Recently my dad and step-mom came for a visit, and they very kindly brought my old typewriter for Isaac. It is a Sears model, c. 1965 I would guess. Thus is was something of a relic even when I was using it in the early 80s in high school. Isaac took to it immediately– the typing, the mechanics, the wonderful clicks and taps, the carriage, the ding of the bell– all of it captivated him. He started out carefully typing things with grown-ups helping him spell, and then moved on to typing his own invented and often nearly inscrutable writings. Then it died… it began only typing on the "stencil" setting, and refused all pleas to change back to using ink. I even got it a new ribbon. … So I just planned to take it to the typewriter repair place (apparently there still are a few in existence), but hadn't gotten around to it. Then, it was miraculously healed! As swiftly and mysteriously as it had set itself on permanent stencil, it went back to normal. So now Isaac is typing again. Mostly the happy marginless pages of solid text, heavy on the fffggghhhjjj type keys near the center.
The other day he came running upstairs to show me an important missive he had typed. It said:
WE WOT $
and
WENED$F FOR CU R CUCHRE
He read these messages to me– "We want money" and "We need money for our country." TRUE!! How true… but WHY?? I have no idea what prompted him to compose these items.
In any case, this has been a week of financial logistics. We just finished the renovations on the old house, costly but needed. And now we are landlords– the tenants actually moved in yesterday!! Wow! We have a rental property. This has been a short-term financial ouch in the hopes of longer term financial health. We recoup the investment not by rental income, per se, but by not having to sell the house right now at a fraction of its value.
Anyway, in the midst of all this check-writing, it was not a good week to learn that we need a new well. Yes– out here in the sticks we have no city water to turn our noses up at. We have well water from our own private, diseased hole in the ground. IN our case, it was apparently dug back sometime before 1940 (as far back as the records go), and seeing as our house dates from 1830, it's hard to pin down just how old and decayed it is.
This was an issue back when we bought the house, and I instinctively suspected that the well would poison my children. I had it tested 9 ways to Sunday, and only after double shock treatments with bleach did it come back negative for bacteria. But the water consultant and the health department gave it all a pass eventually, and seemed indeed to be puzzled by my dread of it, so finally I just put in a big reverse osmosis system for drinking water and let it go. We were told at the time that it would need to be shocked with bleach annually, and more than a year had passed. Meanwhile it had begun to be noticeably stenchy (rotten eggs– yum!), and it was time to change the filters on the R.O. system anyway. So a couple weeks ago I called the water treatment man and had it checked out. Positive for bacteria again– yippee– and "not potable." TUrns out the R.O. system was only approved for potable water and so we had to begin drinking bottled water again immediately.
The water treatment man had a big $$$ cha-ching system to sell me. In any case, because I didn't really trust him all that much, I decided to call the county health department water person for a second opinion. Thus is was on Wednesday I think that the incredibly nice and thorough and nice county water guy came and looked into the well pit (it's not supposed to be in a pit) and looked at the corroded pipe and declared that we need a new well!! The next day he came back and actually climbed down into the pit himself to take some damning photos of the horrible situation. Seems the holes are not only big enough for bugs to get in, but even mice. And… did I mention that we have mice? Like tons? And that mouse poop can have some fun live parasites it in? And we have small children?
So… ARG.
Ben and I have had some marital discord over it, because he's very weary of the huge sucking sound in his wallet. It remains to be seen exactly how this will play out. Meanwhile we're drinking bottled water, carrying cups around to brush teeth. Yesterday we had a play date and kids playing in the hose and I was getting an ulcer with worry about whether they would drink from the wading pool. Isaac began sucking on the drawstring of his swimming trunks just to terrorize me.
Is there ever a good time to need to drill a new well? Probably not…
On the good side, our French girl Alice (ah–LEES) is a gem. We LOVE her. She's a delight. She's leaving on Wednesday, though, and then I think small hearts will be broken around here. i don't think I can lure her back next year, either– she's already booked to the hilt with her schooling. seems she;s about to begin SEVEN years of working her butt off in order to get a degree in business. She just finished HS and this seems a little harsh, but apparently in France that's how they do things. Anyway, it's been great to have her for this week and tempts me ever more that an au pair would be a good invention. I know I could've refinanced the mortgage, managed the last phase of the rehab, dealt with the well issues, and all that, with Elias complicating things greatly, but I can report that doing it with another person on hand was a LOT better!!
Oh yes, and Elias chose this particularly demanding week to need a sudden trip to the ER. Briefly, a horrible cough came over him that was the sort of thing that sends chills down your spine. It was Tuesday afternoon when he woke up from his nap. It was a high-pitched, constricted, strangling sort of cough, combined with retracting ribs and flared nostrils. That is, all the signs of not getting enough air– and pretty near out of the blue. I called his doctor to see if I could get him in there, and the nurse I was talking to heard him over the phone. She said, "You have to take him to the Emergency Room right now." This was not ideal, because I also needed to pick Isaac up from camp. Could I take my medical-emergency boy to camp and get Isaac out of the pool? COuld I leave Isaac there for 2-3 hours while I handled this and Ben finished up his work? No. So I called Ben, pulled him out of a meeting, and he had to drop everything and run up to get Isaac.
This freed me up to just deal with Elias, which was what i needed to do. However, by the time I got him to the ER he was basically fine again. My thought was simply that it's asthma and boy number two is afflicted just like boy number one. Anyway, it wasn't asthma– and just when I was concerned that I was insane, a kindly and very experienced old doctor came in diagnosed it: croup! People toss around the word "croup" to mean any sort of bad nasty cough, but it's got a technical meaning and it's HORRIBLE. And indeed, the little airway can become so constricted during an attack of croup that it can be life-threatening. Steroids… back home… and onward with the week.
EEk. What a week.