Good Eatin' and Good Grief

If you won't get me something to eat, I'll just have to do it myself.

Breakfast was a little overdue, and Jake left the pantry open a crack. She's no dummy. I let her munch away, because, hey, she did the work to get the bag --and she wasn't making a mess.

So, in case you didn't know, I go through phases of sayings. For a long while I would say "honestly" when I was irritated or incredulous. Then I switched to "seriously" --which I still sometimes use. Lately though I'm on a "good grief" kick. Yep, I'm Charlie Brown. Anyway, this last week had me saying "good grief" plenty of times. Wednesday afternoon our television and internet services suddenly were nonexistent. (This was not a happy time considering So You Think You Can Dance? was on and in the cities of Salt Lake and Dallas.) We called Time Warner and began the 3 day battle to get it back. Now, that company has never won any prizes for their customer service, and at the rate they are going, they never will. We have new neighbors, and when Jake met them, he discovered that they had their cable installed from TW on Wednesday afternoon, the same time ours went out. So let us all conclude that that was the reason ours went out. Well, TW doesn't want the customer to come to any conclusions at all except to become so exasperated that they hang up and spontaneously combust. Jake came close. Every single phone call (and there were many) gave us different information or led us down a different path. We did not give up. Finally they made an appt. to come out on Friday to take care of it. They didn't come. I called, and apparently someone came out to check the neighbor's cable and to bury their line. Hm. They set another appt. for Saturday. It turns out the cable installer for the neighbors cut our line. "He just cut it, " the repair guy said. Good grief. But, it was finally fixed! Then we saw that we had a big cable line draped along the back of our fence from the TW box, across our driveway and around the side of the house. We figured they'd be out in a couple days to bury the line.

Well, Sunday morning after Jake's meetings, he came in to let me know that we'd been vandalized. The back of our fence had been sprayed and the city's electrical box on our property had also. We couldn't really tell what it said on our mad dash to church. Later, we called the police to come over and just put the vandalism on file before we attempted to clean it up. Turns out it was black shoe polish and some weird green paint that they also used on the neighbor's garage door. We figured out some of the writings. "No TV" "No television" "666". Nice. So, some emo kids are angry with the world and wandering around in the middle of the night with shoe polish. They see our giant wire running around our house and decide we're stealing cable. Well, they showed us. That's the only thing we can figure. GOOD GRIEF! Ah well, at least it was shoe polish and not spray paint. I've scheduled tomorrow to clean it off, and I think it'll come off okay. TW buried the line yesterday. I actually think all of this is pretty funny. All that mess because some guy spent two seconds making a mistake.
Other than that, we've had some summer fun already.

She means business with that squirt gun.

On Sunday during Sacrament meeting services, the water reached our row. There is no passing her by on the bread and water anymore. I held the little cup for Tessa to drink, and when I took it from her, she let out a big "Aaahh!" Like, "Oh, how refreshing!" The young man taking the tray from us did a good job keeping in his laugh. He did better than me.