Catching up on some family stuff from the past few weeks.

Back to Campus

The biggest event was moving M back to school on Sunday. In every way it was so much easier than moving her into the dorm a year ago.

She’s living in the sorority house this year. She and three other girls share a little quad on the third floor. They have their own rooms with a shared bathroom and little storage hall which has a door to the main hallway. The only downside of that is that her room is on the third floor, so we had to drag everything up two flights of stairs. While it was only in the mid–70s when we moved her in, that still made for sweaty parents.

They had to be back two weeks early for a work week in advance of rush week. So instead of moving in with hundreds of other kids in the dorm, it was just the 30-ish girls that live in the house, and they all staggered arrivals so it was never too crowded. We even found a super rare parking spot right in front of her house for unloading. Her house is directly across the street from campus, so she has a short walk to class.

We completely filled both her car and S’s, but it felt like we had less stuff than last year. It took us less than 30 minutes to load the cars on Saturday night, and about the same amount of time to unload them Sunday. We helped her arrange a few things but basically left the unpacking to her.

We took her out to lunch, hung some drapes, and then got out of her way. It was sooooo much less emotional than last year. Just as I tried to figure out why I was a wreck when dropping her off then, I analyzed why I felt so differently this year. Some of it was obviously having been through it. I think the biggest change, though, is that we were dropping her into the unknown as a freshman, while now she has a support system, has survived a year on campus, etc. Not that she’s totally independent quite yet, but we know she can handle things without us being there to help her.

I’m not sure exactly what work week entails. She tried to explain some of it at lunch Sunday but the music was cranked up so loud at the taco place we went to I couldn’t hear her very well. I guess a lot of planning then figuring out what they can/can’t do during rush. There may be drinking involved since rush week is dry. S laughed on our way home and asked if I noticed one of M’s boxes was “sloshing” around when I carried it up the stairs.

Classes start on August 26th.

20

M also turned 20 two weeks ago. We didn’t do much to celebrate. She didn’t even want anything super special for dinner. For being a round number, 20 doesn’t get much respect. It’s the next birthday that really matters.

On the Dental Tip

I shared last month that our girls all had to get fillings this summer, six total visits to the dentist. Which was fun since we didn’t plan for those extra visits when picking a dental plan for the year. And C also had to get evaluated for a root canal, but luckily avoided it for now.

To top it off, L got her wisdom teeth removed on M’s birthday. Everything went great. She was pretty swollen over vacation but had no lingering pain or issues.

Fortunately/unfortunately she handles anesthesia like I do, and was just sleepy afterward. I was able to take a picture of her when she fell asleep mid-sentence in the recovery room, which was funny. Unlike her sisters she didn’t cry or say anything nonsensical that made me laugh. She was even with it enough that when she tried to talk to me in the car and I couldn’t understand her, she typed something into her phone and used text-to-voice to play it so I could understand her.

Fun With Utilities

I mentioned a while back how our electric company had totally messed up our bill in their system upgrade. Well, I wouldn’t say it’s fixed, but now we’re getting bills that show a credit balance. For two straight months. I honestly have no idea if it is right and don’t really want to print out a year’s worth of bills and crunch the numbers to check their math. We’re just going to roll with it and hope that once we burn through that credit they finally start billing us correctly.

Then yesterday I came home from running errands to find no water pressure. I had run a cleaning cycle on our water softener in the morning, so my first thought was there was some debris in the line. I bypassed the softener with no effect. I checked our water company’s website but it didn’t show any outages. So I called and learned there was, in fact, a large water main break in our part of the city and it would be hours before it was fixed.

Within a couple hours the water began working again, although it took some time to get full pressure again.

It was funny how I immediately felt thirsty when I knew I couldn’t go to the fridge and get cool, filtered water.

We are now under a boil order for up to 48 hours for water we drink and cook with. Which, thankfully, isn’t that big of a deal. Our ice machine and Keurig were already full. I boiled a couple large pots of water that went into pitchers. We had some water bottles in the fridge. And we are free to shower, flush, run the dishwasher, etc.

C and L started school last Thursday. M is back on campus. That leaves me here trying to figure out how to spend my days again. I should probably find a hobby or way of spending my time productively. L wanted to go to the gym and shoot this morning at 5:45, which meant my alarm was set for 5:30. And I woke up at like 4:10 and struggled to get back to sleep after. So I’ll probably just take a nap and be lazy today. If anyone has any ideas for things I can do to stay occupied, I’m all ears.