Tuesday, May 27, 2014

I really need to throw away a certain pair of pants

Y'all.  It's kind of ridiculous how many times I say I'm going to write and then I just up and disappear.  It's not on purpose.  I just get busy.  And too lazy and/or tired to write at night after I get home and do the bazillion things I have to do when I get home.

For instance, the last time I wrote on here which was Thursday a couple of weeks ago, I went to the mall after work (and I wish I could tell y'all how much I hate going to the mall but there are not words sufficient to describe my hatred) because the lady who sits next to me at work also has plantar fasciitis and she told me about some flip flops that people say are good when you have yourself some hurty feet.  So I stampeded over there in my ugly ass shoes with the hard inserts in them because I wanted a pair of flip flops.  Yes, even though that's how I broke my arm a couple of years ago and ended up in a body brace.  I went and paid sixty-five damn dollars for some flip flops and, while they don't hurt my feet while I'm wearing them and walking around all day, my feet hurt like a mother-you-know-what the next morning.  But I've worn them a few times anyway because I spent sixty five of my hard earned dollars on them. 

Anyway, I got home late that night is what I'm saying because I battled the Buckhead traffic, spent some miserable time at the mall, bought some ridiculously priced flip flops, and then sat in more traffic to get home.  I had decided on the way home that what I was craving for dinner that night was breakfast food instead of the chicken and vegetables I already had cooked that just needed to be heated up. 

We are already having summer temps here in Atlanta and when I got home I was sweating like a snowman in a sauna, so I decided that I would run upstairs and put on my pj's and release the girls from my bra before I started cooking eggs and whatnot.  Right before I ran upstairs (and I use the word "run" loosely) I set my home alarm system because I had no plans to go back out in the awful heat.  Y'all, I took off my bra and put on the rattiest, most worn out white tank top you've ever laid eyes on and a pair of super thin, super comfortable pj bottoms that happened to have a giant hole in the crotch.  I did not care because I felt a good ten degrees cooler.

I went back downstairs, pulled out a skillet, turned on the stove, and opened up a package of bacon.  That's right.  Bacon for dinner because I have given up all the white foods - bread, pasta, rice, processed sugar (except for Cake Day at our office once a month), white potatoes, etc. because I need to lose 8 million pounds - but I did not give up bacon.  I had just put two slices of bacon in the pan when my cell phone rang.  As my cell phone rang, I heard sirens coming up the street but that happens multiple times a day so I thought nothing of it.

I didn't recognize the 800 number but I answered anyway and it was my alarm company calling to tell me that they were showing a fire alarm going off at my house.

"Um, no.  There's no alarm going off.  I'm standing in the middle of my house and there is nothing on fire, and there is no alarm going off in here," I told her.

She then said they had tried to call me a minute or two earlier and didn't get an answer (I had my cell phone upstairs with me when I was putting on my beautiful and fancy pj's and it did not ring and there was no missed call from them) so they had gone ahead and dispatched the fire department and then she asked if I wanted them to try and cancel the call.  I had a sinking feeling in my gut but I told her to try since, you know, MY HOUSE WAS NOT ON FIRE.

And that's when two fire trucks pulled up in front of my house with sirens wailing.

"OH MY GOD!  IT'S TOO LATE!  AND I HAVE TO GO RIGHT NOW!" I screamed at her.  "Two fire trucks full of probably hot firefighters just pulled up in front of my house and I am in a white tank top with NO BRA on.  I have to go put a shirt on!  Thanks for your help!" I yelled right into her ear.  She laughed as she responded, "Okay....good luck to you."

And a firefighter was looking right into my front window as I ran up the stairs to go find a shirt.  And this time I am not using the word "ran" loosely.  I was hauling ass as fast as I could.  But I'm fat so it really wasn't that fast at all.  I didn't have time to worry about the giant hole in the crotch of my pants because by the time I found a t-shirt that vaguely matched those awful pants, the firemen were ringing my bell.  So to speak.

I ran back down the stairs and I was huffing and puffing like I had just run a damned 10K, got my alarm system turned off, and then casually opened the front door as though I was expecting two trucks full of loud sirens and hot firemen to show up that evening while I was trying to make some dinner.

"Ma'am, your alarm company called us because you have a fire alarm going off," Hot Guy #1 starting saying.

"Yes, well, I'm sorry that y'all wasted your time coming out here because my house is not on fire and there is no alarm going off so I don't know why they are showing that it is.  I just turned the stove on and I haven't even had time to burn my dinner yet.  Y'all are early!"

He cracked up.  And then I yelled, "OH MY GOD!  My stove is on!  Can I please run in and turn it off before we finish up here?"

Hot Guy #2 said, "Yes, ma'am.  Please don't burn your house down while you're standing on the front porch talking to the fire department.  That would be really bad."  I told Hot Guy #2 that I agreed with him 100% on that.

So I ran back in and turned my stove off and when I walked back out to talk to all of the hot firefighters hanging out with me, I saw one of my neighbors walking up to check on me.  "I'm fine!" I yelled to him.  Then Hot Guy #1 said, "Wow, this is a really nice house you have.  And it's huge!"

"Do y'all know ___________ and __________?" I asked them.  The contractors I used when I first bought my house are full time firefighters with the City of Atlanta and they own a contracting business on the side.

"Oh yeah, I know them" about 3 or 4 of the hot firefighters said.  "_________ is over at Station 13 now," Hot Guy #1 said.  I told them they had done a bunch of work on my house and we discussed what all they had done.  That's right, y'all.  I stood on my porch with a hole in the crotch of my pants and with no bra on and talked about home remodeling with hot firefighters while my bacon was in a pan getting all soggy.  Because that's just a typical Thursday night for me.

