Everything today!

It's everything today! Our nephew's birthday, Valentine's Day, Chinese New Year day, tomorrow is President's Day, and it's Mardi Gras weekend in a town that just won the Superbowl. Was that just last week?

Since it's President's Day tomorrow, the kids have the day off from school tomorrow, so we get to stay in New Orleans today and head back to Houston tomorrow.

The husband and I got up at 5:00 this morning to come set up the ladders on the parade route. And I'm now sitting here, holding our spot. I took a pictue with my cool new phone, but can't figure out how to upload it...

Ah, my reinforcements have arrived with some banana bread that I baked at 6:00 this morning. Time for breakfast!

Have a great day, whatever you're celebrating today! :)

A picture is worth 1000 words

I finally took a picture of our mud bog!

When I took this picture, it hadn't rained in a few days. And yet, there is always standing water on either side of our "driveway", but according to one of the guys who works for the construction company, "That ain't water."

They're replacing the sanitary sewer lines on our side of the street and apparently had a little bit of a problem with the line one day. In case you're not familiar with the term sanitary sewer, it means the exact opposite of "sanitary". My husband is deathly afraid to get anywhere close to anything out there now. Luckily, it doesn't smell.

Also note the 2-inch white pipe running under our driveway. They added that about a week ago. Right after it rained so hard one morning that our entire side of the street got filled up with water.

It was a Friday morning and my husband had to get up really early that morning to head out of town. He called me at one point to tell me that he was pretty sure the end of the world was approaching, based on the amount of rain he was driving through.

We have to leave our house by 7:45am at the latest on school days in order to get Fellan to school on time and not get a tardy slip. So, at 7:15 that morning when I looked out the front window and discovered a pond in front of our house, I was fairly concerned.

It may not look very deep, but it's probably a foot and a half to two feet deep at the lowest point there. I spent quite a bit of time looking out the window and trying to figure out if I would be able to gun the car - in reverse, mind you - fast enough to make it through the two feet of water and pull out into the other side, timing it so that I wouldn't have to stop for a car coming up the street, without getting the exhaust pipe too full of water and killing the car in the process.

To my great relief, at around 7:30, I heard a pump start up outside. The construction workers had shown up to work in order to drain the street-pond. By 7:45, it was down to only about 6 inches of water and we were able to easily get out of the driveway.

And since they installed that white pipe, it hasn't filled up like that since. I think they must have finally created a drain system for the entire side of the street, or hooked back up the drain line, or something.

Thank goodness - we had to make use of our driveway last night during another huge rainstorm and there was relatively little standing water across our driveway. But, of course, the mud is back to being caked on my tires.

Mud Bog

It's been awhile since I posted anything about our street deconstruction. They did finally pour the cement for the other side of the street right before Christmas, so for Christmas vacation, we had fairly clean cars and didn't have to worry about the continuously reappearing mud marks on the backs of our pant legs. I guess I'll count that as my Christmas present from the construction company.

But the mud is back. And it's worse than before because it's now on OUR side of the street. Every time we pull into our garage, the tires get caked with mud. (really, it's probably 1/2 an inch thick) And then when we leave, we back through the mud again and then for probably a mile or so, we can hear the mud splattering all over the back of the car and the wheel wells.

And the mud is making me angry. One day, a fairly nice Mercedes was coming up the street as I was backing out and didn't want to slow down for me to get backed out completely, so I purposely slowed down and then when he got close, I gunned it and slung mud up onto him! I was sliding across the street as the mud slowly worked itself off the back tires, smiling an evil grin. I must have looked like a complete maniac. Shame on me!

I'll try to take a picture of it and post it soon. And maybe I'll take a picture of the side of my car, that has had mud on it for a few months now. The mud has worn off from the area around the door handle, but the splatters are still very distinct. I look at it like it's a nice decorative feature of the car at this point.

Now you know why I haven't been posting very regularly lately. This is the excitement of my life! *sigh*