It....Gets....WORSE!!

By the time this week ended, our problems from last weekend seemed trivial!

Sunday night we went to bed hoping that the coming week would be better. How naive we were! I awoke at 1:37 a.m. to my alarm clock blinking. Hmm...I must have slept through a thunderstorm that disrupted the power. I got up, put on my glasses, and turned on the bedroom light to re-set my clock. UH-OH...the light was too dim to see the clock controls....WTF?! I went to the kitchen, where the lights were also dim. Then the lights brightened...for a couple of minutes, then they dimmed again. I called my parents, who live 2 blocks away, to see if they were having power problems. Nope, their power was fine. I then called the power company and reported my problem on an automated server. Within an hour, a line-truck was in our driveway. We were getting full power to the main entrance box on our pole. The problem was ours. SHIT!!

L and I stayed up the rest of the night. My alarm clock wouldn't work, so I didn't dare go back to sleep and miss getting up for work at 5:00 a.m. We had to manually open our garage doors to get the vehicles out of the garage, as there wasn't enough power for the door openers to work. I also went to my parents' house to pick up their dog, Shadow. My parents would be out of town for 3 days, so Shadow would be staying with us.

L called our electrician first thing Monday morning. He was also here within an hour, bless his heart!! He quickly found that we had full power coming out of our entrance box, BUT we were only getting 1/2 power at the other end of our underground line. This meant that the underground line needed to be replaced. Naturally, this is THE most expensive item that could have failed. By mid-afternoon Monday, we had 150 ft of new, conduit encased power line, running across the top of our yard. The picture above shows our lovely, new, gray yard ornament.

We're now waiting for the ditch-witch guy to come and bury the line. The grass had just started filling in over the trenching work from last summer, when they wired our garage. Now, next spring, we get to smooth out and seed an additional 150 ft of trenching.

By now I'll bet you're thinking that things can't get much worse, aren't you? WRONG!!
When I came home from work Tuesday, Shadow wanted to go out. I tied her out and didn't even make it to the kitchen before Hairry started frantically barking from his vantage point on our bed. I looked out the kitchen window and saw the dog that has been visiting us every couple of weeks for the last year. Shadow was on her hind legs, at the end of the chain, barking and snapping at the dog. I immediately went out and pulled Shadow back into the house. (For a background on Shadow's aggressive personality, check out my 12/3/06 post.)

Shadow laid down on the living room floor and started licking herself. It was raining at the time, so I didn't think anything of this behavior. Within a few minutes, Z came to me and said:"We've got a problem. Shadow needs to go to the vet!" Sure enough; Shadow's skin was flayed open from the middle of her chest to a point beneath her front left leg, about 7 inches long. I immediately called the vet. Unfortunately, our vet was at his other clinic....100 miles away! The vet's assistant called him, then told me to bring Shadow in so she could assess the wound.

The strange thing is, there was no blood! The stray dog had apparently attacked Shadow, but we hadn't heard ANY fight noises. Hairry discovered additional puncture wounds on the back of Shadow's neck.

The vet's assistant gave Shadow an antibiotic shot and wanted to keep her overnight, so the vet could stitch her up first thing Wednesday morning. I knew that Shadow wouldn't eat or rest while kenneled next to strange dogs, so I convinced the assistant to let me take her back home for the night. Hairry was a very attentive nurse to Shadow. He followed her around, with a worried look on his face, while licking the wounds on her neck.

L took Shadow back to the vet first thing Wednesday morning. Since the wound had already started to heal, the vet needed to perform surgery to debride and stitch the wound. We arranged for me to pick Shadow up when I brought Hairry in for shots on Wednesday afternoon. In the meantime, my parents returned from their trip. It wasn't fun explaining what happened to their beloved dog!

By Friday, Shadow was running around like her normal self. My parents are trying to restrain her, but I think that puts more pressure on her stitches.

In addition to our other trials, work was a ZOO on Friday and Saturday!! Our new day dishwasher can't come to work until 9:00, so I have to wash dishes and wait tables. I also had to bake 4 pans of bars and a pumpkin pie for a catering job.

We had planned on insulating and sheeting the south wall of our garage yesterday afternoon. By the time I got home from work, I was too exhausted to attempt this task. I couldn't have pounded in a nail if my life depended on it.

Today is the start of a new week. Wish us luck!