cimorene

The (temporary) boiler is working again because what ailed it was that a worker in the basement had unplugged it, but the plug was hidden in a tangle of cables that were concealed under it so it didn't appear to be unplugged when we tried to check if it was on or not (it doesn't have a power light). The guy who came to fix it fished out the tangle and re-connected the plug.

Our favorite apprentice plumber fixed the bathroom sink so that the hot is on the red side and the cold is on the blue side and the safety lock prevents accidental scalding instead of accidental cold-ing.

We finished putting up the paintable wallpaper (it's actually basically just unbleached newsprint) in the two downstairs rooms and we bought the chalk/lime-milk paint which came in powder form along with some powdered pigments to mix it up ourselves, which I'm super excited to do. But then it rained for 2 days and so the humidity has been too high to paint. The fact that we haven't painted these rooms is all that prevents them having the electricity and radiators put back in, and we REALLY need them livable in like <3 weeks, so it would be great if it could stop raining constantly before Wax has to go back to work. (In the meanwhile, we've started stripping wallpaper in the attic bedroom.)

I had to install a new operating system but there was plenty of space on my hd and it didn't take long. There were a couple of hiccups, but nothing serious. In fact, it fixed several issues I was having with Firefox, although the native FF skin has added these two white triangles at the upper corners where evidently the transparency isn't working properly. The annoying bit is this release is only supported until next January but the new LTS isn't out until mid-October, so I have to upgrade again in the next few months.

LOL so our master plumber was away due to a family emergency when the latest basement flood happened and for the pump truck and camera snake guys. And he requested that we get the video from the camera snake for planning and for insurance purposes, because there's 2 insurance companies in play here and they need to determine whose responsibility the leak is, right? Well, so MIL called the camera snake company. And they were like, "We didn't save video because you didn't request it!" WTF? 1. You're talking to a 70 year old lady here. Nobody told her that she could or should request video! 2. She was also the person who met the camera snake guy and talked to him on the day when he did his thing and he didn't mention anything about it to her either. Great. Just great.

In addition to having thrown out her back a month ago now MIL is having horrible pains and can't sleep and they have sent her to a bunch of tests and have not been able to say for certain if it's gallstones or not. The gallstones (if they are or were there) were likely (def.?) caused by the opioid she had to take because her back being thrown out was too painful to do anything including lie down. Now she can't have opioids. She still has a busier social life than we do, put together. Busier than my parents, too, for that matter (and they have multiple weekly get-togethers with their clique and a group text with them: it's adorable). She has become slightly less on top of things in the exhaustive organizational memory way since I met her 15 years ago, when I would have fearlessly trusted her to organize, like, a two-week class vacation at short notice to a foreign country. But she definitely hasn't lost her... doing-things-itiveness. Respect.