In Case My House Blows Up...

As if one flood wasn't enough, my basement got it again last night. The power went off in the night: I learned this when I woke up struggling for air. My CPAP was off because the power had gone off.

Plus, my leaky Sleep Number bed kept collapsing to the point where it dumped me off the good side and I'd have to wake up and re-inflate the right side of the bed. They overnighted a replacement part Monday but it didn't come Tuesday: UPS apparently sent it on a detour somewhere and it wasn't delivered until shortly before I called Customer Service this morning to bitch about it.

Nothing makes for a long day like not breathing in your sleep combined with not sleeping longer than an hour at a shot because your brand new thousand-dollar bed is defective.

That, and when I got in the shower this morning, it was ice cold. Seems the first flood must have been deep enough to put out the pilot light on the water heater.

So I relit the water heater and did some other straightening up to make this dump more fit for human habitation when I brought the girls home tonight, and headed off late to work.

My day didn't totally suck, though. My Dad called me wanting to take me and the girls to dinner tonight at the Mandarin Kitchen. Which we all adore. And as I left work, I stopped at QuikTrip for a soda, and I don't know if the QT chick at the register (who, by the way, was gorgeous) was just being incredibly sweet to people, or if maybe I was showing the strain of the day, but my money was no good, she had me covered, 'It's hot outside, go on with you.'



Bless her pea-pickin' heart.

Then, after dinner, we went to the Purple Park at Mo's request. It was way too windy for rockets, so we did kites. I tried the airfoil with the new streamers I made, but it kept diving. I think I need longer, heavier streamers for it or something.



Then I got out the seven-foot crayon kite (I should name these things: I won't fly a rocket without a name, yet I have four nameless kites). And before I had him a hundred feet up I worried the rods would snap. He was just getting pulled way too hard.

Slowly but surely I reeled him back down.



Then I decided to try the airfoil again but with the stock streamers it came with.

And it climbed. Like crazy.



It'd start going in circles and diving periodically, but if I let the line spool out it'd stabilize. Until it did so at the end of the 500 foot line, when I had no slack to offer, and it crashed somewhere down the street.

What kind of idiot flies a kite at 500 feet when he doesn't have 500 feet of obstacle free ground around him? Well, whatever I am, I'm that kind of idiot apparently.



I reeled line until I got to a tree the line ran over, and I ran into resistance. I finally walked down the street (unspooling what I'd spooled in) to find the kite hanging on someone's deck, the eave of which was what he'd been snagging on.

Then, instead of being smart enough to unhook the kite and reel in the line, I tried to get it back over the houses.

The crazy climbing kids who live at the house on the end got up on the roofs to help liberate my kite. They refused to be talked out of this craziness. Their Dad even helped with a boost here and there.



I told him I didn't want his kids getting killed or maimed for my ten dollar kite and he said, 'They're looking for an excuse to climb up there.'

I got the kite back, though, so it's all good. And without having to cut the line. No children were harmed in the making of this blog post. Fearless daredevils and inveterate rocket chasers that they are.

So when we get home I make Em go take a shower and she comes back and tells me the water won't get hot.

But I relit the pilot this morning!

So I went down and relit it again. And it went out a few minutes later. And I relit it again.

And the third time, I'm sitting there holding the thing down that you have to hold down for a minute before turning it up and fully on, and I'm reading all the safety warnings because they're there and I'm stuck with nothing else to occupy my feeble mind, and I see a warning.



I'm like, well, I think the flood is what made the pilot go out, but it wasn't that much water. A couple inches. So what's the risk? Is my practically brand new $800 water heater really dead from such a small incident? The warning tells me to not even think about repairing this thing. 'It must be replaced!'

If we were talking about a couple feet of water, okay.

But I wonder, am I getting ready for the Darwin Awards because I kept relighting this thing until it stayed on (four times seems to be the charm)?

So, if my house blows up, it was an accident. Maybe it's because I'm stupid, but I didn't blow my home up on purpose, and I wasn't cooking meth at all. It was either the flooded hot water heater, or else the Chinese Government is way more sensitive to criticism than even I realized.