Hell Week.  A common term for college folk (which I haven’t been in quite a few years) was experienced at my house in a whole new way last week.  I’ll give you a brief run-down so if my posts seem a bit scattered and I really make a grave spelling error, you will maybe forgive me.

It all started when a storm came and blew a breaker, turning off the oven while I was in the middle of baking a pie.  Only I didn’t know it was a blown breaker so I thought we were out of propane and got my husband to go order more.  Then we noticed the air conditioner had stopped.  It is reaching close to 90 every day now.  Not cool.  Literally.  So Addie decides to see if Stripe-Stripe, my beloved pet chicken, can swim.  She almost died therefore I missed the customer appreciation land bank dinner because I had a hypothermic chicken pressed against my breast.  Wet feathers are cold feathers.  A couple of days later while I was snoozing soundly in the barn, the only place with A/C, my husband comes barreling in yelling about the weather at 5:30 in the morning.  We get the kids up and leave our tin mansion because a very unfriendly looking funnel cloud was hovering quite near by.  The sky was black, the wind was howling and suddenly everything got green and perfectly still.  I was mentally making a checklist, at the top of which was “Did I drop off that house insurance check last week?”  I had and thankfully all we lost were some tree limbs and some sleep.  Then school was canceled because they had no power.  About the same time we get a letter saying my darling 15 year-old stepson is failing 4 classes due to missing assignments he didn’t bother to mention until now.  The next day I go to work with my husband, a farrier, we get all the way to our first horse and he realizes he left all his tools in the trailer at home, 40 minutes away.  So we had to go back, which put him in an extremely foul humor.  I bake a little, on the side, for extra income so had 12 dozen sweet treats to bake which took up all of Sunday morning and most of Sunday afternoon.  That was the only thing that went better than expected all week.  They were really tasty and delivered without any issues.  After the tornado, work disaster, chicken near-drowning, a/c death, bad news letter and sweet treat delivery we had to kick it in gear and decapitate, skin and ice down 100 pounds of broilers because I refused to deal with them any longer.  Don’t mess with me.  I’m wicked you know.

THEN.  Guess what.

I come home and walk into my outside kitchen and it smells like something died from eating an overdose of skunk scat.  I thought it was the trash so I took it out, lit a candle, left the door open and came back 30 minutes later.  Worse.  I walk over to my 3 compartment sink.  All 3 are 1/3 full of sewage.  The line was backed up and filling the SINK.  Gross doesn’t cover it.  Off I run to town at 6:45 in the evening for some liquid plumber.  20 dollars, 2 bottles and 8 hours later it solved the problem but I still had to clean the sinks, tripled bleaching them before attacking with pinesol and lysol and every other ‘sol’ I could find.

And my phone stopped charging.  And I went to a biker rally.  And I gained 5 pounds.  And I’m hot.  But the insurance adjuster is coming by Monday.

Good thing I paid them after all.

Stripe-Stripe is glad she made it.

So am I.