The Eternal Refrigerator

 

It goes without saying that the selling and/or the purchase of a house is a time-consuming and exhausting endeavor. For my wife and I back in 2000 we were lucky enough to be the exception to the first half of that rule. However the purchase of our new home was not smooth and seamless. To put it bluntly, it was a huge cluster fuck unparalleled in scope and repercussions. We spent years cleaning up the mess and dealing with the items the previous owners left behind.

Boiling everything down to the basics my spouse and I were in the closing stages of adopting our daughter from China. One of the requirements to satisfy the adoption agency was that the baby had to have a room to itself. Our first home had three bedrooms, enough for us, one for our son, and one for the baby. But my wife felt we needed a fourth bedroom for family and friends who would visit.

So we painted and repaired our old house until it just about shined. Then we went about looking for a new house that had the right number of bedrooms and met my wife's other personal requirements like location, good school district, and distance from her work. The housing market at that time was on the side of the sellers and we immediately ran into some issues. Things got worse when the first family that looked at our home made and offer and we accepted. The clock began ticking for us to find a suitable replacement and get out before the deadline. We had less than two weeks left before we found a house that while meeting all the requirements had several issues.

Namely that the family selling the house we wanted to buy wasn't ready to move. Their replacement house they were building was livable but they wanted more time. It's been over twenty-years now and all I remember was that as far as they were concerned they wanted all the bells and whistles in their new home fully installed and connected. They wanted at least another two weeks before surrendering the house.

That was a no-go for us because the adoption agency had to evaluate our new residence and then send confirmation to the Chinese governmental agency so the adoption could go forward. If we weren't in the new house by the time of the evaluation we could lose the little girl picked for us who was still in a Chinese orphanage.

So the selling family blinked and moved out before their new place met their standards. It was either get out or we would have rescinded the offer leaving them with two mortgage payments. As a Plan B my wife and I had talked about looking at apartments and just staying there until the adoption was over where we would then have a new house built.

The old owners were not happy with the situation and in typical Lexington county passive-aggressive behavior they moved out leaving the house trashed. As we moved in my wife and I were shocked to see dozens of holes in the walls in every room that had been cleverly hid by the selling family. Most were from pictures but no attempt was made to repair any of them. During this bullshit the house inspector somehow didn't warn us about a multitude of issues that the sellers were supposed to fix. Off the top of my head the report that asshole gave us didn't mention a word about the broken burner on the stove; the interior doors that weren't square with the frames; and most of all the stains on the kitchen floor.

I honestly believe the selling family slipped the house inspector money to overlook these issues. I mentioned as much to a few of our new neighbors and I'm sure my suspicions were relayed to the selling family. I have another suspicion that the selling family was friends with many of those people and my accusations colored my relationship with those living around me.

But in true passive-aggressive style it was the refrigerator they conveniently forgot to load up that still makes me harbor ill feelings about those assholes.

Adding icing to the already difficult cake of moving I had National Guard duty on the weekend we took up residence in the new house. And for reasons I never understood both the CO of my unit and the First Sergeant refused to cut me some slack and allow me to slip out to help with the move.

By the time I arrived home late in the afternoon the majority of the moving was finished. My wife and in-laws were still dealing with the shock of the condition of the house. I, in turn was flaming pissed and wanted to kick some ass. Especially when I opened the doors of the refrigerator they left behind.

My dad-in-law knew something about kitchen appliances and guessed that it had to have been twenty-years old back in 2000. While still functioning properly the inside had obvious wear, to the point rust was showing through on some exposed metal parts. Shelves were bent and glass panels cracked making it look like a real backhanded insult to us demanding they move before they were ready.

But most worrisome was the brown sticky stuff at the bottom. Partially covered by the crisper section for vegetables, it looked like a Coke or Pepsi had leaked and they never cleaned it up. I wanted to move that refrigerator out the garage and bring in ours from the old house but by that time my wife was on the verge of a nervous breakdown while my in-laws compassion and love of family were exhausted.

So we assembled beds to sleep, the in-laws went home, and we order pizza from what I was now calling a glorified redneck trailer. Later that night as I lay in bed and fumed we then discovered the marooned refrigerator made some of the god-awful noises. The sounds it produced were like a combination of it about exploded and a plea to end its miserable existence.

Weeks rolled into months and we slowly made our new suburban trash heap a home. That included taking all the insides of the refrigerator out and cleaning them. And yes, I personally cleaned out the brown sticky stuff at the bottom.

The trouble was that a week or two later I noticed the brown sticky stuff had reappeared at the bottom and it was growing. I think the brown stuff reappeared after each cleaning for about a year. It never entirely went away but we learned to live with what little bit we couldn't kill off.

The adoption moved forward and the years came and went but we never pulled the trigger on getting rid of that nightmare refrigerator. We talked about it many times but with a new baby and other issues the fact that it still kept food and drinks cold always prevented us from really doing anything. I even learned to take comfort at night with its strange sounds.

That refrigerator lasted another fourteen years before it had its version of a stroke and died. So if my late dad-in-law was correct, and the old bastard was smart, that refrigerator lasted north of thirty-five years. Here's the real kick in the ass, its replacement died in less than five due to a lightning strike. And its replacement, an expensive Samsung with all the bells and whistles lasted two years before the ice maker on it utterly quit.

We called in the company-approved technician and he isolated the problem to the touch screen controller or the water filter assembly that had its own little micro-controller. He couldn't isolate the issue to a single cause and to fix both electronic components would cost over five-hundred dollars.

We instead bought six plastic ice trays for fifty-cents each from the Dollar Store and called it a day.

I still believe the selling family left the old refrigerator here as a form of insult. A small dig at the ungrateful family that wouldn't give them enough time to move out on their timetable. But I'll be damned as much as anyone can think fondly on a kitchen appliance that bad boy was tough.

One of Those Weeks

Last Friday about this time I was mentally preparing myself for the rough week that I knew was coming. It started Saturday with my wife and I driving separate cars up to Clemson University to bring our daughter home. The semester was over, she had passed all her exams and came away with a GPA well over 3.80. I was/am proud of her as any dad can be.

Once we arrived at the collection of Soviet-era looking building that pass as student dormitories, the crazy shit slammed into a giant high speed fan. Just imagine the night the Titanic got much too personal with a random iceberg and you have something approaching the craziness of several hundred upper middle class parents all struggling to load up their kids' crap and go home. Throw in way too many cars, trucks, SUVs, and even a couple of mid-sized U-haul moving vans in an area never meant to have a quarter of that number and you could begin to understand the confusion and frustration.

