The Trouble-Free Blessing

Had I kept up with my blog (or my blog, somehow, magically, kept up with me) you'd likely know about the ongoing saga of our car.

Now, some of this trouble, I've brought on myself: I don't like to spend money on cars. My aversion isn't as deep as it used to be; for many years, I rode my bicycle everywhere, and looked down on people who drove. It was a moral superiority born of envy, poverty, two-wheel pride, and a large serving of sour grapes—a conflicted condition, to be sure. Very conflicted.

All the cars I've ever owned, combined, come out to a bit over $5000 — about what I paid for my motorcycle. (Priorities, see?) I nursed my '77 Phoenix along until it was eligible for classic car plates. I loved my station wagon until I started losing a friend a week from frequent rescues. I've had two $1 cars. Two more have been gifts of love and deep generosity. One, I actually paid a whole $500 for. I've never had a car payment.

I'm sure that part of this (ahem) extreme thriftiness is from the culture that I grew up in. One of the enduring images of my father is of him making major repairs on our early '60s Toyota nearly every weekend in Costa Rica. "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without" was the motto to go by.

Even so, long about September, even I had to admit that our car was on its last legs. This is the car where we kept a rubber mallet under the front seat, to start the car when it would stop and not re-start. It was creeping up on 190,000 miles, and I had a several-thousand-dollar list of repairs that it needed to keep it truly road-worthy. I had a stack of parts that had fallen off of it. Deborah hated the idea of getting a new car, but I knew it was a matter of time before we'd need to replace it, and I couldn't think of how to get much—if any—money out of it, and where I'd find the funds to replace it.

God took care of that.

And that was a brand new tire, too....

It didn't take much—just a guy pulling out of a gas station, at just the right moment; enough to total the car, but leave it driveable for a week; enough to make it a total loss, but not hurt anyone.

Deborah decided not to smile for the picture. I guess I wouldn't, either.

The insurance company offered us 10 times what I had thought I could get for the car (hint: the junkyard offered $200) and set us up with a rental just in time for us to take on vacation. I didn't want to give that car back — a 300 HP Dodge Charger — but I knew I'd have to. I started shopping.

About the best thing I can say about the process was that very few people outright lied to me. Oh, sure, we got the pink-sweater-in-the-passenger-seat ("Oh, I've been driving my daughter around in it. . ." Really, in the seat with the broken seatbelt?) and the car that wouldn't start in the pouring rain (Thanks, God) even though it had run fine the day before. But for the most part, we got honest people who listened to our needs, and then would point to the one car on the lot that met the criteria. Most of them were awful.

Hmm. I don't think I'll buy this one.

Discouraged after chasing one option down as far north as Mishawaka, we walked across the street from Mr. Pinksweater to see the car dealer there. "We don't have anything in the price range," he said, "but I have a friend that works at a lot just down the road. They have cars that might fit what you're looking for."

Did they ever. A whole lot, stretching out, hundreds of cars. All of them in our price range. It was like a revelation, angels singing forth. And there, right where we pulled up to park — "Look, Andy, it's our car!" And it was — nearly identical to the car we'd just lost, but two years newer and with 100,000 fewer miles. We knew it would fit three car seats across the back. We looked around, but we kept coming back to that one. With the purchase price, tax, title, registration, inspection, and a few new tires, we came within $2 of what we'd budgeted.

Yay! New car!

It was perfect. It was a blessing.

We reveled in it for months. We were even, I dare say, a bit smug about it. Then, one night, I got a desperate call from Deborah. Every light on the dashboard was lit up, and flashing like a Christmas tree. The numbers on the gas gauge and climate control jumped wildly, from Full Tank to -45° to 0 mpg and, mysteriously, "c." I talked her home, assuring her that, if the car was still running, she could ignore the antics on the dash. Finally, it settled down into a pattern of displaying the mysterious "c" and running the air conditioning full blast. I welcomed home a very cold Deborah, and told her I'd look into it.

