Resident Evil and Lucky Larry
2005-01-14
9:14 a.m.

The wind chill this morning is 3 above zero. Brrrr! Today is Friday, our day off. It's one of the benefits of homeschooling. 4yoJ just came bolting into my room to remind me that it's RE day. That's short for Resident Evil, as in Resident Evil IV, the scary, bloody video game. He's been counting down the days since Tuesday--the day it was released. So, today 4yoJ and his dad are going out to purchase us our very own copy of RE IV so that we can perch ourselves on the couch by the fire and bludgeon zombies all day. I know, what a wholesome family pastime. I hope I'm not raising a whole crop of serial killers.

Yesterday's headache did go migraine on me, but it's gone this morning and I'm not feeling any residual. As long as I don't have to get out in the cold I think I'll be okay.

On today's agenda: Stay in pjs all day.
Cook great food.
Eat great food.
Hold the baby.
Sit by the fire.
Watch J and the
children have a riot
playing RE.
Eat more great food.
Eat great cookies
made by 12yoH.
Take a really hot
bath.
Watch a DVD sent
to us by Netflix
with J.
Eat more great food
and more great
cookies.
Sleep.

The hot bath reminds me...we finally got our water heater put in. You don't really think about how wonderful hot water is until you can't take a hot bath. The guy who put the new heater in, Larry, by name, wasn't the brightest light in the sky. The day after installation the city inspector came to check it out and found that the vent pipe was totally screwed up. He declared it an emergency, which makes me think that we're all probably lucky that we woke up. So, Larry comes back out and fixes it, but then about 4 hours later I get a message on our machine that goes something like, "Yeah, J, I mean Mrs. P, I mean J, uh, this is Larry. I wanted to let you guys know that I didn't turn your water heater back on. I left it on pilot, so you'll need to go turn it to on and light it if you want to have hot water this evening. I'm sorry about that." Of course J was gone by this time and I was here alone with 5 of the 7 children. It was storming out when I went down to check things out, and after reading all the warnings on the tank I was terrified so I called the company to ask if someone could come turn the thing on. Well, after a half hour Larry calls to tell me that he's already almost home (45 min. away) but that he'll walk me through it. (Yeah, and he's not the one who'll be blown up.) He then proceeds to walk me through the 3 simple steps and I could tell that he was getting pretty frustrated with my apparent lack of pilot-lighting skills when the thing wouldn't light. (He was forgetting that he wouldn't have been in this boat at all if he'd have just checked his work in the first place.) Anyway he was nearly resigned to the fact that he'd have to turn around and come driving back through a raging storm when the thing finally lit. Lucky for Larry. Luckier for me that we're all still alive.

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