Wednesday, January 24, 2007

A scream

YARGHGHGHGHGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
FUCKITY FUCK FUCK FUCKFUCK FUCK FUCK!
GODDAMN INCOMPETENT PLUMBER. FUCKING DAY SHOT TO HELL!

That is all for now.

Monday, January 22, 2007

So it might be a clog

The tiles have heaved up. The roof has crumples in it (not hard fix but urgh.) Cracks in the drywall. Door not locking or opening properly. Countertops coming away from the wall. All this could be a result of a clogged pipe underneath the floor. Our washer pipe has had a clog and we thought we blasted it away with the blow bag (pressurized water) but we may have just moved it along, causing this lovely problem. Yay.
That was the plumber's opinion today. They tore up the two broken tiles to see if the cement was wet. It was bone dry. We thought it was a leak, but a leak would be wetter. Plus if we had a regular leak, our water consumption would have gone up. It hasn't. In fact it has gone down. By 1000 gallons. That's a lot. So a clog is plausible.
The plumber is returning on Wednesday with a camera to see if there's a clog. Going down the washer drain and the sink drain. They did a lot of testing on the washer and it DID start to back up a bit again. So something is there. The big question is how it's going to be fixed.
At least we have a maybe solution. Better than what we've had before.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Oh hell

So the foundation guy came by yesterday. He was really nice and lives down the street so it wasn't bad for him to get here in the cold and potential ice and all. He came in and took one look at it and said it could be a plumbing leak. He said there's no way the foundation should have moved like that. In fact he's pretty sure it's one from looking at the fun roof. (I'll post pics when the weather lets me take them.) He had the same problem at his house too. Plus his house has had the foundation repaired and all. So ugh.
It does make sense, now that we think of it. The bubbling up of the floor. Our washer drain has been clogged and the clog COULD be a broken pipe and the surrounding dirt and all. So I called our home warranty company and requested a plumber. It does cover leaks and all. I'm just waiting for the call back but I'm not expecting one anytime soon as the weather here means that no one is really at work. So we'll see. I just want to know for sure what is fucking wrong with my floor.
UPDATE: Edited for a major typo. still waiting on the plumber. Austin is pretty much shut down. I'm on day 2 of Ice Day. I'm going crazy at home and may venture out soon just to see what's open.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Blergh

Sigh. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. There’s the small stuff: broke my cell phone last night. I dropped it on the tile floor and it split open. It’s cracked and now ghetto taped so it stays together. It works but only if it stays together. The thing that connects the top part (earpiece and display) got disconnected when it smashed last night. We managed to get the display on the inside and the earpiece working, but that’s it. The front display is gone. Plus it cracks open a bit when you use it. So I need a new phone. Thing is, with the whole wireless industry, unless I’m a brand new customer, I get to pay up the ass for a new phone. I think this phone is under a year old, so still under warranty, so we’ll see. (of course we don’t have insurance, which I think we’ll get now…) Arggh. Not what we need right now. (I really want a razor and all but unless I’m new… What the hell happened to keeping your original customers happy? I mean really.)
There’s the fact that we found out that the hard drive on our old computer is truly corrupted. We bought a USB case that you can put an interior hard drive in to make it an exterior. (Only $50 so it was worth the small amount to find it out than to pay a tech more to find out the same thing.) Then we tried a data retrieval program. That failed. Miserably. I’m going to try to see what I can get before the errors start happening again, but I’m not counting on anything. All those pictures and music gone. It died the week before I was going to back it up. Really. It sucks.
At work, we still can’t eat at our desks, which really doesn’t help the myriad things I have to do during lunch. Since we can’t really do internet stuff during the workday, I have to do it all at lunch, and now in a reduced time frame as I have to go downstairs, wolf down my lunch in 10-15 min. and rush back up to get things done. And I have a lot to do. No one likes the rule, no one can actually see the purpose of it. But yet it stays. The roof leaks and has gigantic holes and other parts of the office building need a complete overhaul but the real reason we have rats and things is that we keep food at our desks. Yes, that’s the real problem.
As for the house, I really don’t want to talk about it. It’s messed up. I think the foundation repair company screwed up when they made the initial repair. It’s awful. I don’t even want to go into detail right now as it makes me cry. Let’s just say that my house is literally falling apart right now, and I have this horrible feeling that we will have to pay for the repairs with money that we simply don’t have right now. It’s bad. Really bad.
I will say that I do not in any way blame the people who sold us the house. They are house flippers but know jack shit about foundations. They listened to the experts like we did and based their decisions on that. They made the same decision we did. They even paid for it all. They’ve actually been extremely helpful in all of this. I just got a phone call from them yesterday wanting to know if we had an update for them. They spent 2 hours at our house a few weeks ago, because we didn’t realize at first it was a foundation issue. I just wanted the name of the contractor that worked on the house. I got so much more. They came and took pictures and pointed out things and really helped us figure out what to do. They’ve told me that we’ve been doing everything right so far. It’s what they would do. This was their baby for a while so they want to know and will help in any way possible. Unfortunately, we’re doing everything that we can and it’s not enough. It’s really a nightmare. We’ve barely lived here for 4 months.

