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Friday, July 28, 2006

When it rains, it pours. (Originally written about 7 days ago)

I haven’t updated this in a couple weeks, I’ve been very busy with one project or another but I decided I had the time right now to update everybody on everything that has happened over the last few days, the good and the bad.

Ok, so a friend of mine had a really bad car accident, but thankfully walked away with relatively minor injuries. I was close to finishing a job in San Diego so when it was over I wanted to go visit him to see how he was doing.

Now, right before I was going to be coming home he was feeling better and sent me a link to a video tutorial for doing a special effect that he knew I wanted to do. Coincidentally I happened to be working on that exact effect when he messaged me with the link. So I watched it, followed it, it was awesome, exactly what I needed and worked great.

Now again, coincidentally with a day or two of him sending me this link I get messaged by another friend of mine who I haven’t spoken to in probably more then a year. And anyway this friend and I start talking and he brings up this really cool website and the tutorials it has… the same website and tutorials I had just been told about.

So anyway this friend and I talk and because I am going to be home soon we decide to get together. Both of these friends live somewhat close together, quite a way from where I live so I decide to combine the two trips into one.

Now. When I get home as per usual I have quite a long “honey-do” list, the most important of which was to replace the pads on the evaporative cooler because they’re dirty and the house is an oven without it. So we replace them and I get on with other jobs that need doing. Later that day (My first day home) my wife leaves for college and I am home alone with my daughter. On her way out she lets me know that we had a power outage. After she leaves we have 3 more power outages, all short ones that just knock out the power, reset a few things and then come back on within seconds. BUT unfortunately there must have been a power surge because it fried the motor on the evaporative cooler, the pump still worked, but the motor was fried.

Now, anyone who knows me knows that I can’t drive. Even if I could we only have one car which my wife had to get to school. So I sit here in my “oven” with the temperature slowly rising. I go online and check Home depot and Lowes for a replacement. I get the numbers of the local branches of both and call them. Several hours later my wife gets home and I tell her what’s up. By that time it is 9:30 at night and Lowes closes at 10. So we jump in the car, stop by the bank to take money out of the emergency fund and go shopping.

My original plan was to fix it in early in the morning before we left to go visit my friends, but I ended up doing it that night until about 11:30. The next morning we get up and go to my friends houses, things were ok and stuff happened, but this post is already running long so I’ll skip it.

We leave the second guys house only about… 4 hours later then I had wanted to, I was just having too much fun catching up. So we get on the road at about midnight and things start to go wrong. I won’t go into full detail but we get on the freeway and the exit we want to transfer to the next freeway is closed. In both directions. So we have to get off, take a detour and get back on somewhere else and blah blah blah. A little while later it is time to transfer again and THAT exit is closed. We have to take another detour and take another freeway and as we are coming up on our third and final freeway change out come the cones… we almost had another exit blocked on us but it freed up just in time, right before our exit the cones stopped and the exit was open. We pick up our daughter from a friends house who was watching her (At this point it was 2 am).

This was yesterday. Today started off fine, I have at least a week off and nowhere to go so I got to lay in. Got up late, watched 10 tutorials from that excellent site I just found and took a nap.

My daughter woke me up a little while later because it had started raining. Long story short, we had a storm, I made rice which got over cooked and the storm got worse. The power went out and still hasn’t comeback on several hours later. I am writing this on my laptop on battery power. Now I skipped a little bit there… the storm got so bad that I am pretty sure that there was a tornado. My wife is sitting in the car with the radio on right now listening to the news to find out.

Earlier today we got a little bit of good news, a refund check came in the mail that we weren’t expecting. Great right!? Not so fast there. At some point during the storm that might have been a tornado part of the awning over my carport and the roof of my shed/workshop got RIPPED OFF.

So after the storm I went and picked up most of the mess. One of my neighbors brought me part of my roof back. I just wish the power would come back on so I could turn the air conditioning back on because now with the rain the house is hot and humid, I am sitting here doing nothing more strenuous than typing and I am sweating.

There are times when I hate life. Every time a little ray of light breaks through the clouds and shines on us… it is unfailingly followed by the rumble of thunder as it starts to rain on us again and like I said… when it rains, it pours.