The bad part of home ownership...

The plumber is here. And the first half an hour he's here he gets $146. Then every 15 minutes after that he gets another $33. Wow. He makes more in 15 minutes than I make in an hour. And now we can't just bill it to the landlord.

Andre tried to install the line to the icemaker last night. And the pipe under the sink sprung a leak. No problem, right? Just turn off the main water valve and wait until morning when Home Depot is open and we can fix it ourselves. Oops, the main water valve doesn't work! The water isn't stopping! The water is shooting across the kitchen! The water is everywhere! We're drowning in the goddamn water!

It wasn't really quite that bad, but it also wasn't fixable unless we could turn off the main water valve. Hence, the Roto Rooter man is now charging us $33 dollars a second to fix our pipe.

I think I'm going to go to plumbing school.

Originally this was supposed to be a blog that Andre and I both posted to. Obviously that's not going to happen so I think I should change the name to something like, "Tavia's better than Andre" or "Tavia, but not Andre" or "Tavia and Fiona. Oh...and Andre." I'll give him a little more time to start chipping in.

I had an interview for a new job this week. I think I did pretty well, but don't think I have the right experience for the job. I'm not too disappointed though because after the interview, I don't think I really want it. The person who would be my supervisor interviewed me and told me that at some of the busy times of the year they work up to 70 hours a week. 70! And it's a salaried position so no overtime. Plus, it's mostly sales and they have some pretty strict sales goals. Why did I apply for this again? I don't really remember.

Andre just bought the TV of enormity. Now we never have to leave the house again. Ahh...blissful netflix and 50 inch TV, what a lovely combination you will make. Guess I don't have to restock our sunscreen supply after all.

So you know what's cute? One of Fiona's favorite foods is "Mommy peas." Can you guess what mommy peas are? Come on...try and guess. They're edamame. Get it? Eda-mommy. That's one cute kid.

We found our new favorite breakfast restaurant. It's really close to our house. We could probably walk there if we weren't so lazy. We had a feeling it was going to be good because of all the old people eating there. Old people know tasty breakfast. I'd say 95 to 99 percent of the diners there were above the age of 65 and white. I felt like we were crashing some sort of old people's club. We were probably the talk of the retirement villages for days, both for our age and our ethnicities. Oh well, like I started saying, it was some mighty tasty breakfast. I think we'll go there again next weekend. Maybe we'll make some old people friends and start going to old people parties. I guess we'll have to learn how to waltz and play dominoes.

It was beautiful this week. Sunny every day - highs just below 80. Gorgeous. Made me want to walk out of my windowless office and never come back. Today, of course, now that it's the weekend and we had planned on doing outdoor things it will be: "Mostly cloudy with morning showers. Some afternoon sunbreaks with a chance of showers or thunderstorms. Increasing rain tonight." Sigh.

The other night, I was sitting in the family room catching up on a little Joan of Arcadia that no one will watch with me. Andre was upstairs giving Fiona a bath. The crows outside were driving me absolutely insane with their cawing so I tried to figure out what they were mad about and saw they were divebombing something crawling around in one of our neighbor's trees. It was really high in the tree, had a long tail (too long for a cat), and was sitting on a branch picking at something higher in the trees with its front paws. It looked way too skinny to be a raccoon and raccoon's don't climb that high in the trees, right? So, I decided it was a monkey. It really looked like a monkey with its long tail and monkey-like use of its front paws. I called Andre and Fiona out to look with me and they could barely see it in the tree and were unconvinced of its monkey status. I was just about to call animal control about the escaped monkey, when it came a little farther down the tree. It was indeed a raccoon. Who knew raccoons were such good tree climbers? It was probably stealing eggs from a nest. Stupid raccoon. I wish you were a monkey.

So riding the bus with Fiona is generally a nice commute. We read books and hang out. It's much better than keeping her in daycare in our neighborhood and spending the commute time apart. EXCEPT when she throws up all over me on the bus. I really hope she didn't splash the lady sitting next to us. Yuck.