Monday, January 08, 2007

Holy Shit

We almost killed someone Friday night. It was nowhere near our fault either. That’s the scariest part. I’m not sure what that woman was on, or if she just wasn’t paying attention, but we almost slammed into the back end of her car, something that would have surely killed her baby in the driver’s side back seat.
We had been heading out for a night on the town. Our friend M was in the front seat and I was in the back. The boy was driving. The boy had just completed a move into the left turn lane, signal and all. We were fully in the left lane and the turn signal was already off. There was a red compact in the lane next to us. She had her turn signal on to move into the right lane and seemed to be moving over in that direction. All of a sudden, without any warning, she swerved into our lane, cutting our truck off. The boy slammed on the brakes and swerved into the oncoming traffic lane. (No traffic coming thankfully.) We missed hitting her by inches. She really didn’t have any room to cut into our lane, but she did.
Thankfully the boy has quick reflexes and the truck has excellent brakes. Otherwise, we would have slammed into the back end of the car. We had been slowing down too, so that helped. Either way, it was bad. The scary part was that the other car continued on as if nothing had happened. We had been literally inches from hitting her, yet she didn’t stop or slow down.
We pulled up next to the car at the next light after making our left turn, as that was what she had done and was turning around. No reaction from her. It was then we noticed the car seat in the back. We really freaked out then. We couldn’t believe that someone would drive that recklessly with a child in the back seat like that. Our vehicle was easily twice the size of hers. There’s no contest as to who would have sustained the most damage.
If there had been oncoming traffic, who knows what would have happened. We may have swerved in the opposite direction, sacrificing the back of the truck. Anything to not hit someone else.
There was no way this could have been our fault. If there had been impact, the angle would have clearly showed that we were fully in the lane and the other car would have been at an angle.
Sadly, this wasn’t the first time it has happened and it won’t be the last. It was the scariest though. People in this town have a tendency to drive as if there aren’t any other people on the road. Lots of people don’t use turn signals and many people just cut you off. I remember one time I was driving down the street in the left lane of a 4 lane street. The cars in front of me were going rather slowly and the traffic to the right of me was basically pacing the other cars. No way to get around it. Suddenly, the car two cars in front of me decided to make a right turn, FROM THE LEFT LANE. There was no traffic light, they just saw a place they wanted to go. The traffic in the right lane was alert enough and was able to avoid an accident by turning into the parking lot. It was definitely scary though. No turn signal, nothing. Just a sudden right turn from the left lane.Most people in Austin really should take another driving course. Or get off their cell phones while driving. Something to make them realize that there are other freakin’ cars on the road! Don’t even get me started on the cyclists who don’t obey traffic laws, of which there are many. I need at least 2 hands to count how many I have nearly hit when they come flying out of a cross street with a stop sign that they didn’t stop at, and I had none. But in this city, who would be villainized for the accident? Not the bicyclist, that’s for sure.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

The funeral was Saturday. Joe had gone to talk to Lucy the Friday before Christmas to tell her the news. Of course she knew and all but wondered why he waited and never called. His excuse was that he was sick and all that. Yeah right. He could have freakin’ called at least. I mean this was her brother. He died that MONDAY. But after that, Lucy just decided to pay for the funeral and stuff because it needed to be done and Joe wasn’t going to do it.
My parents and brother went and they gave me the update. They said it was nice. They did the wake right before the funeral, as it was cheaper to do that. Joe did the readings and things, which was ok but blegh. He didn’t show up to the house afterward though, which was a good thing, as I don’t think it would have went well.
Our family does love to keep secrets. Mom talked to a cousin for a while and found out a lot of other stuff that the aunts and uncles didn’t want to let everyone know until, well, who knows. The idea is that no one wants to burden the family. Sigh. Go figure that.