Recent - and not so recent - highlights

Today I pre-registered at the hospital we plan to deliver at, whee! My doctor's office requires that certain things be taken care of before the 28-week mark (including registering for childbirth classes), and this is one of them. Basically, if I were to deliver any time in the next 14+ weeks, I'd be all set on the hospital/new patient front.

We also got a new microwave. It might be because I someone put a paper plate in the microwave the other while making her lunch ... and coincidentally, the paper plate (left over from a certain someone's 40th birthday party) might have had a design on it that contained metallic properties that might have started a fire in the microwave. (For the record, I never thought there was actual metal in the plate, just that it was colored. And I know better than to knowingly put metal in the microwave.) The microwave then stopped working, which is especially sad because I've had it since college. I bought a new one last night, which we set up today. Yay!

And I've been meaning to blog about this for oh, months, so I thought I'd throw it in with the other more timely updates. Right before we left for Ohio last fall, we had a weird phenomena in our master closet. The floor was wet. And we couldn't figure out why.

At first we thought it might be our washer, like a connection was loose. But no. That wasn't it.

Then we thought it might be the washer in the unit behind ours, because that might be seeping in to our closet, too.

But no.

There was some discussion that it might some sort of leak in the pipes in the walls, even stemming from the vacant unit above ours.

But that's wasn't it, either.

We were puzzled, and the maintenance staff in our complex wasn't exactly helpful. Eventually, a maintenance worker came in, and within about five seconds, he told me that the bathtub was leaking and that we needed a new tub.

Uhhh ...

After thinking about it, it made sense - the closet carpet got wet when we showered. At this point, we'd removed all of our stuff from the floor of the closet, but it was a nightmare - I worried constantly about mold.

I made a few calls and found someone who insisted that our bath tub didn't need to be replaced, it needed to be refinished. I had never heard of this, but the price difference was substantial, so I was sold. The next morning, the guy came over and hooked up a massive ventilation system and got to work. After about four hours, we had a beautiful, reglazed bathtub that looked like new and - most importantly - wouldn't leak.

The problem? We needed to let it set for several days. Like, not use the water at all in there. Really, this wasn't a terrible time for us to do this, because we *were* flying out to Ohio two days later. The first day, we showered at the YMCA. The second day, though, we did quick sponge baths and prepared for our day of travel. As soon as we arrived at Tim's cousins' house, we showered and then headed off for the weekend's wedding festivities. And when we got back to Florida a few days later, we had a sparkly, unleaky tub. And it should hold up for several years.