Not Quite as Planned

If you would like to get a feeling of what 1st Advent Sunday should be like, go to the previous post: A Swedish Advent Hymn. If you want to know what it was actually like for me, this year, stay here.

That I would not be going to church to sing Advent hymns, that much I knew beforehand. The closest I got to a church was that on the way to my dad's house, we (my brother and I) went up to the churchyard  in that village to have a look at the headstone on our mum's grave, which was put up after we were there last. When we got there we were at first greatly surprised to find the car park full and cars parked alongside the road too, because we had by then completely forgotten that it was Sunday at all, and 1st Advent Sunday on top of that...! This because before going to the churchyard we had also been to a store in town to get various technical and plumbing emergency things related to unpleasant discoveries my brother had made at the house when arriving there Saturday afternoon. Namely that there was 3 cm of sewage water on the floor in the old laundry room in the cellar and problems with one of the toilets upstairs...

My major contribution at dad's house was bringing food on the table (most of it I had prepared beforehand) and washing the dishes afterwards, and going through a pile of bills etc. I also managed to find the electric Advent candle holder and a place for it where dad can actually see it. That is actually just about what I can manage in one day (with chronic pain problems in neck-shoulder-arm.)

My brother had a much tougher afternoon trying to fix the flood situation. It turned out it was too big a problem to be solved by the small pump we had bought for the purpose. Pofessional help would have to be called in the next day (today). This however still involved trying to make the flooded room accessible for the professional people. Which meant my brother still had to spend the whole afternoon (several hours) in the cellar, clearing that room from old garden furniture and two sacks full of other various moldy rubbish. One huge problem that we are facing is that our parents rarely threw away anything, ever - Dad's philosophy always having been that as soon as you get rid of something, the next day you'll find yourself in need of that very thing; so he always preferred to be on the safe side...

When I got home in the evening, it was without knowing if my brother would be able to sort the emergency situation out before he had to go back home at noon today (he lives 300 km away). There is also a list of other unsolved big problems of various emergency degree, one or two which my brother had meant to take care of this weekend before he knew about the even more important emergency. Just the mere awareness of the list gave me a literally sleepless night last night. My own computer situation has not even made it to the list yet! (In case anyone missed it, my desktop computer died a couple of weeks ago and the laptop is not very well either.)

However, at noon today my brother called to say the plumbers had been there with their machinery and cleared the pipes and dealt with the flood etc. So a huge sigh of relief, even though a number of other problems still remain.

We have a saying in Swedish that would translate something like "fortune in the midst of bad luck". (I can't think of an exact English equivalent - if someone can, please share.) I guess that's how we have to think of it. Had my brother not come here this weekend, the situation could have got much worse before anyone noticed, because normally now no one else ever goes down into the cellar...