Wanna talk about COVID-19 stress? Well… COVID-19 stress that doesn’t actually involve any COVID-19?
Two. Not one, two. Two plumbers in the house. Not even at the same time.
We knew our plumbing needed looking to. It rained in the cellar on Saturday and that’s… what’s the word… bad. So an appointment was made for today to have the kitchen sink and the dishwasher looked at, as well as to see if there was any damage to the floor that we would need to take care of.
Our appointment window was between 8:00 am and noon. The first guy showed up reasonably early but he wasn’t The Plumber, he was the manager. His deal was sewer issues so he was just checking in. Personally, given the global pandemic and the 98,000 deaths in the US alone, I would have done this over the phone. Whatever. He offered to take a look at the floor from the cellar perspective and said he thought it was okay. No structural issues, no health issues. He gave his card in case we want to fix the tiled floor down stairs, and said he’d check on the actual plumber to get an estimate of his arrival.
The actual plumber arrived a little before noon. He thought he knew what our problem was as soon as I started describing it to him. He also looked around down cellar and the more we talked the more he was sure we just had a clog in the pipe somewhere. Okay. Our sink didn’t give easy access to allow him to run a snake so he had to make some adjustments. Once that was all set he was able to snake out the drain and by 1:30 or so it was all over. At least I hope it was. We have a six month guarantee, but I hope we never have to use it.
And all was right with the kitchen again. Except…
Except that I spent some time with two strangers today. We were all wearing masks, and they were wearing gloves. Jen never came near either of them but she was wearing a mask too. They put the paperwork down on the counter, walked away, then I signed with my own pen, walked away, and they picked it up. All sorts of safe stuff like that. My gut instinct was to shake people’s hands, but I absolutely did not. I was able to suppress my lifelong learned behavior. Good boy.
So nothing bad happened, everyone followed the rules, and still I am super nervous. We made sure to do this on a day when Harry and his autoimmune diseases wasn’t in the house. I will continue the paranoia by quarantining myself for two weeks. No hugs for the kids for this guy. Ugh.
Two weeks from today means my self imposed sort of exile ends on June 9th… just in time to start again when the new dishwasher is delivered on June 16th.
Is our hot water heater dead, or is it just messing with us like the jerk that it is?
I’m working from home today. Hopefully there is a plumber coming to check on our water heater. I had one cold shower yesterday and I don’t want another one. Why is a cold shower such a soul crushingly miserable experience? Why can’t it just be… cold? I don’t get it.
I was talking about the lack of hot water with my step kids yesterday. I said they were probably going to want to skip taking a shower this morning. My step daughter got all indignant (well, a tiny bit indignant at least) and said she was going to take one anyway. Ah to be a cocky teenager again. Wait, was I ever a cocky teenager?
Hey, do you remember when the Olympics were interesting? I do. Back in the long distant past the Olympics were can’t miss television. We used to watch coverage every night. Even the most ridiculous events had us glued to the tube.
Oh, check it out! Synchronized Swimming is on again! Yeah!
When did that change? Was it the end of the Soviet Union? Was it when they added snowboarding? Was it when they let professionals compete thus creating “the dream team” and crap like that? Was it the year the network (was it NBC or CBS?) tried to tie in a pay per view option? What did they call it? Olympic Triple Cast or something like that? I only remember David Letterman ripping the whole thing to shreds on a nightly basis. It was probably a little bit of all of the above (but mostly snowboarding).
I still get really excited for Olympic hockey during the winter games, but other than that? Snooze. Rio this week will mark the first games held since we ditched cable TV and I don’t regret it for a second. I’ll be visiting my mom for a while tonight so she might have the opening ceremonies on. Otherwise I won’t watch any of the coverage at all. Part of me misses the pageantry of the whole thing, but given the mess that Sochi seemed to be two years ago, and the disaster that seems to be shaping up in Rio… well, maybe it’s time we start re-thinking the whole thing.
I didn’t post to my wordpress.com blog yesterday, but I did post to medium.com. Does that mean I am done with wordpress.com? Probably not, but maybe I am for a day or two. We’ll see. One thing that is infuriating me about medium is that it refuses to let me put two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence. I hit the spacebar twice but the bastard cursor only moves once. That’s definitive proof that medium is an evil, unAmerican enterprise. Two, two, two spaces following a period at the end of a sentence! Damn you and your markdown menace!
When I first started looking at medium.com as a blogging option, they had an iOS app but it was read only. You couldn’t post from it. That wasn’t a deal breaker but it was damn close. Now you can write and post and upload images from the app (at least from the iPad version).
This very post, in fact, has made use of both the iPad app and the web app. I started writing this while sitting at my computer. I got about halfway through the stuff about the Olympics and then had to stop for a little while. When I picked it up again, I went to the drafts list on the iOS app and continued writing. After finishing the Olympic stuff I had to stop again and now I’m back on my Mac. Pretty cool. I never did that with wordpress, although I know I could have. Still, living in the future is kinda fun.
Speaking of living in the future, I just turned on the lights in my living room, and my air conditioner using apps on my iPhone. Yes, living in the future rules.
I have to ask a serious question about a not-serious topic. When did Hollywood lose the ability to make a decent DC Comics movie? The first two Superman movies are classics. The first two Tim Burton Batman movies are fantastic. Batman Begins is excellent, and The Dark Knight is about as good as comics movies have ever been. Now though? I didn’t hate Batman v Superman as much as most people did, but some of it was just laughably bad. Hey, what was it that made Batman and Superman stop trying to kill each other and become BFFs? Yeah, that’s what I am talking about. Now Suicide Squad comes out today and, while I really had no interest in it at all, the reviews are vicious. Is it really that bad, or has Marvel just bought out all of the critics? Maybe they took some of that massive Disney money and did just that.
My step kids and I watch the DC TV shows. We all love Flash. They love Arrow (I think it’s okay). We just started watching Supergirl so the jury is still out. My only beef at this point is, why does Jimmy Olson look like he could bench press a mini-van? Isn’t he supposed to just be a nerdy little guy? Regardless, DC is getting the TV shows right but getting the huge budget films terribly wrong. At this point I can’t imagine it is simply bad writing or bad directing on an individual movie basis. If it’s a trend then it has to be coming from higher up the management food chain, doesn’t it? Is Suicide Squad going to be bad because the parameters within which it was written, cast, filmed, directed, edited, and marketed bad? It’s starting to feel that way. It’s starting to feel like the DC movies are going to be awful before the stories are even conceived. It’s like they have three strikes against them before they even start.
The little Justice League tease they released at the San Diego Comic Con was pretty exciting, but when push comes to shove… who cares, there’s a Star Wars flick coming out in December.
Okay, so I’ve been picking at this for an hour now. Do I have anything else I need to leak out of my brain? Nope, just going to wait for the plumber to check in.