Scrambled Tuesday

It sounds like a cute Denny's menu item involving breakfast comfort food. "I'll have a Scrambled Tuesday with a side of hash browns and orange juice to drink, please." If only. We had a real-life scrambled Tuesday this week, and it was neither cute nor comforting.

Tuesday started out great! The kids ended up having in-person school after a last minute decision made on Monday night. After spending all of Monday at home without any school due to insufficient staffing, we got a phone call at 9:29pm informing us that school would be in-session in-person the next day. So all three kids plus my husband were at school on Tuesday and I had a quiet house to myself for five hours straight. 

Since my home alone time is so limited these days, I used Tuesday for some much-needed Shaina time. I ventured into the thick freezing fog on my most rugged dirt-flinging rock-bumping bike ride yet, out on the access roads through the orchards and farmland north of our house. It was a great workout, even if I did have to walk my bike down a too-steep too-rocky hill once and jump/stumble/tip off my bike several other times to avoid crashing/tipping over on the rough terrain. The fog provided a liberating anonymity for my novice mountain biking gaffs, and I was actually thankful for its thick obscuring veil. To use an old equestrian phrase, it was a refreshing, bruising ride! I returned home to shower and lunch feeling vitally invigorated. 

After lunch, I snuggled up on the couch with a heated blanket and a book. The glow of the Christmas tree lights pressed back the dark fog swirling at the window, the heated blanket warmed my bones, and the book took me on a tantalizing far-off journey. An hour later, I sighed and turned off my Kindle. It was time to get to work on The Chore I had saved for the last half hour before school pick-up time. I let myself enjoy 4.5 hours of my home alone time, then donated the last half hour of it to the greater good of home maintenance.

Jeff has been feeling extra allergic lately, so we decided to have the air ducts cleaned in our house. When I asked our landlord's foreman, Juan, about it, he suggested checking the furnace filter first. When he mentioned the filter, I had a sinking realization: we have never changed the filter once in the entire 3.5 years we've lived in this house! It was an embarrassing realization. The comfort and ease of renting seem to have damaged our memory of basic home maintenance. If owning a house is for adults, then renting seems to rewind the ole maturity level to adolescent at best. It is kind of a miracle that our HVAC system has worked so well for so long without regular filter changes! 

I have to insert one more sheepish grimace before moving on.

The furnace is deep in our low-ceilinged attic, and I had never actually gone into that claustrophobic cave of insulation. I strapped on a headlamp, grabbed a measuring tape, climbed awkwardly onto the high platform in our bedroom, and opened the little door into the attic. The attic runs the length of our long skinny house, and the furnace was on the far side of the long narrow peak-roofed room. Bent double, I stepped onto the pink insulation that blanketed the floor and began slowly following the packed down pink path across the attic. Every few feet, I had to step over a knee-high air duct while still bent at the waist under the low ceiling, a feat which made me thankful for all the yoga I've been doing. 

After stepping over several ducts and skirting an unused chimney, I arrived at the furnace. It was positioned horizontally across the floor. I examined it minutely and took pictures of its product number. After much deliberation, I found what I thought was the filter compartment. Snapping off the latches, I lifted off the narrow cover expecting to find a filthy allergen-coated three year old filter. What I found was nothing. There was no filter at all. I groaned. When we had our HVAC system replaced at our old house in Grandview, the heating and cooling company worked hard to impress upon us how important it was to change the filter regularly. We even upgraded to a six-inch-thick filter when we learned all of the things that could go wrong with a poorly filtered, poorly maintained air system. 

So when I saw that empty filter slot, crouched amidst fluffy insulation in our cramped attic, I was shocked that our air system was even working at all. I also wondered why on earth the people who had installed it didn't put a filter in before we moved into the house! That should have been on the top of the list! HVAC systems are expensive--we know that firsthand. Filters are much cheaper than new furnaces.  Obviously since we are renting, if the furnace died, our landlord would replace it. I was more concerned with the current issue of cleaning everything out and installing correct filters. That in itself would be a process involving phone calls, appointments, professional home invasion, waiting, and uncertainty. And renting is awkward. How do you ask your landlord if they pay for something without sounding like a whiny child? Suffice it to say, I was concerned and distracted when I climbed out of the attic and switched off my headlamp.

It was time to pick up Jay from school, and thanks to my attic spelunking expedition, I was late. Once I collected Jay, we had maybe enough time to swing by the hardware store for a new air filter before it was Amber's pick-up time. I was speedy at the hardware store, but still picked up Amber seven minutes later than usual. Back home, I donned my headlamp and plunged into the attic once again, awkwardly shaped filter in hand. Unclipping the compartment, I slid the filter into the slot. It fit like a glove! Then I noticed a second slot. Did this furnace require two filters? I measured the slot and then crouch-clambered my way back across the odd obstacle course to the small door. As my headlamp flashed over the door frame, it lit up a light switch. I rolled my eyes. Seriously, how did I not see the light switch after two journeys into the abyss? It was only one bare bulb positioned halfway down the attic, but still--it made a difference. 

