All Wet...Again at 7:46 PM

Remember that story I never finished about my basement flooding? Well, it happened again. I don’t know if I even mentioned what caused the flood last time, but it ended up that the wiring in our house isn’t well done. I don’t know the details, but the ground fault interrupter or something, which is a safety switch that turns off the power to certain appliances if the circuit overloads, isn’t set up right. So what happens is that if the circuit overloads, everything plugged into a GFCI outlet loses power.

Well, it’s an easy enough fix if you know that the circuit has shut off, so after last year we didn’t think it’d be a big deal. If you see that the GFCI overloads, you just push the reset button on one of the outlets, and you’re all set to go. Also we had lived here for two years prior to the flood with no problems, so we figured it was probably a fluke thing. Obviously we were wrong on all counts, as it happened again last week. It was raining pretty hard at the time, and Jessica had just seen that the circuit was still working because we’ve got a night light plugged into one of the GFCI outlets to let us know they’re functional. Ten minutes later, water was seeping through the carpet in the basement.

Another reason we didn’t get the wiring fixed last year was that the electrician that came out told us it would cost several thousand dollars to fix. Seeing as how we had just spent a healthy sum on drying out the basement, such an investment just wasn’t feasible at the time. With this happening, however, we decided to just bite the bullet and get the stupid thing fixed. Well, another electrician came out today (different guy, same company) and gave us an estimate: $320. So needless to say, we’re pretty pleased that there’s one zero fewer than was expected. Now once we take care of however much it’ll cost to get the basement dried out again (it wasn’t nearly as bad this time, so it shouldn’t be too ridiculous), hopefully we’ll be done spending money on fixing water damage in the house.

So anyway, here I am posting again. I won’t make lame excuses, because they’re lame. I’ve just let myself get busy and bogged down again with work, and blogging took a backseat to everything else – even though I seriously would think about it almost daily. I would constantly think, “I’ve got to blog about this,” or “I’ve got to post that picture.” Alas, I never did either of those things. So hopefully in the next little while I’ll be able to catch you up on some happenings. The kids are entertaining (and/or maddening) as ever, so there’s plenty of stories and whatnot to talk about. I’ll be back soon. Hey, if Matt could revitalize his blog, why can’t I?

Don't Leave Drinks in the Car at 10:22 PM

[Note: I'm in my hotel in Florida right now. Despite being a very nice hotel, they don't have very good wireless Internet here. In fact, I'll be lucky to stay connected long enough to post this. It's kind of like living in the Stone Age, only with HBO. But anyway, my point is that if you don't hear from me at any point this week, I'm more than likely still writing, but unable to post.]

It’s 6:05am, and I’m currently on my way to the airport in a big white limousine. This shuttle company kills me. I’ve used them a couple of times before, and I always request a sedan. Every time, they pick me up in a limo. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. It’s comfortable and it’s pretty cool to rolling around Kokomo in style. It just feels a bit excessive to be the only one in the car. But anyway, I’ve got a story to tell.

Yesterday morning was like most Sundays. I got up and got ready for church as usual, then walked out in the zero-degree cold to my car. The car was in the driveway instead of the garage, because as I’ve mentioned before my garage door is sometimes loathe to operate correctly in the cold. As such, the car had frosted over in the night. I figured it wasn’t a big deal, and I’d just start it up for a few minutes before I left and get the heat going, so I wouldn’t have to scrape it. So as I opened my car door, I noticed something on the inside of the window. I thought it was odd that something would be there, and the mystery of its origins would soon be solved when I looked inside.

A bit of back story: Whenever I work Saturdays, it’s a pretty long shift. Usually about 5am-4pm or so. So during that shift, I usually get pretty hungry, but in particular I get thirsty. So this past Saturday I decided to bring a soda with me for when I would get thirsty. I left it in the car, since I figured the car would keep it cold, and I’d come and get it when I wanted it. As luck would have it, on this particular Saturday I wasn’t thirsty at all. So the soda remained in the car and I forgot about it. Combine that with the fact that the car spent Saturday night in the freezing cold driveway, and you have a perfect storm of coincidence which brought about the disaster I’m about to speak of.

