Don't get the Lobster wet!

Yes, I know, crustaceans are supposed to like water. And we do, in it's proper contexts. Hot tubs, taking a shower, a river to look at and wonder why anyone would want to go fishing...

Plus, water is a chief ingredient in beer.

We don't generally like it when rainwater fills the basement, soaking the rug. Baby books, photo albums, library books. And ten years of Zymurgy back issues. It's not cute.

I only actually got water in my den once before, a time when we got three inches of rain in 45 minutes. The jerk who built our house set it up with a driveway that goes down to a basement garage. This is not a problem in houses where the landscape tapers away from the driveway on one side, giving the rain someplace besides the basement to go.

My house is built like an enormous runoff collector.

I hired a friend to fix this. I know, don't do business with friends. But you've done it, I bet. I'd amend it to this: don't do business with friends if the work and money are big enough to cause hard feelings. I’m not wealthy enough to have a sense of humor about the job not being down right, as it was a lot of money to me. My friend isn’t in any position to make it right because he’d lose his ass with all the stuff he’d have to redo within the remainder of what I’d owe him if he’d finished it as planned.

So the trees he was to remove stump and all, a couple of them are back up to telephone line height. Instead of inconveniently located maple trees, they are enormous, ugly maple bushes. The fence still has the roll of remainder hanging off the end. The pump he put in is one meant to be a secondary backup pump, but it’s in a primary rainwater moving position. Almost everything is, at best, partially finished, and the biggest project, the driveway is done wrong to begin with. Despite the Lobster’s specificity that the driveway had to slope down from the garage floor, the slab that was poured by his friend is actually HIGHER than the garage floor.

Because this jack of all trades did not take the law of gravity into consideration when doing the cement masonry, we’ve gone from getting water in the garage during heavy rainfall to getting water in the garage if it sprinkles. As an added bonus, instead of freakishly heavy rains causing a partial flooding of my den, it caused a TOTAL flooding of my den.

Estimates to undo the improvements committed against my driveway run higher than the $5,000 the combination of projects (tree removal, landscaping, retaining wall, drainage system, fence) was supposed to cost. What’s worse, something I’d never have done for a stranger, I allowed him to up the price by $500 for unexpected materials costs with the concrete, plus I let him nickel and dime me from a 50% down to a total of $4000 in payments.

Now, my funds depleted, I’m faced with $7,000 or more just to fix the driveway, never mind the trees, the fence, the landscaping work. I went from having a saleable house with some dated interior décor to having a distressed property. Isn’t that nice?

Plus, until my den dries out a bit more, I can’t turn my computer on. The humidity is so high, I’d likely short the motherboard. I dare not run my hi-fi down there for the same reason. Not that anyone would want to stay down there while it smells like a flooded basement. So while the dehumidifier does its best to get the moisture I couldn’t get running the steam cleaner as an extractor over the carpet, I’m stuck using this crappy library PC, with its time limits, perpetually sticky keys that have to be hammered with hydraulic tools to accept a stroke. Or mooching time on my wife’s laptop, which aggravates her as well as posing a different keyboard nightmare.

For the uninitiated, laptop computers got very tiny keyboards when getting small was the primary issue. Now people buy bigger and bigger machines to get wider screens, but they put the same flat, improperly configured, extremely un-ergonomic keypads on them. It’s like trying to type with a McDonald’s cash register.

And my 30 day trial of GoLive, in which I was to discover whether it was worth the extra when I upgrade my CS, well, those days are ticking away and I have no way to use them until I quit getting a couple of gallons a day out of the air in my den.

Now, at the library, with the time limits on the PCs, the distractions of having teenagers sit down next to me and try to chat with me about their chat-room activities, I am attempting to update a blog that got screwed up when I tried to import it to my own web site. Then to work on my novel, a malformed monster in its ugly fourth rewrite.

Meantime, I finally learned the location of the blog a friend of mine keeps. Really keeps. She posts like crazy, and my wife is always reading it, but I could never seem to find it.