Part II

"Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name."
- Sympathy for the Devil, The Rolling Stones

"Stocks may rise and fall. Utilities and transportation systems may collapse. People are no damn good. But they will always need land and they will pay through the nose to get it. Remember, my father said, 'land' "
- Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), Superman the Movie

"It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to carpet it."
- Stephen Wright

July 14th, 2008

I'm not sure If I've mentioned this before but my best rants are written when I'm in some kind of pain.

It's sort of like giving birth and this would be my labor pain. Most of the time, the pain comes from a hangover. I'm not the first to profess something like this. Reporter personality and author, Jimmy Breslin, wrote his best, most biting criticism with a bourbon hangover. Mine come from scotch.

Today, though, I'm in agony from my broken toe. It's not enough pain to cripple me, but it is certainly enough pain to make me crabby. The most strategic thing I can do at this point is to avoid everyone I care for and go down to my dungeon and continue my rant. So, I'm sitting in my new sanctum sanctorum, listening to the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil, and plotting world domination.

Before I continue my rant, I want to tell you a bit more of my injury. In keeping with most of my injuries, it was done stupidly and without plan. Really. I can't make this up. I can compare this injury to the time I stepped off a curb 13 years ago and sprained my ankle. I was on an air cast for a month and had to use crutches. Just to reiterate, this happened because I stepped off of a curb wrong.

I broke my toe along those lines.

While setting up my Foreman Griller outside, I saw I needed one of the extension chords I keep in the garage. As I came back up to the house, I decided to walk up the stone path that leads to the house. As I walked up the stones, my foot, in mid stride, caught one of the large stones by the toe. My toe hit the stone step in the exact wrong way. I lost my balance and fell to the ground. The pain was excruciating. I got up and started over to the griller. As I walked further, I found that the pain started to increase.

Something was definitely wrong.

I plugged the extension chord into the socket and went inside the house. As I started to take my shoe off to assess the damage, my wife asked me what was wrong. I told her and she asked me if I could actually go a month without hurting my stone. She then saw that I really wasn't in the mood for that and she took a look at my toe. It started to swell and it wasn't pointing in the direction that it usually points in.

She got some ice and I sat back in the easy chair and was focused on not screaming. My toe started to swell almost immediately. About two hours later, it started to turn colors. It's still very much "wild cherry" red and "grape" purple. The next day, I went out to get flip flops because having my toe in a shoe or a sneaker was just not going to happen. And the brief time I kept it in a sneaker was just agony. Right now, I'm testing the limits of my chemical tolerances by seeing how many ibuprofen I can take in a 2 hour period.

Like I said, it's stupid... painful, but stupid. The pain, as I said, is tolerable now, however, it's really annoying. And it's enough to make me really bad company.

So, where was I? Oh yes, "No good deed ever goes unpunished."

I wasn't really thrilled with my sister's husbands work. It was good. It just wasn't "two thousand dollars" good. I'm not angry with him, I'm angry at me. Ordinarily, I'd get 3 estimates from other competitors and then I'd make a decision. It is entirely my fault that I did not follow my own advice.

I'm also a bit peeved that I've started to hemorrhage money like a hemophiliac hemorrhages blood in a pool full of razors. In the last two months I've spent close to 8 thousand dollars on repairs on the old house and furniture for the new house ($2,150). Right now, we have a guest bedroom without a bed, an apartment without a bed, and conservatory with no furniture at all. This is okay as all of the boxes that we have not unpacked are either in the garage or in the conservatory.

I still can't find more than two pairs of black socks.

My wife really is not happy with the appliances that were left behind. The dishwasher is not as good as our old one, the washing machine takes small loads, the dryer doesn't get really hot (or clothes really dry). As we now have more than an acre of land, I had to buy a tractor mower ($1,700) to get that done (on the upside, I was able to purchase a Toro self propelled mower with my Amex points). The pool, as of this writing, has not been opened yet. The pool company I called to open the pool would not do anything until the water was drained from the cover. This required a submersible pump ($200) which would also be used to drain the now empty coy pond.

Why empty the coy pond? West Nile and mosquitoes. They have made their home at my house. Don't ask me to donate blood this year. The bugs have taken most of it already. These are monster mosquitoes, too. I saw one about the size of my palm. Start buying citronella stock because I'm going to buy a lot of that, along with the torches as well. Also, if you know a good quinine supplier, please e-mail me.

Here's the good news. The former owner left me an extra refrigerator. Guess what that's now stocked with. Yup. Corona, Sam Adams, Mike Hard Lime, Hard Cider, Blue Coladas, Strawberry Daiquiris, Blue Moon Ales, Twisted Teas, Mohitos, and two bottles of German Riesling. I may not know where the next mortgage payment is coming from but I know where my next beer is. The fist step to happiness is knowing that you won't be starting a 12 step program in the near future.

Now, I know what you're thinking: Why did you move, anyway? I ask myself that question sometimes. My mortgage was less than $1,000 a month, the association would take care of most of the yard work and heating the townhouse hardly cost anything.

Well, it was time. We needed to get out, my mother-in-law's lung cancer was growing worse. Plus, the amount of profit we'd get from the house would probably not come at a better time. We had the money to make a good down payment and the house we bought was a great deal.

What would really make me happy would be to have the other house sold. I could use an extra $150K. That would make me smile.. a lot. I still have some work with the old place in order to get the Certificate of Occupancy. My wife thinks that the reason we have to do all of this work is because the inspector must have had an argument with this wife before seeing our house. I try not to speculate on these things and try to think positive. I like to think he's upset because he has an incurable disease and is looking to get back at the world one house at a time.

My wife's concerns are a bit more intangible. She's worried that her mother won't like the house and be a perpetual pain the ass. I told her not to worry about such silly things. I simply assume that she will most certainly be a pain in the ass and that it's already a forgone conclusion. She should just brace for the impact and accept the fact that we have plenty of land to hide the body.

I plan to have a nice garden.

Her other complaint was that she felt we did not have enough land. I didn't lose my patience immediately. I simply looked at the situation practically and thought it would be best for her to do the yard work at this point. The upside would be that she would get a realistic concept of "enough land" but the downside would be that she'd probably kill all of my plants - and who wants that? There's a reason why I bought a ride-on mower. I'm no longer 17 years old and, as Dana Carvey says, people my age get hurt for no reason.

The most amount of exercise that I want is to "Jump to conclusions" and to do some 12 oz curls. Unfortunately, it looks my backyard will give me all the physical exercise I will require in my forties. And with the exception of lying down while my toe is broken to watch some of the tube, I really haven't sat down long enough to relax.

(More to come)