You’ll remember that earlier in the month, I talked about a phenomenon known as the exploding soda can. This is what took place in my car some time on Saturday night or Sunday morning. So when I opened my door yesterday and looked at what lay before me I was, shall we say, distressed. There was frozen soda everywhere. On the seats, on the steering wheel, the glove compartment, the back seat, the cargo space. It had gotten the front and the back of the Explorer in equal parts. Needless to say, I was going to be late for church.

I set about the task of cleaning up with much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. As you may or may not know, frozen soda is much easier to clean up than liquid soda. So in order to keep the soda frozen while I cleaned, I had to leave the car off and clean it in the zero-degree cold. With no gloves. Oh, did I not mention that? On the Friday before, Zimm gave me a ride back from the regional meeting, and I left my jacket (with my gloves in the pockets) in his car. So I had no gloves, and I was cleaning the soda with a wet paper towel. As you may guess, it was cold as frick. Whenever I made a trip into the house, I would run my hands under the hot water so that I could feel them again before I went back out.

So to summarize, I used the paper towel on the seats (thank goodness they’re vinyl and not fabric), and the ice scraper on the inside of the windows, because all of the windows had been sprayed. After all this was done, I got ready to get back in the car, thinking to myself, “Well, that could have been worse.” No sooner than the thought had entered my mind did I look up at the ceiling of the car and see that the situation could indeed not have been worse. For covering the ceiling was a layer of soda-ice that would be impenetrable by paper towel. I’m not exaggerating either. I couldn’t see parts of the ceiling because the ice was covering it completely. So while my fury ran white-hot, I knew I had to take action before starting the car, because I couldn’t clean it effectively, and if I just left it there, it would surely be raining soda in a short while.

So with that in mind, I grabbed a garbage bag and some duct tape. I proceeded to tape the garbage bag to the ceiling in order to catch the soda as it melted. You see, I had no desire to have soda rain down on my car’s interior.

So that’s where we are right now. The bag is still taped to the ceiling, and I’m not going to be home until Friday. Convenient, right? I’ll be taking it in for some upholstery cleaning as soon as is permissible when I get back. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m sleepy and I’ve still got about 45 minutes till we get to the airport. Till tomorrow.

Surgery Stories from the Airport at 5:43 PM

So I figured on writing a couple of posts last night, and posting one of them just after midnight so that it would count for today. I didn’t get around to actually doing that, so I was somewhat concerned that between going to work and leaving for Delaware, I wouldn’t have time to write more than a “Hello, Goodbye” type thing, if I even got to it before midnight tonight. But wait! What should happen when I get the airport in Indianapolis? My flight is delayed for an hour. And so I get to bust out the laptop, put some Jay-Z on my giant headphones, and go to town for a bit. Of course, the wireless connection here is not great, so I may not be able to actually post this for a while, but it’s being written at 3:30. I’m just sayin.

I’d do the thing that Amelia tagged me with, but again, I can’t really get online to see what the questions are and answer them. So that will have to wait until Friday. I’d also finish my basement story, but I can’t remember where I left off. So luckily I have one more story to tell, and it is about a body part. Not the one you’re thinking of, but my knee.

Every year, a bunch of the guys from church get together and play football on Thanksgiving. It’s lots of fun, and so I was looking forward to it this year. Zimm’s brother-in-law Matt and I went to the field by the church on Tuesday night and painted in some end zones and sidelines, so there would be no disputing in/out of bounds or whether or not someone crossed the threshold of the end zone. With Matt as the quarterback and me as the big-time receiver (I know what you’re thinking, but it’s true!), we were ready to go.

