Well. That didn't go as I had planned. At all.

Poor Amanda.

Amanda came to Atlanta this weekend to stay with me and thought we would have a party, do some touristy things, and eat at some good restaurants.  We did have a party.  And that's about all we did on her list.

(I'm not sure if y'all have ever picked up on this, but my plans seldom go off without a hitch or like I think they're going to.)

She had some delays trying to leave to come down on Thursday, so she didn't arrive at my house until sometime between 10:00 and 11:00.  Around 1:00 a.m., I started saying we probably should go to bed because I had to get up early because I had two contractors coming to my house on Friday morning.  We finally stopped talking and went to bed at 4:00 in the morning.

Guess what?

I'm way too old to stay up that late.

I also am a terrible sleeper, so I was wide awake by 6:30 and got up at 7:00 a.m. and tried to be very, very quiet so I wouldn't wake Amanda up since she was right across the hall from me.  She said she never heard me so one thing in my life went according to plan.  Go, me.

The guy who is installing my new gates and security cameras arrived Friday morning and he said he thought he would get the cameras done that day.  He worked from 9:30 - 6:30 on Friday.  He worked from 9:30 - 3:00 on Saturday.  He worked from 10:00 - 5:00 on Sunday.  He'll be back next Saturday.

(I'm not sure if y'all picked up on this, but the security guy's plans didn't go off without a hitch or like he thought they were going to.)

My regular contractor also came by because, and I know this will come as a surprise...I have some stuff going wrong with my house.  I've replaced 2 deadbolts on my front door in 2 years.  Now a third one has broken.  Now I have to buy a new front door and have it installed.  It turns out the front door that was put in by the previous owner was not done correctly.  It should have been 36" wide.  Instead it's 30" wide.  The door jamb was not put in properly.  Nothing is aligned correctly.  My contractor said the lady apparently tried to custom fit a door but failed miserably.  Amanda and I were talking and the stain glass on the front door matches the stain glass in a transom window inside the house so the door was probably originally an interior door that she moved.  And now I'm gonna have to pay a bunch of money to fix it.

I have paint cracking throughout my house on bead board and paneled doors.  My contractor believes it's because I have no insulation in my crawl space and very little insulation in the attic space.  So I'm gonna have to pay a bunch of money to fix that.

I have two outlets that don't work on my deck because the wire has been cut in the crawl space.  (It's been like that since I bought the house.  It's not another security issue.)

I need my gutters cleaned.

My deck that he refinished last June is messed up (the paint is coming off).  At least that won't cost me anything because he stands behind his work.

One of my neighbors wanted to meet with him so I walked down the street to introduce them.

Amanda and I ran around all afternoon getting food prepared for my sex toy party on Friday evening. I warned my security camera guy that he might want to be gone before 6:00 because a lady with purple hair and a bunch of tattoos was arriving at that time with cases full of vibrators and lube.  And then around 7:00 my house was going to be full of women.  I'm kind of surprised he showed back up on Saturday.

In the middle of all of this activity, my brother called me.  He said he'd tried my work number but I didn't answer so he decided to call my cell phone.  I said, "I'm off work today because I have two contractors here at my house, company from out of town who arrived last night, I'm having my sex toy party tonight, I have more company spending the night tonight, and I will have a houseful of people here in a few hours so I'm in the middle of preparing a bunch of food."

"Oh.  That's right," he said as though all of this was even a tiny bit normal.

He went on to tell me that my niece/his daughter (16-years-old) was in the hospital because she had run over herself with her own car.  For real.

They have two dogs which are of decent size and they are ill behaved and not trained.  They had both escaped from the house so my niece jumped in her car to go drive around their neighborhood to look for them.  She saw a neighbor out walking her tiny dog on a leash.  My niece stopped to speak with her to see if she had seen the dogs running around.  As they were talking, her two dogs came running up towards them.  My niece was afraid her dogs would attack the neighbor's smaller dog so she jumped out of the car to try and grab them, but forgot she had not put her car in park.  As the car started rolling, she tried to get back in but the door hit her, knocked her down, she was dragged down the street, she finally had to let go and the back tire rolled all the way over her down the left side of her body.  The car kept going, went through two yards where it eventually rammed through someone's garage and into a closet where it finally stopped.

The neighbor called 9-1-1 and apparently it is normal procedure when a minor is involved in a serious car accident that they get air lifted to the hospital so they flew her by helicopter to a hospital in Atlanta.  She has a very deep puncture wound to her ankle, severe road rash down both legs and on her bottom, a liver laceration, and a partially collapsed lung.  They took her into an operating room but I don't know that you'd call what she had an actual surgery.  The wound on her ankle was cut roughly so they put her under, had to cut it a little more to have clean lines so they could get it to heal properly, they irrigated the wound so it would be clean and hopefully not get infected, and then put staples in it.  Both legs are bandaged because of road rash, and they put a chest tube in to re-inflate her lung.  Her liver seems to be doing okay at this point but they still don't have the lung where they want it to be.  Right now we're waiting to see if she will be released this evening.

So instead of going to the Margaret Mitchell House or the art festival we had thought about going to, Amanda got to go to the hospital on Saturday afternoon and meet part of my family. 

While we were there, they decided to take the chest tube out so we stepped out into the hall while they were working on that.  Her room is the last room at the end of the hall so there was a big window there and we stood in front of it.  About 30 seconds after walking out in the hall, a gun battle broke out in a park across the street from the hospital.  We saw about 20 people running from the scene.  Nurses, doctors, etc. came down to watch out the window with us.  My brother came out of my niece's room when he heard the gunshots and because he's a cop he told us we might want to not stand in front of the window while people are shooting at each other.  Good point.

After we left, Amanda wanted to stop in Trader Joe's so we did that and it was 6:00 p.m. and all I had eaten all day was four M&Ms because I'm the healthiest eater that ever was.  I was starving so we stopped at Roasters because I was about to pass out and I ate chicken fingers, a sweet potato, and some green beans because I'm sort of healthy but not all the way.  I scarfed it down.  We were both exhausted so we decided to go back to my house and just chill.

And as we sat out on my front porch in the middle of Atlanta, we heard a monkey at a neighbor's house.  I have no idea what neighbor around me has a monkey because I've never heard it before, but we both heard it plain as day.

So yes, Amanda thought we would have good tours, good art and good food.  Instead she experienced contractors, a grocery store, visiting someone in the hospital, and Roasters.

Tomorrow I will tell y'all about the party and how One Fabulous Mama almost ran over my feet with her mini-van and she slightly damaged a part of my house.  Apparently we were trying to be like my niece.  On a much smaller scale.