Strangely enough, everyone seemed in a friendly and lighthearted mood. No arguments or fights, just way too many people in an area that the campus authorities had setup with multiple barriers to impend anyone getting too close to the buildings. We're talking 9/11 era safety features to prevent anyone from driving hypothetical car bombs up to the buildings front entrances.

Luckily, my wife and I had arrived a little earlier than our scheduled pickup time, so getting our daughter's stuff loaded was actually not as bad as I feared. Just when we were pulling out the next wave of parents started flowing into dorm parking lot. Still though, the drive back down to Columbia was exhausting and I pretty much gave up on all activity the minute I walked back into the house and saw the living room couch.

The next day was yard work, and even with a nifty new John Deere riding lawnmower I still had to pull out the trusty push mower and the irritating weed whacker to tame smaller, overgrown areas. Where was my rising Clemson University sophomore daughter? She had skipped out with her two college friends for an early Sunday brunch leaving me high and dry. I didn't say much to her about abandoning good old dad because she really buckled down and studied for her exams.

But wait folks, there was still a good bit of flying shit for the rest of the week as well.

Back at my work, I took a buddy's on-call for this week because he was hurt. And it was a moderately bad week involving a great deal of hospital equipment and circumstances I never had to deal with before. That was just Monday morning and early afternoon. The real fun began around five o'clock in the afternoon.

As massive squall line of storms swept through my area and as I was trying to post something that day. Somewhere around four O'clock I heard what that I'd have to describe as a combination of a thick limb breaking and outright explosion. It happened after a massive and prolonged gust of wind that had me listening for the telltale sound of the proverbial locomotive plowing through my subdivision.

 

We totally lost one tree in the backyard with it falling over into the neighbor's backyard crushing the fence. Making matters worse, where that tree fell is the usual location of that guy's super fancy bass boat. Luckily, the neighbor moved his boat sometime before so I didn't have to deal with my insurance guy. But I did talk to the neighbor about going halves on the fence repair since he had attached his small segment of fence to mine without asking permission. No he said, they're broke but will gladly give us tons of moral support for our trouble.

In the front yard the old and brittle river birch growing right at the neighborhood intersection lost a lot of decent-sized limbs. Limbs big and numerous enough to completely stop traffic from coming in and going out of the neighborhood. While it was still raining I ran out into the street and cleaned up the fallen limbs tossing them in my front yard. Looking on the bright side of things, my wife has finally agreed to have that river birch removed. After every storm over the last several years, I had informed her that if one of the big limbs or even a part of the trunk had fallen into the street there was no way I could clear it. And Heaven forbid had a big limb or part of the trunk hit a car that was stopped at the intersection. 

 The tree guys are coming in a couple of days to give us an estimate for removal. We're talking a couple of thousand dollars, at least.

Given the situation at work on Monday and my impromptu tree cleaning that day I passed out the second my head hit the bed that night. The rest of the work week was quite busy with me breaking new records in the number of total steps each day. I still have to cover for my buddy this weekend and will not be off call until Monday morning. Here's hoping nothing weird happens as this week slowly dies.

The final icing on the cake this week was the dishwasher. Last Sunday it gave up the ghost, stopping in the middle of a cleaning cycle. The tiny LED screen on the door threw up an error message saying the drain pump was the issue.

No problem, a couple of YouTube videos later I have my head in the dishwasher cleaning the filter screen. Since that didn't solve anything the next item on the trouble shooting agenda had me giving it a mechanical colonoscopy around the impeller of the drain pump. Sure enough the impeller was frozen with me not finding anything causing the jam.

Enter the professional appliance technician who had to make three separate visits this week to fix the dishwasher each time. Third service call appears to have been the charm with the dishwasher purring along even now as I type out this less than glamours collection of verbal offal.

Yeah, washing dishes is literally one of those “First World Problems” privileged and spoiled Americans whine about but I've hated that chore all my life. So as I sit at the kitchen table reflecting on the past week I take solace in the idea that my entire family, wife, son, his girlfriend, and my daughter will be going to Disney World this December. It's still a long time away but thankfully 2021 seems to be flowing far smoother than 2020.

I just hope I get to hug Goofy. I'll probably cry if I do. It doesn't take much to make me happy at my current stage of life. 

 

 

***Just as I was preparing to post, the dishwasher shut down again and started displaying the same error code. Oh well, at least it's Friday night.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Smooth Criminal

 

 There is a long sordid history of why I hate the subdivision I find myself living. Yes, it was a mistake to purchase a home among the collection of arrogant and stuck up individuals my family and I do our best to ignore but you know the deal with hindsight.

Now the issues with the neighbors are all my fault. And they revolve around my attitude and practices dealing with lawn care and maintenance on the house. I do not obsess over the greenness of my grass, nor really the composition of the chlorophyll-using plant species that live within my territory. In other words my yard has a multitude of weeds and I am fine with that. Making matters worse, it was only at the beginning of last spring that I had my irrigation pump replaced after it burned up two-years ago.

The first year it was down we had a decent level of rain that kept it within bounds. But the following year I know my neighbors were cussing me up a storm. Because while all their yards were a heavily chemically-induced emerald green, mine had that post-apocalyptic brown, black, and gray color from lack of water. See, in 2019 I was coming off my near death experiences with my heart and lawn care for me and my family just wasn't on the radar.

And honestly another reason my neighbors don't like me is because I simply do not fit into their expectations of being a proper southern suburban gentlemen. My first and most radical thought crime is my politics, since I'm an Obama-loving, Hillary voting, tree-hugging liberal. From that standpoint alone, it's a wonder my kids had any friends at all during their school years. From my observations, the natives here get so extreme Ronald Reagan wouldn't pass the current Republican acceptance test.

The vehicle I drive is also and issue because all manly men here are required own a truck along the Ford F-150-class are larger. Smaller trucks like a Ford Ranger are passable but are snickered at by the big boys. My only transportation is a mid-sized sedan so I'm already suspect even if the natives don't see my “Riding with Biden” bumper sticker.

Understand, my wife does believe I generally overreact and regularly tells me I'm the problem but a couple of nights ago she had to side with me. Strangely enough, on this particular incident, I wasn't the asshole, it was my cat. But first a little background on suburban geopolitical situation.

