I don't know about you, but I don't like to fail. When I was little, and my family would play a game of cards, I'd throw a hissy fit if I lost. If my favorite team loses a game (and that seems to be happening more often lately) I sulk. Once I hit college and the classes really counted, I pulled down A's and B's.
So yesterday, after we failed another inspection, I started to feel a little frustrated. When we failed the first inspection - the foundation - I managed to find the silver lining. But when we failed the plumbing inspection, I couldn't think of anything positive to say about it. The worst part was the fact that the inspector told our contractor, "You have obviously tried really hard here. I can see you're a good worker." That sounds like something you'd say to a student who is very nice and always smiles but is never going to win any prizes for excellence.
This morning Darryl woke up the girls and me so that we could use the bathroom before the plumber got to our house. We quickly washed and dressed and settled down for a day without water (again). What we thought would be a 3 hour job turned into an entire day's worth of sidestepping the work. At around 2:30 this afternoon, I took the girls shopping primarily so that we could go somewhere to use a bathroom.
Now I'm crossing my fingers that the follow up inspection on Monday will go well. I'm going to pull from all the tricks I used in college. I'll chant key terms before I go to sleep ("water flows downhill", "drain out needs to be totally accessible"). I'll make flash cards (it's pretty easy to draw maps of pipes, just a bunch of lines and curves). I'll even re-read the textbook looking for trick questions (our plans are so dog-eared at this point but it never hurts to look at them one more time). I want to do everything I can to make sure the inspection goes well. As I said, I don't like to fail.
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