the "vacation," part IV

(read part I, part II, part III)

When we got into town, we called our friends, and found out that the clean-up crew recommended calling a plumber as soon as possible, since what was leaking into our basement was actually sewage.  Which explained why the water level was going down so slowly.  The sewer pipe was blocked.  So the water would get pumped out by the sump pump, dumped into the laundry tub, and then flow directly back into the blocked sewer pipe, then back into our basement, in some kind of circle of death.  Resourceful things that we are, we booked the plumber for 9 am the next morning, scheduled the clean-up crew to come back after he was done, and went to the county fair.  Bam.

The county fair was one of the most fun things I have ever done in my life.  Here are some things you should know if you find yourself at one:

1. The Gravitron will make you want to throw up, even if you could go on it 10 times in a row when you were a kid.
2. If you ask whether there are any animals at a county fair, the people will look at you like you are a mutant.  Of course there are animals.  It's a county fair.
3. You don't actually need to tell the woman letting you pet her baby bull that you are from New York City. She already knows that.  By how you want to pet her bull, and how you are afraid of its tongue.
4. There is a relatively large market for handmade potholders, and wooden signs specifying that coffee is 5 cents.
5. In a tractor race, the tractors just go one at a time and then try to beat the time of the other tractors.  So watching is kind of boring.

(we are all actually as afraid as we look)

After a full day at the county fair, our happy, sweaty, countrified selves piled into the car and started to drive back home, listening to country music and eating Slim Jims.  

When we were about halfway home, it started to rain a little.  Which would have been fine, except that I had pulled the fuse on the windshield wipers, remember?  So Kathy pulled over and started to get out.  "STOP!!!" I screamed.  "My dad says you should never open your door on the side of the freeway!! What are you thinking?  I will have to just put it back in with you sitting there."  Kathy disagreed, and said she should just get out of my way, but I won.  The fuse box on our car is underneath the dashboard on the driver's side.  Which means that I had to lean across the car, put my head in Kathy's lap, and rummage around under the dark dashboard, to try to put the fuse back in.  

"What are you doing down there?  We're going to get arrested," Kathy said, after about 10 minutes of me rummaging around between her legs as she tried to stay out of my way.

"Fixing the car.  Be quiet."  The kids did not know what was so funny.  Then, my sunglasses, which were perched on top of my head, slid down over my face, plunging me into darkness, and I dropped the fuse down a hole. 

The good news is, all this took so long that it had quit raining.  Kathy got out (I know! How dangerous!) and pushed the windshield wipers up with her hand to clear the windshield.  Apparently you can only push them up, not down, so she had to finish the trip peering through a triangle made by the windshield wipers.  Whoops.  

As we neared home, Kathy suggested that I call our house-sitting friends and arrange to meet them at a local bar/restaurant so we could feed the kids and put them to bed, which sounded like a great idea to me.  They were apparently on a bar crawl in our small town, so this sounded like a great idea to them, too.  I imagine after 4 drinks anything sounds like a great idea.  We thought we should probably stop home first though, because (1) I smelled horrible from sweating all day, and thought I should at least cover the smell with a clean sweatshirt, (2) we wanted to check on the house, and (3) we wanted to switch cars, in case it started raining again.  We dashed into the house, and the second we opened the door we could hear water.

Kathy ran down to the basement, and apparently the sump pump hose had sprung a leak, and was SPRAYING POOP WATER ALL OVER OUR BASEMENT.  Nice.  We unplugged it, and just left.  Because we couldn't handle it.  We got into the other car, and I got behind the wheel.  As we were driving down a hill near our house, Kathy said, "Watch out for that cat."  Which wasn't a cat.  It was a skunk.  And it sprayed the car.  

I'm not kidding.  I can't make this stuff up.

TO BE CONTINUED...