While good fences make good neighbors, having a row of Leyland cypress trees lining the entirety of the section between my backyard and that of my neighbors was pretty much heaven. With the those trees, the neighbors could have their pools parties and I could sit out on my deck and read without either of us knowing of the others existence.

But the Leyland got old and started dying and a couple of tropical storms later several had fallen over while others were leaning threatening to smash the fence or either of the storage houses in the backyards. So I'm forced to have the trees removed and now both that neighboring family and mine do our best not look like we're gawking at the other when outside.

Here's the general scenario from my point of view; say I have a fantastic book that I can't put down and decide to go outside and read so I can enjoy the sunlight and fresh air. As I open up my book to delve back into a universe with starships, ancient alien civilizations, and rogue AI's, I discover the neighbors are having a pool party. Something one of the previous owners installed a few years ago.

Since my deck is about two feet above ground level those neighbors can easily see me. Given the locals suspicious nature, they assume I'm outside trying to catch a glimpse of the moms sunbathing while their kids play in the water. Sound easily echos off the houses so I catch more than half of their conversation with one mom asking about the tall, weird looking guy sitting on his deck.

I stay outside on the deck just long enough to act like I didn't hear that. Not long later, I excuse myself by acting like my cell phone vibrated and go back inside to take the call.

Since that awkward spring afternoon right after we had the Leylands removed, I am quite circumspect about when I go sit on my deck. I harbor no hard feelings to the neighbors, I did go outside while they were hanging out in the pool and honestly, my sudden appearance was probably unsettling. See, over the years many people have commented that my natural, neutral resting expression looks a lot like a pissed off Clint Eastwood about to ask some street punk if he feels lucky. This mainly comes from the fact that I find most people ridiculous idiots but that statement expands the scope of this essay far beyond what I intend.

So now that were brought up to the present a couple of night ago my furry buddy, Knox the Cat, was throwing a fit to get outside. It was a work night for me, I was tired, and didn't want to spend the last thirty minutes or so before I went to bed dealing with feline whining. I open the door leading to the deck and let him slip outside. During that brief moment, I catch a glimpse of the neighbors sitting on their own deck. I really couldn't tell what they were doing, and as you might be able to surmise I didn't really care.

I return to my nightly routine of making lunch for the next day as well as loading the dishwasher and sweeping the kitchen floor. Several minutes later I hear Knox making strange sounds at the same door I let him out. Without thinking I let him back inside only to see he had something large in his mouth.

Now it is quite common for Knox to bring home a live bird or the occasional baby rabbit. Almost always this will then mean I have to make a twenty-minute drive to the nearest wild animal rescue center to drop off the hapless animal.

With Knox running around with something in his mouth the usual household panic erupts. My wife runs off to the bedroom, slamming the door to avoid the predatory horror. I in turn chase the cat in a desperate attempt to save his prey. When I finally catch the damn cat, I find his prize is not a live bird but one that had been deep fried, probably twelve herds and spices.

Knox somehow has a fried chicken drumstick, and after I take it away I discover its still warm and fresh. Naturally, I have no idea where Knox obtained a piece of Colonel Sander's finest, and he sure as Hell wouldn't tell me even if he could. At that moment, I had one pissed off cat who didn't understand why I was taking away his prize. The answer to that question came to the front door about ten minutes later.

Before the knock at the door, I toss the drumstick and return to prepping for the next work day. My wife emerges from the bedroom and takes a seat in front of the television. I'm in the bedroom when I hear the knock from the front door. I let my wife deal with the person and whatever their business might be.

Being on the other end of the house, I didn't catch the conversation between my wife and the visitor. But since there wasn't any yelling or screams for my help , I didn't think much of it. That is until my wife comes into the bedroom to tell me the visitor was the backyard neighbor come to complain that Knox the Cat had crashed their dinner.

From what my wife told me that group's attention was diverted just enough for Knox to jump onto the picnic table and grab the drumstick he brought home. In the process of Knox's escape, he apparently made a mess of the table items and, if I understood correctly, knocked over a pitcher of tea and the gravy for the mashed potatoes.

I asked my wife if the neighbors wanted some sort of apology or payment for the feline damages. She said no, and made like the neighbor weren't “too upset.” Of course, given my biases, the neighbor was being diplomatic and was probably highly pissed.

So now Knox the Cat is essentially permanently grounded, or at least until the sore butts have a chance to cool down. Since the weather is getting colder in a week or so I'll let my smooth criminal slip back outside. There will be far less of a chance that he could crash any outside dinner parties.

A Short Post From Crappy Suburbia

 

 

 As usual for me, August brings nothing but endless yard work and long, hot humid days with me dreaming of cooler weather. That was the case last weekend since my daughter and I decided to do the mowing and trimming on Saturday. By the time we were finished the only thing I wanted to do was get cleaned up and vegetate on the couch for the rest of the day.

I've done this blogging long enough to fully understand that a weary and overheated Beach Bum does not create audacious fiction nor insightful essays. However, I still wanted to post something so here is some new Jimmy Buffett. 

Have a good week and send me ideas on how I can get my wife to let me go to the coast next Saturday. Understand this, any ideas offered I will consider. I will not held back by moral or ethical concerns. I need a sandy beach, ocean waves, and a salty breeze.      

Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season

 For the obvious selfish and foolish reasons, I had begun to convince myself the South Carolina coast just might avoid any issues this hurricane season. This hurricane season thankfully seemed a bust with few Atlantic storms forming and those that did quickly fizzling out. Well, much to my chagrin, I got up yesterday morning, made a cup of crappy decaf coffee, and turned on the television to learn Hurricane Florence appears to have the South Carolina coast dead in its sights.

For the survivors of Hurricane Maria, my complaints about what may happen in the coming days are most definitely the highest form of whining. But such is human nature when the delicate balance of normal demands and daily concerns of life are threatened by a much worse outside force. What is slightly funny for me on a strictly personal level is whenever I use to voice my trepidation on what may happen, like the possible damage an approaching hurricane might cause, some jackleg douche invariably tries to offer up a “glass half full” scenario. Such people like to offer trite statements at how adversity could pull people together to work for the common good, or some other feel good crap. I would consider such a possibility in more enlightened portions of the country or world, but here in Red State suburbia, I highly doubt it. Personally, I often believe these seemingly civilized suburbanites are just a few missed meals away from eating each other. 

