UGHHHHHHHHHH. I was SO excited to get these new info cards I made to send with orders…and just look. JUST LOOK. All 200 are cut off.
I really should have known better but I trusted that the crop lines Snapfish provided were legit. Plot twist — they weren’t.
They’ve given me credits for my next order but I’m NOT wasting these so I’m still sending them out!
TIP OF THE YEAR: Avoid Chicago on September 15-16.
Tonight we got stuck in Chicago trying to get out of town after the show (it took an hour to go like four blocks).
Turns out it was the start of Mexican independence day (it’s actually 9/16 but the celebrating starts the day before) and the traffic was freaking insane!
Apparently the thing to do is drive around with passengers hanging outside the car (through the window or sunroof or both), honk your horn like a madman while waving huge flags, and cause traffic jams. And there’s lots of cops out…not doing anything.
Consider yourself warned.
I mistakenly left some products on the floor inside of a box and these damn dogs got into it and chewed it all up out of the backyard.
This was in the cheese drawer. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
So this is happening. Which is actually a good thing—he’s completing a heating element recall we didn’t know about that could prevent future leaking… But he’s only here because the plastic pull handle busted (which of course we are out of warranty by 6 months and costs $250 to replace since it’s the entire door panel). So we’re just gonna pretend the heater replacement recall is costing us $125 (the service call fee).
Fingers crossed it really doesn’t get to 100°-115° today…the windows and doors are fogging up!
We decided to stay the night in Lansing on the way home so we wouldn’t have to drive the full 6 hours at night…plus we’d get a chance to stop and visit with Beth and Jim and shop at our favorite Horrocks in the morning.
And then we noticed this when we were heading to dinner. Ughhhh. It wasn’t like that when we left Reese… So in the half hour we were in the hotel room, this happened in the hotel parking lot.
AND THEN! I realized that someone stole my unicorn magnet, too! Like, seriously?!
I come downstairs from my shower to find this:
GRRRRRRRRR.
I left a cabinet open and somehow the dogs got into a bag AND a box and…Katie just found this.
This is what it originally looked like:
It’s just a ‘thing’ so it probably shouldn’t bother me as much as it did—but it was one of my souvenirs from the week I spent with my mom at Pysanky On The River last year and I met the artist (Theresa Somerset, who is amazing) and she had so many beautiful eggs that it took awhile for me to decide and pick this one… And it was expensive and can’t be replaced (I asked).
Stupid dogs.
… having to clean vomited dog shit out of carpet, you’re ahead of me. And now look at how cute they are.
I’ve told them a hundred times to wash their cereal down the drain but does it happen?
The new punishment for “forgetting” is cleaning the sink. Like with actual sink cleaner and a sponge. (This was Katie’s mess but Owen does it, too.)
To be honest, we liked them at first—we used them to replace a dead refrigerator after we bought the house and the entire process went easily and smoothly.
So we renewed.
We recently had two of our beer/wine refrigerators in the bar die. We called and told them (and were very specific about them being bar fridges), and they assigned us a repair person. Plus called again to say we needed TWO repair calls so it would be $200. Fine.
And guess what? After the repairman left, like he was barely out of the driveway, we got notice that our claim was denied because beer fridges weren’t covered.
What?!
We called and talked to them and they told us “Sorry, you should have read your policy.”
Well, we assumed they would tell us when we called if it wasn’t covered. But they didn’t. And then to call and get another $100 out of us like an hour before—when they knew they weren’t covered? AYFKM?
Yes I guess we should have read our policy, and we should have known that warranty companies are shady as hell, but since we had a previous good experience with them, we thought they’d be more helpful and honest.
We then escalated the issue to a claim agent…and she said the sane thing: You should have read your policy. Case closed.
What a joke.
We are crossing our fingers and disputing it with the credit card company…
Home Warranty of America
90 Washington Valley Road
Bedminister, NJ 07091
https://www.hwahomewarranty.com/
I’m loving getting back into reading—back in my school days I used to read a book every 2 days or so during the summer. Sometimes 2 a day depending on length and whatever else I was doing (like a road trip, camping, or day at the beach).