The next day, I looked into it, and, since Deborah needed to go to work, I pulled the fuse for the air conditioning, so that she could drive in relative comfort. Unfortunately, by doing so, I also pulled the fuse that would have alerted her to the fact that the battery wasn't charging. A tow truck ride later, and we had a new alternator, battery, but still some odd behavior on the dash. My mechanic worked on it for hours, tracing one potential problem after another, but the haunted dash persisted. His best estimate for the next step involved pre-authorizing up to eight hours of labor for tracing down wiring faults — a figure echoed by the Cadillac dealership in town. We re-enabled the air conditioning, and stuck in a few blankets.

A few days later, on the way to church, an odd thwapping sound emanated from under the hood. I pulled over and had a look. The serpentine belt was shredding. I got it home, and installed a new one. Once I got it all together, though, I realized what the original problem had been: the new alternator was off by about a quarter of an inch, causing the belt to jump up on the edge. I couldn't adjust the pulley off the shaft, so I gave our mechanic a call. He graciously sent out a tow truck, and, because he couldn't move the pulley either, we went home with yet another new alternator.

Apparently, I groused about it often enough on Twitter/Facebook (I often update my status on Twitter, so that I won't be distracted by the rest of Facebook) that Dad called me up to see if he could have a go at solving the dash problem.

We started out by disconnecting the battery, and then spent the next few hours trying to get the battery connected again.

Stripped threads. On a battery terminal. Aaaaargh.

(We also ran the car out of gas. That's another neat little "feature" of this whole mess — no gas gauge.)

On the way home from that adventure, the whine that had been developing under the hood stopped, and a new dash light came on: the battery was not charging. Thank God for cell phones. My parents followed me halfway home from Valparaiso, until we met up with Paul coming the other way. Once the battery ran out, we'd stop, charge up the battery for 10 minutes, then hit the road again for another 5 miles.

Mere days before, I'd helped Paul pick out a new car from that same dealership. It came with jumper cables.

We kept that up until 2 a.m., when we were finally within striking distance of Warsaw, and we had a recognizable place where we could park it, and call the mechanic. A tow truck ride and yet another alternator later (the auto parts supplier now owes my mechanic several hundred dollars in towing charges) and we're back on the road, driving in style, if not comfort.

In the meanwhile, we're back to hunting and theorizing. Fortunately, our mechanic has the wonderful ability to separate his feelings about the car and the customer ("Andy, I'm starting to hate your car") and has been giving Dad and I feedback on some of our ideas about what to try next. Last time I was in there, he showed me some new software he was trying out. We plugged in the make, model, and year, and drilled down to climate control issues — sure enough, there was the problem, described in perfect detail, down to the lowercase "c" on the dash, along with what other mecahnics had done to fix it. There were six entries on-screen, and they all showed the same thing: replace the body control module (BCM). It would have been a revelation, except for one thing: We'd already tried that.

Oh, look. It's snowing. Inside the car.

We're working with a new theory, now, that it's the PROM (Programmable Read Only Memory) unit that sits between the computer and the rest of the wiring. Of course, they don't make them anymore, so I've been contacting junkyards from all over, trying to find one for a reasonable price. We may get there yet.

So, this car is a blessing. Did anyone say it had to be trouble-free?

Grief on the Island

I used to pass by it every morning on my way to work. A hammock, out at the end of the point. It was always up, summer, winter, spring and fall. A really lovely place to sit and watch a sunset, snuggle up. I never climbed into it myself (it's not mine, after all!) but I always appreciated the brilliance of the location and the view.

It's gone now.

Very late last night, the whole end of the Island was swarming with every kind of emergency vehicle, trying to extricate the two college students that had been laying in the hammock when the dead tree the hammock was connected to toppled over on top of them. The girl, Mallori Kastner, was pronounced dead at the scene. The guy, Jeremy Mohr, is apparently paralyzed from the neck down.

The hammock is gone. There's a growing pile of flowers there. The body of the tree is still there, half-rolled off into the water. And there are people, always people. I came across a group that I'm fairly certain included the girl's parents and siblings this afternoon, the mother talking about her daughter's hopes and dreams. I stayed out of the way.

What was I supposed to do?