Of course, this being Indiana, the day came and the weather was nasty. It snowed the day before, and it continued to rain and be cold that morning. This didn’t faze anyone of course, because everyone knows that football is best played on a sloppy field. So we got going and took a commanding lead (the teams were a bit lopsided in our favor this year, since we played old guys against young guys—young guys being 18 and younger, and with a distinct height disadvantage), and it was our turn to be on defense. I went to drop back into coverage on a routine play, and we just happened to be in the sloppiest part of the field. As I backed up, I slipped in some mud and felt the familiar sensation of my knee buckling as ligaments stretched and slid around. Not the best. So I went down and figured I was done for the day. This wasn’t the first time I’d messed up my knee, which would likely lead one to believe that I wear a knee brace when I play sports (one would be wrong). Usually when it happened (once every couple of years or so), I’d limp around for a little bit, then be fine in a couple of hours. Thinking this was the case at that particular time, I attempted to walk it off for a little while so that I could get back into the game (hey—I don’t get to play football all that often, okay?)

Needless to say, I determined that I could still play after a little while, though I was still limping. The injury worked in my favor game-wise, since no one wanted to cover me, and I could limp out for a few yards, wide open, and catch check-down passes. So we played for a while longer until it was time to go, at which point I called my wife and gave her the story on my knee. She was not pleased, but I played it off, because hey, this kind of thing has happened before.

The first indication that this time was different came when I got home and had a look at my knee. It was roughly eight times the size of my other knee, which had never heretofore been the case. I still wasn’t alarmed, because I figured I had just sprained something, and I could stay off it for a little bit and be okay. Worst case scenario, I’d be fine in a couple of days. Unfortunately for my knee, it wasn’t an option to stay home. We were taking the boys to the children’s museum in Indy the next day, so I was going to have to figure something out with my lame self. (Excuse me for a moment while I get that dirt off my shoulder…thank you.)

We ended up going to the museum as planned, and I used the stroller as a makeshift walker on the way inside. Luckily for me, the museum rented out wheelchairs, so I got to wheel myself around in that for the day. I was hoping I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew (not because it’s embarrassing to be in a wheelchair you understand; I just didn’t want to have to tell the story), and I was fortunate in that way as well. So that was all fine.

Well, a couple more days came and went, and I decided I should probably go get my knee checked out, because it was still rather large, and I couldn’t bend it. I went in and they gave me an X-Ray, which I thought was kind of silly, because of course it wasn’t something with a bone. As expected, the doctor said there was an “effusion” around my knee, which as far as I can tell means “stuff that’s surrounding the knee, making it big”. This was not a news flash. So I got referred to the orthopedic dude in Carmel (a tasty suburb of Indy.) I went there on Friday, figuring I’d get an MRI and they’d figure out what was wrong. Well, I got to the office (about 45 minutes away), signed in, waited for about 15 minutes, got called back to the exam room, took my pants off, waited for another 15 minutes, then saw the doctor. He felt my knee for a few minutes, asked me a couple of questions, and then said, “Okay, I think it’s a torn meniscus. I’m going to send you for an MRI, which you can have done in Kokomo.” At this point I was confused, because I live in Kokomo, and really I already knew I needed an MRI. So I had driven a total of an hour and a half, waited for half an hour, and had the substance of my visit take five minutes all so that I could get sent for something I already knew I’d need. Of course, without that visit, I could hardly have paid my $30 co pay, right?

The MRI was good times. I had just watched the episode of “House” the night before where the magician swallowed a key before he went into the MRI and it got sucked out of his intestines by the magnet, so I made sure not to swallow any foreign (especially metal) objects before I went in. Or at least I made sure they passed through the system beforehand.

What I didn’t realize from all my experiences with MRI machines (again, most of that experience comes from watching “House”) was that they are exceedingly loud. The tech gave me some headphones before the procedure was to start, and she said the radio was broken, so she’d have to put in a CD. She asked if Rascall Flatts was okay. I figured that was just about a small step above listening to an MRI machine for 45 minutes, so I said sure.

