Did I mention my nickname is Calamity?

Really, with a nickname like that, it's a wonder that Scott ever agreed to live with me. I seem to invite disasters big and small. Recently these calamities collided, making for a very grumpy household.

Where to begin? Well, we recently took in a pug named Max. We're not keeping him, we're justing holding him for a friend. For a month. As you can imagine, the idea was mine, not Scott's. Max was shy for the first two days in our care, but now he is terrorizing our own dogs. He doesn't seem to notice our cats, which is one of the reasons I suspect that there is something wrong with him. Another reason is that he always tries to leave the house through the hinged side of the door. As well, he appears to have forgotten all about housetraining. He will come inside after a run in the yard and promptly relieve himself on the floor. I am guaranteed to find poop on the floor when I get up in the morning and when I arrive home in the evening. Good times.

Also, as you know, our basement recently flooded. That same night, our insurance company sent a couple of men from Bare Minimum Contracting to clean up. After they finished, the basement looked like this:

Much better, right? That's what I thought, too. Unfortunately, when the claims adjuster finally came out, he remarked that the first pair of dimwits did not do what they were supposed to do, which is to remove any water-damaged material. As a result, mould had been spreading while our basement festered for an entire week. (I was too busy picking up pug poop and battling the insurance company over our ridiculously high deductible to notice.) The claims adjuster apologized profusely, which didn't make our basement smell any better, and he assured us that a crew from a different contractor would do a proper clean-up the following day. Unable to afford another day off work, I handed over a spare house key.

Before I left the next morning, I confined the the cats to our bedroom, locked Montana in his crate and shut Max in the bathroom. I didn't want any pets fleeing the house or getting in the way while the clean-up crew carried garbage outside. Ferris, being terrified of strangers, was not a concern. The clean-up crew reportedly arrived at 10:00 am. By "crew" I mean a man named Andre. One lone guy was responsible for boxing all the items in the basement, moving the furniture, and tearing out the floor, baseboards and damaged drywall. He did a thorough job, but when I got home that evening I could barely move around the main floor because the basement had vomited all over it. There were (and still are) stacks of boxes everywhere. On the plus side, we've managed to build walls out of the boxes so that Max has only a small area in which to crap.

This is what our basement looked like when Andre's work was done:

Where is my floor?

Where are my walls?

But we already had an entrance in that room.

Ugh.

Speaking of "ugh," let's move to disaster #3. Scott called me at work to inform me that he was heading to the hospital to get stitches. Scott works with dangerous tools and machines all day long and he has already lost part of a thumb on the job. My stomach was turning somersaults as Scott nonchalantly told me what had happened. Something about a hand-held grinder with a circular blade that spins at 12,000 RPM. Rather than explaining the details, I'll just post a couple of photos of the results:

With all of that going on, when I got home I just needed to lie down for a few minutes. I went into the bedroom where our cats were huddled and tried to turn on the ceiling fan. It didn't work. Neither did the attached light. There was nothing wrong with the breaker; the fan/light unit had simply died. Now, that may seem like a trivial thing, but with a third of the house out of bounds, the main living area full of musty boxes and an unhousetrained dog and the bedroom all dark and stuffy, it was getting to be a bit much. The next thing you know, we'll be forced to bathe in the kitchen sink.