Oh, What a Night.

So yesterday I spent the day at the new teacher orientation, advertising for the company I work for. Rather successful day, lots of conversations, fun people.

Afterward I had to go to the Clerk of Court and do a search for a document showing a legal split of two lots that one of our buyers is trying to build on. Talk about a needle in a haystack. Microfilm? Are you kidding? Not successful.

Throughout the day I had tried to make some phone calls on my cell phone-- voicemails from work, phone call to Steph during a break, etc. The phone kept turning off by itself, full battery, mind you, periodically. By the end of the day it was staying on for no longer than 30 seconds. Argh. I'll need to go to the store AGAIN on Tuesday.

I got home around 4 (after leaving the house at 6:00 a.m.) and decided to put up those shelves in the laundry room. I figured I'd get a few brackets in the wall before Brad got home and we'd finish them up this weekend. Well, I got all 9 brackets up and even got the shelves in place when he walked in the door. We screwed the shelves into the brackets and admired our handywork. Three glorious long shelves, just brimming with potential.

We had dinner and then reorganized the "linen" closet in the hall. It's supposed to be a linen closet, but it has turned into the Cuisinart Closet due to all the appliances I've shoved in there-- food processor, rice cooker, blender, waffle iron, george foreman, tupperware stuff, paper plates-- the poor little 18 inch wide closet was filled up. So we cleaned it out, allocating all electrical appliances to our new shelves. "Why didn't we do this sooner?" Brad wondered aloud several times. We gazed at our handwork for a few minutes and then went off to relax.

I took a nice long bath with Aveeno bubble bath-- lavender and other yummy relaxing smells helped me take the worries of the day off my mind, and I had a great feeling of accomplishment. Around 9:30 we decided to watch Who's Line Is It Anyway, one of our favorite evening shows for it's lightheartedness, just before turning in for an early evening. We'd been up late Sunday night and up at 5 on Monday, so we were tired.

And then it happened.

About five minutes past ten we heard the most horrifiying crash as the two top shelves came out of the wall, anchors and all, and crashed to the floor.

Oh, it was just horrid.

The top shelf had my box-lid of precious vases, the forcing vases my dear friend Cornelia gave to me before she moved to Berlin, the bud vase Sandi gave me when first moved out on my own, the painted vase Kate gave me when she came for a visit once, the mint green vase my mom gave me that had the lid with the holes in it to help the flower-arranging-challenged... oh, I loved those vases. All broken.

The top shelf crashed down onto the second shelf, and then they both dove to the floor. Somewhere on those shelves was the waffle iron, george foreman, ice cream maker, and coffee grinder, among other things. Those are all ok, except for the lid for the ice cream maker-- that's broken. Oh, and the crock pot broke-- not the glass lid, but the ceramic crock insert-- shattered.

What a mess. Just a horrible mess. Glass everywhere-- I stepped in it barefoot and then instinctively wiped the sole of that foot across my other foot, drawing blood. We just stared in horror until it was finished falling.

Oh, and did I mention we had about four gallons of paint up there? Remember the gold hallway color we didn't like? Two whole gallons of that. Four quarts of varying khakis we didn't use. The leftover bathroom paint-- our 10th and final khaki. The leftover green from the guest suite. Thankfully, the leftover paint and the quarts didn't open, except for one quart of khaki which splatter-painted the laundry room door. Very 80's chic. But the two whole gallons of yellow paint opened and blanketed the floor with a lovely puddle of buttercream.

Brad ran to get a trash can from the garage to put all the glass in. A minute after he set it down an inch-long fat roach crawled into the mess to add his two cents. A quick whammo with my shoe took care of him quickly, but seriously, did we need to add a roach to the mix? I take comfort from the fact that he came from outside and wasn't hiding inside somewhere, at least.

I'll spare you the details of the cleanup. In short, we squeegeed the paint into a dustpan and then into a little trashcan that is now full of paint and glass shards. We then scrubbed the floor to get the dried bits out of the nooks and crannies of the linoleum's texture. Last we lifted up the clothes dryer to get the last puddle of paint out from under it.

Oh, what a night. It all ended around 12:30 p.m. I said a lot of bad words, I'm afraid. But they were all warranted, I assure you.

I think we're in a bit of a rough patch these days. Please be praying for us.