Wednesday, July 03, 2013

'Tis The Season

Just mailed the following to all colleagues:

May your celebration of the Treacherous and Childish Ingrate Colonial Mutiny be safe and enjoyable, and may a skyrocket with a battlefield grade warhead of the type so beloved of the celebrating New Yorker not crash into your roof and burn down your house.

I mail something along these lines each year, and yet for reasons I cannot comprehend I still get cited for "bad attitude" and "lack of teamwork ethic" at annual reviews.

Monday, July 01, 2013

I ♥ My Machine Gun

It may be fake but I do indeed ♥ my machine gun.

Life has been a bit swinish of late. So far I have

Not opened the pool because the Stevieling lost the shed keys. I was about to cut the lock off (again) on Saturday when she dropped into the conversation that she had, in fact, found them upstairs where I said she'd put them instead of on the key hook, a couple of days before. How did I know she'd put them in or near her room? Because a) every time I've looked on the key hook and not found the shed keys, the kid has had them 2) she was asking me for them a week and a half ago þ) ergo she had lost the bloody things and was attempting, in the best traditions of the family, to make it Somebody Else's Fault.

Not repaired the leaking water heater pipe that occasionally overflows the container I put to catch the drips and has begun to corrode the casing of the ten year old (or thereabouts) water heater. This is because to do the fix I need to drain the hot water system, which is a pain, and shut down the water heater itself, which I've never done and view as akin to shutting down a Warp Core on the starship Enterprise. We might never have hot water again once I've extinguished the pilot light. Also, the leaking pipe is up next to the rafters and the house might burn down. However, we are at crisis point now so I guess that is what I'll be doing on July 4th, that being the first free time I'll have.

Not installed the sprinklers. Technically I did install them, but the timer broke so I had to buy a new one, then one of the electric valves wouldn't stop dripping so I had to swap it out for a spare, then I couldn't find one of the sprinklers and surmised it was in the (locked forever) shed so I just unplugged that particular valve so it wouldn't open. Then one of the other hoses proved to be leakier than the Government of late, so I unplugged that valve too. The others tested out good so I announced Job Done (mostly) and Got On With Life, returning home to a flooded basement. So that needs re-doing then.

And to top it off I've injured my left elbow quite badly, making for a pair now since the right one never properly healed after the incident some years ago that buggered it up.

I thought I'd hit rock bottom, but on the same day I hurt my elbow I developed what I now believe to be Gout in my right foot. It's been about three weeks and I can almost walk normally on the swollen lump of agonized redness that once served as a foot.

But yesterday, I got a call from Mrs Stevie asking me if I would do Pastor a favor and rid the church gymnasium of two balloons that had got loose, and that made everything almost all right with the world.

Nothing calms the nerves and restores equilibrium quite like machine-gunning recalcitrant balloons in the gym ceiling.