Lesson Learned

1) When you call the gas company and say you smell gas leaking from your stove when you turn it on and as it heats up, they take you seriously and send a tech out right away, no matter the day or hour. In fact they take you so seriously that they won't even let you hang up your phone in fear that could cause a spark and they disconnect it for you remotely.

2) It probably would have been wiser to call last Thursday when I first noticed the smell instead of just turning the stove off, getting away with not cooking dinner and going about our business throughout the weekend.

3) If your immediate neighbor in attached housing is having their kitchen redone, including having new hardwood floors installed and finished, that "gas" smell emanating from your stove could very well be the chemicals from their work burning off through your gas line. Huh? Curious. At least the Washington Gas techs didn't treat me like I was a fool and reassured me that it's better to be safe than sorry (even 4 days later!)

Guess I have to come home to cook dinner again after back-to-school night tonight. Sigh...

Homeowner Woes

I love our house. I do. And people did warn me that as soon as we moved in shizz would start to happen and the repairs and maintenance would be on us, but there are some days I really do miss our nutty old property manager and being able to place the responsibility on her to get things done for us. This past weekend for example:

1) Our 2 year old roof leaked. Into Leila's bedroom. Causing plaster to fall down around the A/C vent in her ceiling. The plaster that is still barely hanging is now Duct taped up. Ghetto fabulous I tell you, but can't do much about fixing that until we tackle the source of the roof leak. That 2 year old roof is under warranty for issues of workmanship and materials found to be at fault of the roofers. They went out yesterday and whatever the issue it is apparently one that is not covered by warranty. They're probably shifting the blame to the air duct work. I don't really know, but the woman who answers the phone gives me 2 word answers and says they'll send me an estimate when the owner of the company gets back in town...

2) PESTS. Yes, it is a 50 + year old attached row house. Yes, I recognize we will have pests no matter how clean we keep the place. However, it seems that my pest issues are always just slightly more gruesome than most. Sunday, I'm sitting on the kitchen floor playing with Leila and her train tracks when something catches my eye hanging out of the bottom of the dishwasher. I catch Cesar coming up the stairs from the basement and say "look down there, does that look like a mouse's tail to you." He looks and says "yeah, no, I think it may be a cable..." but puts on a latex glove and gives it a tug and sure enough, a nice, dried, rotting tail snaps off between his fingers. We had no clue how to get into the bottom of the washer to access the rest of the corpse and I had to go in search of the Kenmore manual. Finally figured it out and it was clear to our noses that the little guy had been there a while. Accompanied by a fair smattering of droppings and cockroach carcasses. Thank god for the suction of my Dyson's hose b/c I'd be do squeamish to clean it out otherwise.

I've been wondering how long...

...it would take her to discover mom's lipstick.
The real deal. Not chapstick.

Well, as real of a deal as $3.95 Rimmel gloss from Target is.

Leila Takes Manhattan

Or not...
Granted, and lesson learned, that 45 minute drive from Hartford to New Haven and 2 hour Metro North ride to Grand Central is a long one.

And mom... is just a big old geek like always!

Wonderland Weekend

As my friend and former colleague Morgan, who is way younger than me, said in response to my telling her we were going to take Leila to Lancaster, PA to do Dutch Wonderland last weekend: "that didn't exist when I did that family trip." I was initially surprised to learn about this pleasantly refreshing amusement park too, but anyone who's on the DC area parents' blogs and listservs does know that it exists. Now I had plenty of fun back in the day at Kings Dominion as a tween and teener, but my perspective on amusement parks now (all those large, sweaty, sticky people in jean shorts and fannie packs crushed together in hours' long lines...) probably tends toward the negative. And that is why I refer to Dutch Wonderland as pleasantly refreshing. I'm glad we didn't take Leila at any younger than age 3, but I can see her enjoying it for another 5 years or so. The park is nicely contained and laid out with plenty of shady trees. We started on a miniature version of the Strasburg railroad that looped around the park so we could get an idea of where the rides, shows and concessions were laid out. Yeah, the map would have given us that too, but the train's the first thing you hit once you go through the castle walls to enter the park. It took Leila a little while to get her stride, and the Frog Hopper ride she next went on traumatized her a bit (think a mini-bungee effect.) She probably would have been fine had one of us been on it with her, but I didn't think the shoulder harness would clear my frame. She adamantly refused to get on many rides after that, but she came back around after seeing the "Frog Prince" show, which combines the typical Princess kisses the frog and breaks the spell story with some pretty spectacular (even to an adult) diving routines. Actually, she probably enjoyed the shows more than anything else, but we got her on the log flume with us after that, then the merry go round and the sky gondola thing that crosses the park etc... It was crowded, but we didn't wait more than 5 minutes in line for anything but the log flume, and that was only about 15. I had her bathing suit in a back pack, but we did not venture into the water park. Cesar and I didn't have our suits on, and I couldn't see her doing anything by herself aside from maybe standing in a fountain, and that just didn't seem worth the hassle.

