Mute Magic and Other Musings

Every now and then homeownership becomes more of a burden than a privilege. Lately it has felt like that. Yesterday I decided I wanted to clean out the gutters so my husband helped me set up the ladder and I pulled out all the leaves and branches which had accumulated over the last year. It wasn’t hard, but it’s not glamorous work, especially when it’s 100 degrees outside. My one small victory is that everything I pull out of the gutter goes straight into my composter. As I discovered years ago, the gutter is a wonderful place for compost to decompose, but an abomination to water flow when full of compost. 

When I got to my last downspout, I saw that a lot of the debris had piled on top of the opening. Chances are it was inside the downspout, too. So we proceeded to unhook our rain barrel hose attachment and I watched this brick of compost slide down the inside of the gutter. Unfortunately for us, it got stuck on the way down so we had to unscrew the bottom of the gutter and jiggle it out. It was like our gutter pooped out some compost. 

Look at the color of that dirt. Believe it or not, it came out of my gutter.

See how dark that color is? It’s quite extraordinary. Im pretty sure the quality of that soil is better than the quality of potting mix I purchased from the store. As I mentioned earlier, wonderful place for decomposition to occur, but a nightmare for drainage. 

While unclogging the gutter, I also discovered a leak in our hose. It must’ve happened that afternoon in the heat because I had just used the hose that morning and everything was fine. Well, that was a bummer. However, the hose has a lifetime warranty so I was able to claim that and receive some money back for it. I actually still have the original receipt from 7 years ago. 

They require a picture of your house taken out of commission.
If you look carefully, you can see where it burst.

Later in the evening, I noticed our kitchen sink was falling down. It's an undermount sink so it's glued to the underside of our kitchen counter. Of course it would be ours that falls down within six years of being installed. Ironically, we used a car jack stand which was almost the perfect height to prop the kitchen sink back up so it wouldn't be half dangling in the cabinet. The saddest part is it would be cheaper for us to buy another jack stand to use for the car than to hire someone to come out and reglue the kitchen sink. So what's the trade-off? We lose a good portion of our under-sink cabinet storage space. 

You can't really tell that something is holding up our sink....right?

For now, this is going to do because we have no desire to drop hundreds of dollars to pay someone to reglue our kitchen sink, especially not because we found a quick fix that does exactly the same thing for $0 cost to us for now. Eventually down the road or one day when we sell the house, it'll need to be done, but for now, we'll just lose a portion of our cabinet space. 

That evening after bath time, I decided to play a little game with my daughter. Instead of speaking to her, I started mouthing words to her. I'd see the videos on social media where parents mess with their kids and trick them into thinking they're deaf to their parents voices. Or that they've become invisible. While that wasn't my goal, I was curious what she would do. So for the rest of the evening as I got her ready for bed, I didn't say anything audible. She could see my mouth moving and mouthing words, and someone who has a strong sense of lip reading could have communicated with me almost perfectly. But you know what conclusion I found? Bedtime was smoother than it normally is. On any other day she likes to give me a lot of nonsense about using the toilet before bed or brushing her own teeth instead of letting me help her or wanting specific items in her room put in specific places. That night was the easiest, most straightforward, she's ever gone to bed. 

Now parents, I'm not suggesting you go mute on your children and expect them to behave 5x better than normal. But I am proposing the idea that the best listening skills sometimes come out when there is "nothing" to listen to. 

It's been quite the week, y'all.