• Hiccups.

    There will always be times where your roof springs a leak, your water heater lets loose an Old Testament flood, your child acts up in school, you don’t get that new job you wanted, your favorite computer dies, you can’t shake an awful cold, or Bob Villa decides your house isn’t good enough for him.

    What does Bob Villa know anyway? He can take his crapy Craftsman socketless, adjustable wrench and go back to where ever he came from! And who’s to say This Old House would even have him back?

    Here is where my job and the national news serve me well; they are a daily dose of perspective. My child has two caring parents. My family has a stable home life. My family likes to spend time together (sometimes). I don’t have to pay for heating oil. We’re not among the record breaking masses filing for bankruptcy (yet). My legs are killing me from that hard ride home. (How’d that one sneak in there?)

    As I’ve mused before, bad things don’t necessarily bring greater good. Storm clouds don’t always have a silver lining. What’s important to me is that the rain doesn’t usually wash away all of the good stuff you had before. Now if we could just pay off that home equity loan…

  • I smell a rant.

    … but first an update on the water heater saga…

    The last time we touched on this issue, the plumber had managed to botch two sequential appointments with a city inspector – one of which cost me 400mg of Ibuprofen. As you may recall, an inspection is required when a water heater is installed in our corner of existence.

    Now that everyone is up to date, here’s the latest development. We are officially done dealing with the plumber. Afterall, fool me once… shame on you; fool me twice… call me gullible; fool me three times… well, that’s just not going to happen. My trusty wife called the inspector directly this morning and he came out to inspect the plumber’s work. If you were a betting reader, how much would you wager that the plumber’s work left the inspector wanting? If this were an off-shore, gambling web site you would be a winner! The inspector told my wife that there was a pipe leading outside that needed to be sealed with caulk. The inspector then advised us that we could just fix the problem ourselves, and that he didn’t need to call out the plumber to fix it.

    Cheryl called me to see what I wanted to do.

    “Hell no I’m not going to fix it myself! If the plumber was supposed to do it then he should do it. I don’t have any caulk, so I’d have to buy some, and I don’t think the plumber’s mistake should cost me any more money – even if it isn’t very much money. It’s a matter of principle.”

    Cheryl relayed this message to the inspector. She called me later to say that the inspector was suprised that I wanted him to call the plumber back out. I don’t know why he was surprised, it seems perfectly reasonable to me.

  • Waste in the workplace.

    Every now and again I am tempted to loaf at work. Loafing is an official department term, defined in the code of conduct as: spending time in idleness; to lounge or loiter about. How can I help my mind wandering now and again? No one is perfect, not even the famous Revenue Specialist III of the Clearwater
    Court Team (sure, it doesn’t have quite the punch of “Archbishop of Canterbury” or “Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces”, but its mine, all mine). Today, during my brief daily episode of loafing, it struck me as critically important to know the exact date that our office moved from St. Petersburg to Clearwater. I asked one coworker if they knew, but they did not. They did however have a priceless face to make… one that said “is there any reason in particular that you’re dealing from a partial deck this afternoon?” After a a couple of minutes loafing and ten minutes of thorough research I found my answer: September 30, 1996. I made a circuit of the office sharing my new found knowledge with my court team cohorts.

    My legend is an ever evolving creature, one that requires constant attention. Luckily, I am up to the task.

    (Author’s note: this entry is best read with a sense of sarcasm. All meaning, what little there is, is lost without it.)