Whatever the case, Dragonwife, my lovely and smart spouse is heading to the local Costco today to pick up a respectable amount of bottled water and canned goods as a precaution. If Florence does decide to smack South Carolina, even indirectly, my work will certainly demand I stay on-site to help maintain continued safe and steady operation. So, I wish everyone within Hurricane Florence's possible path destruction the best of luck. Here's a couple of required Buffett tunes to think about in the coming days. 

Living the Dream

As someone who likes to hold the banner of science and rationality, I've got to admit to a certain level of hypocrisy. See, while I regularly ridicule superstition after years of living in my current house I've come to the conclusion that the damn money hole is jinxed. This is where a short history might be helpful in painting the required picture.

This sad story began back in 2000 as my wife and I entered the last stages of the adoption procedure that would result in my sister-in-law and her flying over to China to pick up the baby. Because one of the requirements for adoption was that the child had to have a bedroom all to herself my wife and I upgraded our old home and quickly sold it to literally the first couple that looked at the place. We were ecstatic, my wife and I had already picked out a new house and with the buyers of our old home quickly getting approval for a mortgage we called the real estate agent to make an offer on the larger house.

Turned out the couple who owned the house we wanted had accepted a bid on theirs pretty much the same time the people who looked at our home made an offer. While there was no reason to immediately panic, my wife and I had to start looking at more houses. The trouble was that my wife had certain stringent requirements for any house we might offer to buy.

The first thing was that she was adamant about the builder, the floor plan, and the general area it was located. Numerous perspective homes that were close to mansions to me given the dwellings I lived in as a child were rejected because they were built by company “B” instead of “A.” It was the same for the interior layout, my wife refused to consider anything with an open floor plan. As for the location, at the time I didn't care but she wanted the kids to attend the best school district.

My requirements weren't as strict but because we had two dogs I rejected several houses that simply didn't have a backyard fence. One of our dogs was a large, very energetic, mixed breed black lab that absolutely could not be allowed to roam free given the rules of modern subdivisions. That fact ran counter to the subdivision I grew up where the dogs were allowed to roam and sort of became neighborhood pets. Keeping the lab inside during the day while we were at work wasn't an option because while she was a loving dog her inadvertently destructive ways would have guaranteed war zone-level devastation by the time we returned home.

Since the home we were selling was located on a large corner lot, I had some delusion about the next one being the same way. That one issue and my blatant ignorance still causes me to cringe when I think too much about it. While we did have a large front yard at our first home, it was extremely low maintenance and I simply did not consider how demanding a similar sized but more decorated location would be on my time and energy.

With these requirements, and a little ill-timed bad luck, my wife and I were finally forced to make a choice a few weeks later. We had narrowed our prospects down to three locations that neither my wife nor I really liked. The trouble was that the buyers of our old home were about a week or two away from being forced to move and they, naturally, needed us out. Now I admit, despite what I began to feel were my wife's ridiculous requirements, I made the horrendous mistake of actually giving an opinion on one of the three choices. I made matters even worse by saying the house on the corner lot with the highly manicured yards, “spoke to me.” The situation was getting quite tense given the deadline we faced and my words were a sad attempt to lighten the mood.

My wife compounded my error by making an offer on that house which was accepted by the owners. Before I go any further let me state that we did look at the interior of the house we bought on two separate occasions before making an offer. Both were haste affairs and no, we did not look anywhere near as closely as we should have, which would have dire consequences almost immediately. As for the professional inspector, who we paid for and was supposed to catch issues before all the paperwork was finalized, I have often considered the possibility that he was bribed in some fashion to ignore the obvious problems.

Making matter for more complicated, the day we had to move into the new house was my National Guard drill weekend and the leadership at my unit refused to cut me some slack so I could assist. Luckily my in-laws were there to help my wife and keep an eye on the movers we hired to deliver the big stuff. Late that Saturday afternoon I got to the new house to see the sorry state the previous owners had left things.

First off were the numerous holes in the walls that had been hidden by an array of family pictures. Given the number of holes in the walls it literally looked like that family had rearranged the display of pictures at least a couple of times a month. Secondly, and the first bit of evidence I believe the home inspector was compromised, we learned that night one of the four elements on the kitchen stove didn't work. Then there were the electrical sockets that when you tried to push a plug into them moved backwards an inch or two. Quite frankly, it wouldn't be a challenge to write several pages listing the deficiencies the inspector had somehow missed.

My wife and I were furious, but the reason we didn't pursue legal action was that we had a critical assessment coming up with the adoption agency handling our case. Pursuing a lawsuit while trying to adopt a little girl from China would have been too much. So, just a few days after moving in the new house, my wife assigned me the task of correcting any and all deficiencies I had the ability to fix. We've lived in our current money hole since then and in many ways we are still fixing things.

Given these circumstances, and several others outside the purview of this narrow memoir, it shouldn't surprise anyone why I have developed such an extreme dislike for suburban living in general and the house I live in specifically. So much that instead of the usual fantasies middle-aged men like myself entertain, I dream of winning the lotto so I can move the family and myself into another house which would allow me to burn down the one I live. Despite the numerous deficiencies, there is another, truly bizarre aspect to the house I live that often leads me to believe the place might be cursed.

As I mentioned, the house we bought had several decorative landscape islands in both the front and backyards. Somewhere around six months after we moved in two of the three pine trees that were in the backyard landscape island suddenly died. No, I have little knowledge of trees and I know both of the ones that died were probably already sick but all I can say is their appearance changed from thriving to zombie-like was so abruptly it shocked both my wife and myself. That wasn't the only issue we had with trees.

Over the course of six or seven years lightning struck three other trees, all resulting in collapses of major limbs and even trunks. Since my wife and I were dealing with demanding jobs and two young children, we never could immediately deal with the carriage of singed and broken limbs littering the ground. A fact that the neighbors, all unhealthily obsessed with the appearance of their yards in my opinion, I am sure commented upon among themselves.

A lightning strike also hit the pump used to draw well water for the lawn sprinklers. This particular incident naturally occurred during a severely hot July with August being even worse. By the time cooler weather arrived in late September my front yard had taken on the appearance of a desert. We did replace the pump the following May, at the cost of two-thousand dollars when you include installation but my front yard never really recovered.

Water heaters have also been an issue with us on our third one right now. The first water heater is another example of the home inspector possibly being paid off because while on the outward facing side it looked okay, when the tank cracked and started leaking I discovered the side facing the wall was heavily rusted. I have no idea why the second water heater cracked, it was probably the result of someone bumping the thing but even then I thought such items were supposed to be a little more resilient.

