Plumbing Hide & Seek and The Creepy Cat Lady Goes to Lunch

We've been having some minor plumbing issues here at casa del Verde and decided we probably need to have our pipes snaked. Since I can't say that without blushing and giggling I just told the plumber that we were having to plunge the potties from time to time to keep them from overflowing.  And it's not just the worthless water saver downstairs potty that you have to flush 3 times for it to be effective, it's all the potties. When I was complaining about the water saving toilet recently, one helpful friend suggested that we just poo smaller. Well duh, why didn't I think of that?

Of course the potties flushed perfectly while the plumber was here but the water level in the potty fluctuated when he ran water in the sink. Mr. Plumber said that's usually a sign of some kind of blockage in the main line so we went on a search for the access.
I know what to look for, it's the little round white thing that's usually hiding in a flower bed somewhere near the house. We searched for 20 minutes and couldn't find the dang thing! Whoever used to own this house put concrete pavers all around the foundation at the back of the house. It looks great and is really convenient cuz it gives you a little sidewalk to stand on when you're turning the water hose off and on. But I have a feeling that the main line access thing is hiding somewhere under those pavers.

Mr. Plumber is supposed to come back Wednesday to run a camera down the potty to find where the access is. I envision this as sort of like a colonoscopy for your toilet. Maybe I should flush a bunch of Golytely to prep it first.

After me and Mr. Plumber completed our unsuccessful search for the main line, Jayson called to ask me to check our bank statement to see if any hotel charges showed up for his last business trip. While I was looking that up I noticed that the Holiday Inn in Lafayette had charged our debit card twice for the night we stayed there to close on our house. I called the Holiday Inn and told the gal what happened. She looked it up and assured me that they only charged us once and said that I would need to contact my bank to get that cleared up. In other words, she was too lazy to look into it.

Great. I called MidSouth Bank, explained it all to them and they told me I would need to go to their one and only branch in Houston, which is not exactly conveniently located for me, since there's a form I would need to sign in front of a notary to dispute the charge.  I decided to put that off until after lunch.

I met a friend who I haven't seen for at least 10 years for lunch and we had a nice visit and some great food. I'm not a people person and generally don't require much human interaction. I almost always prefer to be alone rather than with other people even though I realize this is not necessarily the best thing for me. I sometimes have to force myself to socialize just to keep from getting weird. Or weirder. Right now I can pass for relatively sane but it might not take much for me to turn into Howard Hughes and I wouldn't be able to pull that off at my income level. When rich people do that they're called an eccentric recluse. When people like me do that they're called the creepy cat lady on the corner.

Another friend from Lafayette recently moved to this area so hopefully after she gets all moved in and settled I'll put on my big girl clothes again and have lunch with her. Not that I usually wear little girl clothes, but my daily attire over the past several months has been a pair of ratty shorts and a t-shirt covered with paint. If I'm not leaving the house, and I don't leave it every day, I see no need to get all dressed up just so that I can get sweaty and gross working on projects around the house. The only problem with that is when I do put on my big girl clothes I feel like I'm playing dress up in someone else's clothes. Nothing fits exactly right, everything is itchy and binding and I'm just counting the minutes until I can go home and put on a t-shirt and shorts.

This same friend who moved here from Lafayette recently posted on her Facebook about shopping for a cocktail dress for a party she and her husband would be attending. They didn't even have their furniture yet and they already have a party to go to. I've been here for 2 weeks and the closest I've come to making a friend is the Ace Hardware girl who told me they didn't carry what I was looking for but she stood there and stared at the shelf with me in complete silence for almost 10 minutes as I tried to will the product to magically appear. I thought we had something really special between us but she never called.