Our Ceiling Surprise

      So, we got home from work the other day and found quite the surprise in our bathroom!! Ryan had just lain down to take a nap, and I went to use the bathroom with the plan of taking a nap with him after. However, when I walked into the bathroom I knew that a nap was out of the question for us both. I called Ryan (apparently with some urgency he said, but who could blame me!) and he came quickly to the bathroom. This is what we found.

      As far as I know (granted I'm not in the construction business...), this is not even close to normal. Haha. So we set a bucket underneath to catch the dripping water and called our landlord. We seriously have the best landlords ever. Seriously. I think we just about gave Les a heart attack though when we started describing what was happening in our humble abode. Luckily, they live like 5 blocks away, so he was there super fast after the call. At this point in time, I had to go run an errand so I left the boys to play Construction Crew. I wish they would have taken pictures! Luckily the collapsed part wasn't full of water, it just had water dripping through it. When Les removed the sagging part, he apparently was up to his knees in dry wall, and our bathroom looked like a cotton candy machine had thrown up in there. Sadly I missed out on that festive sight. Tragic. They were able to get it cleaned up, and added some dry wall as a temporary fix until Les could get the insurance adjusters out to evaluate. This was our fun bathroom that night.

      They ended up removing way more of the ceiling than had been sagging due to all of the damaged stuff. Apparently what happened is the pan to our swamp cooler had rusted through and had a slow drip that wasn't going where it was supposed to. Instead it was dripping down under some of the shingles and collecting in that spot on our bathroom. The insurance evaluation resulted in a higher cost to fix it than Les could do on his own, so he opted to fix it. Good thing he's a general contractor! In fact, he built our entire duplex, so it was right up his alley to fix. Now it looks as good as new and you could never tell a difference.

      Just another adventure in the life of the Deuels!

Pink Barbie Bike

      Recently we made the decision to use some of our tax return money to buy some bikes. I'm a big review reader before making purchases, so I spent a lot of time researching before finally deciding on the one I wanted to buy. 

      The qualities I was really wanting:

• Comfort (beach cruiser)
• Gears
• Cushy seat
• Cute!

      Ryan kept telling me that I wasn't going to be able to find a beach cruiser with speeds for a price that we could afford. I was determined to prove him wrong, and I did exactly that!! Muah ha ha. I found a wonderful pink bike, with 7 gears, cushy seat, and beach cruiser style. And I got it $127. 32 from walmart.com! 

      There she is! Yes, she's Pepto Bismol pink. When I first got it she was also covered in butterfly and flower stickers, as well as breast cancer awareness stickers. It's a Susan G. Koman sponsored bike, so a portion of the sale proceeds go to breast cancer research. I'm totally in support of breast cancer awareness, but I prefer not riding a bike that looks as though breast cancer awareness threw up on it. I'm totally in love with the pink though (I'm a fan of pink, as everyone knows). I bought that wicker basket and spray painted it white cause I liked how that looked better than just the tan color it came in. 

      Even better than ME having this bike, I convinced not one, but *two* friends to also buy it. So we have a super awesome pink biker gang thing going on. Everyone better watch out, cause obviously you wouldn't want to mess with us. We are pretty hard core. :)

      Ryan wasn't convinced that he would look really good riding a pink bike too, so he ordered a 3 speed cruiser from California. I don't have a picture, but it's a pretty snazzy bike. It's black, and the tires are white with red rings around the outside. Very cool. It's not hot pink barbie bike, but it's still pretty great. 

     So on Memorial Day, Ryan, me, and two of our friends decided we wanted to go on a long bike ride. One of the friends borrowed one of the pink bikes, so Ry was cruisin' along on his sleek bike with us 3 ladies showing off our pink biker gang bikes. I bet we kind of looked like a weird polygamy family to people seeing us ride. We did about 12 miles that day, and it was a blast. Almost near the end though, disaster struck.

      I'm quite the accident prone person (surprising, I know). I was in a bike accident in the 4th grade that gave me a concussion so bad I had to miss school for a month to recover. I think that was my first trip to the ER rather than just an Urgent Care. Fun times. After that I rode a bike a handful of times, but couldn't ever really get into riding again like I always had before. I told Ryan when we were talking about buying bikes that I knew it would only be a matter of time until I crashed, and he needed to be prepared for that. He laughed, thinking I was being dramatic. Unfortunately, he is still learning about my magnetic draw to accidents so he didn't exactly worry at all about it. 

      So we are nearing the end of our bike ride and are having to go through these cement tunnels, similar to the kind you drive through in canyons and such. They made me nervous the first time through them (I think because I don't do well with cement barriers because of the rollover accident that happened after my first big accident), and for some reason I was even more nervous the second time through them. I get into one and suddenly my bike got too close to the side (they were narrow, like you could reach out your arms and touch both sides) and I kind of fell into the wall and skidded along until I came to a halt on my knees. Graceful, I know. I have talent, what can I say! My hand got scraped up a bit from the skidding, along with the band of my wedding ring. Tragic. I need to send it in to get re-dipped to fix it. I hit my knees pretty hard, but only scraped one of them a tiny bit. There were only a few drops of blood, so it really wasn't a big deal. My cute white basket got a little crunched, and I had to rearrange the front fender so the wheel wasn't grinding on it. Ryan had been riding ahead, so it was just me, Carlie and Anna that were there for my mini wreck. I got back on my bike and rode out of the tunnel and saw that Ryan had finally realized we weren't behind him anymore so was coming towards us. I explained what happened, and he had the most incredulous look on his face. He then asked "How does that even happen??" My only response was "Because I'm me?". He laughed and gave me a hug and told me it was going to be ok. He's such a sweet and patient man. My pride was hurt more than anything. Because really, there was almost no way to crash in that little tunnel thing. Except, I am me. And I have this little black rain cloud that hangs over my head, just waiting to throw another accident in my path. Silly little cloud. It doesn't realize that it's become more of a joke than anything! I'm accident prone and can laugh about it. So take that little cloud! :P

Beginning bruises

Added this photo a few *weeks* after the wreck. Apparently I hit my knees harder than I thought to still be this bruised 3 weeks after the fact!!

Maybe now that I have that wreck out of the way, I'll be spared for another couple of years from the next one. Fingers crossed! Haha.