We did spend the night there because I wanted to take her on the real Strasburg Railroad and see some countryside on Sunday, but the trip from DC and back could totally be managed in a (long) day. Especially with the GPS in the car - man I've learned to love that thing and follow it with blind faith in a very short time after denying Cesar one for years. We also wanted some time to hit the outlets. We stayed at the Country Inn and Suites, literally across from the park and next to the Tanger outlets. It was more than we should spend on a weekend, but perfectly reasonable for 2 Queen beds and a living room suite. We wanted to watch the Olympics Saturday night, so I found us a sports bar in downtown Lancaster in an old tobacco warehouse that had individual TVs at each booth. For a sports bar, the food wasn't half bad. We shared fried mozzarella that was coated in pretzels instead of breadcrumbs and served w/ dijon mustard sauce and I had a "Pittsburgh Salad", which was greens topped with flank steak and french fries(!!) is that perfection on a plate, or what?

The only downer to the weekend was coming home Sunday when Leila finally announced to us at 2:30 that she was hungry for lunch (we'd downed a bag of kettle corn around 12:30) and it had to be McDonald's of course, so we stopped at one in Timonium, MD. MICE. MICE. MICE. In broad daylight in the indoor play area. Lord only knows what was in the kitchen, but it was about the grungiest McDs I've ever been in. I refused to take Leila in the bathroom. Thankfully, I didn't see the vermin, but trust Cesar's reporting. I'd already done my best to curb Leila's interst in the play area b/c those places just creep me out as a rule. Cesar took her in while I waited for the food to prove to her it was too dirty then came back to me to say he'd seen 3 or 4 mice peaking out of the equipment. EWWWWWWWWWW.

National Book Fair Sept. 27

Think that's the date at least, but due to my small brain content at this hour of night, I may be off a digit or two from the time I read Sunday's Book World (on Wednesday) to the time I got upstairs to write this. It's whatever the last Saturday in September is. I haven't yet been to this annual event, despite the fact that my adopted Godmother spearheaded it in its first two years, but this is the year. Here are just a few of the participants: Phillipa Gregory (gasp, sigh, gasp, mmmm... The Other Boleyn Girl), Geraldine Brooks (made the plague truly fascinating and March, about the absent dad in Little Women, amazing as well), Salman Rushdie (!!! Favorite. Author. Ever!!!) Neil Gaiman (and I'm not a comic geek, but loved the mythology of American Gods) David Maraniss (yeah, don't think I can claim to reading one of his full length books, but still..) Anyway... that is a pretty amazing lineup and yes, I'm a book geek, but I'll be begging my dad to go with me. In the meantime, Cesar is blaming me for encouraging librarian tendencies in 3 year old Leila by taking her to the library one night a week. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than Barnes & Noble I say!

A Husband Funny

Cesar looks at me at dinner last night while Leila's in the midst of a face turning purple temper tantrum b/c she was corrected for showing us the couscous on her tongue repeatedly and says for the 2nd time in as many days: "Babe, I think we need to go to church." And I say, "OK, we can check out St. Rita's sometime. They probably have a Sunday school." And he replies in all seriousness, " I think we need to go to church because she has a devil in her." Yep, and that devil is named "THREE." I'm totally open to visiting a church for the community and ritual of it, but for exorcising my normal (I think!) toddler, not so much!