My goal this year was 12 books—just one a month. And I’m already on book 15! Go me!
So this is my current book—and it had great ratings—but man it’s just NOT my thing. I know I said I don’t finish books that I don’t like, but I also hate having a book unfinished in Goodreads. I managed to make it to 61% complete but I’m out.
Just shoot me. I am in my own personal hell today. A full park. No seats anywhere—let alone in the shade. So I’m stuck in a tiny sliver of shade on a steep hill so that I’m constantly sliding down. And there are ants.
Nine is ungrateful. Minutes after returning home from a playdate, Nine will beg to have the next door neighbors over. When you explain why that’s not possible tonight, in a ridiculously kind and patient manner, Nine will sigh loudly and snidely mutter something about life being unfair. No matter how many toys or friends or things Nine has, it will never be enough.
https://www.scarymommy.com/this-is-9-year-old
Oh HELL no, dear Katie. Keep your crap contained to your own room!
This is what my kids considered “picked up” before the housekeepers got here.
Please tell me mine aren’t the only ones that do this? Come home, kick off shoes, and leave door open? I did give Owen major props for bringing in the packages but c’mon boy — it’s winter. Close the damn door! (Katie does this, too. Today was just Owen!)
I screwed it up when I did a shirt like this for his 11th birthday, too. I managed to fix that one but this one I’m just leaving.
I asked and turns out I did design it correctly but I forgot to “weld” the design to print as one solid piece… so the Cricut assumed it knew better than me and rearranged the design to use less vinyl. Lesson learned.
When you decide the laundry room floor needs to be replaced before the new machines arrive in three days…
Tom did this today. He’s awesome. (Oh, and he has time to do this because he hasn’t actually had a full day of work yet even though Monday was his first day!)
But check this out. This is what he found when he removed the vent cover! If you look closely you can see something growing in the second pic. Good lord—what on earth happened in the laundry room?!
Everyone go check your dryers right now and clean every speck of lint from every single crevice. Detach and open things if you need to.
Our dryer stopped working last week so we filed a home warranty claim. The tech came and looked and said that there had been a dryer fire at some point — which we hadn’t known for sure but suspected since there were marks in the dryer when we moved in 18 months ago (and honestly we didn’t give it a second thought because the dryer worked fine). We clean the lint very frequently so didn’t worry about it.
But!
The Warranty claim was denied. The powers that be said it was a lint fire and that is never covered because “annual dryer maintenance” is the homeowners responsibility and since we’ve lived here for 18 months, it was our responsibility to find it. Even though it’s worked fine for 18 months.
The tech said that he could tell just by looking in there (when he opened it all up) that the previous owners had probably never taken care of it because there was lint falling out. (He said he really doesn’t think you have to do it every year but that’s how the insurance company screws you out of claims.)
So I asked his opinion on the best avenue to fight the decision and he said we can’t. It’s done.
So that’s it. We’re out the entire cost.
The good news? The new set will be here Friday AND Tom started his new job today.
Did you know that all Great Wolf Lodge waterparks are not the same?! I didn’t until this week.
Anna got a steal of a deal on a weekday suite so we took the kids for an overnight surprise before school starts again.
As broken-bodied adults, we were excited about the hot tub (and, to a lesser extent, the lazy river).
Until.
We learned that this particular GWL does not have a hot tub!! WHAAAAAT?! I know, right? Fail. Big BIG fail. Ughhhh.
And then we learned that the lazy river (among other things) wasn’t open because they were short-staffed.
GAHHHHHHHH!!!!! 0 for 2 does not make for a happy mom.
But the kids didn’t care. And they ended up opening the lazy river later in the day so Anna and I got to be floating blobs for two hours.
But the water wasn’t warm enough for me and the air temp felt too cold, too. I think maybe I’m too old for this.
After checkout, Anna and I managed to find a somewhat secluded couch to relax while the kids are back in the waterpark. We can actually stay until close (!) but I’m thinking we’ll just stay until lunch!
