The New Year is trying to kill us. Eight days in and 2017 is trying to end me.

New Year’s Eve our stove caught on fire from a loose connection. It burned out at 7:45 and we needed a new power cord to finish cooking our New Year’s Eve snacks.

Our local home improvement store had a sign on the door that informed us they had closed at 7:00 in honor of the holiday.

I wired things back together and watched the cords for thirty minutes while our deep fried dill pickles and chicken pot stickers finished cooking. No problems and I changed the cord the next day.

We had our dryer vent tube and dryer cleaned out by professionals. For some reason the contractor who built our house made the choice to make the dryer vent pipe twenty feet long instead of exiting a nearby wall and allowing the vent to be six feet long instead. Over the last seven years the vent has collected lint and moisture creating a solid plug of lint-mache’. As the gentlemen worked to pull the lint lumps out of the vent, Supermom stood around the corner and listened to their chit chat about what they were finding.

“Oh wow.”

“What is that? Oh wait… Look. It’s Squidwerd from Spongebob. How’d he get in here?”

“A couple of socks here. That’s amazing.”

“Oh GOD.”

“They are lucky to be alive.”

The end result of this cleanout was about three pounds of lint that Supermom saved in a bag for me to marvel at when I got home. It was amazing and disgusting all at once. Par for the course around here.

Spent a day traveling to a couple different hospitals with a family member who was having some serious symptoms of losing consciousness and, after the second day of testing, found out that they have the flu. Now I am taking Tamiflu as a preventative and the side effect is that it makes you feel like crap. I always wonder who the people are that take prescription meds where the side effects are the same as the initial problem. Like taking a nausea medicine that “may cause vomiting”. Now I know, its people like me.

The weather decided to go from 75 degrees on Christmas Day to snow-magedon and temperatures in the teens for the last three days.

The kids have been begging to play in the snow but with a couple of snotty noses already and the actual snow being a layer of dust on top of frozen leaves, I couldn’t justify braving the 11 degree windy punishment. I did drive to work on Friday in the middle of the worst part of the storm and witnessed several icy road incidents.

To top it all off, I almost bled to death from a small woodland creature. We have small animals with pointy claws that like to climb all over us. It looked fun in the brochure. Most of the time, their claws only scratch the surface and leave us looking like we ran naked through the undergrowth of a forest. No big deal right. This time the little ninja assassin made a surgical strike that would impress the CIA. The sharp nailed little rat ran up the back of my leg and one of his needle-like claws poked through my polar bear sleep pants and located the one tiny varicose vein on the back of my knee. I barely even noticed until a few minutes later when my leg felt wet. I thought, “Did this little jerk just pee on my leg?” I touched it and my fingers came away red. I ended up having to apply pressure and lay with my leg elevated to get it to stop bleeding. I couldn’t even see the hole. It was crazy.

Also, one of the children spackled the underside of the toilet lid with diarrhea. It looked like someone threw a rock into a mud puddle nearby and I couldn’t figure it out until I saw it firsthand. The child in question was totally engrossed in her iPad watching Kids YouTube. She walked to the bathroom and sat on the toilet. She then placed the iPad on the floor and bent all the way over until her chest was touching her knees so she could watch the iPad closer. It was at that angle and geometry that I realized what was about to happen. She farted and sprayed a rooster tail up the toilet behind her and the mystery was solved.

New Rule: No iPads while taking a dump.

Our youngest went on a streak of messing her pants because a) she doesn’t want to use the potty because she has to pick up the seat and put it on or b) she doesn’t like her underwear and knows that ruining them gets them changed. I’m at a loss. Whatever, poop it up.

If you looked forward to 2017 but it feels like 2016.2, this post is for you. You’re welcome.

-Underdaddy to the rescue.