April Showers Bring Mo' Problems

May 3

May 3 April Showers Bring Mo' Problems

You know the saying “April showers bring May flowers”? I really felt that last month. It was a very challenging month for us, both mentally and physically. It took all the strength I had to summon up the ghost of Biggie Smalls, twist his lyrics around a playful proverb and bask in the ultimate wetness that April had in store for us.

It all started when I decided to renovate our front yard with all my newfound freetime. The plan was to rip out all of the grass and replace it with some perennial plants and a garden box. Easy peasy right? Mentally planning things out, I thought it would take roughly 2 weeks to finish the entire renovation. Things started out smoothly as I started shoveling out patches of lawn. Dare I say, even a bit of good fortune crossed my path as my cousin told me he’d like to take the lawn off of my hands!

If you’ve never torn out grass to transplant it somewhere else, you may not realize what a pain it is...I was tempted to rent a sod cutter to make quick work of the process, but with the coronavirus being such an undefined issue at the time, I was trying to limit my exposure in public settings. As such, meticulously cutting shovel-sized pieces of sod to neatly roll up for my cousin would have to do.

Three days in and all of the grass was gone. I was basically like halfway done! In a few more days I had finished tilling the ground, built a sturdy garden box, created a beauty of a retaining wall out of concrete blocks and set up the drip system for the garden box. Things were going smoothly. A little too smoothly. A little too slippery you might say. It was at this point my luck started to runneth over in mounds and mounds of flowing bad fortune...

As I capped off the last sprinkler head and got ready to try out the drip system for the first time, I was smiling. I tried to curb my anticipation. I knew I’d have to adjust something to stop dripping. You never get things right the first time. But I wasn’t ready for the adjustment in store. I turned out the drip system and the earth around my garden box started to liquefy. Water was bubbling from the ground as I scrambled to turn off the system and find the source. Apparently in my effort to effectively till our lawn, I must have ruptured a sprinkler line. That sucks...but that’s a minor setback! Right? I just have to dig it out, cut out the broken section and glue a new section back in. After a few trips to Home Depot, things were back in order. At least for a little bit.

I turned my attention back to installing the rest of the drip line and noticed that the water main access on our parking strip was leaking water. Well shit...I called up my dad and we spent the next 5 hours trying to identify the source. After sucking out all of the water in the access point, we found a small leak going into our water meter on the city side. That means we didn’t have to pay! At least not directly we would find out…

The city came out and fixed our water main. Turns out our water pressure was a lot lower than it should have been. We had slowly gotten used to low water pressure in our house. Everything was back on schedule! I started planting more plants and the yard was soooo close to being done. I got done working on the yard last Friday night and we joined a virtual hang session with our friends. I was ready to unwind for the weekend. And then Sophie felt water under her foot. Weird. One of us must have knocked our water bottle over. Oh well, let’s watch a movie. Squish. Even weirder...another spot where one of us spilled water. As we kept trying to cling to denial, our socks were getting wetter and wetter. We finally opened the utility room to discover the horrors we would inevitably have to face…

You know all that newfound water pressure we got? Well it came at a price. The price of our homeowner’s insurance deductible. We ended up spending the next week finding the problem, having our basement professionally cleaned and having the faulty device replaced. We are still in the middle of replacing the damaged floors. With every step we took forward, we were taking three muddy steps backward.

Last week we finally started seeing the light at the end of our watery septic tunnel though. After 4 ½ weeks of arduous labor and torrential torment, I finished the front yard! Well almost...April had one more middle finger to give me in the form of a leaky garden box line. I had to dig out the line I installed two weeks ago, replace the leaky components and refill the box. I ended up going to Home Depot like 14 times last month. No kidding. I counted. So much for social freaking distancing.

Sophie lost her office temporarily so she gets to work from home in our dining room that we call hell. Count how many things are wrong with this picture!

Things are looking up for us though. Sophie is getting bigger each day and we have less than 45 days before the baby comes! Looking back on April, despite all of the twists and turns we encountered, it has been incredibly enjoyable spending time with Sophie. We have been eating dinner with each other and hanging out almost every night. I’m sure that’s pretty common for most of you, but as a bartender, it’s been a new habit we have gotten into. It’s going to be hard to go back to work…

Speaking of work, I have been officially laid off from the Montage. It must have been due to my previous blog post. Okay not really, it was probably due to a lack of business because of some pesky virus. Whatever the case, I won’t be working there at least for the near future. I’m welcome back once business picks up though. As states begin to slowly open up their economies again, I am anxious thinking about the future. I’ve talked to the managers at Undercurrent and they are good with me coming back to work after we have the baby. I just hope that we don’t see a spike in cases and have to go through a second wave of shut downs…

April, you’ve been a month to remember. I learned a lot from you and...I’m ready for summer.