The title is a bit deceiving. However, the story yielded several laughs when it happened. That’s when I thought to myself with everything going on, a laugh might be nice. Anyway, with all the stay home orders and craziness in our practice as well as my speaking and training business, we were glad to be back, at least to some degree, toward the end of May. 

Recently, we’ve had some really crazy weather that produced an incredible hail storm.  One that made my husband’s truck (and all our team’s cars as well as the office roof) look like a group of kindergarteners were asked to play with rubber hammers! It quite literally was one of the worst in the Brazos Valley. The next day we actually lost power. As we approached the 24-hour mark we were told, due to COVID, it might be 48 hours before our power was restored. 

Panic time

This is when you think about all the veggies and meat you’ve stocked up on and began to go into panic mode!

We moved Chuck’s patients around, got gas, and headed 40 minutes into our little town to get a generator for our two inside refrigerator-freezers and the freezer in our garage. After all that has gone on the last thing we wanted to do was clean up the mess of everything melting! Once we ran the electricity out the back of our house to the generator Chuck headed back to the office.

I decided to stay at the house to try and prepare a few things so we could go over and stay at my loft office in Bryan, near the practice. It’s pretty hot in Texas this time of year. As we approached 30 plus hours, to my surprise, the electricity blinked and we had power. Thrilled I decided I would surprise Chuck and get the areas behind at least the two inside refrigerators clean and put them back in place. 

Best laid plans

Well…you can probably guess where this is going. As I gently began to move the second refrigerator in our laundry room back into place the unexpected happened. The handle I was using to hold the hose with the ice filter unit up slipped and hit the tile floor. It was like one of those geysers people travel to see. As I wedged my body into the space I could tell the water was coming out by the gallons and I couldn’t get the valve, he had shown me so many times, to turn off at the wall. Immediately I called him and he could literally hear the water spewing out of the filter unit. He said, “babe, you’ve got this, we’ve been over it. Go to the garage…” 

As I walked out of the kitchen the water had already filled the laundry room and made it halfway into the kitchen. I ran to the garage where water had begun to flow like a river into the area and out the garage and slanted drive. I went directly to the area where I got the lever he had showed me, then to the yard, and used a tool to pull off the green lid and another lever to turn the water to the house off.

Now, I had a mess to clean up, and as I beat myself up and said to Chuck, still on the phone, “I’m so sorry. I should have waited for you; I was trying to help. It’s Thursday and I knew you had a really long and tiring week now I’ve just made more work”. My sweet husband interrupted me and said, “hold on, I’m proud that you are the plumber today, do you realize we’ve practiced this and you did great!” 

Bottom line…

…my garage floor hasn’t been this clean in a long time. I didn’t work out during COVID and my friends had talked about doing burpees. All I could think about was the workout I was getting and I called it, slurpees! (As I worked to lift those ten soaked beach towels, eleven bath towels, and several smaller ones to the washer for the spin cycle!)

Chuck had shared this prior too. And, as I shared the story with my co-host Kathy on our podcast SpouseTales we laughed and shared that I had become a plumber but without the plumber’s crack! I was clad in a set of black rubber boots sloshing around and my totally soaked t-shirt and shorts. It was a look for sure!

SpouseTales is now available on YouTube!

Part of sharing this is to let you know that we have moved our podcast to a video-cast. Our podcast will still be available but we had so much fun discussing it on our ZOOM call and laughing as we watched the video that we decided it was the way we would continue. I share this because like some of you, I like podcasts when I am walking or in a car. However, if I can see a short video and feel more connected it is the essence of all I teach in my seminars and trainings.

We’re excited that next month’s blog post will also have a video. You won’t want to miss the heartfelt and on-point interview Kathy Cigno and I recorded with our friend, colleague and DeW Crew member, Beverly Berglund Wilburn. 

See you on the road…or the web!

JoAn

Read more SpouseTales from JoAn HERE.

Learn more about JoAn HERE.