Sorry I have been remiss in writing. I was suffering from PTVO - Post Traumatic Volunteer Overload and bathroom remodeling hell(I'll get into that later). I'm sure many of you reading this have experienced it. Especially when your kids go to different schools. It's all well and good in the beginning of the school year. You are refreshed from the summer break. You have all the best intentions. You want to help.You sign up for this committee and that board etc. etc... It seems harmless. You can handle it. After all, we have so much free time right?! (ha-ha) It was somewhat manageable up until the kids got back from winter vacation- then the floodgates burst. Two fundraising gala/auctions on back to back Saturdays. If you attend these auctions, but are not involved in the planning, you have no earthly idea how much work is involved to pull off one of these events. It takes an army of Moms working for months-each assigned to a specific duty- to have it run smoothly. One of my schools has it down pat. It is still a tremendous amount of work, but these women are like a well oiled machine. The same group has run it for years. The other group, though well intentioned, was filled with mostly first time volunteers and not very many of them at that. When that happens, hours upon hours are eaten up batting around idea after idea. Disagreements are common place and I always take it upon myself to be a buffer in between clashing personalities. It is exhausting. My blood pressure probably went up about 30 points. The good thing is, in the end, both auctions raised well over a hundred thousand dollars and I lost 20 pounds. Stress does have its virtues.
Now onto to my never ending bathroom remodel. I ended up having to gut my 1980's style master bathroom due to a huge leak. I thought, it shouldn't take long- it's just a bathroom. Wrong. I haven't had a master bathroom for going on 4 months! Now I know why people hire contractors. Just getting people to show up for work is a job unto itself! My plumber comes for literally 8 minutes at a time to do one little thing- then he is off to another job-never completing mine. He totally overbooks himself. I can't withhold payment, because he doesn't even want it until the job is complete, which at this rate, might be in early 2015! He is what I like to call an Eeyore. You know the sad sack donkey from the Winnie The Pooh stories. His attitude is pitiful. He is nice, but at a certain point you dread speaking with him because you don't want to hear anymore complaints about how bad his life is. His unhappiness is exactly why my bleeding heart can't fire him. Finally, as he was nearing the end of months of plumbing work that someone else would have finished in a couple of days- he fell in a hole on another job and broke his leg. Thus, I am still bathing in my kids bathroom with a duck faucet cover. Painting the damn room is another horror story. I hired someone to paint the room at 130 dollars a day. I thought, at most it would take 2 days- the walls were already patched and mostly sanded. Well, on day 5 -he was still not done! Only one coat was on and the toilet closet only had primer on it. You probably already know this-Never pay someone by the day. I learned my lesson the hard way. I fired him, but now I'm 650 in and my bathroom is still not done being painted. I feel like an over trusting idiot. At this point, I probably could have gone to trade school and learned how to be a handy-woman and done all this crap myself, but I don't have the time, I'm too busy volunteering at school.
