One crazy week -

Last Saturday with Celeste’s gentle insisting I took mom to see the play Wicked which was in town. The acting, voices, and staging was incredible. I loved how the story came together and it is always interesting when things are not pure good or pure evil. There are bad characters you can like and good characters you can dislike, sort of like people in life who are not all good or all bad – except for most of the left leaning Democrats – we know they are really bad. I was a little disappointed in the music, there wasn’t anything that captured my humming abilities and so I didn’t leave the theater rolling a song around in my head.

On Sunday the drama started that lead to a whole week worth of craziness around here. A recently baptized new member came over to dinner as well as a missionary who was just released from our area 3 weeks ago and the girl he had baptized the last week of his mission. She had a boyfriend who was getting baptized in one week, but he didn’t attend the dinner. It seems she broke off the relationship with the boyfriend and now she and the missionary are very serious and the baptism of the boyfriend is up in the air. It made for a fun dinner conversation. Latest flash the baptism is on for today and the returned missionary who is now the boyfriend is performing the baptism for the ex-boyfriend.

Then on Monday the parade started. We had the missionary, Chris Larmouth, and a pre missionary from the ward start ripping out our bathroom fixtures to begin the remodeling process. The were banging and crashing and crushing things, then mom’s newly hired cleaning crew shows up to clean the house. On top of that the franchise team from Florida for Preferred Care at home came for the six month visit, and spent a couple of days at the house going through the accounts. There were plumbing issues so all the water in the house was shut off. Then the hot water heater pooped out on us when the water was shut off. There were three camps in the house – one was destroying things, one was trying to clean, and another was trying to conduct business – but we weren’t finished. On the heals of the wrecking crew came the handyman and his wife to get the destroyed bathroom ready for the tile crew. The garage was covered in ripped sheet rock, shower doors, glass mirrors, broken cabinets, and tile pieces. I almost forgot the missionaries who live in the basement who were kind enough to rake up all the leaves in the yard during the week so we had ten bags of leaves to add to the garbage.

Imagine life down one bathroom and a house full of people coming in and out, construction, no hot or running water, conducting a business, and a mound of garbage, but that wasn’t enough. It started so innocently with just a few soft flakes and turned into a massive two day, 2 ft., traffic stopping blizzard. That really compounded things for mom because her care givers couldn’t get to their clients and her phone rang constantly. All of my appointments cancelled and we ended up shoveling snow most of the time. When the garbage man finally came he didn’t take away any of the construction debris and we had to drag the wet snowy junk back into the garage. I don’t need it to ever snow like that again.

We spent Halloween doing the worse thing ever – shopping, for bathroom stuff – tile, vanities, and faucets. Who could have believed that three bathroom faucets could cost over a $1,000. My credit card will never forgive me. The bright spot was visiting with Danica and family and seeing how funny and excited Jensen and Lily were about trick or treating. Lily got an early start when she took her bag for candy over to the bucket of candy to give away and started downloading the chocolate giveaways into her bag – singing and laughing the whole time saying, “Candy, candy, candy……