MaeLyn's Musings

There is a place we named the Playroom when our kids were small.  It was a magical space where the kids had fun! There are hazards to keeping things in this space. It is outdoors, although it has a roof.  When it rains a lot, it can flood.  When it snows, the snow blows in. A squirrel once thought that a cloth pumpkin decoration we stored there would make a great nest! In spite of the hazards, as the kids got older and played out there less, the space became more of a storage space than a play space. Occasionally we would clean it up...  (Picture from 2008) but it always got dirty and messy again. The fence got old and started to lean and sway. The gate got harder to close. The green indoor/outdoor carpet got old and stained and frayed. We started to remove it bit by bit and discovered that the concrete underneath it was cracked and ugly. The whole space was cluttered and crowded. It wasn't a place we wanted to hang out in anymore. It wasn't even a place we wanted to...

One day a couple months ago, I looked into the kids' shower. I don't usually do that. It's kind of gross.  I have these unrealistic thoughts that since they're the ones who use it, they should be the ones to clean it, and they believe that some magical fairy is going to clean it for them, and that's never actually happened. But anyway the point is that I looked into it.  I'm not sure now exactly what I was looking for. I think maybe I was making my shopping list and I was looking to see if I needed to buy more shampoo for them. Anyway, I noticed that there was a tile loose. I wiggled it a little, and it fell right out, revealing a hole in the wall board behind it, and a whole bunch of mildew. Ick! Josh helped remove the old tile I had no idea how long the tile had been loose. When I mentioned it to the kids, they told me it had been like that for months. "And you never told anyone?" I asked. "Well, no. I only think about it when I'm in...

Roses Steven gave me for my birthday. Friday, May 30th I woke with energy, ready for anything... I thought. The day before had been my birthday and I had taken things easy. I hadn't cleaned the house. I hadn't washed laundry. I hadn't even done the dishes, and there were a lot from baking a cake, and muffins, and stuff. To add to the excitement, we were planning on going camping that evening, so we needed to pack and prepare for an overnight trip. I had energy. I had most of the day. I could do this! My attitude lasted until after breakfast when I headed to the laundry room to clean out the cat's litter box, and noticed that what was usually a small amount of dry litter that the cats had kicked out of the box, was a thick, oozy mud that caked the floor surrounding the water heater. Remembering the puddle of water I had found on the pantry floor the evening before (and tossed a towel over and forgotten) I realized that our ancient water heater had finally sprung a...

I lifted the lever on the faucet to turn it on a few days ago and, as expected, water poured from the spout and into the sink. I noticed, however, an unexpected trail of water leaking from the hose at the base of the pullout spout and dribbling down over the base of the faucet. I didn't look, but I knew there was probably water dripping down the hose as well, and into the cabinet beneath the sink. Years ago, I had lined the bottom of the cupboard with leftover linoleum from our kitchen floor to protect the wood which was already warped from water damage from other faucets with similar issues. At the moment, I was glad that it was there. I had liked this faucet. I liked how I could pull out the nozzle to spray the inside of pots, or fill a pitcher of water even when the sink was crowded with dishes waiting to be washed. I liked how I could change the water pressure depending on whether I wanted to spray stuck on scum from dirty plates, or gently fill a tablespoon for a recipe. But...

Yesterday I was on the computer around noon working on some things when I noticed something odd.  I was really cold! My hands were shaking because they were so  very cold.  I checked to see if someone had turned down the thermostat, but no, it was still set between 65 and 70 degrees. The actual temperature, however, was about 55 degrees! I told Steven what was going on, and checked the pilot light on the heater and made sure the switch was on. I had heard the heater earlier making an odd buzzing sound, I knew the gas was going on and the heater was running off and on, but there was no warm air blowing through the vents.  Finally we decided to call an acquaintance who owns a heating and cooling company. He agreed to come check it out when he got a chance, since he already had several appointments already scheduled for the day. He arrived around 5pm to take a look.  He determined that the fan motor was shot and needs to be replaced. For the time, he...

I'm not usually one to make an $800 expenditure on a whim, especially when money has been so tight... but what else do you do when your washing machine breaks down? Yesterday, I was washing my normal load-a-day of laundry, and at one point the washer sounded a little odd, but I just thought it was slightly off balance or something. When I went to transfer it to the dryer, the clothes were still dripping wet - and obviously dirty! I ended up rinsing everything out in the sink, scrubbing a few spots by hand, wringing it as dry as I could, and then sticking it in the dryer. In the bottom of the washing machine there remained several inches of dirty water. I tried messing with the controls, putting it on spin cycle, hoping that would drain it, but it didn't, and I noticed an odor, kind of like my hair dryer smells sometimes, like an electric burning smell. My guess is that the pump that pumps the water out burnt out. I eventually managed to figure out how to drain the old machi...

We moved our old sofa into the newly cleaned up playroom/patio on Saturday. By yesterday morning, the kids had arranged the area to their taste, and had made themselves at home. (Despite the smiling faces, most of them weren't particularly pleased that I interrupted their card game to take a picture.)

Describe your room as a child. Did you have your own room or have to share it with a sibling? Tell some experiences. I shared a room for all but one month of my childhood. Usually, I shared a room with my older sister, Lindy. Sometimes, this was a lot of fun. We would stay up late talking. We would play games together. On the days that we had to good clean our bedrooms, we would do puppet shows for each other, using the end of our bunk bed as a stage. (The bed was pulled away from the wall so we could change the sheets... It probably took a lot longer than it needed to.)  One night after bedtime, we were playing a game, trying to scare each other. At one point I left the room to use the bathroom or something, and when I came back, I thought that Lindy had given up the game and gone to sleep. I got in my bed and tried to go to sleep myself. Just as I was drifting off, someone reached out from the little space between the edge of my bed and the wall (I think I was sleeping on the...

You: What did you do today? Me: The usual,... Got up, got the kids to school, went to institute, took apart the dishwasher, ate lunch... You: You took apart your dishwasher? Me: Yeah. You: Why on earth would you do that????? Well, it's like this. Our clothes dryer isn't the only appliance in the house that we've had issues with. A couple weeks ago we had a friend in our ward come over and look at our hot water heater to figure out why we've only been getting about 1 1/2 showers worth of hot water lately. He replaced a pipe, and it's working great now, but he also said something like the heater had a six year warranty and it's about twelve years old now, so we'll probably need to think about replacing it some time soon. This was how the dishes looked AFTER the wash cycle! The dishwasher has also had issues. It's only about three years old ( how I know ), but I go back and forth between washing things in the dishwasher because it's easier, ...

It's funny how you don't really appreciate something until you lose it, but it is true. Oddly, the opposite is also true - you don't really realize how bad something was until it suddenly becomes wonderful. I have been having trouble with my dryer for months. It usually took 2 - 2 1/2  hours to dry a load of laundry, and then suddenly, even that wasn't doing it. At the end of the cycle, the clothes were still wet and I had to run it a second, even a third time to get completely dry. Also, the dryer started making loud squeaking noises every time the drum turned. A couple months ago I strung up clothes lines, because clothes got dry just as fast (and a lot more quietly) drip drying as they did in the dryer. Then the weather got cold and hanging clothes outside resulted in things like this: Steven was an angel and tried to help. We tested to see if the dryer was getting hot, and it did seem to be hot when I tested it after it had been running a few minutes, but ...