Tuesday, May 15, 2007

A Bloggable Occurance

So what do you do when your everyday ordinary life takes a turn for the strange, and even borders on bizarre? You blog about it!

Last night at about 8:30 p.m., Pete was taking a shower with Alex because they had both been out in the backyard and had gotten pretty dirty and sweaty. I was holding Teagan and we had gone into the master bathroom to see if I needed to get Alex out of the shower and dry him off. Pete was complaining that the water was too hot, and that it wasn't getting cooler in spite of the fact that he was adjusting the temperature. I reminded him that I had experienced the same phenomenon a couple of weeks ago, and I had to turn the water all the way over to cold before it would get cooler and then readjust it to be warm again. (I think that we must have a worn out washer or something in the faucet.) When all of a sudden, I heard a loud crashing, shattering sound. I had no idea what had happened; I thought that maybe something fell. I proceeded to check the closets for fallen rods, the nick-knack shelves for broken figurines, and the front bathroom. I thought, considering the violence of the crash, that maybe the mirror had fallen off the wall. Then finally, I figured it out: A full, unopened, 12 ounce can of Dr. Pepper had crashed thorough our bedroom window. Thrown presumably from over the brick wall that separates our backyard from American Boulevard, the can had managed to break both panes of the top half of our bedroom window. Fortunately, the blinds were down and closed, so the can appeared to have hit the glass and broken it, become lacerated and spewed soda all over the backside of the blinds and between the remainder of the panes of glass, and then fallen back out onto the ground. Before I realized that the damage had been caused by this can of soda, my mind was racing: "Had our foundation suddenly shifted?"; "Did someone hit an incredible fly ball from the softball fields at EDS?"; "Did a roller coaster car fly off the Texas Giant and fly all the way across Grand Prairie only to smash into our back window?". Okay, so I never actually thought the last scenario, but the others were definite possibilities.

So, Pete and I were left with a lot of broken glass to clean up, and a window to patch (we used cardboard and duct tape) as quickly as possible before the entire fleet of West Nile laden mosquitoes came to reside in our house, but before we started our clean-up, I felt it appropriate to call in Gil Grissom and his men .... actually it ended up being Officer Keck with the Ft.Worth Police Department. The officer came out and took a report of "criminal mischief" and advised me on how difficult it is to remove an Oleander and prevent it from growing back. The officer said that the can couldn't be used as evidence, because apparently soda cans pick-up quite a few fingerprints in their journey from the bottling factory through the convenience store or soda machine to the purchaser and then finally through our bedroom window. He theorized that someone may have tossed it out the window of their car, but I disagree. I have a couple of theories about "who done it": My first theory is that Jon Douglas Rainey from the Discovery Channel show It Takes a Thief threw the can through our window to get back at us for recently installing a cipher lock in the garage, but I think they do most of their filming in New Jersey, so that is a bit of a drive. My second theory is that TXU (the electric company) is angry that we keep the thermostat set at 78 degrees in the summer and they don't think they're sucking quite enough money out of our pockets as it stands, so they decided to break out one of our windows in an effort to make our house less energy efficient, and thereby take for themselves every last nickle and dime we have this summer. Or, maybe it was just some teenager walking down the street, up to no good who suddenly had the brilliant idea to toss a can of soda through some one's window, and we happened to be the unlucky house he was by when this idea took shape.

We contacted our homeowners insurance, but at last check they were still sorting through all the other claims from yesterday and hadn't yet found the time to look at ours and schedule an adjuster to come out. I'll keep everyone posted on the outcome.

I know that Pete was hoping for a little excitement in the bedroom, but something tells me that this isn't what he had in mind. *wink*

Thursday, May 03, 2007

The lights weren't on, but we were home

Last night we had some severe thunderstorms with reported wind gusts up to 100 miles per hour. We dodged the bullet as far as damage, but we did get to sit in the dark for about five hours. We spent about 30 minutes taking shelter in the closet while the storms were right over us. No one should ever have to spend 30 minutes in the closet with Alex. Anyway, the lights came back on around midnight, so we got up and reset all the clocks and Pete set his alarm to wake up this morning. We've been getting to hear the tornado sirens go off at least once a week for the past month. I guess we're in the midst of a fairly volitile severe weather season.