Lost weekend

It's all a blur.

I wish I could say it was because I spent 48 hrs. in Vegas, non-stop drinking and gambling, maybe taking in a few shows. But sadly, no.

This past weekend was a total loss because that cold, flu-y bug that's been taking no prisoners finally came a knockin' at my door. Well, it came knocking at my wife's door about a week ago, so I knew it was only a matter of time.

Hard to imagine, but I'm not as pleasant a patient as you might think. At the beginning I'm fine—the part where it looks like I can go on with my life and work through it without having to carry around a box of Kleenex. But once we move on to phase two, the sore throat, runny nose, coughing up all colors of the rainbow, sneezing and other sordid bodily adventures, I'm not good about it at all.

I get that no one likes being sick. I just think I hate it more than most people.

All weekend long, I was taking naps in between CNN repeating news about the groper-in-chief's middle east trip and The Aviator playing over and over on HBO.

The other thing I hate is that my normally marginal level of productivity is reduced even more (I know, how would you know), and every little thing seems to take its toll.

Sunday morning, after two days of sweating through a fever and hot weather, I thought a shower was in order, not just for me but as a public service to my family. They all said it would make me feel better. It didn't. While I was in the shower it felt great, and I was tricked into thinking I was refreshed and felt good enough to get a few things done.

Come to find out it was only one thing: make a beeline back to my bed and take another nap.

The older I get, the longer it takes to bounce back from anything: colds, flu, bad movies, the price of sushi. I hate being reminded of that.

But I know that this too will end. Being the considerate individual I am, and the fact I'm still under the weather, I've decided to stay home from work today (you're welcome co-workers) and take care of myself.

Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll be back at it: showered, rested and ready to be marginally productive.

It's showering money

There are shower people and there are bath people. For the most part, all of us here at the Ponderosa are shower people. That's because not only is it easy to take a shower, it's easy to take a shower for granted.

Right up until something goes wrong.

Back in June my wife opened a door to a closet in the back of the house that we don't use very often. When she did, not only was she hit with a musty, mildewy smell, she also stepped onto a soaking wet carpet that made a very unpleasant squishing sound. She yelled to me down the hall, "Do you know where this water is coming from?" I replied, "Narnia?"

Sometimes she doesn't think I'm so funny.

Now I'm no stranger to household flooding. I've had experience with it before. Which is why I was able to figure out the problem was the shower in my son's bathroom on the other side of the closet wall.

I immediately leapt into action to fix the problem by grabbing the one indispensable tool every Jew is a master at. The telephone.

I called the plumber.

It didn't take long for him to figure out it was a cracked shower pan. And judging by the damage, it'd been cracked for a long while (I told you we don't use that closet often).

So the first order of business was to dry out everything back there: the walls, the items in the closet and the carpet. The good news is I found out there are people for that.

The Servpro team stormed our house like the beaches at Normandy, and came in with four giant fans that sounded like a 747 taking off, plus three giant dehumidifiers. We had to close off the back part of the house for four days while all of them ran 24/7.

That is until the circuits blew.

Our house was built in 1949, and the wiring has always been a little sketchy. If we run the washer, dryer and dishwasher at the same time the circuit blows. Sure, we could rewire the place so the electrical load is more evenly distributed. But where's the fun in that?

Besides, resetting the circuits is one thing I actually know how to do.

The next thing was to call my insurance company and have a very long, unrewarding conversation with my agent. Here's the funny part: if this had been a sudden accident - like a pipe bursting and flooding the place - we would've been covered. But since this was a cracked shower pan, they wouldn't cover the repair, although they would cover the water damage.

So I was happy about that, at least until I found out how much our deductible is.

Seems in my attempt to be a shrewd negotiator, and let State Farm know exactly who they were dealing with, I tried to save a few bucks on my homeowner's policy. Somewhere along the line I said okay to a $5,000 deductible. Which is not a bad thing if you have $50,000 in damage. We weren't even close.

Also turns out there are two ways to replace a shower pan. The cheap way, and the right way, which as you'd expect costs considerably more.

Guess which one we went for?
Of course when you're involved in any kind of big home project, one thing inevitably leads to another. Since we're also replacing the tile floor, we had to take out the vanity - the cabinet and sink - to get to the tile underneath. If there was a cheap and wrong way to do it, that's how the former owners of this house did it. The vanity is no exception. When the contractor went to remove it, it literally crumbled.

So last night the family and I had a romantic evening at Lowe's plumbing and bathroom section, picking out a new vanity. And moving ever closer to our deductible.

Anyway, enough about this. Suffice it to say at the end of it all, my son will have an awesome, newly tiled bathroom with an updated vanity. And he'll be able to enjoy his newly subway tiled, leak-proof shower.

The same shower it turns out I'm going to take a bath on.