breakdown weeekend

Crazy weekend.
Started out yesterday by going out for breakfast with Mr. S., and then returned home to attempt the never-ending tidying operation of the piles and piles of crap everywhere. My daughter is missing a few items that I became determined to find, giving me an excuse to overhaul her room, which is always the most horrendous mess. Long story short: after thoroughly tidying her whole room and searching the rest of the apt., I never found any of the missing items; and I almost always find things. Lately, though ... she insists that the cleaning lady is taking stuff home, but I can't believe that yet.

Since I was already in there, I changed her sheets, and then mine too, and started a load of laundry. By this time I was sweaty and exhausted, so took a break to listen to my very relaxing meditation disc. Ten minutes into it, the disc player (plugged into the electricity) stopped cold. I opened my eyes and looked around and discovered we had no electricity. First thing to check: Is it the whole building or just us? The hallway lights were working, so it was just us. Went to the circuit board and found that the main switch was down, so I flipped it up. Electricity was back. For about one minute, and then went off again. Again, I'll cut to the chase: After much fussing, phoning and checking plus a house call from our electrician, it was clear that the washing machine was tripping the circuit. And this after weeks of problems with our dryer (which still makes a grinding noise for the first five minutes of each load) and many visits from the dryer technician. We put in another call to him but will have to wait till after the weekend for his visit.

It is not fun dealing with a washing machine full of clothes and dirty water, so I left that for the next day.

Meanwhile, electrical outages are not very good for computers either. Due to technical reasons I won't bore you with, we next found ourselves with no internet connection and no solution forthcoming. So we had to call our computer techie for that, and found him to be incapacitated with shock over an collision he'd just had between his car and a motorcycle. There was no way he was coming over to fix our computer, so we were a family of internet addicts looking at a weekend offline. Not inspiring.

Oh, did I mention that my PMS was kicking in big time, with a migraine just beginning to claw the right side of my neck?

The weekend was looking very grim.

In the end, following many more phone calls, our ISP was able to talk us through reconfiguring our router, for a small fee (much less than the techie would have charged us), and we were connected again. Whew.

That's when we decided to go to a movie. We paid a visit to Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which just opened here (only a week after opening in North America, unlike the old days when we had to wait six months to see new movies). It's an okay flick, kind of fun in places, but longer than necessary; by the end you really don't even care about the outcome anymore. But ms. Angelina is so luscious to watch, how could anyone really mind? Yeah, alright, Brad's ok, too. Too much gunplay for young ms. squarepeg, though.

And that was just the first half of an exhausting weekend.

Part 2 tomorrow. It's nearly 3 am and I have to get up to go to work in 4 hours???!!!!