Like the deficiencies the home inspector somehow missed, I could spend a considerable amount of time listing the premature and often disastrously expensive breakdowns with things like washing machines, air conditioning systems, televisions, and lawn mowers. But the example that sums up the bad luck we've had with the house we live occurred after a heavy thunderstorm a few years back. No, lightning didn't fry anything that particular instant but what it did was trip the ground fault breaker in the garage. The place we had the freezer, which a few days before we had filled up with a couple of hundred dollars worth of meat bought at Sam's Club.

Being somewhat oblivious five or six days after the thunderstorm I finally noticed that the sprinkler system, whose pump had been replaced several months earlier wasn't coming on like it should. Yes, the controller for the sprinkler system was on the same circuit as the freezer and when I traced the issue to the tripped ground fault breaker I am happy to report it only took and extra thirty minutes for me to realize what that meant for all the meat we had purchased. In fact, the exact moment I realized all that meat was ruined I was sitting at the table drinking a beer. My reaction was a classic movie spit-take that lead immediately into a coughing fit so bad my wife thought I was having a heart attack. Once I recovered enough to explain my sudden epiphany, my lovely spouse promptly had her own bad reaction to the news.

Sure enough, even though I had reset the breaker thirty minutes before the freezer was still room temperature with the faint hint of spoiled meat becoming apparent after I lifted the lid. After that everything became a bit of a blur, so much I don't really remember taking all that ruined meat to the trash place.

This all leads to the statement I made to my wife a couple of days ago as I backed my car out of the garage, I made an offhand comment about how after all the crappy breakdown both the garage openers, which were installed by the first owners were still working perfectly. Taking history into consideration I now expect one or both of them to suddenly and totally meltdown at the worst conceivable moment. On the other hand, if that meltdown and resulting fire could somehow occur with the house empty of my family, the dogs, and cats I would be lying if I didn't say that I would consider such an unlucky event a type of blessing.

Strange Tales from the Dark Side of Suburbia

Growing up in the Lowcountry of South Carolina you had to expect loud and violent thunderstorms during the spring and summer months. For me it was easy to image that the normal combination of high temperatures and soul crushing humidity that stirred up the atmosphere to produced these storms was akin to some ill-humored witch or warlock. The angry dark clouds that made up these storms could drift in like an enemy armada anywhere from the afternoon hours to late at night producing high winds, torrential rain, some hail, but it was the displays of lightning that most people would remember.

In fact, back before such things as cable/satellite television, smart phones, and the internet claimed the majority of our attention span, the lightning from these storms could have been called a form of entertainment. One afternoon in the late 1980's while home on leave from the army, I attended a soccer game and saw the people sitting in the stands paying more attention to the several small clouds shooting off occasional bolts of lighting. Given that their collective reaction was the same as if they were watching a Fourth of July fireworks show, for a couple of minutes I worried about the kids still running around on the field kicking the ball. At least the referees understood what the lightning meant and pulled all of them off the field.

Despite the damage these storms could do they could provide a much needed respite from the very conditions that produced them. Adding to that effect, the sounds of the rain and thunder were quite relaxing and could cause the most tense and anxiety-ridden person to fall asleep. That being said, there was one incident from my childhood that still causes me wonder about the nature of dreams and the behavior or people who otherwise seem normal.

I was about twelve years old when I went to live with my grandparents. The reasons are complicated and beyond the scope of such an informal and the admittedly clumsy story I am writing here. All I will say it involves my parents' divorce that so bad it made Chernobyl look like someone had spilled a mildly dirty mop bucket on a clean floor.

It was in the middle of summer when the event happened. The days were brutally hot and humid leaving the streets of my neighborhood almost empty of the flocks of children who could be seen riding their bikes when the weather wasn't so abusive. Since my grandparents' house was built in the years just after World War Two instead of the air conditioning system which is ubiquitous in homes now, it had an attic fan. This huge fan, which was mounted in the hallway ceiling, sucked in outside air and pushed it up into the attic and back outside. While it didn't actually cool the air, it did provide a constant flow which made the inside of the house comfortable. As you can probably surmise, the attic fan only worked if you had almost all the windows open to allow the air to be drawn inside. Throw in the afternoon/evening thunderstorms and there were times during the summer my grandparents' house almost felt chilly.

The night of the incident we went to bed normally, with all the windows open and me in my PJ's but without any cover. I'm not sure when the thunderstorm begun but it was so late that sometime earlier I had pulled a thin blanket over me to ward off what now felt like chilly air. At first it was the usual booms of thunder and flashes of lightning with the sound of the heavy rain easing me back to sleep.

It could have been a couple of hours later or just a few minutes but what brought me back to consciousness was a noise that sounding like someone was banging on the front door. It was an urgent, almost panicked knocking of someone in danger. Now the first thought that might have occurred to you was that I still half asleep and the knocking I was hearing was just thunder. The trouble with that idea is that I distinctly remember the sound of thunder booming at the same time, so much that it overwhelmed the knocking at the door.

Being twelve, and having survived some uncomfortable events concerning the breakup of my parents I had no intention of rushing to the front door to find out who was there. I did get out of bed and slowly make my way down the hallway towards the living room. Standing on the border between the hallway and the living room I peered around the corner at the front door listening to the banging.

The door didn't shake from the impacts nor did I hear any voice on the other side pleading for help. But the knocking continued to the point I began wondering why my grandparents hadn't also been awaken. Had I been braver, I might have thought about raising the blind to the window positioned just to the left of the front door to see who was there. Instead I rushed back down the hallway to my grandparents' room to inform them of the situation.

“Granddad,” I said shaking his arm, “someone's knocking at the front door.”

My Grandfather, who hadn't yet retired had just spent a week working the 3:00pm to 11:00pm shift at the local papermill and wasn't in the mood to be disturbed.

“It's just the storm,” he said with a tone of voice that was a combination of concern and weariness all parents have to suffer through. “You're dreaming, just go back to bed and it will be all over in the morning.”

