A Lack of Sewers and a Lot of Home Videos

So, we're now looking at our fifth day of sewer blockage at our house.

Nice, right?

Barring a city inspection this afternoon in which the city discovers that it's actually THEIR problem (awesome, but unlikely), or another plumbing company coming out for an estimate and discovering that they can fix the problem in ten minutes for a hundred bucks (even awesomer, and even more unlikely), we are yet again in the Slough of Home Repair Despond, where all weary homeowners whose sewer pipes have collapsed at the edge of the yard, entailing a permit to dig up the street, and then DIGGING UP THE STREET, and then putting the street back together, using up a tidy chunk of their retirement funds in the process, slog without succor for a really, really long time. The wheels of progress (and crucial infrastructure repair) grind slowly, my friends.

Okay, that's about all I want to say right now about my life of driving to Wal-mart to use the toilet.

Instead, look at these home videos that my kids made!



It's been a whole new winter activity that they've recently discovered, this acting out skits and videotaping each other. Last week, Syd even brought her camera to our homeschool group's Gym Day to see if her friends like videotaping each other, too. Turns out that they do!

I've been burning the girls' videos to DVD for them, because they cannot get enough of watching themselves being silly. When I was a kid, we had a huge camcorder, but it wasn't used for this kind of silliness; it was reserved for Christmas Day, or our summer road trip, or the school spelling bee. I have some memories of playing with my friends at this age, sure, and the silly, oh-so-serious-at-the-time stuff that we got up to. I wonder, though, how different it will be for my own kiddos, who, when they're my age, can just pop a DVD in to the player (if they still have DVDs then...maybe they'll use a holoplayer?) and see themselves all teeny, dressed all goofy, playing with their toys, hamming it up with their friends.

I would LOVE to be able to see myself like that. Of course, I'd also love to be able to use the toilet inside my own house, though, so what do I know?