody has problems, most of which are probably far greater than my own. You know that saying about how you probably wouldn't want to trade troubles with anybody else, right? By next week Porter and I will feel better, progress will be made on the basement issues, and I will start drugging my children if they don't quit waking me up in the night. Okay, I'm kidding about that last one. Maybe.

If you've made it through all this whining, please feel free to leave a complaining and whining comment of your own! Go ahead and let it all out and I won't judge you or tell you to quit being a complainer--that's what friends do. Then we can all just pull up our big-girl pants and get on with dealing with our troubles, right? So, spill it.