If you haven’t had an MRI before, I’ll explain the process. Basically they take whichever part of your body is ailing, stick whichever half of your body encompasses that part in a loud tube for an hour, and tell you to sit completely still for the duration. Luckily for me, the knee is in the lower half of the body, so I didn’t get my head stuck in the tube. That would have made me claustrophobic, and I might have gone crazy having to sit still for that long, or at least turned into the Incredible Hulk. No, I was merely waist-deep in the magnet tube. So seeing as how I was supposed to hold still and I was sleepy, I managed to take a nap, despite the loud high-voicedness that was Rascall Flatts assaulting my eardrums.

It took a few days for the results to come back, and in the meantime I continued to limp around. Zimm said at one point that I looked like Anton Chigurh from “No Country for Old Men” with the way I was lurching and having shaggy hair (I didn’t quite have the bowl-cut-bob of Chigurh, mind you.) The office called with the results eventually and said that the problem was indeed not a torn meniscus, as the doctor had originally theorized, but a piece of broken bone that was floating around in my knee area. She told me that it was a chip from my femoral something-or-other, meaning the top of my femur. This sounded like it should have been quite painful, but in truth I didn’t hurt too badly at all. (This, if you’re wondering, is because I’m a badass.) The problem was simply that I couldn’t really walk well because my knee felt like it was going to buckle. (Which didn’t really fit with the diagnosis until I found out more about muscle and bone structure later on. I will not bore you with this information, but just trust me when I say that it makes sense now.)

So the verdict was that I would need surgery to get the piece of bone out. Shocking, right? I’d never had surgery up to this point, so I was actually kind of excited for the new experience. It was scheduled for a week later in Carmel again.

Before the surgery, I got some material in the mail that told me a little of what to expect. I was supposed to shave me knee and a few inches above and below, and I was also supposed to write “No” on the knee that was not to be sliced. I will say this: shaving legs that have never been shaved before is not the easiest of tasks. I have five blades on my razor, and I needed all of them for about 20 minutes to carve through the forest of knee hair. I wondered at one point if a machete might not do the job better. And I’m not even all that hairy. As for writing on my knee, I figured if I was going to write on it, I might as well go all the way. I took a sharpie and wrote “NO. Please use other knee (the smooth one).” I have a picture, which I’ll post when I get back from Delaware, since I don’t have it on me. They also mentioned that I should have someone drive me to the hospital so that I’d have a ride home afterwards. I thought perhaps I’d be able to drive home, but found that apparently they use this thing in surgery called “anesthetic” that renders one incapable of operating motor vehicles. I wondered if it was like Nyquil.

It was not like Nyquil. I was wheeled into the surgery room, and the anesthesiologist said he was going to give me something to make me relax. I said, “I’m actually pretty relaxed right now.” He said, “No, I mean relaxed.” You know the most disturbing thing about being under for the surgery? There was absolutely no sensation of the passage of time. I woke up and didn’t even know that they had started. Also, I have no recollection of the events that occurred directly after the surgery. According to my wife, however, I was loud, obnoxious, and prone to fits of laughter. Apparently I asked the nurse loudly if the surgeon had seen the knee that I wrote on, and I laughed for a good few minutes when she said she was sure they had seen it. That’s hardly all I said, too. She knows better than I do, and she was lamenting the fact that she didn’t bring the video camera. There was also one point when the nurse was going to take my IV out, and I said, “You should have told me to shave my arm too. This is going to hurt! Oooooh, it’s gonna hurt! Is this gonna hurt? Ohhhhh.” Or something to that effect. I heard all sorts of things that I allegedly did, but I can’t remember what most of them were anymore.

The epilogue to the story is that I’m walking pretty well now, though my knee is still a bit tight. I don’t especially like climbing ladders, but I can do it. I can also go up and down stairs, but I don’t know that I could run right now. Oh—and one more thing. Before the surgery, in between the 45 times they asked me which knee was being operated on (didn’t they read my message?), they told me that the piece of bone was actually from my kneecap. I thought that made a little more sense than the top of my femur, but I still don’t get how it happened. No one even hit my knee. It just buckled. Oh well. Guess I’ll wear a knee brace next year.

