A sewer, a tree, a laptop, and me — to say nothing of the beer bread

It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon…. oh wait… that’s not my story to tell…

It’s been a busy week here. It all started about 9 years ago when I hired a highly recommended gardener to design our garden. When he finished, it was spectacular. It was only a few months later that I heard that ficus trees are noteworthy for sending out roots to enter one’s plumbing system. But the three he had planted (one very close to the house) were attractive and flourishing, and so we did nothing.

Once or twice, our pipes had to be cleaned and the sewer cleaned out to remove roots. However on Passover this year, we had a complete blockage of our plumbing in our master bathroom. It took three plumbers (or 4, if you count the one who went running away in fear) to get things working again (they fixed the toilet and then the shower didn’t drain properly- they fixed the shower and the floor drain rose…) so we decided to get a contractor to get the roots out of the system, see where the blockage was, and replace/reposition pipes. As the work proceeded, more and more of our patio needed to be dug up and then some of the Jerusalem stone at the front of the house had to be removed. The pipes, it turns out, were not joined properly and were placed at odd angles that didn’t help the flow…

Of course, while still in the middle of this, we decided to pull out the guilty tree which aside from shading our bedroom, shaded the front of the building and our patio and took up a good deal of the front garden. So we called a tree remover since the tree had grown well past the second story and was very full and lush. In just a few minutes, we had a lot of beautiful branches spread over the sidewalk.

So now the front of the house is not only bare, but it has a gaping wound (where they are fixing the pipes) and to say I feel somewhat exposed woud be an understatement.

And finally, the Dell laptop with the fabulous celeron processor finally got on my last nerve (among other cute baby tricks, every once in a while it decides that there is no internet connection over our LAN when the other two computers are just charging along with no trouble. Usually it takes at least three cold boots to get it back.) So yesterday we went and got a new laptop. Fortunately with the assistance of one of my fabulous genius sons-in-law (of which I am blessed with exactly 2), I was able to set it up with relatively little sweat (although I am a strange type of technophobe.) Now I just need to figure out how to prepare my travelogues for our trip to the States…

And speaking of trips… my husband (no, I am NOT implying that he is a trip) came up with an idea that I was wary of for the trips we lead. Kosher bread is not easy to get in some of the locations we visit and so he went trawling the internet and came up with an idea of making “beer bread” which looked easy to make because it had almost no ingredients, required no time to rise, and could be made in one bowl. I told him that I thought it complicated things, but this morning he baked two loaves and to tell the truth, it tasted pretty good.

How do I tie together a sewer, a tree, a computer, and beer bread? Only via non sequitur: Tomorrow I will be babysitting Princess Kinneret Kangaroo who has the chickenpox. It was a busy week.