As I have detailed in the past here and here, I think I am the center of universal attention — hence the blog and all. Despite my debilitating self-absorption, I actually managed to ride my new bike to work last week without breaking out in a nervous sweat (or any sweat at all; the two-mile ride is on a fairly level grade) or collapsing in a fit of anxiety hives. Even when I shifted badly and dropped my chain, I was able to fix this mechanical mishap without feeling that each car driving by held the entirety of my adolescent romantic failures, all of them pointing and giggling at my predicament.

However, this past Saturday, I had that feeling again. Hazel woke up nice and early around 6 a.m. ready for the day, a fact that invariably begets two groggy parents rolling out of bed to attend her needs. Once Hazel was changed, dressed, and fed, I headed out to do some yard work. First on my list was digging up the remnants of an overgrown forsythia bush. Last year, I noticed that it was sending shoots and branches up under the siding on the east side of our house. I read online that you can hack off forsythia limbs and transplant them in the fall, each branch taking root and growing into a fully-fledged forsythia bush. I was skeptical, but hopes for the best since, as the adage goes, “If it’s on the internet, it must be true.” And this spring, just like a starfish’s arm that grows a whole fish(?), those ungainly bare stalks I jabbed in the ground actually blossomed and have new, promising growth.

So like I said, this weekend I put spade to dirt. Even though the remaining bush was nothing more than a few inches of knotty trunk, foot-long shoots were sprouting still, so I knew I had to move this beast. Everything was going well until, just before the imminent uproot, my shovel (which I was using as a makeshift pry bar) gave out, its fiberglass handle issuing forth a disappointing crack. I looked around, but I guess nobody heard it. No newshound popped out from behind the maple tree remarking, “What a scoop!” No paparazzi shouted my name as their flashbulbs painted my now flaccid digging instrument in stark relief. Once more, life reminded me that I’m not the center of it all, despite what I might have Sharpied on the waistband of all my underpants.

Last night was our free estimate appointment with a local contractor — we’re hoping to put up a two-car garage. Not having a garage stinks, especially in Maine where winters are cold and snowy. Plus, it’d be cherry to have a place to store the lawnmower, snowblowerthrower, bikes, and sundry other things that we don’t want sitting in the middle of the living room. This includes our cars.

I met the guy (let’s call him Guy) in our driveway and shook hands. After a few minutes of small talk, he set his mind to the business at hand. Right away I noticed that Guy was a very jittery person. He seemed to have difficulty using the 25’ tape measure he brought and never stopped talking. He continually spewed words from his mouth for the entire 15-minute visit without answering a single question I posed. This includes the three times I asked, “So can you give me a rough estimate on how much a new garage would cost?” He kept putting this inquiry off, saying how there were so many factors that could affect the price. Our free estimate was becoming a free awkward experience.

“I should come back when both you and Megan can sit down to go over the options,” he stammered.

I told him no and asked for just a base number. I knew siding choice and such would change the price, and we wouldn’t hold him to an exact number today. Just tell me something so that we won’t waste his time. But Guy kept blubbering, back-peddling toward his truck, saying that there were so many options, we should really wait until Megan was available. I pressed the issue again, and he went into bamboozle mode, trying to use terms like “roof grade” and “rafter span” to scare me into dropping the conversation. At that point, I asked Guy to leave, which he did only after giving me a three-page list of references. In short, Guy was a bad salesman, even though his card read “Senior Vice President”. I imagine that everyone who works at this place is a Senior Vice President; it must be the entry level title.

I can only assume that Guy wanted to speak with Megan as well as me so that he could win over the little lady with surface level details like windows and door shape. This stereotyping strategy wouldn’t have worked though, as I’m the soft sell in our house. I couldn’t imagine writing Guy’s business a check for several thousand dollars. It’s a wonder he does enough business to afford his official company polo shirt.

Is this a sign that a garage would be superfluous at this point? Maybe. But what if the band gets back together? We need a rehearsal space, and Hazel’s room has terrible acoustics.

Picture yourself in front of an impossibly tall door that can easily be opened, but not by you. Imagine, if you will, the sound of a small hand smacking against a pane of glass. Visualize the frantic motions of someone whose dexterity is still in beta development, spurred into action by a burning need to get the attention of a person who is looking the other way and cannot hear your warnings. Can you imagine the frustration felt, the panicky sweat that would make smooth hands clammy and brushed hair matted?

Hopefully you are picturing a cute, active baby and not some sort of demon spawn just birthed from the unholy womb of Hell because I’m talking about Hazel, not Beelzebub Jr. This week was the inaugural First Mow of the Yard and I’m embarrassed by the glee that bubbled up inside me at the thought of cutting the grass, one straight, deliberate row after another. But what made me actually laugh out loud (and I don’t mean LOL) is when I briefly looked over at our front screen door. As I shore our lawn to a respectable height, there stood Hazel — 30 inches of flailing fury, desperately trying to get my attention and alert me of the big scary monster (i.e. the push mower) that could very well make me into Daddy mulch.

One of the best skills a person can have is the ability to put a positive spin on a potentially bad situation. I’m not talking about someone who blindly ignores the icky parts of life in favor of Precious Moments figurines and posters of kittens staunchly “hanging in there.” This optimistic outlook needs to be authentic and honest, boldly acknowledging that things aren’t perfect without actually focusing on that glum fact. Take for example this anecdote from my college graduation. Commencement was held outside on the Marist College green despite warnings of heavy rains to come. And come they did; dumping rains began soon after the first diploma was handed out. Many of my classmates left in a huff as soon as they walked across the stage, but a good handful of us stayed on to cheer our fellow graduates. By the end, the mass of students who had stuck it out congregated to the front of the seating area, celebrating as the steady rain soaked us through our gowns, our eyes barely protected by our waterlogged mortarboards. Once the last name was called, Marist Brother Paul Ambrose took the microphone to deliver the closing benediction. He cleared his throat as said, “May your young lives have as many blessings as rain drops that have fallen on your heads today.”

So that’s what I mean by effective positive spin. Let’s now use this method to assess our dry(ish) basement. We had originally planned to finish off a good portion of it, making a play room, a dark room, and two office spaces for Megan and myself. Moving forward, I feel that we’d be foolish to blithely disregard our basement penchant for getting wet. Even with a sump pump installed, we’re still talking about a potentially damp environment from time to time. I don’t want to put our computers and their peripherals down there. So now what?

Well, we’re considering an addition. Right now, two of our three bedrooms are being used as advertised with the third servicing as an office/craft room. But if we’re going to expand our family (a serious possibility in the next year or so) then we are going to need to revert that third bedroom to a nursery. With no extra space for computer stuff, an addition may be just the thing. So the estimate gathering has begun, but I have to say how very nerve-racking this is. If anyone out there has a better idea, I’m all ears.

At the very least, we can always depend on Hazel to take care of clean up.

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!