A little while later, Jeff got home from track practice all cold and damp. After I told him all about the filter-less furnace, he jumped into the shower, and I decided to indulge in my daily dose of social media scrolling. In order to protect myself from too much of an online barrage, I have [mostly] reduced my social media participation to once a day. This was a perfect time for a social media scroll--Jeff was in the shower and the kids were having screen time. I scrolled for a good 6 or 7 minutes before all of a sudden, my brain caught on that previous thought--the kids were having screen time, but:

WHERE WAS ROSE?

She never came home from school! Since her school gets out almost the same time as track practice ends, she was supposed to walk over and meet Jeff after track practice so he could take her home. I was so distracted by our stupid furnace issues that I didn't realize she was missing. What happened to her? All of this jetted through my mind in half a second, and I dashed across the house, barged into the bathroom, and screeched: 

"WHERE IS ROSE??" 

"I never saw her after track practice!" Jeff gasped. 

"Oh my goodness! What should we do??" I asked in a panic.

"Go find her!" he said.

Of course! If I didn't already know I wasn't smooth in a crisis, this would have confirmed that fact. I closed the bathroom door, grabbed my keys, and drove for dear life. It was 4:57pm, pitch dark, with that pervasive thick freezing fog clogging the air. As I pulled out of our driveway, I thought about my sweet little Rose waiting all alone at the tree by the school. How could I have forgotten my CHILD? She needed me! Jeff had been home for a solid 15-20 minutes before I realized that Rose was not with him. Epic Mom fail! What if something had happened to her? She was probably so scared! 

Panic built in my chest. I could not drive the six minutes to the school in silence. I was going to spiral into a full blown emotional mom-guilt-terror-borne freak out if I didn't talk to someone. Jeff was still in the shower. So I called my mom. She calmly swallowed my garbled explanation and spoke soothing words to me and shared memories from my own childhood about kids waiting too long to be picked up. That's why we need parents and grandparents: in previous decades, it was way less of a big deal for a kid to be left on her own for an hour after school. 

Jeff called halfway through my drive. He was on his way to the school too. He had rinsed off the soap, jumped out of the shower, and put his clothes on without drying off first. We talked strategy, and he was still on the phone when I pulled up to the tree at the high school where Rose was supposed to wait. She was there, pacing along the fence, her back to me. When she turned around and saw me pull up, her sweet little face crumpled and she started crying. Choking back tears of my own, I untangled myself from the seatbelt, shoved the door open, stumbled onto the grass, and hugged my shaking sobbing betrayed daughter at last. Jeff was still on the phone, via bluetooth connection in the van. Once Rose and I had hugged it out for a while, we got into the warm car and talked with Jeff the whole way home. 

Rose was emotional for most of the ride home. She laughed and seemed to recover slightly when I told her it was a "reverse Home Alone moment" and I did the same thing Mrs. McAllister does in the movie Home Alone when she looks up with horror in her eyes and shouts "KEVIN!" I totally did that. "ROSE!" At home, Jeff made Rose some hot chocolate and plugged in an electric blanket to warm her up from her hour-long wait in the cold. "I waited for an hour and ten minutes!" she informed us, precise with her numbers like always. Jeff and I hovered for a bit, making sure Rose knew how sorry we were and that we loved her, but almost immediately she zoned out watching a cartoon with Amber and we left her to sip her hot chocolate in peace, poor little dear.

Curse this pandemic and its lack of routine. When there's only in-person school twice a week, and both parents are on a rotating coaching schedule where one parent coaches 6 days out of every 10 and the other parent coaches 3 days every 10, and the 6 days are only consecutive sometimes and the location of the practice is different half of the time, no wonder this happened! Cue future pick-up paranoia.

We finished on a high note--literally. Since singing in church is banned in our state due to germ spreading, we have been singing a Christmas carol every night before bedtime. On Tuesday night, Rose proudly played Jingle Bells on the piano while we sang along. Then Jay played The Twelve Days of Christmas for us. We sang all the way through five golden rings. Cozy happy loving family vibes returned and my heart healed. 

It was a very scrambled Tuesday. 

THICK FOG scene from my bike ride.

Random swatch of old tropical wallpaper in our attic space? Did the former owners use the miniature attic for luaus or something?

View from the tiny doorway. The furnace is out of sight wayyy down past that cement chimney. I had to step over all of those odd plastic ducts while crouched over under the low ceiling that had the tips of nails peeking through the wood.

The hobbit sized door opening high on the wall in our bedroom.

Head lamped and hunched on the platform by the attic door, for size reference.

I took a photo on the sly of Rose with her hot chocolate, just to remind myself of how glad I felt that she was home and safe. She was zoning out watching Amber's cartoon at this point.