When we moved in, I sorted and organized ALL the Tupperware and got rid of ALL mismatched pieces. Fast forward to now and after sorting, this is a FRACTION of the mismatched pieces.
How? How the hell does this happen? I am missing like six bottoms of one type of container. SIX! That’s not just misplaced or accidentally ruined. And some of the missing pieces are sets I literally just bought within the last two months. GRRRR.
One word: kids.
Just ugh. I mean writing on walls is not something a 9yo should be doing. Especially after we’ve talked to her about getting marker on her carpets.
So we took away all her markers and made her clean it (thankfully it came off).
Yes, this is the same spot it leaked from before. And we tore apart our shower and fixed things. And tested it for a month after with no leaks. And now suddenly this?! UGHHHHH. This means there’s a new problem.
Tom said the area where the water was pooling and dripping was fixed. And we did fix the cracked tiles we found that we thought we the only problem.
But! He’s pretty sure ALL of the grout is bad…so there are tons of tiny holes all over that are allowing the water to soak through. Yesterday was just the breaking point of the pooling water.
I don’t even want to think about this. They don’t make the tile anymore. We will have to likely redo the whole thing. Then do we redo all the tile (tub, floor?)? How do we make it look decent if we just do the shower? And of course we have zero money now. But we have to fix the shower.
And apparently all the houses from this era are having the same issue. At least three of our friends in this neighborhood are having the same issue and are redoing their bathrooms.
Tom went into the gazebo for something and scared out a squirrel! Then look what he discovered…
The damn critter had been locked in the gazebo and had been trying to chew his way out! The kids had left the sliding door open for who knows how long and then Tom eventually noticed and shut it—obviously locking the damn thing in.
Just what we want to deal with.
It started waaaay back in July. We ordered two pieces from The Roomstore on July 3 with delivery on July 10. Easy, right?
Except that the ottoman was damaged—it had a cracked foot (that fell apart when unwrapped) and a badly ripped corner.
Okay. Crap happens, we get it. So we scheduled another attempt—just thankful they had more in stock since in-stock furniture is hard to come by. So they attempted again on July 13 (#2) and…it was ripped on an edge.
Our friends told us to just cancel it but it’s soooo pretty—it’s the perfect color and perfect size, plus it’s a storage ottoman. We asked for a discount and they refused, saying they’ll just exchange it.
On July 16 they attempted again (#3) and this time we made them unwrap it before they even brought it in the house. Nope. Two of the “squares” were so unbelievably discolored it was ridiculous that anyone looking at it for a second would assume it was good to deliver. I don’t have a photo of this one.
The next exchange (#4) was scheduled for July 20. This one was actually the least damaged of them all but the colors were off. Again. Not as bad as the first one but still unfit to accept.
SURPRISE SURPRISE—delivery attempt #5 on July 23 was a fail. Damaged. The inside edge was really scratched. It wasn’t visible, but the piece was expensive, so we figure it should be perfect to start with. Right? But we told the customer service person that we would accept it at a big discount and she offered us $50. On a $1100 ottoman. Um, no.
They told us it would be another month for delivery because they are getting one straight from the manufacturer to hopefully avoid any issues. UGH. At this point I really just wanted to be done with them, but it’s the perfect color, shape, size, etc.
Previous to this, Tom had talked to managers a few times and they assured him that we would be getting white glove service—that someone would be in the warehouse and looking it over first before it got loaded on the truck. Yeah no. That never happened. As evidenced by the continued arrival of damaged ottomans.
But then! We got a call saying they were going to deliver again. How? What happened to getting one straight from the manufacturer? Honestly at this point I don’t remember all the lies but I do know that they cancelled a few attempts because they discovered before or while loading it that it was damaged. I have texts from 7/28, 7/31, 8/11, 8/12, and 8/19—all of which I think were attempts that got cancelled. So maybe now a manager was actually checking them?!
