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Category Archives: House & Home

Someone got a timeout at the pool today.

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One of the rules for going to the water park and being able to run around on their own is that they MUST come and check in at each safety break. These happen every two hours and are announced on the loudspeakers—and they clear the pools. We’ve had a few issues with them not remembering and they’ve been given warnings. Today was the last day for warnings, so Katie had to sit out for 15 minutes (past the end of the safety break, for a total of 30 minutes). I figure that’s small payment for the stress she caused me having to go hunt her down (and not finding her on the first go-round).

Welcome to my personal hell.

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Okay, one of my personal hells: A garage sale. Last minute. In the rain.

This is a community-wide sale that we only found about Thursday so we didn’t put much effort into it. And since it was rainy we didn’t really have much to do anyways so I sat there and worked on business and blog stuff the whole time.

I did have a helper for a bit.

And a cuddler.

Our Gurnee Garden

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They had flowers in these raised beds but we decided to put in something useful… so we’ll have basil, a few varieties of tomatoes, jalapeños, rosemary, onions, and Owen’s cabbage he brought home from school that we brought back from the brink of death (he left it in his backpack for a week).

My view for five hours today.

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Water park, Day 1: Opening Day

👍🏻 Pros?

💦Two miles from home.
💦Lots for the kids to do.
💦It took Katie five minutes to find a friend.
💦The kids are both old enough to go out on their own.

👎🏻 Cons?

💦 Lots of people.
💦 The lounge chairs are not comfortable.
💦 Not nearly as relaxing as the Lorton Valley pool.

I took one of the very last seats in the shade and kept busy doing work (gotta love being able to run most of my business from a phone) for five hours while the kiddies played.

HOLY SHIT WE’RE AWAKE NOW!!

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It had been storming all night—lots of thunder and lightning—with some being extremely loud (close). Then about 6:20am I was awoken by THE. LOUDEST. NOISE. I’ve ever heard in my LIFE. It literally jolted me out of bed and instantly set my heart racing. Obviously it was a bolt of lightning but I didn’t think much about it other than Wow, that must have been pretty close. I knew Katie would be in our room pretty quickly so waited for her. Yep, within a minute. So while we were cuddling (and I was trying to fall back to sleep), Owen came up to ask if we’d looked outside. Well, no…I was in bed. He excitedly said we had to look at the tree. So I got up and looked out our second-story window and…

Well then. That would certainly explain the super loud crazy lightning strike we heard! YIKES!

Then Tom came up and we ooohed and aaahed and then we thought “Hmmm. Maybe we should check our electronics.”

Yeah. Most everything in the living room was dead. The amazing 55″ Pioneer plasma TV that Dad and Lin had handed down to us nine years ago (that they don’t make anymore). The 2-year-old Yamaha receiver. The lifetimed TiVo. The new-in-January Roku HD. The Xfinity cable box. The cable card.

Oh! And two UPSs/surge protectors (the damage came in through the HDMI cable so the units didn’t protect against that surge).

Needless to say that is not how we envisioned our morning starting.

And how sad is this? Our master bedroom TV moved down so Tom could troubleshoot.

Our first thought was making an insurance claim because the damages totaled about $3000… But it’s always nerve-wracking making a claim on something that isn’t major (and while this felt major, it wasn’t catastrophic). So we just went about gathering receipts and prepping just in case.