Dear Diary,

So this marks my big week off at home, with nothing to do but play with the kid and do some house projects I’ve been planning since Ford invented the Model T. Nothing too big or difficult. Should be fun. And the temperature is only 160 degrees outside, so maybe the elastic in my underwear won’t melt to me like last year.

Can’t wait. Gonna’ be exciting. So let’s get started.

Day 1

Today I began work on what should have been a quick and very routine project: moving the hot water heater from its roost in the kitchen pantry. Time allotted: 2 hours. It should have been a piece of cake, despite the fact that I have no idea how to disconnect or reconnect a water heater. It weighs more than a Hummer, is well over a decade old and appears to be wood-burning, not electric or gas. I decided to wing it.

I drained it by running a garden hose from the pantry, through the kitchen, out the dining room and off the porch. Lizards and birds scurried for cover when the steaming water started pouring out. A small, manageable flood developed in the kitchen, but was quite sizable by the time it reached the dining room. Not sure exactly how that happened, but thank goodness the floors are wood as they soaked up the water. I’ll fix the buckling and mildew smell later.

After the water came red-rust sludge. This struck me as a little unusual as water is usually clear and not thick like pudding. Could this explain why even in the winter we look like we have sun tans?
Continue Reading »

It’s quite a relief to know I don’t have a demon (as once suspected) living in my walls. I’m not a big believer in ghosts or UFOs, until I have something in my walls, sewer line or attic. Usually, it turns out to be a squirrel, but at first I always suspect spirits … or worse.

Take the other night, very late in the evening, when my wife jumped up in bed.

“What’s that noise?” she asked. “Can you hear it? A buzzing in the wall?”

Indeed it was. I had heard it the night before, but chalked it up to critters.

It’s funny, though, how when you’re woken up in the middle of the night by your wife who hears a strange noise, it takes on added significance. This was a dull noise, almost a hum, and yes, kind of a buzz. Suddenly, it was a little worrisome. What WAS that noise in the wall? Wasn’t there an Edgar Allen Poe story about just such a thing? Oh crap, now I’m freaked out.

What could it be?
Continue Reading »

I get confused with lots of directions. Give me complicated instructions — turn right over there, then stop — and I’m a basket case. My mind spins in somersaults trying to understand such strange and cryptic commands. It just can’t process them.

Tell me specifically what to do with my hands — put them here, lift this way, rotate around and don’t forget to breathe — and it’s like I’ve just been told how to put the space shuttle together. My face goes blank, and sometimes I pee my pants.

It’s why I was never good at knots. The bunny goes around the tree, down the hole, over the hill, down by the prairie, back up the hole … What the heck are they talking about? Next thing I know, I’m tied up in a tree screaming for someone to cut me down. I’m a basket case.

Which is why days later I’m still not sure how well our first baby swimming class at the YMCA went, or whether I accomplished anything at all.

This I can tell you: I sure didn’t understand anything at all.

My wife signed up our family, including our little 6-month-old girl, for these very basic classes. No Olympic breast stroke for babies here. Mainly it’s how to handle your child in water, and for your child, how to handle being nearly drowned by your clumsy parents.

It was a lot of fun. We swam, we splashed, we didn’t drown and my baggy board shorts didn’t fall off, as is often known to happen, to the displeasure of mothers who then have to explain to their children why the skinny guy in the pool is screaming and naked.

But what did I learn? And did I do anything right that I was taught? The jury is not only out. It hung itself.
Continue Reading »

It’s time to insure your home insurance. Do they sell policies like that? Floridians might need them if the hurricanes keep coming, the rates keep rising and companies keep evacuating from the state.

I’ve been listening to my mother talk about this quite a bit recently. Her homeowner’s insurance in Tampa went up $1,000 this year, and there’s another increase looming. She wants to sue them, not for price gouging or raising rates, but specifically for being jerks. I don’t know that it will stand up in court.

So I tell her insurance is a business, and all businesses need to make money, but she’s not listening. Then it occurs to me: What am I doing defending insurance companies? My rates are going up, too.

But it’s all made me much more interested in my own policy, specifically what is and isn’t covered. If you’ve never read the excluded losses in your policy, take a look as it’s not only critical, but also fascinating. I read mine the other day and wondered if they had been written expressly for me as a way to head off stupid, house-damaging things I do.

Strange stuff I thought only happened to me is on there, like this uninsured loss: “settling, cracking, bulging, shrinkage or expansion of the structure.” Shoot, that’s been known to happen all on the same weekend at my house. Plus elongating and elevating.
Continue Reading »