So, fast forward through almost a month of attempts and cancellations and reschedules and talks with Customer Service (and Tweets!) that accomplished exactly nothing. (Oh wait! Tom had talked to customer service a few more times and they ended up giving us a $75 store credit and another time they refunded our $199 delivery fees. They then turned the store credit into an actual $75 credit but we never saw it on our account.)
8/19 — No idea what actual delivery attempt, but it was a FAIL. The outside had had packing tape on it, so when they ripped it off… OMFG… the color ripped off.
Tom tried to get store managers and it proved to be near impossible. He did finally get one and they basically told him they’d just keep trying. I want to give up but I want this damn ottoman because I haven’t found anything else this size or color or with storage in my search (and I’ve been searching)!
8/25 — Surprise surprise. Ottoman delivery attempt FAIL. It was scratched in two places and when the delivery guys went to try leather conditioner to fix it, it took the color off!
We decided enough was enough and even though it was a perfect size/shape/color, we couldn’t have something that got ruined that easily. (We had also noticed that we were scratching it just in daily use.) So we decided that we wanted to send both pieces from them back. Why both? Well, we bought them together (to go together) and if we couldn’t have one, we didn’t want either. Also? The loveseat turned out to be really crappy and was already getting deformed. We technically don’t need it since we found our real one elsewhere (after) and are just waiting for it to come in.
Well of course they fought it. Tom said if they refuse we will tell them we expect an ottoman delivery every Saturday from here on out until we’re happy…or they take both pieces. It was just ridiculous. Had they just given us a respectable discount to keep a less-damaged one, we would have been done with this in July. I mean, how much time and money did they waste attempting delivery of like nine ottomans?
After like 10 minutes on hold, the manager came back and said they will pick up both pieces! YAY! But also boo because I loved this ottoman. So now we are on the hunt.
I just received a whole handful of letters from Northwestern all saying the same thing—their records indicate I don’t have insurance to cover my recent services. Except everything (or almost everything) was already approved. Sigh. This shit exhausts me.
I really wasn’t planning on cleaning Katie’s room (even though I desperately wanted to throw every single thing away because she’s really ungrateful). But it happened. I just could not stand this disaster any more. (And moreso because she swears she’s cleaned it and it’s always still a pit.)
We both worked in there for hours. We did all the laundry (at least 4-5 loads—which she had assured us all her laundry was done), picked up all the toys and crap, tossed all the garbage, organized things, and created two boxes of crap for her to go through and sort. If she doesn’t want to, it’s going straight into the garbage. This is her LAST chance. If she can’t keep it remotely picked up, she’s losing things. I hope she’s having fun at grandparent camp because life is changing when she gets home. I told Tom if he ever wanted to be a drill sergeant, now is going to be the time.
And when we moved the nightstand…
Sidenote: I did run across these. Cue ugly cry.
But lest you think we’re just picking on Katie…Owen’s room is getting cleaned out, too. I didn’t move from my initial position (between his desk and the bed) for almost two hours—there was so much crap shoved and crammed in/on/around/behind/under his desk/bed/drawers I wanted to scream. I mean I was duly impressed…but I wanted to scream.
Swim shirt and bathing suit he couldn’t find for weeks? Under the bed. A pack of winter thermal shirts? Desk drawer. Missing laundry bags? Under his bed. All the school notebooks I’d asked him to find that he claimed were gone? Everywhere. Dirty clothes? Everywhere. Candy wrappers? Everywhere.
And of course Katie notes!
I took out two bags of garbage, a bag of recycling, and did four loads of dirty laundry (when he said it was all done) including about six bath towels and 83 socks. I picked up approximately 712 Lego pieces, 128 Pokémon cards, 300 random playing cards and other assorted game pieces, a shoebox of markers/pens/pencils, and about 13 spiral school notebooks that have 2% schoolwork and 98% drawings in them. I steam cleaned the carpet and half-heartedly dusted. Oh, and Tom put up a new ceiling fan!
Life will sure be different for him post-grandparent camp as well.
I realize most of this is par for the course for kids and kids their age but I just. couldn’t. any. longer. I don’t mind a little mess or being unorganized. But both rooms were flat out disgusting.
Stay tuned.