Category: Going for Broke

Just as the Patriots were kicking off to the Panthers, Cheryl calls me into the kitchen with the following announcement: “John, the ceiling is wet.” There are several reasons why a ceiling in your home might be wet and none of them are harbingers of good tidings. MAYDAY MAYDAY! WE ARE GOING DOWN! I REPEAT, WE ARE GOING DOWN!

I think the biggest scam going in the tech world isn’t the Nigerian email con – it’s ink jet printers. You can buy a new printer for about the cost to replace the ink. No, I’m not kidding. To replace the two cartridges in my Epson printer will cost me $48.00. The price of a low end HP color printer is $49.99. Apples and oranges, you say? True, the HP replacements would be less. They would only come to $40.00, but that’s still about eighty percent of the cost of the printer. OUCH! Maybe they’ll sell me just the printer for nine bucks? The printer I have now is the king of the con. The documentation says I should get hundreds of prints, even at the highest quality. Yet I couldn’t even get through my Christmas cards without having to change cartridges (at less than the highest quality and only 80 pages of output). Doh!

Any way you look at it, they’ve got me.

I’ll show them… I’ll stop printing things! Yeah, that’s what I said two months ago. Now I find my self pacing the isles of CompUSA like someone granted early release from the coo-coo’ nest, doing the single player debate to it’s full effect. It’s the age old question that has plagued mankind since the advent of “instant credit”: do I try to milk more value out of a product that I’m unhappy with, or do I bite the bullet and try something else?

I wonder what stone tablets go for nowadays?

The last remaining vestiges of the great family room flood are gone. Forty or so square feet of carpet and padding is gone. In it’s place rests brand new, self adhesive, square, fake ceramic, laminate tile. Yes, it is everything it sounds like and more. No, there is no danger of my becoming the spokesperson for Armstrong laminate tile.

In a move that was designed solely to shock my wife, I finished the flooring and did our taxes in a single afternoon. Cheryl’s faith in the natural order of things has been shattered. My only mistake was in showing just what I am capable of doing in a single afternoon. That kind of information should be held back in the even of an emergency. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle. Expectations are a heavy burden, and I’ve unwittingly upped the ante.

What a fool I’ve been.

Whence the death watch concludes, I’m on my way to nail down tack strips. You too can enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes from hammering a wood strip into concrete. Think of the aggression you can work out. Think of the cathartic value. Think of how many more ways I can think of to say the exact same thing. If you missed the trimming of wet carpet you won’t want to miss tack stripping. It’s great fun for all of your upper bodies’ muscle groups.

Do you want to know something strange? Despite my sarcastic tone, I’m looking forward to tack stripping. I’m looking forward to this family room flooring project. What the hell is wrong with me?

It was necessary to drive my newish car to work this morning. I haven’t driven it for the better part of two weeks, so it was quite the event. My enthusiasm was tempered by the good natured ribbing I got from my coworkers.

“John, your daughter’s too young to drive. Why did you buy her a car already?”

“John, you’ve got a car just like my neighbor’s sixteen year old.”

I was driving to my allergists office and I began to think how I could turn my car into a teen dream. Remove the suspension and pick-up some lumber from Home Depot. Tint the windows and get some stencils for Japanese lettering. Illuminate the undercarriage. And most importantly, install some party favors in the tail pipe. Go speed racer!

Post plumbing woe life in the Kauffman household (version 2.2) continues. The fan is still blowing on a wall. What, don’t you have a fan blowing on your walls? A single sample of tile is resting in a large space where there used to be wet carpet. Four boxes of laminate, self adhesive tile are waiting patiently in our family room.

I have garnered just about as much respect from my previous exploits as I deserve.

“John, where are you going?”
“I thought I would stop at Home Depot to look at tile.”
“I just assumed you would drive home. I’m really hungry. I figured you would be ready to look at tile in a month or so.”
“Am I really that bad?”
“Did you ever quite finish everything you wanted to with the Pergo?”
“Point well taken.”

There comes a time in the life of every home owner when you wonder if renting is really all that bad. We had one of those experiences this weekend. It started with a puddle. It grew to a small pond. It ended with a large check.

“Cheryl, we have a problem. I think our water heater has seen better days.”
“Why do you say that?”
“There’s a puddle of hot water surrounding the water heater in the laundry closet.”
“Oh great.”

So we did what any other freedom loving homeowner would do, we called our parents. Unfortunately, neither of us come from a family of plumbers, so we had to try something else. We called in professional help. The trouble was, professional help doesn’t like working on the weekend. “You don’t really want to pay me time and a half, do you?”, the plumber asked. “No, I guess it’s not leaking all that bad right now. Maybe we’ll try to wait until Monday.” That was Saturday afternoon.

