Best Laid Plans...

So my parents arrive in America in less than 7 hours.

Sunny and I had a plan this week. Starting on Monday, we were going to spend about an hour per day getting the house cleaned up in time for my parent’s arrival. We were basically using my parent’s their as an excuse to do some real tidying up and cleaning.

You know what I mean. All those little jobs around the house that you always mean to get around to, but never do.

Fix the dripping faucet in the Kitchen. Installing the new showerhead in the bathroom. Finally get around to shampooing the carpets and organizing the storage room.

Of course, we should have learned by now that there really is no point planning anything ever.

Last Saturday I started to get sick. By Monday, even moving was way too strenuous for me. I finally started feeling better and was operating at about 70% capacity on Wednesday…just in time for Sunny to start coming down with the same thing.

So our plan changed. We’d managed to get a little done during the week, but last night we both decided an early night was in order so we could be bright-eyed and bushy tailed this morning…so we could get everything we absolutely have to get done finished before we have to go get my parents from the airport.

So, last night we go to bed.

After sleeping for a grand total of two hours I wake up and it’s hot…stupid hot…unnaturally hot. Getting up for a drink I walk into the kitchen…where it’s absolutely freezing. Something pings on my ‘something’s-not-right-o-meter’. Without any heating or air-conditioning on in the house, here’s no way there should be such a big temperature difference.

I walk back to the bedroom and notice a funny smell coming from the laundry room. I pull the door all the way open and got the same sensation you get when you open the oven door while standing too close. It was about a million degrees in there.

The dryer had finished its cycle, had stopped spinning, but the heating elements were still going full blast. They’d been that way for at least six hours. I lean over to unplug it, and the top of it is so hot I actually burn my hand.

If there’d been any clothes stacked on top like there usually is, they’d probably have caught fire.

As you can probably guess, I wasn’t exactly the happiest person in the world at this point. Waking up and finding that your house almost caught fire does that to a person.

So I’m wide-awake and don’t actually want to go back to sleep until the dryer had cooled down in case anything in there was smouldering. As a result, I never actually managed to get back to sleep.

So, after going to bed at 11pm, I found myself up and awake by about half past one in the morning. I’d also like to point out that thanks to being sick for the entire week before, I hadn’t slept more than half an hour at a stretch for over seven days.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. But of course, today, we have to clean the house from top to bottom, take off the trash and do a hundred other chores before going to pick them up at five.

Let’s just hope like hell they’ve got jet lag and want to go to bed within an hour of us getting back to the house.