Despite his assurances, I wasn't convinced that the panicked knocking I was hearing with just the sound of thunder invading my dreams. Still though, I wasn't about to head back down to the living room and throw open the door just to prove a point. Then there was the fact that even though I was just twelve it did occur to me that if someone was at the door needing help, there were houses on either side of the one my grandparents lived. Common sense suggested that if the got no answer at one door they would rush over to the next house. Another dash of logic suggested that someone truly in danger might try knocking on the windows to get attention. And if they did, these hypothetical people in need would see that they were open and then scream for help. Since nothing of the sort happened I went back to bed and before long was back asleep in spite of what I now presumed was just my runaway imagination.

Like all thunderstorms, that one faded away leaving just wet grass and a faint breeze. The next morning I remember waking up to the sun streaming into my eastward facing bedroom window. My dream of the panicked knocking at the door was still fresh on my mind but by that time my concerns had evaporated away. My grandparents were still asleep so I quietly got out of bed and made my way to the kitchen to make a bowl of cereal. It an hour or so late when my Granddad woke up with him asking me to walk outside to the mail box to get the newspaper.

Stepping out onto the front porch all my assumptions and logic was quickly swept away when I saw a single female shoe on one of the steps. Don't ask me what type of shoe it was, all I could say even now was that it was most definitely female. What I can tell you is that given my grandmother's age, the shoe I found that morning was made for a much younger adult woman. I briefly looked around for its partner but didn't see it nor any other item that might suggest someone had in fact knocked on the front door during that storm.

As the years have passed, the shock and confusion I felt upon that unexpected discovery has long since faded. What remains is more a wore out memory of a memory much like an office form that has been photocopied to the point the wording has blurred past the point of usability. Still though, I do remember standing and on the front porch looking down at the mysterious shoe filled with the dread and certainty only children can know that something weird in fact had occurred the previous night.

I decided against telling my grandfather about the shoe on the front porch. He would probably just dismiss it as something one of the neighbors' dogs just left behind during its wanderings. While the people who inhabit subdivisions these days come close to declaring martial law if the dogs of one of the residents gets loose, back then there were several canines that had the run of my grandparents' neighborhood. One of these dogs, a huge, friendly black lab, fittingly named Bear, made a point of greeting every person he came across during his daily journeys.

You might be wondering if there were any strange reports from the other neighbors? No, the people that lived on that street were quite close and communicated on a regular basis. If someone had been running through the neighborhood during a severe thunderstorm knocking on doors looking for help it's a certainty that it would have been mentioned in conversation. The one small detail I am left with is where did that damn shoe come from? While dogs did wander the neighborhood looking for both attention and the occasional snack, they never before that night or after leave items on anyone's front porch.

Besides dwelling on idiotic childhood memories what keep bring me back to this event was that years later a few other bizarre events did take place that sort of make mine seem possible. The first being the time two teenagers decided to play chicken with their cars down the street in front of my grandparents' house. I was away that night but when I returned home the wreckage was cleaned up and no one wanted to talk about the event, not even my grandfather after he told me the story. The second time was a several years later when word got out that one of the teenage girls living several houses down surprised everyone, including her parents, by “suddenly” giving birth to a baby inside her closet. After returning home from the army in 1990 I remember seeing this same girl obviously living with her parents but no small child. While I had once known that family, they weren't the friendliest bunch by that time so I ultimately had to assume the child was given up for adoption.

The final strange event though is the one that takes the proverbial cake. Technically these weren't neighbors since they lived a couple of streets down from my grandparents but word got around that two couples who were best friends had a falling out while having dinner at one of their homes. Turns out one of the couples was either into swinging or wanted to try it and felt the other couple were the perfect partners. Well, after revealing this information the husband of the more straitlaced couple he threw the other out of the living room window. That time people talked so much about the event that both couples found reason to quickly move out of the neighborhood.

Being older and wiser, I'm certain that the knocking at the front door was just a dream, but honestly given the things that happened later there are times I wonder.

Glacial Home Renovations

Home renovations are proceeding at the expected glacial pace with the biggest problem for me being that the kitchen table is filled to overflowing with stuff and I don't have a reliable place to write. At least we're down to having the kitchen cabinets remodeled and painted to the color my wife wants. The new carpet was installed about a month ago, which was a huge relief since after having removed the old stuff in two rooms, we were walking on rough plywood boards. Other finished projects include repairs to the backyard deck, remodeled master bathroom, and the room over the garage having been transformed into a habitable living space.  

There is actual hope that once everything is either back in its proper place, or thrown away, or donated to charity we might be able to use the dining room again. It should go without saying I am truly sick of having to think about anything to do with home improvements. Thankfully, my lovely spouse has refrained from bringing up the outside projects she wants done to the front and back yard. I am seriously not in the mood, especially with my wife and daughter planning their summer trip to London, England while I stay here at the house.

What I Did Last Weekend

 No, I'm not bragging...



If a period of time, in this case the 365 days making up a normal terrestrial year, could have sinister motives, I swear 2016 could be Hannibal Lecter or even one of the supernaturally indestructible movie slashers such as Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger. From the moment David Bowie died and the 2016 American presidential campaign started, I distinctly remember a few people on the internet saying this year was going to be a full-fledged crapfest. And in all honesty, given what we have been through calling 2016 a crapfest is a gross understatement. Just the trauma of having such people as Ted Cruz appear on the news almost daily during the primaries and then top it off with Trump winning the Republican nomination is more than any sane person should have to deal with in a single year.

Somehow, we’ve made it to the end of October and quite frankly, I’m not expecting things to get much better in the short-term. Multiply that last statement fifty to one-hundred times and extend this nightmare until 2020, if America goes and elects that bizarre combination of Jerry Lewis and Benito Mussolini president of the United States.

On a personal level, my lovely spouse, whose codename remains Dragonwife, has spent most of this year doing her best to take what little free time I can normally call my own. For the last several years she has wanted to do major renovations on the money hole…I mean the house we live. These changes would include ripping out the carpet in all the rooms and replace them with hardwood floors, changing out the kitchen countertops, and installing at least a closet in the room over the garage so it could be classified as a fourth bedroom. I say at least on that last item because for a while Dragonwife wanted to add a half-bathroom to that room as well.