Sunday morning we woke up to pouring rain. It was a fitting metaphor. The flood was not restricted to outdoors. Water from the water heater flooded the laundry closet, seeped under a wall, and soaked the carpet in the adjacent room (the family room). Now I wasn’t going to wait until Monday.

Enter the plumber.

Things went smoothly enough. The old water heater went out. I got on my hands and knees and swabbed out the science project that had cultured, and the new unit went in. The plumber tested it out, filled out the invoice and I wrote him a check. It was ten until three p.m. It was ten minutes until kickoff. The plumber really wanted to see the game. I handed him the check. He took it. He turned for the door. I saw water dripping from the pipe leading to the water heater. “Wait a minute, is that pipe leaking?” This is a family web site so I can’t repeat what the plumber said, or what he continued to say for the next forty minutes as he took his frustration over his career, his life, and a missed game – out on my new water heater. At one point I heard a rush of water. I was sure he had expected a pipe to take a little too much and it blew. I rushed over to the source, just outside. As I got to the door I was met by the plumber. “Watch out man, I”m trying to get out of here.” This is followed by some more grumbling and swearing. A moment later he storms into our bathroom and turns on the water. Beth looks in from the living room and says, “sir, what are you doing?” These are the first words she has spoken to the plumber since he has arrived (she was surprisingly good). He replies, in a snide, accusing and sarcastic tone “I’M WORKING.” He storms back into the laundry closet, tosses his tools together, and runs out the door, yelling after he has crossed the threshold “o.k. sir, you’re all set.” With that he was gone.

I have a new water heater. Despite my misgivings about the noise outside, everything seems fine now. However, there’s another place of business that I will never give money to again.

I have made it perfectly clear that I hate Saturn. I have no problems with any of the planets in our solar system, but I do have problems with a particular american auto maker. My dislike is easier to live with now that I am no longer burdened with the lemon formerly parked in my driveway. However, because of this dislike I am happy to share this drive time story with you today.

I was driving down the highway on my way home from work. Like all good defensive drivers, I was paying attention to the cars around me. I noticed another victim of Saturn ahead and to the right of me. At first there was nothing obvious about the car to suggest that the driver was a victim, not yet anyway. In fact, the car looked pretty good (for a Saturn). You know what they say about looks… they can be deceiving. Much to my surprise (I’m sure the driver was surprised too), the front driver side fender started flapping like a flag in a forty mile an hour gale. The front corner would drop to the ground and bounce up, due to the forward movement of the piece of cr… I mean car. Traffic was moving at brisk forty miles an hour, thus producing the flapping like movement. I don’t know much about cars, but I don’t think body parts are supposed to swing free like a guy in boxer shorts.

Other than the bouncing action off of the pavement, it looked like a perfectly good front fender. Of course, the fender might not have been Saturn’s fault. Maybe the guy needed a few screws to hang things on the wall at home and decided to take them out of his car. Maybe there’s an epidemic of fender loosening pranksters running rampant on the Florida highways. Maybe he was in a minor fender-bender and decided to save a few bucks by installing his own replacement fender. Then again, maybe he just bought the wrong kind of car.

Regardless of the real reason, you know my vote.

Have you ever noticed the sound that two cars make when they come together in an unconventional manner? Have you heard the sound that a driver makes when her new car gets together with another in an unconventional manner?

Have you ever taken a turn and had the back end of your car move out from underneath you unexpectedly? Have you done this after it just starts raining? After regaining control of your car and after somehow avoiding the other lanes of traffic, have you had someone plow into your now stationary car from behind you, from your own lane? Have you ever sprinted through the parking lot at your place of employment, rushing off to survey the damage to your wife and property for yourself?

Most importantly, do you know what it’s like to walk away from an auto accident without any injuries? Thankfully, we can answer yes to ALL of these questions.

Earlier this year we replaced the outside unit to our air conditioner. Figuring, “what’s a hundred more dollars…”, we sprung for a fancy programable thermostat to go along for the ride to financial ruin. After the installation folks left, we read about all of the cool features of our new thermostat, most of which we could figure out on our own. One documented feature eluded us – the capability to have the thermostat alternately cool or heat the house without having to manually switch between heating and cooling modes. Yesterday evening we finally figured it out. What you do is wait until something else with the air conditioning stops working. Then when the repair guy comes out to fix it, ask him for “one more thing”.

Now it’s all figured out. Sure, I feel a little less independent, a little less like a real man. I’ve put less sweat equity into the house; but perhaps more importantly, I’ve put some serious psychological equity into my marriage.

Here’s to your mental health!