Thursday

Funny week.  When you have a functional problem in your home (heating, cooling, electricity, plumbing, or some for of damage), that item jumps to Number One on your to-do list until it gets resolved.  That's kinda where I have been this week with the water in the basement.  And I really don't consider this event that disastrous.  But it has certainly been disrupting to my household routines.

At this point, I'm just letting the dehumidifiers and fans pull the moisture out of the air.  It seems to be working.  There doesn't appear to be any odor.  The plan is to put some new padding down in the affected areas this weekend and put the carpet back down.  All in all, if this is all I have to do, my actual out of pocket costs will be less that $500, which includes the new sump pump and a small dehumidifier.  The biggest cost has been the inconvenience and stress.

Moving on...

These little "that's life" episodes can contribute to the natural reduction in "stuff" that your survivors will have to sift through once you're gone.  In this case, there were 3-4 boxes of receipts, check-books, date-books and miscellaneous documents dating back to the early 2000''s caught in the water's path.  Some of this stuff has now already made its way to the dumpster, while some is drying out in the garage...before it too will likely be tossed.  The reality is that I need to toss a box every year of this kind of junk that I'm in the habit of saving on a current basis.

(At the office, we are on a 10-year program of shredding old files/documents.  And with our conversion to scanning a couple of years ago, we have greatly slowed the accumulation of future shred-eligible material.)

Moving further on...

2 provided me with some education at one of our pit stops on our trip to/from Woodbury.  At an Arby's where we had stopped for lunch, our bill came to over $15 for two "medium" meal-deals that I had read on the overhead menu to be $6.39 each.  I'm no math wiz, but two times $6.39 computed to be something less than $15 in my mind.  When I questioned the clerk, she started an explanation that I quickly knew was much more complicated than I was interested in coming to understand, so I waved her off and took my change.

2 took me aside as we waited for the meals and explained to me that, if I was a more frequent user of fast-food places, I would "get" the meal-deal math.  As it turns out, the "#2" meal-deal only relates to the sandwich, and if you medium-ize a #2, you're actually up-grading the fries and soda, at an additional cost.  I never understood that before. Not sure I do now.  Just call me a slow senior citizen.

Finally, I had another experience yesterday of, "its the shoes"!  Due to my normal pair of daily-wear shoes getting wet in the work to pull the padding from the basement, I had to go to my back-up pair for work yesterday.  This was the same pair I used in NYC when 4 and I spent a day around town...and I came away that day with a lower back ache.  Same thing yesterday...the back was killing me by the afternoon.  So there will be heel-inserts before I use those shoes again...and even then, they may not make it for the long term.

My pal Pete has always said, "its the shoes" whenever I have complained about a leg problem of any sort.  And I think that that is a good first diagnosis for lots of structural discomforts in the body.

All for now.  Have a great day.

BCOT