It's so strange to be in the midst of grief. I came around the point yet again this evening, to find a silver minivan blocking the road, illuminating the wreath and flowers left there in the headlights. They quickly reversed and drove on, and I cursed myself for driving them off. I'd have gladly backed up and taken the other road, to let them sit and look. Rolling up next to them at the stoplight, I zipped down my window and apologized for running them off. They waved it off, but I could see in their eyes that they had other things on their minds. Sorry, silver-minivan-people-from-Illinois. I should let you grieve. My usual route wasn't that important.

What do you do when grief is so close by, but has nothing to do with you? My only connection is that I drive by that hammock every day, that I live just down the block, that I think I saw them snuggling under that tree over there, a few weeks ago, that I used to go to the same college... it's not a connection, really; who am I to intrude on their grief?

So why does it feel wrong to step back and do nothing?

More late-night phone calls

Deborah, Paul and I were sitting around, looking at stuff on the computer, when May called, sounding very flat and small. Allan (my father-in-law; Deborah's, Paul's, and May's father) was in the hospital with chest pains and apparent heart trouble. A little while later, another call came in: he'd had a heart attack, right there in the hospital — they had to revive him twice with the paddles — and was now having emergency surgery. Around midnight, the call went out that he was now out of surgery; they did a balloon angioplasty, put in a stent, and he has some sort of balloon pump to help his much-weakened heart.

And this from a guy who, all the years I've known him, ran everywhere he went, and whose lone vice was peanut butter ("peanut butter goes with anything.")

Please pray for him.

I've got them rear-ended blues

You'll just have to imagine the blues riffs in the background...

Well I had me a day
and I was driving home
down past the drive-in
the B & K., that's the one

Drivin' a gray car
on a gray rainy day
turnin' folks in front of me
Waitin' for my turn

Oh, I got them rear-ended blues
Guy named Lucky 13
Ran the red
and now I got the blues

Well, they sent me the Po-lice
and they sent me the medicos
Now they're sending me nice letters,
those attorneys-at-low

Well, the next day was awful
and the day after was bad
but I'm feeling better now
it's blues, but ain'cha glad?

Paramedic: Are you numb anywhere? Deborah: Yes! I just came from the dentist!

Oh, I got them rear-ended blues
Guy named Lucky 13
Ran the red
and now I got the blues

Well, I got me a mashed-up Fender
to play this trueful tune
'bout my mashed-up fender
gotta fix it soon

Well I'm still drivin'
down those lonely roads
But I feel sorry for ol' Lucky
he sure had a heavy load

Oh, I got them rear-ended blues
Guy named Lucky 13
Ran the red
and now I got the blues

So. Yeah. Deborah had a blues station playing when I sat down to write this post, and the inspiration was there, so I rolled with it. Should I — as Robert Frost famously put it — say it again in worse words?

Thanks to a doctor friend of ours who was coming to visit anyway, our medical bills thus far have amounted to $13 for an extra-large bottle of ibuprofen. The part that leaves me somewhat nonplussed is the response of (a) the insurance companies, plural — even my own insurance company is falling over themselves to help out, even though they're not on the hook for any of this — and; (b) the sudden influx of mail from personal-injury lawyers. I'm getting stuff from all over the state, and nearly all of them portray insurance companies as thieving scum that need to be battled. I am certain that (a) and (b) are related, but the exact mechanics and history of that relationship are beyond my scope at the moment. I don't plan to take any of this up with any lawyers. If nothing else, "Lucky" seems to have enough trouble in his life — if you're running red lights to try to pick up your kids from your ex-wife on time, your troubles may or may not be self-induced, but they're still problems.

On the whole, though it comes down to this: Deborah isn't hurt, other than a few days of stiffness and pain. The other guy walked away. Cars can be fixed or replaced; people can't. I'm glad it worked out the way it did.

Yikes!

Back when I lived in California, and Spain, and Germany, I used to read books where characters stood around, talking about the weather. I thought this was exceedingly odd behavior, but now that I live in the Midwest, I understand completely.

Now, it's a regular staple of conversation: "Well, the weather radio said we were under a severe thunderstorm watch, but it sure doesn't look like it now, does it?" "Yeah, I wish the storm would show up and cool us off..."

Beware of what you wish for.