At Least You'll Have Something To Blog About at 12:42 AM

These were the words spoken to me some three weeks ago (I started writing this in September, so it's now been about three months) by my good friend Zimm, after he helped me carry my furniture out of my basement. But he wasn't referring to the actual moving of the furniture, because if that were the case, I'd already be done with this entry. No, moving furniture was simply a byproduct on this day. We were moving furniture because of the flood in my basement. I had every intention of blogging about this when the ordeal was over, say in four or five days at the most, right? Well, let's just say that I'm blogging about it now (on September 12, mind you), and it's not what one would call "over". But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start at the beginning.

Summer in Indiana is a bit of a strange time, or at least it can be. Sometimes the climate functions normally. You know, it's hot for a while, then it rains, and it's still pretty hot, but at least everything's not all dried up. But sometimes, as it happened this year, it's really hot and humid for...I don't know, 19 weeks in the summer, and it never rains during that period. Then when it does rain, the rain comes in torrents for eight consecutive weeks, without stopping. It was during one of these torrential times in which our story takes place.
On August 20, if memory serves, the rain started. It came down all day long. I had mixed emotions at first about the rain, because I hadn't mowed my lawn in a good three weeks, which is nice, but it had also started to look scorched, which is not as good. So I'd have to mow the lawn again, but at least there would be patches of green among the brown. Traditionally, of course, the rain falls outside the house, and that was what we were expecting on this day as well. Unfortunately, when Jessica went to do laundry, she found that water was on the floor in the laundry room (which is in the basement). This wasn't an immediate cause for alarm, because hey--lots of things can leak, right?

The problem became apparent when we investigated further and found that the carpet along the walls was a bit...damp. Now this, my friends, got us alarmed. This alarm was multiplied when, in front of our very eyes, the carpet began to get wetter, and said wetness began to spread into the middle of the room. Now, I can take some wetness along the walls, but this was getting ridiculous, you know? To make a long story not as long, we eventually figured out that the sump pump had stopped working. (Duh.) I know approximately as much about sump pumps as I do about most other household appliances. I'm glad they work, and I know what they're supposed to do when they work, but when they stop working, I have no idea what to do with them. So I called both my dad and Jessica's dad, and as it turns out, I could get back to where the sump pump was, reach my hand down into the hole, and see if there's a switch that was tripped. Or something. This was a while ago. All I really remember is that I needed to stick my hand down in the hole that was full of water.

The sump pump is back in the crawlspace of the house. Of course the name "crawlspace" is deceiving, because it implies that there's room for one to crawl. A more accurate title might be "slitherspace", or "rollspace", because those are the two things I could have done more easily than crawling to the sump pump. When I finally did get back there (Jessica went in before me since she fit better, but was unable to reach very far into the opening for the sump pump), I reached into the hole and felt water. And that was about it. After a few minutes of trying to improve my position to reach further down, I gave up. You see, there was no guarantee of me being able to fix the pump even if I was able to locate a switch, or a blockage of some sort, or whatever it was I was looking for. And so, since the rain was still falling and the basement wasn't exactly getting any drier, we called an emergency plumber. Of course, when a service has "emergency" in the title, that translates to "expensive".

And so it's here that I will leave you for now, so as to avoid having this sit as a draft for another two months. I'll finish the story soon. (Maybe this will even push the Will Ferrell video to the archives so that it doesn't load every time you open my blog...)

Tha Docta Bloggeth at 10:30 PM

It may be true that I'm spending a lot of my time writing and podcasting for MMATorch, where I'm having a lot of fun, but you can be sure that I will visit this space when things happen like the events of Monday. But first! Back story.

