This week hopefully will be a better week than last week was. I was doing ok last week until Wednesday afternoon. That was when the mixed episode began to hit. The mixed episode ate up Thursday, Friday, and most of Saturday. The weird weather we had over the weekend gave me a migraine that lasted a couple of days, that made doing stuff even harder. On top of that, we had the glorious disaster of the kids' room that had to get cleaned up. They worked all weekend on it. It's still not done, but you can at least see the floor. This is what you get when you don't do chores for two weeks and give them a ton of stuff to play with in addition to what they already had. So, the week and weekend were pretty challenging.
On the new and exciting front, Beloved picked up a new vacuum cleaner. It may not be exciting for most people, but I'm glad for it. Our old one is busted, again, and just makes a horrible noise as you run it. I think part of it is the thing needs professional servicing by someone who has more skills than I do. It sat for the better part of ten years going unused because the children have auditory processing issues due to their autism and they were terrified of the sound it made. Only within the last year have they gotten to the point where they can tolerate the sound of a vacuum cleaner. We burned through three electric sweepers over that course of time. Much quieter and less effective cleaning tool, but at least it was something.
With the new landlord making an effort to fix and clean up this place, I'm vaguely worried about my rent going up. My FIL keeps insisting that is what's going to happen. Beloved tells me his father's likely wrong about this because the landlord is working with us to do things like get the entryway sorted out and such. There's a chance that our busted sink will finally get fixed. That would be fantastic because this is the other thing that the children are terrified of. It isn't vented properly and as such makes a horrendous gurgling noise randomly. The kids may be ten and twelve, but they're still terrified of the sink. It wouldn't be so bad if it had been this way from day one. I think they'd have had some tolerance for it by now if so. But, I guess it was about four years ago we had a downstairs neighbor who fancied himself a handyman. He decided he was going to 'fix' the plumbing and made a gods awful mess out of it all. That was when the gurgling business started.
I'm pretty sure there's some valve somewhere in the plumbing that is set to closed that is the reason why the thing has this problem. The problem is, no one knows what it is to fix because the plumbing is a mess down there. But, back to the gurgling thing, the kids didn't have this gurgling going on from day one of being in here. It started as a thing when they were cognizant that scary things exist. Since then, it's been as much if not more of a source of terror as the vacuum cleaner because it is loud as fuck and random. The kids now can somewhat tolerate the vacuum cleaner because we've got 'ear defenders' (they can wear headphones/a pair of earmuffs to quiet the sound of it) and they have learned that it can't harm them at all.
I think it helped that they watched me take the thing apart and service it as best I could. I explained what the parts were as I was working and did my best to explain how they worked. It took the thing from a big scary monster to a noisy machine. Noisy machines are ok, though they don't like all of them up close. The biggest problem with vacuuming now is the fact that there is stuff all over the place here that needs to be purged or somehow put up this way I can actually clean the apartment properly. Hence the big push with the kids on their room this weekend. I hope that by the end of the month, we can have this place fully clean and I just have to do light maintenance on it all with a moderate cleaning session once a week. It's a work in progress. The bribery of allowance helps some but Beloved and I still have to sit and watch them work. I know they'll eventually mature out of stopping in the middle of the job to play with the latest toy they discovered.
This week's dinner menu is pretty simple. The kids are having breakfast at school all week and lunch there as well. Beloved's been having leftovers and ramen for his lunches. I've been working on leftovers as well.
Sunday - Pizza
Monday - Burgers and carrot salad
Tuesday - Tacos / Taco salad
Wednesday - Chicken nuggets
Thursday - Pasta with meatballs
Friday - Pizza meatloaf
Saturday - Chili
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