The storm blew in as we were sitting down to supper, and it blew in hard. The sky got darker and darker, and then the winds picked up dramatically. I heard a swish and a thump among the sounds of trees roaring in the wind.

Fiona was very concerned that all manner of things would blow away, including the decorative wind sock (with good reason; I fished it out of the mulberry tree...) to her bicycle (which I thought much less likely, but I humored her anyway.) When I was taking her bike around to the shed, I saw this:

Er, yeah. That's a good chunk of our northeast tree, broken off from about 30 feet up, and mashed right through my neighbor's porch. Amazingly, no one was hurt (various people had gotten inside just 30 seconds earlier) and the branch missed the main part of the house. I'd have trouble getting my arms around that branch.

Chris and Ryan plotting on how to make the front door usable again.

Well, at least the roots held...

Down the block, there were more limbs, and even an entire tree down. This one split about 25 feet up — that was not a small tree.

No one was hurt, that we know about... and we've got plenty to talk about now.

Thirteen

Our thirteenth anniversary was on Monday. (We actually have two anniversaries: May 27th, when we got legally married here in the States, and June 7th, when we had the wedding down in Ecuador — but the first also corresponds to Deborah's birthday, so we tend to celebrate the second date as our anniversary.)

So, how do you celebrate thirteen years? By going out and doing all the unlucky things you can think of!

We opened umbrellas indoors.

We didn't actually break this mirror; it came broken with the house. Does that imbue bad luck onto the old owners, or us? Either way, the seven years have worn off by now....

We spilled some salt...

LOTS of salt...

....and threw some over our shoulders.

We stepped on cracks (sorry, Mom!)

We picked up coins — thirteen cents! — that were tail-side-up (Have you heard of this? This is a new one on me.)

Walked under ladders...

...and laughed at the gods. Or something above us, anyway.

We had an orange cat cross our path...

...but that probably wasn't unlucky enough, so we drove around in the Zipper, looking for black cats, but didn't find any. So we settled for a shot at 13th street.

So, we had plenty of fun, and no resultant bad luck.*

Thirteen years? Luck has nothing to do with it!

---

*Admittedly, we did have one spot of bad luck that evening: unbeknownst to us, Fiona and Aiden were playing with the branch trimmers: Aiden holding twigs, and Fiona working the clippers. Aiden lost a bit of his thumb and got a trip to the emergency room out of the deal. Luckily, Paul was here and could watch the other kids while we took him, and his thumb is healing up nicely. Besides, this all happened before we started doing unlucky things.

Early Morning Phone calls

6 a.m. phone calls are rarely good news. When you've been expecting it, it's really only necessary for the phone to ring for you to know what's happened. I was up already, feeding a grumpy Risanna when the call came through that Grandma Renaud had died.

The second call came in at 8:30, just after I'd finished passing the news along to Deborah—sleep is precious in this house; you don't wake anyone unless you have to. We now had a date and time for the funeral, and all the "what if" conversations we'd been having over the last few days swung into action.

By late afternoon, I'd dropped two weeks' pay on plane tickets for Deborah to fly up to New Hampshire. Paul would be driving up, and picking up May and her belongings on the way. (In this sense, the timing was perfect: May just finished her 2-year term at YWAM, and would have needed to pack up and return home then anyway.)

It feels good to be doing something, to have a plan in place. I'm still working out what I'm going to be doing Saturday through Tuesday, given that I'll be home with the kids, and, in the absence of the usual kid-watchers, unable to work. There's still things like Fiona's school, choir practice, and piano lessons, but the rest of the time is wide-open, which means that I'll be going nuts unless I figure out a plan, both for the daytime, and when I'm the lone conscious soul in the house. Anyone with kids in the Warsaw area up for a play date? Anyone want to come over for a game night or a movie after the kids are in bed? The more the merrier....

* * *

My little bit of whining here also makes me realize how much I respect I have for the grandmother Deborah whose funeral Deborah is going to. An orphan since a very young age, a widow for some fifty years, she still managed to raise five kids. In her 80s, she was the go-to person in her area if you wanted a nanny to take care of triplets and quadruplets. Sheesh, what kind of wuss am I, to dread a whole weekend unsupported?

