Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Really, I am usually pretty fun

So - I haven't posted in almost a month... wow, where did the time go?

Hmmm. Husband travelling. Hockey practices and tournaments, ballet classes, illness, mornings at school, school council shenanigans (oh our lovely treasurer!! He is a post all on his own, I really need to get to that one!)... in other words, life in general.

Remember our evil contractor ??? On Friday he served me with papers from Small Claims Court. He is claiming the money from the cheque that we put a stop payment on (since we had to use it to pay someone else to FINISH the job) as well as - get this! - an additional $960 for three days he claims he never billed us!! Absurd!! We were paying him every week (like the idiots we were!) so unless there are days he was here that I wasn't I don't know where that could come from... he's so frickin crooked, or so frickin stupid if he can't bill people properly.

Of course we have no bills from him, no additional quote for the "extra" work he claimed should take no more than a handful of days etc. And we will be filing a defence thank you very much. We've already had a technician (from an authorized dealer) regarding the air exchanger that he spend 3 days moving and "fixing". Guess what? To move it should have taken 4.5 hours. And by the way - the reason that the previous owner, real estate agent and the house inspector said it didn't work was because THE ENGINE HAD SEIZED - a long time ago. So tricking us into thinking he'd "fixed" it was pretty low - no?

I know, I am an idiot. By the end I would have done anything to get him out of my house.

Well that started on Friday night (because hey - let's serve you at 5pm on a Friday when you can't do anything but stew about it for the weekend!).

Saturday was actually a great day... our friends Myles and Cathie were in town from Luxembourg (on their way to a family wedding in the Dominican Republic, I am so hoping Cathie reads this while drinking a mojito for me!) and came by for dinner (smoked meat, birthday cake and hockey playoffs... good fun!). It was so so so good to see them, it had been going on two years (longer for Myles as he was in Afghanistan when we left Luxembourg) and yet it felt like no time had passed.

Saturday also brought about two new additions to our family... Josie and Minuit, two 5 week old kittens who were rescued from between a shed and a fence where their mother had given birth to them. They are adorable... Josie is black and white and Minuit is completely black - for now at least, there is obviously some tabby in them waiting to come out.

Sunday was good but things went wrong at 10 pm when Josie managed to get her claws in my eyeball. Ouch. (I don't know, it's me, these things just happen to me. What can I say). A visit to the pharmacy resulted in a visit to the ER room (holy cow, those pharmacists can really scare you!). Oh the joy of finding the ER in the dark, especially since someone at our hospital has a strange sense of humour, staggering signs all over the place so you are never sure where to go... the wait to see a doctor was 7+ hours (!!) so the triage nurse and I decided I could come back in the morning, since I would probably only be an hour or two later than if I sat there all night.

So back I went Monday morning and waited 4.5 hours to be told that there was a tiny scratch on my cornea, that most of it was in the white of my eye and here was a prescription for antibiotic drops should I get an infection, which I probably wouldn't (and don't have so far- yippee!). I could launch into a diatribe about what is wrong with the Canadian medical system but really - what would it accomplish? Our healthcare sucks.

Monday afternoon - migraine!! Oh the fun!

Monday night to Tuesday morning - Julia up with a cold and high fever.

Tuesday - Julia home. Now I have the fever.

Tuesday night to Wednesday morning - WHY are there 4 people sleeping in my bed? And what is lodged in my throat.

Wednesday - everyone but Marc home sick. Why are sick kids so loud?

I know, fun times people, fun times. I think I need to put it all down some days to realize why I never get anything done around here.

And now back to laundry... that I am getting through!! Thank heavens for small mercies!