The setting is lovely Kokomo, Indiana. Dixon Road. July of 2006. I'm driving home from work, as I tend to do on occasion. As I approach the entrance to a neighborhood (the neighborhood where Zimm lives, coincidentally, but he is not a character in this story), I see that there are cars stopping. Cars have a tendency to stop in front of neighborhoods when someone wishes to make a left turn into said group of residences. This was the case as I approached, and as such, I applied my foot to the brake, causing my car to cease its forward progression toward my own abode. Apparently there were cars behind me who either felt that such action was unnecessary, or decided to play chicken with themselves to see if they could hit their brakes really fast and not hit someone in front of them. Whatever the case, there was an automobile about three cars back that made the wrong decision at some point and rear ended the person in front of it. (I say the car made the decision, but you know what I mean.) As it happened, the chain of rear-endings stopped at my bumper, and I was tapped right before I had planned on accelerating away from this situation. I didn't even realize that contact had been made until I looked in my mirror and saw that people were exiting their vehicles. Of course, feeling like I should see if everything was okay, I exited my vehicle as well, and checked things out. As it happened, there wasn't much to check out, but for reasons that escape me at the moment, I stayed until the law arrived.

To make what could be a long story not so long, the officer checked everything out, assigned fault, and checked everyone's information, including mine (though I said I didn't sustain any damage to my car or person and felt the measure unnecessary, and also I wanted to go home.) To my dismay, the insurance information that I provided the officer was out of date, as I had forgotten to put the new information in my glove box when the policy renewed. Luckily (or so I thought at the time), the benevolent officer told me not to worry about it when I explained the situation, and that I did indeed have insurance.

Let's fast-forward now, past my time in Fort Wayne, and up until this past Monday afternoon. I was driving once again, as I tend to do, but this time I was accompanied by my wife and the boys. This would prove to be fortuitous later in the story. We were pulling into the parking lot at Wal-Mart, where I only go for oil changes anymore, because I hate it. But that's beside the point. As we pulled into the parking lot, I looked in my rearview mirror, only to see flashing red and blue lights. A UFO, you would think? The Publisher's Clearinghouse van, coming to give me large sums of money? The Monkeywagon, coming to award me with my long-awaited pet monkey? No. Alas, it was none of these things, but rather an officer of the law, looking to gain my attention and my pulling over. I obliged him, at which time he came to the car and told me that I had a tail light out. And really, why else would one get pulled over while entering a parking lot, other than having disembodied limbs hanging from one's trunk?

And so, as is customary, I provided him with my license and registration. He returned shortly to tell me that my license, which I had thought to be valid up until that point, was actually suspended. Why, you ask? Well, I had the same question. As it turned out, the events of July, 2006 proved more annoying than I realized. For you see, when the original officer mentioned in this story told me not to worry about having proof of expired insurance, what he really meant was that I needed to go to the DMV (called the BMV in Indiana for some reason) and provide proof of current insurance, or my license would be suspended. Unfortunately for me, he chose to communicate this information by telling me not to worry about it. Luckily for me, my wife has a valid license, and as such it was not requisite that my car be towed and I be hauled off to the big house until I could be picked up, basking in the ignominy of having to ride in the back of a police car.

So at least I had avoided that extra annoyance, but an annoyance it still was, and I'm still not pleased about it. Now I have to fax my insurance company a form, which they will fill out, then fax back to the state. Because that's the...easiest way to take care of this? No, that's not it. It's the...way that ensures I'll have no control over whether and when it's finished? That sounds about right. So who knows when I'll have a valid license again? I'm certainly not going to stop driving because of it, while I wait for fools to fax documents. A man's got to work, you know, and I can't have my poor wife drive me to work every day, especially when I often work as early as 5:30 am, and we have two kids that we'd have to haul around at such a ridiculous hour. I'm not too worried about it. The tail light is fixed, and I haven't been pulled over in almost three years for anything else. So the moral of this story? If you're in an accident, leave the scene immediately, regardless of the circumstances. Free advice from Tha Docta.