The Magic Smoke Escapes Again

The kids were all in their coats, and I went out to get the Cart to take them up the hill to Fiona's preschool. Disconnect the charger, close the trunk, switch it to forward... nothing. I switched it to reverse. Nothing again. Back in forward, and I suddenly started wishing for "nothing" as smoke erupted from under the seat and swarmed out the back. I pulled the emergency disconnect as fast as I could (thank God for that feature!) and hauled it away from the buildings, lest it catch fire or the batteries explode. Once the smoke cleared — and there was a tense minute or so when I worried that it wouldn't — I was able to open up the back and assess the damage.

It looks, to my untrained eye, like the same thing happened as last time: one of the forward or reverse relays got stuck, making a very hot, fast, discharge loop between the three batteries.

Maybe it's time to replace those relays and put in a circuit breaker...

Row, row, row your boat...

...gently down the street!

It's been a bit wet around here. A few big rains and a lot of melted snow pushed the water level up — way up — to the highest level anyone has seen around here, a good three inches higher then the flood of '81, and much more spectacular than what we had last January.

High enough, in fact, to go paddling around the neighborhood in a canoe.

Alas, I didn't know any gondolier's songs. That didn't stop me from singing, though...

A romantic ride through Venice...

I could commute to work like this. I really could.

I just like this shot.

My neighbor, Chris, taking a lap around the block.

Of course, it wasn't all fun and games and photo ops; there were several tense days of pumping water as fast as we could as it rose ever and ever higher. I even went out and got new, larger hoses for my pump (which I've nicknamed "the candle" — as in, "Better to light one small candle than curse the darkness") and watching the green on the radar map stretch from here to California, knowing it was all coming our way.

We didn't suffer any damage other than water getting into the floor of the shed. The carpet's no great loss, but it'll take work to pull it out.

The rest of the neighborhood didn't all fare as well as us. Several houses on our street have basements, believe it or not, and many of those got flooded.

You can normally drive a speedboat under this bridge. Here, I don't think you could even manage a canoe.

This sculpture by the canal took on some new interpretations that I'm sure the artist never intended.

At the height of the flood, the street and the lake became one. You could paddle from one to the other without bottoming out on the curb.

Despite the destructiveness, it was still beautiful and, — dare I say it? — kinda fun. I'm sure we'd feel a bit differently if we'd sustained more losses, but we still would have enjoyed the "wow" factor either way.

If I don't respond to your email right away...

...it's because I can't access it.

Embarq reports a major outage in Indiana (as in, most of the state) and both KCOnline and Eisenbrauns get their main connections through them. So: no email for me! Unfortunately, that also means no sales for Eisenbrauns, either...

Art

It seems hard to believe that just a few weeks ago, I was reading daily updates from the Art Department at Grace about Prof. Art Davis going in for surgery, and the optimism about making a full recovery from his cancer. I smiled when I heard that it had been successful, and that he was back at home recovering, and grading senior portfolios with his wife on the couch. Then, suddenly, the cancer spread, fast and vicious, to his spine and liver, and he was back in the hospital again, going downhill fast. He was only there a few days, and died April 30.

I didn't go to the memorial service, as we had company over, but I talked to people who had gone, and was surprised to hear the tales of steady prodding and encouragement — usually, the best I had gotten out of him in class when my pieces came up for discussion was, "OK, that works," before moving on to the next piece. Twenty years of being told you were a good artist didn't count for much here. If nothing else, it was grim practice for the unappreciation of my first (and very nearly last) job as a graphic designer. The guy just about had me convinced I was mediocre, and that the best I could hope for was to not have my work criticized publicly.

Near the end of my penultimate semester, as I was getting ready to go get married, and get a job, I was sitting in his office, when his phone rang. He took the call.

"This is Art Davis." (pause)
"Of course. One of the most talented and creative individuals ever to come through our program."

My jaw just about fell off my face as he proceeded to give the most amazing reference I've ever heard. Whoever it was, I wanted to meet them, just to know who it was Prof. thought so highly of.

"Wow," I said, once he'd hung up, "what I'd do to get a reference like that!"

Prof. looked at me with a quizzical, pained expression.

"That was for you."

Thanks, Prof. Davis. Thank you.

