Fourth of July--rained out!

The fourth of July has been canceled in Lubbock. The sizzling fuse working its way through town, getting everyone excited about the parade and the street dance and the BBQ and the watermelon and water fights and baseball and fireworks has been snuffed out, or rather doused.

5.5 inches of rain fell on Lubbock Saturday, flooding streets, stranding motorists, and turning our backyard into a swamp. We'd been planning on heading to South Lubbock for a big neighborhood party with some friends, but we ended up staying inside all day and watching World Cup Soccer, instead.

Well, kind of.

Friday night at about midnight I started doing some dishes when the sink clogged up. In the process of trouble shooting the problem, I unintentionally drained a sink's worth of dish water onto the kitchen floor. I managed to mop up most of the water, but not before a substantial amount of it leaked through the caulk around the edges of the floor and pooled beneath beneath the floor (laminate floors are free-floating).

I ended up pulling out several pieces of the floor and sliding broom handles beneath the rest of it to raise it up high enough to allow air to help dry out the water. I got the entire floor raised up and then barricaded off the kitchen so that unsuspecting boys would not try to walk on the floor in the morning when they woke up.

Saturday morning the floor had dried out so I put it back together and then installed a new garbage disposal (what I thought was the source of the clog...it's an old garbage disposal, old like the instructions say "no fish, chicken or dinosaur bones." Ha ha ha....wow, I must be tired, because that was a lame joke and I'm just going to leave it in here).

However, changing the garbage disposal required a trip to Home Depot, of course, for some plumber's putty, so we all piled into the car and went (and missed Germany's #2,3,and 4 goals against Argentina)

Changing the garbage disposal also meant fixing some of the electrical issues under the sink, which meant about three hours of head scratching, phone calling dad, disconnecting and moving the dishwasher, and almost electrocuting myself.

by four thirty in the afternoon, I'd gotten the floor, sink, dishwasher, and new disposal all in place, but when I turned it on and ran some water, the sink still clogged up again. I'd just spent all day fixing nothing. At this point it was dinner time and the kitchen was a disaster and all of us were grumpy and hungry so the QB found a coupon online for Applebees and we went out to eat.

By the way, I definitely recommend their Cajun Tilapia and their house salad.

By the time we finished eating, the streets were already starting to flood and we almost got stuck in the WalMart parking lot. After the kids went to bed I spent another hour or two trying to unclog the drain with a pipe snake, but nothing seemed to work. Not even 64 ounces of Draino.

Finally, Sunday night, with the help of a friend's electric pipe snake we unclogged the drain and got the kitchen clean enough to bake a cake and eat some real dinner. This cake was our only real homage to the Fourth of July this weekend, and despite missing out on all the fun, the boys handled it pretty well.


Mr. Baseball really wanted to put the real flag in this photo. The cake beneath the flag is slightly doctored version of a Martha Stewart white cake recipe.


The one consolation for missing all the fourth of July stuff this weekend--since we couldn't wash any dishes for twenty four hours or so, we ended up eating fourth of July dinner on paper plates anyway, even without the picnic.