Of Floods and Stresses, Swim Badges, Pant Hems and Hamsters!

What an odd mix in the title .... I know. Coming back from vacation is always a bit stressful as you have to leave behind the carefree days of very little schedules and structure to jump back full tilt into activities, responsibilities and MOUNTAINS of laundry, but last week was so wild that I didn’t even have my computer on for 48 hours!!

We arrived home half a day later than expected, having volunteered to be bumped on an overbooked flight from Detroit to Bangor, Maine, thus earning our tickets for next year’s Spring Break, only to find a note from our cleaning ladies telling us that our basement had flooded! There had been a rain storm with high winds on ground that was still very frozen, so much of the water around the city had almost nowhere to go. They’d managed to catch the worst of it in my office and the family room with the wet/dry vacuum and set the dehumidifier running, but I still lost a few boxes of product to some water damage for stuff that had been down on the floor. I also wanted to be sure that everything was nice and dry before powering up either computer! I guess we were lucky compared to some of the people in town who actually had INCHES of water in the basement instead of just puddles, but it made coming home to reality a bit more abrupt than we wanted.

As soon as the computers were back on, I jumped right back into a huge assignment for one client with two complex layouts and way too much information to fit in them. Nick also had a week at school with the principal out on preretirement leave, but neither of the 3 Vice-Principals really in charge of more than their own section. Murphy’s Law demands that that’s when everything will go “snakey-bananas” right?? Right!

By Friday, we were all feeling tired from a week back, so we had a fun family evening to relax. Saturday morning, both girls were tested during their last swim lesson of this session and passed their levels with flying colours. Bethany completed Level 3 in the red cross series while Erin passed Level 9!

After lunch on Saturday, we took Nick off for some much needed wardrobe upgrading and found a wonderful outfit for his job interview today. He is applying for a Principalship of an elementary school here in town for next year and is both thrilled and nervous to have the interview fall on this, his birthday. The pants of the outfit needed to be hemmed right away, so we took a walk to the pet store in the same complex to see what they had.

I’ve been missing Nipper incredibly since her passing after Christmas, but we wanted to get through March Break before adding a new hamster to the household. The shop where we’d purchased Nipper had a litter of babies that were almost ready for sale, but they would be one step even more inbred than Nipper since it was two of her siblings that mated. Diabetes being so hereditary in Dwarf Hamsters, I just wasn’t willing to take that chance again. It hurts too much to say goodbye to them when they die so quickly!

We saw one little dwarf hamster in a cage all by itself (or so we thought) and asked the clerk if we could see it up close. She smiled and told us that this new batch had just arrived from the breeder and were VERY friendly! She poked the bedding and revealed a few more fast asleep, but the little one we’d been watching walked right over to her and climbed into her hand! She handed him to me and he promptly tried to climb right up my coat sleeve with nary a nip or nibble!! What a change from Nipper who certainly lived up to her name and only achieved marginal tameness at best. He clambered out of my hand to Erin’s and then back into mine, sniffing everything in sight, and we just beamed at the store clerk and yelled “SOLD!” All the way home, he kept sticking the tip of his nose out of the holes in the box to sniff the air and “wuffle” his nose about, so Wuffles he became. He is the friendliest little fur ball I have ever seen and even Nick has held him!

Welcome to our home, Wuffles!!!