Timmy, come home!

First, it was the mouse. Then the lawn mower. Then the irrigation water.

And Tim has been gone for only three days.

It started Sunday morning, about 12 hours after Tim left for business meetings in North Dakota. A small dark creature scuttled across the second basement step as I opened the door to call down to Number 7 and make sure he (Number 7, not the creature) was awake. I peered more closely as the light came on. Yep. A mouse. And he was trapped by me at the top of the steps and what was apparently the great unknown eight steps down. He dithered. He sniffed. He had nowhere to hide, though.

I hate mice and so does Number 7, but we were on our own here with Tim gone.

Brandishing a baseball bat in what was probably a tiny bit of overkill, Number 7 attempted to drive the mouse back up to the top of the stairs. In an effort to keep this process painless, I had opened the door to the garage - directly opposite the basement door where the mouse was bound to appear once he caught sight of the baseball bat. A straight shot for sure.

Wrong.

The mouse prefers indoors, apparently, and instead of making straight for the garage (and freedom), he scurried around the corner, perilously close to my feet, and disappeared behind a radiator in the hallway leading to the kitchen.

I squealed and jumped around like a little girl. Number 7, still holding the baseball bat, appeared in the kitchen doorway and announced that he might be breaking a floor tile in his quest to get the mouse.

I begged him to spare the floor.

The mouse outsmarted us both and managed to disappear somewhere beyond the radiator, into a wall or something. No floor tiles were broken, thankfully. I spent the rest of the day giving the stink eye to anything that seemed to move.

Later that afternoon, Number 7 started his weekly task of mowing the lawn. He got the riding mower out to the front yard to begin, and the drive shaft malfunctioned. The funny part is that he called me and proceeded to explain it all  -- and I barely understood any of the concepts that he was trying to convey. Me: "You realize you are telling all of this to the wrong person? I have no clue how to fix that." Number 7: " Oh, I know. I just wanted to explain why I can't mow the lawn."

Okay.

Tonight my neighbor called to tell me that the annual summer irrigation water had arrived unexpectedly and that our pasture valve was wide open - thus flooding the pasture and the lawn of at least one other neighbor as the water gushed out. Lovely. It's dark by now. Tim changed a lot of the irrigation system structure last year and I am not sure I know how to turn it off. And did I mention that it's dark? Really dark.

I put in a call to our nephew, who owns 50% of the horse population in our pasture. He agrees to come right over. In the meantime, I go outside with a flashlight and hope I don't encounter any unexpected critters in the long grass. I don't. But I do end up in cold water up to my ankles. Thankfully nephew and great-niece arrive and they are wearing boots. The valve is finally closed and, as I sit here, I hope all is well out there.

Tim, please come home before something else goes wrong!