What we did last night...

We'd heard that there is an Asian Market somewhere in Dunlap, so we decided to go on an adventure last night and find it. Usually, I think one would have to try really,really hard to have an adventure in Dunlap, but everyday is an adventure in this zany family of mine.

What kick-started our adventure last night was a couple of broken water pipes. See, I told you we were zany, what other people start out with broken pipes and end the night with shopping at an Asian Grocery? Hubby was trying to FIX the shower-turner-on-er-thingey in the bathroom. He had a BIG wrench (clue #1 that trouble was about it happen.) He's trying to wrench something off and it wouldn't move. So, he wrenches, harder and harder. Then when he realizes he not doing the pipes any favors by wrenching them to the left, he decides that the best thing to do is wrench them back to the right. In the process of all this wrenching back and forth, he shreds some copper pipe, but doesn't realize it because it's hidden in the shower wall (which, by the way, has NO access to it unless we go move my stove and cupboards in the kitchen and cut through the dry wall.) There also is no shut-off to the shower so when we turned the main water valve back on (not realizing yet the pipes had been torn apart) we had cascades of water pouring through the walls down into the basement. Did I mention that the reason hubby was trying to fix this stuff is that we want to put the house up for sale in a week or 2?

The water goes back on, starts to pour through the walls, main water goes back off, husband has a meltdown, I start laughing, 'cause really what else can you do? Cry? Naaa. I prayed. Told the kids to pray. Kids went online to find the patron saint of plumbing. After things settled down abit and after hubby called a plumber who said "Oh, sure, we can come out but it'll be charged overtime hours." which prompted more moaning and weeping and gnashing of teeth from hubby, my sweet, dyslexic, 18 year old son took a look at the problem and said "Hey Dad, why don't you just do this and this and that will at least let us turn the house water back on and buy us sometime to figure out what we need to do." Hubby looks at me and says "Brilliant! That will work." By this time I had given him some homeopathic nerve medicine and had forced him to do some yoga moves and Lamaze breathing with me while all 5 of us were crowded into our postage-stamp sized bathroom trying to figure out what to do next. (Really, do you think I could make this all up?) So, hubby and I are off to Menards to buy what we need for the quick-fix. While there, standing in the plumbing aisle looking at pipes, hubby has a flash of inspiration and says "I know how I can fix this." and it doesn't involve plumbers on overtime pay or ripping down drywall. He loads my arms up with pvc pipes, fittings, valves, joints, whatnot and we head back home.

By this time, supper hour is looooong past. We still have no water back in the house yet, kids are starving, husband is starving, they are all looking to me for food. Gender lines are pretty well-drawn in this family, the boys plumb and the mom feeds them. We finally negotiated a place to go out for supper and headed out. We were pretty close to Dunlap so after we ate we decided to go looking for this Asian Grocery that we had once heard of.

We looked where we were told it was, "If you go past the mall, you've gone too far." Up and down the highway we all looked, as hubby drove waaaayyy to slow and backed up traffic. We looked in the little strip malls we thought it would be in. No dice. We drove up to the mall. No dice. Hub says," Let's look a little further." Past the mall, crawling along the highway, no Asian market. We're miles past where it SHOULD have been, almost to the US 20 by-pass for you locals, getting close to Elkhart. We give up and hubby does a U-turn in the middle of US 33. He's about halfway through the turn and, lo and behold, THERE IT IS!!! A white plywood sign with "ASIAN MARKET" sprayed on in red, tacked up to a small warehouse building that is sitting behind what looks like a computer repair store, however, the words on the sign were spray- painted in Spanish, so I'm not exactly sure what kind of business it was other than "computers."

We pull into the little parking lot and the kids are having FITS. It was almost 8pm at night, we weren't in the most aesthetically pleasing area of town. The neon "Open" sign in the window of the store was still on though, so hubby says "I'm goin' in". He disappears into the building. I sit in the van with the boys and wait. He doesn't come back out. Ok, it's open, no one has chased him out yet. We wait. I look at my oldest boy. The sign on the window says (amongst other things) Noodles and Tea.
"Noodles, Andy. I bet they have all sort of yummy noodles in there."
He's intrigued, I can tell.
"Tea. Asian tea. Prolly not Lipton either."
"You wanna go in with me?"
He hesitates only a second and slides opens the van door.......