December 22, 2005 7:34 pm

Beer and Parties and Flooding, Oh My!

:note: Trans-Siberian Orchestra – “Carol of the Bells”

Christmas vacation is always insane. Case in point: yesterday I helped bottle beer, then went to a pajama/dinner party, and then today we went shopping in Coeur d’ Alene, and our basement started flooding.

The beer thing: My mom got my dad a “make your own beer” gift certificate last year for Christmas. He didn’t start the process until a bit before Thanksgiving, so it was ready to bottle this week. You get to fill the bottles with the gas and beer and everything and then cap them with bottlecaps. I just helped sterilize the bottles beforehand and then once they were capped, I put them in the boxes. But it was fun. :D I do have pictures, but I’ll have to upload them later. If you’re interested. :P

The party thing: Heidi picked me up to go to a dinner party/pajama party. It was tons of fun – we played this game called “Catchphrase” and it’s kind of like Taboo or Charades in that you have to get your team to guess a word, but the cool thing is that the rules are really lax. You can make noises, talk, act things out, etc. SO MUCH FUN. My stomach muscles hurt from laughing for hours. I ended up finding it and buying it today when we went shopping. Speaking of which…

The shopping thing: So, I bought all these presents today, right? And the important one, the reason we went to CDA in the first place, was the Apple brand iPod headphones that Daniel really wanted. I looked all over and finally found them and made it back out to the car. Then Daniel calls my cell phone and I ask him about his day, and he tells me this story about how he was walking around downtown and ended up in the Apple store, and saw the headphones he wanted and thought “What the hell, I just got a paycheck, and I have a long train ride coming up – Why not?” and BOUGHT THEM.
*dies*
Fortunately, we hadn’t even left the parking lot yet, so my mom just circled around and I ran back in and returned them. Lesson #1: Don’t buy gifts for yourself near Christmas. Daniel said I’m not allowed to continually bring this situation up in the future, like “Remember that one time that I drove forty-five miles to Coeur d’ Alene just to get you your special headphones that cost forty dollars and then YOU HAD BOUGHT THEM FOR YOURSELF EARLIER THAT DAY?” So. If you ever see me saying that here, um, I’m not allowed to do that.

The flooding thing: We called my brother Carson (he stayed at home) to see what his plans were for the day, and he said, “Um, I think you should know that the basement is flooding.” He wasn’t sure whether it was leaking in from outside (it’s been POURING down rain here for days) or whether it was from the water heater, but the puddle was huge. Naturally, I thought this was hilarious, but my mom panicked and we tried to get ahold of my dad at work. He didn’t answer the phone, so we drove over there to find him. After much driving around, we saw him running a Pettibone and flagged him down. He told us to dig trenches by the house, hoping to steer the puddles of water away from the house instead of, you know, into our basement.

So far, it hasn’t really worked that well, and my mom made a dam out of towels and is currently vacuuming the water up with her wet/dry Rainbow vacuum. It’s, um, sort of a disaster. Nothing is ruined (yet), but there’s a crack in the concrete wall and water is slowly but steadily trickling in. If you put your hand against the wall, it’ll flow over it, so it’s a pretty strong stream.

My grandma across the road just called to say her basement is flooding too. Heh. I suppose this isn’t really funny, but the concept of basements flooding is funny to me because it just seems like it happens to other people, never you. In the end, we had to call property damage restoration services.

My mom is still freaking out about me “blogging and NOT HELPING” so I must go. She’ll probably have me make cookies or something, since I’ve already wrapped about a million presents and baked a million loaves of delicious lemon poppyseed bread and pumpkin bread. Oh, and I crocheted a trapezoid. It, um, was supposed to be a square, but I’m not very good at doing the edges and kept dropping stitches and it came out like a trapezoid. Ah well.

I forgot to mention in my last post that I read the book “The Golden Compass” by Phillip Pullman (?) and LOVED IT. OMG. It was fanastic. And then I was going nuts because I finished it at like, 9:30 and didn’t have anything else to read for the entire rest of the ride. I should have just bought the sequels.

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