A couple of interviews with renovation contractors later and she has finally realized that while such a project is possible, the cost would be so great it would make more sense just to sell the house and move into another that would already have such facilities. I didn’t hear the amount the contractors said it would take to add a half-bathroom but it was enough to utterly kill that idea. You’d have to know my wife but she does not easily abandon any project, especially something she has talked about for years. However, after speaking with those guys, she placed a big “X” through the notes she had for the half-bath and hasn’t mentioned it since. There are most certainly other items she wants to change and replace while all this is going on but I’d would get bogged down listing them.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty here but whenever my wife conjures up fantastic plans involving home projects she eventually starts nickel and diming everything down to my level. She does this mostly to save money and redirect funds to other things that I simply cannot do alone or lack the proper equipment to accomplish. Cases in point are the several Leyland cypress trees that fell over in our backyard due to the recent hurricane. I do own a small electric-powered chain saw, which is solely designed to cut small limbs and not forty and fifty foot trees whose trunks are at least a foot in diameter. This says nothing about having the truck and/or trailer big enough to carry away the wood after cutting everything down. Dragonwife eventually realized that it was simply better to stick with hiring someone to remove the trees since they would also have the equipment and personnel to pull up the stumps as well.

Now throw in the water heater that for some unknown cosmic reason decided to start leaking, a lot, several days after the cypress trees tipped over and several home renovation projects that were going to be outsourced have found their way on my honey-do list. This weekend I tackled the first of these new honey-do items with a Dragonwife high priority star beside it. Little side note here, for those who don’t know I work third-shift so my weekend starts after I leave work Friday morning and ends around 10:30pm Sunday night.

Painting the vanity in the small bathroom at first didn’t look like a major job. Sure, I was going to have to sand the wood so I could apply the couple of coats of primer needed so it could be painted but I didn’t think the job would take that long. The first thing I didn’t take into consideration was the freaking mess that I would make from sanding the heavily varnished wood. All together the cabinet was done, inside and out, in about two hours. It took me three damn hours to clean up the mess inside the bathroom and in the hallway. At one point, I began wishing the bathroom floor had a drain that would have allowed me to use the detachable shower head to wash off the dust coating the toilet, bathtub, walls, and floor.

Applying the primer came next and while that was easy, the bathroom in question is quite small so I had to contort into some improbable and uncomfortable positions to cover everything inside and outside of the cabinet. Once that was done I had to get cleaned up because it was getting close to the time to pick up my daughter from school and I absolutely refuse to sit in my car waiting for her while feeling that dust on my skin. Needless to say, Dragonwife and me had a talk when she came home Friday evening wondering why the small bathroom wasn’t done yet.

Saturday morning began bright and early with me painting the cabinet. After three coats of paint, it finally began looking decent. One of the contractors told my wife from the get-go during the interview process that there was simply no way to hide the grain pattern in the wood so when she said the cabinet looked good I agreed and called it a win before she could change her mind. Now that left the two cabinet doors and the two small drawers to sand and paint.

Sanding those four items was one of the most time consuming chores I have attempted in recent memory. I’ll be honest and say I have no talent when it comes to this home improvement stuff and as far as woodworking is concerned, I haven’t done anything like that since high school. But it took me hours to properly sand away the layers of varnish on those items. I have no idea if I was doing something wrong of that the cabinet doors and drawers were prepared differently than the vanity.

Understand I have some sense, I did the sanding on the doors and drawers outside on my deck and there was a point about halfway through that I wished I decided to take on the fallen cypress trees instead with my pitiful under-powered electric chainsaw. Somewhere around 4:00pm Saturday I reached a point that I had gotten enough primer and paint on those hateful things to quit for the day.
 All that is left is the back of the cabinet doors and I hope some kind deity might not throw any unexpected issues in front of me when I finally tackle that last segment this coming Friday. Why am I waiting for this coming Friday to finish such a ridiculously small job? Because the next item on my high priority honey-do list is the larger cabinet above the washer and dryer in the laundry closet.

Supposedly, the timeline my wife has for completion of all these projects, both the ones I have been enslaved to do as well as those using contractors, is the middle of December. At this point all I can do is hope that at some point the evil grip 2016 has on me and everyone else will be broken allowing us all to have a happier and much saner 2017. Quite frankly, a large part of that hope hinges on what happens on Election Day. No matter what, the one thing I am sure of is that I will be coughing up wood and varnish dust well into next year.

The situation isn't that bad

Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season and Home Ownership

One of the benefits of living through several relatively calm hurricane seasons as a kid was that the “minor” tropical storms that did impact or brush the coast of South Carolina tended to create more excitement than actual fear. While these weak storms were still dangerous in many ways, they didn't cause the wholesale destruction people on the coast constantly worried about when they saw dark clouds coming over the horizon while at the same time barometers began registering the atmospheric pressure dropping like a rock. I do remember both my grandparents and parents talking about Hurricane Hazel, a category 4 storm that ravaged several Caribbean islands back in 1954 before slamming into South Carolina with a combination of awe, dread, and outright fear that I found difficult to fathom in my grade-school years. Up until Hurricane Hugo hit Charleston back in 1989, the way the name “Hazel” was whispered by people that lived through that storm it was clear, even to a small child, it had become synonymous with the boogeyman for many in South Carolina.

I was in the last months of my active army enlistment when Hugo struck the coast of South Carolina pretty much wiping away any remaining memory of Hazel. Which is easy to understand since by 1989 the coastal areas of South Carolina were exponentially more developed and populated than back in 1954. As Hugo zeroed in on Charleston I was in the barracks watching the CNN weather reporters on television trying not to look totally silly as the wind and rain threatened to send them flying off like an ill-trained winged monkey from Oz.

Being stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado during that time, I was spared the post-storm aftermath of the long weeks living without electric power, the total disruption of economic services like deliveries of food and fuel, and the general chaos that results when a massive storm strikes. I did return home to South Carolina about three months after Hugo, while the main roads were open again and a good chunk of the storm-related debris had been removed, many locations were still baring the scars. One of my favorite places on the planet, Pawleys Island, had an uncomfortable resemblance to many active war zones with houses looking like an artillery battalion used them for target practice.

Despite the damage and the persistent anxiety caused by Hugo, South Carolina not only cleaned up and rebuilt the state but quickly returned to its near exponential growth along the coast. I came home on leave about a year before Hugo and was frankly disturbed with how much things had changed in the Lowcountry since the last time I was in the area. The best example I can give is that Charleston, once a genuine sleepy little town, had overnight turned into thriving city. Once my enlistment was over in July of 1990, I came back to watch that general area expand in real time into undeveloped sections that had remained untouched since the end of the Civil War. About sixty miles separate Charleston from my hometown and while the pace of growth has slowed, I still expect to see the two essentially joined together in one humid and hot Southern megalopolis before I shed my mortal coil.

