That's So Yesterday...

Yesterday:

 It was horrific!

  "Well it wasn't that horrible!" My mother-in law- says.
 
  It was horrible then!

  "It's been worse," my wife reminds me.

  It was definitely one annoying thing after another!  You must really believe that.


9:00 A.M. 

 "Yay!  I'm so excited for the next episode of WHODUNNIT!" I yell.
 "Yep!  It's our Monday morning ritual," Kim tells her mother.
 "Mmm-hmmm." Her mother says clipping coupons.
 "Oh no!  What's wrong with the playstation?  Why isn't it working?"
 "I don't know," Kim says playing on her Ipad."
 "Mmm-hmmm." Kim's mother says clipping coupons.
 "It's so slow!  Jeez!  We can't watch it!  I'm dying to know what happened next."
  "It's not a big deal," Kim says.
  "Mmm-hmmm," says Kim's mother clipping coupons.

1:00 P.M.

  Ding Dong.
  Bella the trained attack dog goes tearing for the door.  I have to shove her into the laundry room to keep her from going insane on the Septic guys. 
  "Hi!" 
  "Hey!" they say.  "Do you know where your septic tank is? 
 "Uh no,  I looked at our blue print, but it's not on there." I say.
  "Okay," they say and proceed to go around the yard with a metal rod and poke into the ground in hopes to find the septic tank.
   After a little digging and following pipes they found the lids to our septic tank and pried them open. 
   "OHHH!" I almost gagged as the interestingly unappetizing build up of poop bobbed on the top of the tank, smiling at us.  (Apparently the previous owners had never pumped the septic before.)
   "Well, we'll be inside," I say to the men. 
   "GAAA!" I shuddered as I headed back into the house.
  "What's wrong?" Kim asks while playing on her Ipad.
  "It's so nasty.  I saw your poop out there!" I tell her.
  "It's not just my poop!  It's everyone that has ever lived here and has ever visited us."
  Suddenly visions of everyone's faces who has ever visited played through my mind.  (Unfortunately I associated all of your faces with that big vat of poo.  I'm very sorry.  I apologize.)
 
  3:00 P.M.

  The moment I said goodbye and handed 200 some dollars to the men, I turned to go inside and spotted a carpenter ant on the side of the garage! 
   "Now how did you get here?" I said taking my flip flop off to kill the little bugger.
  As my eyes scanned higher, I saw what appeared to be thousands ("It was probably only hundreds," my mother-in-law says.)  of carpenter ants swarming on the side of the garage, going into the tiniest of holes on our hardy plank siding.
  I suddenly hyperventilate, run into the garage, grab my big ole jug of carpenter ant poison and go to town on the side of the wall and all around the exterior.  I can hear the carpenter ants screaming in pain as they shout "Abandon ship!" and dislodge themselves from the wall.  (I joke about it now, but I was hating life at the moment.)
    Suddenly the ants, beeline for the front door.
  "No!  You are supposed to be heading for the grass!" I scream.  (This is all an inner monologue, by the way.)
  I spray the front door with poison like it's trying to win a wet t-shirt contest and the ants suddenly start moving less and less. 
  I went inside, to try to relax, though I continued to scan every speck of black I could see within the house thinking the ants would go marching two by two, hurrah, hurrah.
  My mother-in-law went to check on them a half hour later and she said the coast was clear.  (I continued to check the rest of the night.)

  5:30 P.M. 

   My wife and her mother went to Wal-Mart, to try and walk Rory right out of her, and pick up a few supplies, but mostly to walk Rory right out of her.  The storms started roaring and the wind was howling.  The rain came down, the thunder was roaring and Bella...  sweet little Bella, was trying to climb her big butt into my lap. 
  "Just lay down, Bella.  It's just thunder."
 Eventually I logged my computer off, and lay down on the bed with the crazy dog to read so she could lay next to her Papa.  (It's funny, every time we have a storm, she comes running to me.  I think ever since she was just a pup, she knew I was the one who protected her.  She will literally climb on my lap during a bad storm. ) 

  6:00 P.M.

  My wife came home to trade the car for the dog and I headed to church for a meeting.  The storm continued to blow and howl but I managed to grab some McDonalds on my way to church.  

7:30 P.M.

  Ring.  Ring.  "Hot Wife" shows up on my screen.  She knows I'm at church.  Is this it?  Is the baby coming?  I answer the phone and slip into the hallway. 
  "I'm not in labor!" she says.
  "Well, why are you calling then?"
  "The storm knocked our Air Conditioning out.  I can't handle this," she cries, "I don't know what to do." 
  "If you call them now, they are going to charge you over time," I can hear Kim's mom saying.
  "I'm 39 weeks pregnant!  I'm going to die!" Kim rebuts.
  "Okay, I'll figure it out."
 
  8:00 P.M. 

 A guy at the meeting calls a friend he knows who works for an AC company, and I head home into the storm.

  8:30 P.M.

  "Hello," I say.
  "Hi this is Troy..."  the guy introduced himself and walked me through what he thinks might be wrong.  "I really want to save you some money.  If I have to come over after 7:30, it's going to cost you time and a half."
  "Yeah, I know it's going to be expensive man, and if it were just me, I'd wait and call you back in the morning, but my wife is super pregnant.  She could go any day and I can't have her try to sleep in the heat.  It's already 80 degrees in here, and it's in the middle of a storm."
  "Ohh," Troy says, "I get ya, my wife is super pregnant too!  That's all you had to say.  I'm near the Walgreens now, how can I get to your house?"

  8:35 P.M.

  Troy walks up and I invite him in to check out the system.  He says hello to everyone and finds the problem fairly quickly.  We walk out side and he puts on his headlamp. 
   "I know it's silly, but it works awesome."
  "I actually have one of those too, man!  My wife thinks I'm crazy, but how else are you going to start a campfire in the dark."
  He cleans out some stuff, fixes it up, and is done within 15 minutes. 
  "How much do I owe you?" I ask when he is finished. 




Ponderings the next day:

  It was a crazy day, and totally  not fun, because it seems that everything went wrong, all day long, but I learned some very important things.

I was able to watch WHODUNNIT, on the Wii instead of the PlayStation, and well TV is not that big of a deal. 

The cute little palm tree in our front yard is way too close to our septic system and in a few years the roots will completely demolish the septic tank, which will cost me thousands of dollars of damage if I don't get the tree taken down.

The carpenter ants just suck, I can't find any silver lining in that, except that I don't see any of them today.

My dog loves me, even when she's being annoying.

McDonalds is okay, every once in a while.

Troy from the AC company said this to me last night:

 "I'm just going to charge you the normal price.  I don't see a need to charge you over time since it was fairly easy and I wasn't here for very long."

It's pretty amazing that even when bad things happen, you definitely learn something from it.  You can find help from others when you ask for it, and you can find the goodness in other people even when you are least expecting it.  That's something, if you ask me.
 

Comic by Bitstrips