Foot in Mouth Disease

My co-worker still isn't talking to me, the one that designed the catalog cover. I'm not sure how he found my post. I'm not certain I wrote it well. I meant to talk more about how what we know gets in the way of communicating. I think I ended up making fun of the cover, instead.

Cancel that Trip to Venice...

...we've already got enough water.

It's actually higher than it was back in August — this time, I see water leaking in between the floorboards in the shed. This time, too, the street isn't draining, for some reason.

I always wanted waterfront property. The depth here varies between 4 to 8 inches.

We called the town to come out and investigate, and I saw the worker stick the handle of his rake almost all the way into the drains, but the water still isn't going down, and no-one has any good explanations why. The thing that worries me is that the temperature is dropping again. Care to think of what this place will look like if all that freezes?

In the meantime, the carport got me again — the water soaked the packed dirt floor enough that the sidestand sunk right through it. Grrr. My war with the carport was delayed so Deborah could take some classes, but in 2008 I shall show no mercy.

To my surprise, it wasn't difficult to pick up — 500 pounds felt like 50. Deborah asked if I had been bitten by a radioactive spider. I don't have a better explanation yet.

Fiona's Barber Shop

Fiona has had about three haircuts in her entire life. One, when she was just a few months old; another, at the beginning of this year; and now that her hair is almost to her waist, a third that she did herself. Oops. Fortunately, it doesn't show much. You notice it most when she has a braid, and little tufts of shorter hair stick out in odd places.

Digital Wheezing

It doesn't do this all the time... just often enough to be frustrating.

Our camera is dying. 'Tis a sad thing. 50,000 pictures a good lifespan for a camera, isn't it?

If anyone can identify what's going on with the camera in this picture, and knows of a simple fix, I'd be happy to hear it.

Things I've learned from having kids...

#56,342. You can disable an entire piano with a single popsicle stick.

On the bright side, it was a good excuse to clear off all the junk that had been accumulating up there. The piano works fine now.

The Cart Chronicles

I realized when I first started putting this post together that a fair amount of this is going to sound a bit like "Ruth got out of the hospital." The problem is, you don't necessarily know who Ruth is, and you certainly don't know what landed her in the hospital.

So I need to back up a bit.

Several decades ago, my father-in-law, then a missionary in Quito, Ecuador, started putting together a bike trailer to haul his kids around in. As the kids got larger, and the hillside that he lived on didn't get any less steep, he decided to electrify it, and, through a near-constant evolutionary process (or intelligent design with a lot of revisions, if you'd rather) he came up with a small, battery-powered vehicle, known to the family as The Cart.

This didn't go unnoticed, either; it was a bit of a trademark, actually, as, to my knowledge, they never owned a gasoline-powered car while they were there. This was daily transport, and unusual enough to get him on Ecuadorian TV at one point.

Once Deborah's parents retired, though, the cart came back with them, and sat; the 12-15 mile range wasn't practical in rural New Hampshire. So, when they came to visit, they brought it with them.

Seats four, comfortably!

It took a little work to get it going again — a few new bulbs and $180 worth of deep-cycle marine batteries — but within a few hours, it was ready to take for spins around the block, and to show off a bit for our neighbors...

I totally misjudged the speed, weight, and braking ability, big time. Fortunately, Tiffany jumped, and, with all the weight over the rear axle, the front end of the cart hopped the curb without damage to man or machine. Chris says he's not going to press charges. :o)

This was an extremely welcome addition to the stable, too, because Deborah needed to take our one working car in order to get to work and class, and I was effectively stuck at home. The cart opened up all sorts of around-town possibilities.

But, sadly, the fun was short-lived: I knew I had to keep the batteries from shifting around, but it never occurred to me to prevent them from bouncing up. I was tooling around Winona Lake with the kids one afternoon, and we hit a rough patch of pavement. The batteries bounced. They made contact with the aluminum frame. 36 volts and a great number of amps sparked, the cart lurched, and then everything was still.

Providentially, we broke down right in front of some folks we knew, and they opened their garage and provided toys for the kids to play with while I checked out the damage.

I watched this wire melt before my eyes.