Of course, sea level rise and an increase in problematic tropical storms brought on by human-caused climate change is the pesky irritant that could send the descendants of all those folks who fled the northern states because it was just too damn cold up there back home. Hell, if things get bad enough, and I think they will, the effects of climate change might force many Southerners to the relative safety of places like the Midwest. Even now the steadily growing cost of home owners insurance in the coastal areas of South Carolina has already forced many with long family histories tied to the Lowcountry deeper inland. It's not hard to imagine that as conditions worsen, even the folks that can afford the insurance on their raised three and even four-story beach houses might have to retreat from the coast.

As Hugo faded into the background, except for a few minor tropical storms South Carolina didn't have to deal with a major hurricane for a couple of decades. While minor, those weaker cousins of Hugo were enough of an issue that several National Guard units, including mine, were activated and sent down to the coast just in case. The duty was quite boring actually, my memories are mostly of staying in some hot and uncomfortable school gym until the leadership decided we weren't needed and sent home. The worst thing I can complain about during those activations was that I was away from home just enough to upset my wife's morning routine. Our son was in his pre-potty training toddler years where every simple task, like getting him dressed for daycare, could become an epic battle of endurance if say he did a sudden and messy number two in his diaper right before it was time to leave the house.

When I rejoined the National Guard in 1990 after my active army enlistment, I got to hear a great deal of complaining by guys who got called up for Hugo and literally spent months pulling traffic control or guard duty in waterlogged shopping center parking lots. The main reason these Hugo vets were upset was because many of them built or renovated houses for a living, and as anyone can imagine their business was booming during that time. One weekend warrior I knew suggested there was favoritism being shown in the way some guys were released back to their civilian lives while others were forced to stay in uniform. This weekend warrior said he received an Article 15 after cussing out his lieutenant because a couple of weeks into Hugo duty he saw another guy from his platoon, who had been released from his National Guard obligation, down in Myrtle Beach installing new roofs on damaged homes, thereby “making money hand over fist.” I couldn't help but silently laugh whenever I heard such bad attitudes because not only were they rather common, even long before the ball buster deployments for Afghanistan and Iraq began but because they are totally contrary to the high-end recruiting commercials on television showing dynamic and happy part-time warriors.

In the history of tropical storms the very recent Hurricane Matthew presented those living along the coast with some curious problems. While tropical storms have a long history of meandering, and even looping around on themselves, Matthew hugged the southeast coast with an almost supernatural precision. This was after slamming into the country of Haiti, causing yet another round of suffering for those people. However, it wasn't until Matthew began to take a firm aim at the United States that the assorted weather forecasting folks started having panic attacks. The impression I got was that they were worried Matthew might take a sudden left turn as it headed north, concentrating its destructive power in one area.

Since I am now marooned in the Midlands of South Carolina, Hurricane Matthew's wanderings in some respects played out similar to my experience with Hugo. I spent the better part of that Friday and Saturday as the storm crawled northward watching high-paid reporters on television stand in knee deep water while being hit with driving rain exclaiming to their viewers just how much the situation sucked. Where this situation differed from Hugo was that my area was going to get winds whose speeds would be pushing the tropical storm-level of intensity.

My immediate concern as the winds increased was centered on a rather large, twenty-seven year old river birch tree situated on the edge of my front yard growing right beside a stop sign. I'm a certified tree hugging environmentalist but for about five years now I have been pleading with my wife to have someone cut that thing down. The reason being that we've already had two other river birch trees lose major limbs, but at least they were in areas of the yard I didn't have to worry about hitting anyone, and yes, once those two essentially collapsed we had them removed. The river birch next the stop sign loses minor limbs all the time, but the tree is far enough back that at least they almost always fall inside the yard and not on the street.

After one of the other river birches collapsed I was told, by someone I trust, that the wood of that tree is weak compared to other species and that after so many years of growth it is bound to lose of a major limb. The resistance my wife is giving me on having the river birch next the stop sign removed is due to her ideas about the aesthetics of the front yard as well as how all the landscaping adds value to the property. You'd have to know my wife, but I have long since learned there are some battles that are simply not worth the cost, so after a token resistance, enough to qualify me to say “I told you so”, I let the subject drop.

Well, Hurricane Matthew brought my simmering fears to the forefront again and as the winds increased I spent a great deal of time watching that river birch sway in the heavy winds. I'll be damned, but even after some serious gusts that weekend which scared the crap out of me, the front yard river birch not only survived intact, it really didn't lose any minor limbs. Unfortunately, the Leyland Cypress trees that line the backyard suffered a disaster that even a couple of weeks after the storm still has me freaked out.

It was early Saturday morning, even though it was raining and the sky was a subdued gray there was enough light for me to see four of the cypress trees were leaning over at a steep angle. I'll just skip over the words I said after discovering this surprising fact and just say I wasn't happy. As that day progressed, I literally watched my personal homeowner's disaster unfold in slow motion. These cypress trees fell over at the root mass with another degree or two of decent signified with a loud pop as another tendril broke below ground. Just to show how complicated things can get, the root masses of the falling cypress tree lifted up the backyard fence destroying twenty-five to thirty feet of it.

Excuse the following understatement but home ownership to me has always seemed more trouble than it was worth, but this incident caused a new high in my frustration level. Yes, I know many people suffered true disasters losing their lives, homes, and all their personal property because of Hurricane Matthew. As I have already written, this is a personal disaster and will eventually be cleaned up leaving only another bad memory for me. If there is a lesson in this truly small affair, compared to what others suffered through it is that you never really know the direction from which things can go bad.

As the days have passed, my wife and I have discovered that our homeowner's insurance will not cover the removal of the trees. Had one of them crashed into the house, we would be golden, but unless something changes we will have to cover the cost of tree removal and the price to fix the fence that divides our backyard and the neighbors. At least those neighbors are being cool about the situation, although if we wanted to press the subject my wife vaguely mentioned that we MIGHT be able to charge them rent on the portion of our fence they attached their own segments. Yet, another reason for me to hate all the semi-implied and murky details associated with suburban existence.

All things considered, once this situation is cleaned up and removed I plan on keeping my mouth shut and not worry anymore about the yard. Life is too short and there is always something waiting in the wings to make it more complicated. Like the five-year old water heater that started leaking just yesterday. 

The situations is actually worse that this picture suggests. You can't see the damaged fence and a couple of other cypress trees are out of view on the far right.