Boiling My Bottom at La Chateau Stevie

So, the insurance compay sent round some house disaster recovery specialists who poked the walls, celings and floors with a thing that looked like a cattle prod and swept them with a thing that looked like a stud-finder and declared that everything was dry as a bone. Then they remembered to switch their sensors on, repeated the process and declared that everything was wringing wet.
"No kiddng?" sezzeye.
So the expert house dryers deployed four huge "high grain refridgerant" deumidifiers and four hurricane strength portable wind machines and left saying "keep them turned on and the windows closed until we call again later next week".

Well, it's been two days and I've noticed the following side effects of this plan:

1. no-one can hear what anyone else is saying even if they are shrieking so hard their Starbuck's Extra-large Mug O'Triple Espresso is sloshing everywhere
2. It is 97 degrees F outside. It is 102 inside
3. My skin is so dry I'm starting to look like Joan Rivers
4. The gale force wind howling into the downstairs bathroom causes the toilet paper to self-deploy all over the bathroom unless you jam the roll with a broomhandle

The upstairs bathroom turned out to have two layers of sheet rock per wall, being constructed "Gennaro fashion¹". The house drying experts (HDEs) demanded the right to pull down one layer. I said they could do what they had to since the rest of the bathroom was such a write-off. The floor tiles all came off the plywood subfloor, which delaminated and is now like a big springy wooden book. The commode has come adrift from its seal on the floor, and some of that seal broke away and ended up in the downstairs bathroom. This is now an ex-bathroom.

Just when I thought things had reached rock bottom, my UPS² suddenly reconfigured itself into an IPS³ and began powering my computer down unexpectedly.

Life sucks.

Earlier

On Friday evening, as I was driving to my bi-monthly Dungeons and Dragons manly high stakes poker game, I was listening to "In The Court of the Crimson King", the first King Crimson album and a perenial favourite of mine. As the band hit the jam in the middle of "21st Century Schizoid Man" I looked out of the side window of my car and noticed that the pink clouds and blue sky mimicked, to my mind exactly, the pink of the face and the blue of the background from the inside cover art of the album and a feeling of rightness, of something completed settled over me. Funny thing, life.

You take the flint nodule in your hands and examine it carefully. You turn it just so and strike it with the deer antler you shaped specially for the task, and a flake of glasslike rock shears off and lands in the grass a few inches away. You pick it up very carefully, minding your fingers and give it the once over. It is good, but not great, destined to be a skinning knife, but when you look back at the surface the shard came from, you can see that the next flake will be a perfect arrowhead.

There are two great satisfactions in life: one comes from things you do with your own hands and brain, the other from things that are. Your lover's face as she/he lies asleep. Your lover's reaction to your touch.

Life is good.

1: See Mother's Day Job, posted ages ago.
2: Uninterrupable Power Supply
3: Interrupting Power Supply