Once it was obvious that we weren't going anywhere in the cart, our friends took us home, and I came back a few hours later with a borrowed pickup to get the cart.

There she sits. Did you ever wonder why I had made a large door in the side of my shed?

So it's all very sad. I'm trying to diagnose the poor beast, but electical circuits aren't my specialty. Deborah and I were talking about saving up some money to get her father to come down and take a look at it. He says he's sure he could get it running again pretty quickly.

I miss it already. And I didn't even grow up with it!

It's a bit damp around here

Rain, rain on my face
It hasnt stopped raining for days
My world is a flood
Slowly I become one with the mud

Those were the lyrics going through my head a few days ago as I watched state-wide thunderstorms roll across the weather radar on my computer screen, and as I tried, with increasing difficulty, to get things done around the outside of the house. After discovering that the motorcycle was in water deep enough to cover the rims, I parked it out on the street. The streets seemed to be well drained, but not the place between our house and the Volkers'...

Fortunately, Chris has the sort of equipment on hand to deal with this. He says he was going to use this water pump to make a giant Slip 'N' Slide for his youth group, but it got put to much better use here, I think. Not a moment too soon, either — the water was less than half an inch away from spilling into the shed when we finally got the pump going, and it was almost two in the morning before the water level dropped below the level where the pump could pull it.

Thank God for neighbors who are better prepared than we are!

The Headphones, the Vacuum, and the Heritage of Making Things Work

My headphones at work met an early demise last week at in the jaws of a vacuum cleaner. The cleaning lady left a nice note offering to replace them, but balked when she learned of the cost — not pocket change, for sure. (When you wear headphones as much as I do, it starts to make sense to buy a nice pair, and these were the nicest pair to date.)

Growing up as I did, though, one gets the idea that anything can be repaired, with enough patience and ingenuity. So I tried, and it required plenty of both — there were wires broken all over the place, and it was arguably the toughest soldering job I've taken on.

Itty-bitty. The circuit board is for the noise-canceling feature that I've grown rather fond of.

In the end, I succeeded, though. I think. They're definitly not going to survive another trip through a sweeper, but they work. I'm the grandson, son, and son-in-law of electrical engineers, all of whom had a reputation for being able to fix just about anything — It's in my genes. It's in my family. I had to try!

Weathering the Storm

I remember looking at the weather map yesterday afternoon and thinking, "This wasn't such a great day to ride my motorcycle to work..." There was a line of severe thunderstorms all the way from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and they would be hitting right about the time I was supposed to get off of work.

Deborah called a bit later to tell me the power had gone out, and to ask if she needed to go hide out in the bathroom — the safest room in our house for tornadoes. The sky wasn't the sickly green color I associate with tornado weather, and there wasn't anything worse than a severe thunderstorm warning, so I said that she didn't need to worry about how to entertain the kids in our itty-bitty bathroom.

After I got home, we went for a walk around the island (what else was there to do?) to see what damage had been done. There wasn't any to our place, thank God, but a few other places had not been so fortunate. It wasn't anywhere near the July 4 storm of a few years ago that necessitated the evacuation of the island, but there was some damage nonetheless.

This is the coach house, over by the Boathouse restaurant. This tree had dropped several large branches into the canal this winter, so I guess it was fairly weak already.

We followed the flashing lights and found the source of our own power outage. Another tree had come down, taking two power poles with it, one of then snapped off clean at the base. The firefighters were there mainly to keep things under control until NIPSCO could actually show up and do something about the downed lines. Deborah had called to report the outage, and had to listen to a list of some 50 towns that had power outages to see if Winona Lake was already on the list. It wasn't, so she added it.

You can see one of the poles leaning just above the brown shed. The architecture of many of the homes along the canal is... unique.

It was getting darker as we made our way home, and we realized that we only had one flashlight. Or, rather, we only had one working flashlight that Fiona had not disassembled and broken. The one left was a green dinosaur that roars when you pull the handle, and opens it's mouth to reveal the light. It has the advantage that we always know where the kids are...

Roar.

So we called up Paul. He brought over half a dozen or so lights, and I went out to get some batteries, and some ice cream for us all to enjoy by candlelight.

We got our power back awhile after midnight.