I asked them if they needed to check my house and they said as long as I didn't smell smoke and there was no audible alarm going off they did not need to check anything.

They left after a few minutes and I went in and finished making bacon and eggs. 

Y'all know this now means that in the past two and a half months I have almost gotten arrested by the police in a county just outside of Atlanta, had the Atlanta police show up at my house because someone emailed them and said I had a huge cat fight going on at my house when I was actually in bed watching Everybody Loves Raymond re-runs, and the fire department showed up because apparently a silent fire alarm was going off in my house.  And I had a hole in the crotch of my pj bottoms for two of those incidents.  That's right.  Same pants both times.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

The one where I tell you how my house was about to fall down.

Oh.  Hey, y'all!

Has it really been 3 weeks since I wrote something on here?  I've been kind of busy, yo.

So 3 weeks ago I told y'all I was having a bunch of work done to my house.  (Again.)  I had my deck refinished last June and huge chunks of the paint (it's not really a normal paint - it's stuff meant to restore old decks) had started coming off.  My contractor looked at it and said he's used the same product on other decks and has never had that happen so he would re-do it for free.  He has been more than fair on a ton of stuff he's done on my house so I told him since it's not his fault, I would pay for the product if he would provide the labor at no charge because I didn't want to take advantage of him.  (I think this was a good move because he then gave me a really good deal on something else that happened which I will tell you about in a minute).  So on the Wednesday before Easter, he and his crew came out to spend the day working at my house and one of them repainted my deck.  And on Easter morning, my mom's husband went out to blow my deck off because I had 25ish people coming over, and chunks of the finish blew off again.  Sigh.  So my contractor came back out again yesterday and worked on it some more at no charge to me.  And how much do I hate my deck right now?  A lot.

I also had to have my front door replaced.  Did I already tell you I had gone through 3 deadbolts in 2 years and my contractor discovered my front door was the wrong size, was probably an interior door, the door frame was not done correctly, the door was sagging and out of alignment, etc.?  Well, when he took the old door down and then took the frame out to re-do it, he discovered that all underneath my door, the wood was rotted out from water damage.  And the frame halfway up the wall was rotted out from water damage.  So he spent two and a half days putting in my new door because he had to replace all of that.

I trust him with my life so I leave him there when I'm not home because I would hardly work a day in my life if I had to stay home every single time something was wrong with my house.  He has the code to open my security gate and to get in my garage.  And one evening he called me and said his whole day had gotten off schedule and even though it was 7:00 he was still going to come to my house and get a couple of hours of work done.  I was standing in the middle of the grocery store when he called and a marching band had just come in, played a little song and left (for real) and I told him I would be home within an hour and would see him when I got there.  Not 15 minutes later, the guy who just installed my security cameras and gates called me and said, "Beverly!  There are some guys at your house!  Do you know there are guys at your house?  I just saw them on my phone!"  I had been having some issues with the DVR and he and the camera company had been working on my equipment remotely that day and he just happened to log on to make sure everything seemed to be working when Tim had shown up.  So I told him, "Oh yeah, that's Tim that you met," because these past few weeks I've had so much crap being done to my house that my contractors have been meeting and exchanging business cards with each other on my front porch.  Anyway, once I got off the phone with my contractors and finished my grocery shopping, I went home and I was standing on the front porch talking with Tim while he was working on the front door and I noticed when he stepped right inside the front door, I could see the floor of my entryway kind of sag down and I decided that was probably not a good thing and was probably an expensive thing and I was right on both accounts.

So the day before Easter and the day before I had 25 people coming to my house, he and his crew were at my house cleaning out gutters, installing gutter guards, finishing up insulation work, and he was still working on my door.  He and his guys went up under my house and came back out with a beautiful picture.  It was a picture of one of the main support beams under my house which sits on top of the foundation and holds up a bunch of other support beams and it was also completely rotted out from water damage.  I said, "Oh crap, Tim.  How much are we talking to fix this?" and he said, "Miss Beverly, I don't even want to go there because it's going to make you want to cry.  But I'm trying to think of a less expensive way to fix it."

About 20 minutes later, he came in and said, "Okay.  Here's the deal."  Whenever someone says "here's the deal" I always know bad news is probably coming.  "To do this the technically correct way, we need to jack your house up, remove that beam and replace it.  And that would be about $6,000."  And I almost fainted on the floor.  "BUT!  We're going to do it not technically the correct way, but it will still fix the problem.  It's simply a much more cost effective way."  My mom's husband was standing there and I'm glad because what he told me they were doing made no sense whatsoever to me, but my mom's husband said it did to him and it should fix the problem just fine and last for another 100 years.  But most importantly he told me that if I had called him out just for that one issue, he would charge me $1,500 but since he knew all of the crap I've been through with my house since he's fixed the majority of it, and he knows how much money I've spent, and he knows I'm one of his excellent customers and he knows that I'm going to have 500 more things break in my house that I'll call him for and because he was already at my house doing a few thousand dollars worth of work on other stuff, he would only charge me $1,000 to do whatever it is he did to shift the weight of my entire house.

And that's a little story about how the day before I had 25 people coming to my house I ended up having guys on my roof, guys in my crawl space, guys finishing up a new front door, and guys shifting the weight of my house so it won't cave in.

I'm going to try to write again tomorrow.  Pinky swear!  Tonight I'm going to go try to buy YET MORE SHOES to try and help my stupid feet.

(I haven't even had time to proof this so probably lots of typos and mistakes.)