I realize that I have been remiss in reporting funny Hazel anecdotes, illustrated by unbelievably cute photos of our little girl. Just so you know, this post won’t really have much to say about Hazel, but with her First Birthday coming up in just two weeks(!), she’ll have much attention lavished upon her. For now, let’s focus on two occurrences that happened this week to pull Ragozzine optimism into a pin-wheeling nosedive.
First off, let’s turn the clock back a few nights. Hazel was slumbering peacefully in her crib, affording Megan and I the chance to sit back and watch some good old fashion network television. With upwards of four static-snowed channels provided FOR FREE by our rabbit ears antennae, a veritable world of entertainment waited for us in our living room. One of us was already sitting on the right-side of the futon when the other came in and sat down on the left-side of the futon, and with a KER-THUMP! the left-side of the futon frame collapsed to the ground, leaving us askew and laughing. That futon has been through a lot, including holding up the heft of O3Paul (One Ounce Overweight) on several occasions with nary a crack nor a sag. But its time has obviously come, so we resolved ourselves to buying a new couch with our well-timed economic stimulus check.
We settled on a sofa from IKEA’s Ektorp series. Not only will this match our Ektorp loveseat, but now we have twice the reasons to randomly bark out “Ektorp!” in a nigh passable German accent. Ektorp! And yes, we realize that IKEA is a Swedish company. But just like Paul, Ektorp has a distinct German connotation to it. However, unlike Paul, our soon-to-arrive Ektorp sofa won’t set off any “too much weight” elevator alarms.
I suppose now would be the best time to wish Paul a happy birthday. We hope to be making fat jokes about you for decades to come, so here’s to your long and joyous life!
The second ill-fated happenstance bubbled to the surface yesterday morning. In addition to May flowers, April showers brought us another flooded basement. We just got too much precipitation in too short a time earlier this week and the excessive water found its way inside again. Since we already have everything of value off the floor following the last flooding episode, nothing of great importance was lost except for some tag sale stuff, a few more cardboard boxes left over from our move, and all of our surplus stock of toilet paper. If you know me, you know that the latter actually may impact us fairly hard, but I’m trying to be positive.
After 5 hours of work with our utility pump and wet/dry vac, the tides seemed to have turned, so Megan and I went downtown for some lunch (Hazel having been magically whisked away to Grammie house). When we returned to the basement after about an hour or so, all the water had come back. Clearly our methods were not keeping up with the rate of ingress. Lucky for us, though, a new Lowe’s store opened up just 4 minutes from home and were offering 10% off on all purchases to celebrate their opening. So we were able to buy a larger, better pump with an electronic on/off sensor along with a few other things necessary to get our affairs in order. After just three more hours of work, the pump could now keep up with the water’s continual entry and we could take the rest of the night off from mopping and such.
All told, I wound up moving about 300 gallons of water by bucket and vacuum container up our bulkhead steps. In a moment of desperation, we also tried moving the many bags of tube sand off the floor drain (covered over by me based on a theory that it is not so much a drain as a forever-on faucet for groundwater) to see if it would do what it was designed to do. After hoisting 540 lbs of sand up the stairs to the backyard, we discovered that the drain is definitely where the water comes in; when I lifted up the last bag, water began gushing in like a leak in a submarine. So back down came 420 lbs worth of tube sand (the two last bags were just too many) and we picked up where we left off with water removal. If we can agree that one gallon of water weighs about 8 lbs, then I moved about 3400 lbs worth of water and sand yesterday up and/or down a half dozen cellar stairs. That’s close to 1-3/4 tons of stuff that I personally relocated, which ain’t half bad for a guy who hasn’t been to a gym in five years!
I’m happy to report that no new water has gotten inside, so things are looking up once more. In closing, I think this week can be most adequately summarized thusly: EKTORP!
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First off:
and all of our surplus stock of toilet paper. If you know me, you know that the latter actually may impact us fairly hard, but I’m trying to be positive.
I hope this is wasn’t an intentional pun because because frankly, the word “impact” makes me squirm.
As for Paul, he’s as secretative about his actual birthday as he is about his “brother”. I knew him a good 10 years before he revealed he was born “sometime not around thanksgiving”. Just like the whole Edwin thing, he’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, coated with a fine layer of insulating blubber (ok, so it’s not true but we needed a Paul is one ounce overweight joke).