Murphy’s Law

When I said yes to my husband going to India for work for 70 days I was not aware of this particular brand of Murphy’s Law that would come to visit us.  I might have changed my answer if I had known. Probably not, because I am stubborn, but I might have.

Lately I have felt like everything that can go wrong or break, has.  Let me fill you in on what has been going on around here lately.

Our 200 + pound pig who is waiting until this fall to be dispatched to the freezer (because we harvest our own meat rather than spending the money on someone else doing it) decided that she was super bored after being the only pig for not even 3 months.  The other pig had literally picked her up and moved her around by his nose so we thought her life would be better by putting him in the freezer first. And it was until she got Bored.  One of the first Mondays my hubby was gone we had the pig escape not once, not twice, but about four times from a pen that she had otherwise never gotten out of.  And we kept shoring up the sides of the fence, adding an additional fence post, giving her food to lull her back into the fence until finally I used the jet spray on the hose and used it on her nose to herd her back into her pen where we finally shored it up enough.  

Then I bought her a bale of hay and that has kept her busy.  I actually bought her two and now not quite a month later we keep giving her new bits so she has something new to play with and a new nest to build in her 3 sided house.  It’s three sided because she took the other two sides off.

We have also randomly lost one of the meat turkeys while friends were visiting and we woke up one morning to a dead duck for no apparent reason.  Homestead life.

The very first time I used our John Deere to mow our 2 acre rolling lawn, when I was almost done with the bit farthest from the house the belt that runs the mower portion broke.  So we had to order a new belt and then I had to figure out how to replace it because we don’t have a pickup truck so there wasn’t anyway to transport the riding mower to a place that might do it for me.  I spent the 3rd and 4th of July fixing the belt. And in the end it was hubby looking at photographs of the belt woven into all the wheels that caught the mistake I had made in the weaving. It still took a fair bit of muscle, lying on the ground and swearing to get it to work.

Victory right?  Wrong. Because I was able to get about half the lawn mowed stopping every 20 minutes because the rear back tire would go flat because of it’s “slow leak”.  That got so bad that I gave up mowing and we looked into getting Slime to fix the tire long enough until hubby got back home in about 40 days and he could fix it himself.

I left the mower for a few days because I was frankly sick of it.  I tried again last evening because we had a cooler day where it wasn’t raining.  I put the Slime in following the directions and pumped the tire as full as I could get it.  And drove the tractor own the hill to the part of the yard I hadn’t mowed yet and then it stopped moving.  Because the tire had come completely off the rim. The tractor is still sitting out there while hubby and I research the next steps on fixing that.

I am hosting a Harry Potter themed party next week and we may just have to play Quidditch in tall grass, if anyone wants to play make your own Quidditch game.

Also I have been paying my girls in ice cream drumsticks or sandwiches to do extra chores.  You know like clean up the yard, clean out the van, mop the kitchen floor that kind of thing.  When I first asked them to vacuum they turned it on and got a rubbery smell. I was in the middle of something else so asked them to stop and came up with something else for them to do.  The vacuum sat for a couple of weeks while I dealt with the mower and other things and I fixed it yesterday. Turned out to be a squirrel sized pile of hair and yarn and crap wound around the brushes.  So the stairs finally got vacuumed yesterday.

There is something going on with our passenger side sliding door on the van.  I don’t know what it is but it feels like it is getting caught on something and really doesn’t want to close.  I have done minimal diagnosing and have gotten the door shut and have banned anyone from opening it. I haven’t even told hubby about it yet because he will just research the heck out of it and I am fine with just not using it and having it wait until he gets home to deal with it.  If he starts sending me how to fix it stuff I will end up having a go and I really don’t want to.

I still haven’t found the small vacuum and vacuumed out the lint trap in the dryer that he told me that needed to be done as he was driving to the bus station to go to the airport for his trip.  So we are drying everything on the clothesline and I am trying to feel good about lessening my carbon footprint.

Then there is the fact that if anyone poops in the upstairs bathroom it doesn’t want to flush down well.  I am literally sick of using the plunger and smelling shit upstairs. I have tried to ban poops upstairs but inevitably someone forgets every few days.

We have had a stray kitten show up and decide to live with us.  She gets fixed next week but in the meantime she hasn’t always been 100% on the litter box usage, she has caused the cat food consumption to be way higher than what two cats were like and she went into heat last week and we did our best to keep her inside.  With two other indoor/outdoor cats and a 5 year old that was not a full proof plan. Hopefully she didn’t get pregnant because that will make her spaying bill a bit higher.

We have also lost power twice since hubby has left, and that had only happened like twice before in the year we have lived in this house.  Last time we lost power it was for so long we ended up sleeping at a friends house and I thought about trying to figure out how to use the generator I have never used.  It came on before I got the nerve up to try it. But the next day we thought the washer was broken for awhile before I figured out it was just the plug that got fried during the power outage.  Rerouted the washer to another plug and now it works just fine.

Also my kids are slobs and don’t want to do their daily chores so my house looks worse than normal and I am hosting a party that the kids wanted to do in less than a week.  I hope they enjoy cleaning shit up because I am not doing this all by myself. It’s not all my mess. I mean some of it is, but most of it is theirs.

So yeah.  Can we put a moratorium on anything else breaking until say August 19th when hubby will have been home for a few days and might have caught up on some sleep?  Please?  I am handy but I am tired of having to deal with all of this alone, and be the muscle and have someone who is much better fixing it trying to give me directions from across the world.  

Maybe I am just tired.  That could be it too.