BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

…Or am I just happy to see you?

Remember your childhood? No… Not back that far. No need for poopy diapers around here. I fling enough poo for all of us.

I mean like back when you were about 8 to 10… Maybe slightly younger, but not too much. You know, kind of like around the age of kids in those sub sandwich commercials where they have all the adults running around but they have little kid kinda voices…

You haven’t seen those? Well damn… They’re actually kinda funny…

Hmmm… Well just stick with me here and maybe we can work this out.

Back when you were a kid, around 8 to 10, did your parents ever say, “Come on, Rusty (or whatever they called you). We’re going for a ride.” Then, drive for about two hours and eventually boot you out of the car on some lonely country road and then speed off?

Okay, okay so mine didn’t do that to me either.

So, how about this instead: Did they ever hustle you into the car, not telling you where you were going, then listen to you gripe for 20 minutes because you wanted to watch Lassie or The Lone Ranger instead of go somewhere that you didn’t even know where or what it was? And then, after you were really good and bored, and extra grumpy, and were just plain being a kid, they broke the news to you that you were on your way to get a new bike… Or a puppy… Or to see a movie you’d just been dying to see… Or Holiday Hill… Or White Castle… Or swimming… Or any one of a million things that would make a kid go ape-shit excited to the point where they wiggle right out of their Superman Underoos?

Well, unless you had a truly horrible childhood then you probably know what I’m talking about, at least on some level, be it big or small.  If you did have a truly horrible childhood, you have my sympathies…

So anyway, why the hell am I rambling about such inane silliness? Well, you see, sometimes it’s exactly like that for writers. We get started on a manuscript (hustled into the car). We write, and write, and write (gripe and get grouchy because we’d rather be looking at porn… Hey, the other shows have lost their appeal at this point)… and besides, even though the story is good, and the prose we have penned is gripping, the final destination is in the hands of the characters and they haven’t yet given up the secret info…

But then, just like our parents who had tortured us with clandestine car rides only to surprise us with serendipitous banana splits from Velvet Freeze,  our characters choose some arbitrary moment to reveal to us where we are going.

You know, like when we are folding the laundry and ruminating about where to take that next chapter.

And, just like the little kids we were then, we wiggle right out of our  Superman Underoos, giggle, pee ourselves, and get all kinds of cotton candy overload excited.

Yeah… Pretty cool, eh?

So… I guess now that I’ve peed my Superman Underoos I should change. Whaddaya think, Batman or Aquaman?

Of course, there’s always Wonder Woman… But those are really designated for when I’m looking at porn instead of writing…

More to come…

Murv

If you’ve been around Facebook lately, you’ve probably seen my “Note” about being busier than a one-legged cat in a paper kicking contest… wait… that’s… hmmm… Dammit. Someone must have spilled my metaphors and just tossed ’em all back into the box all willy-nilly and they’re mixed up…

(SIGH)

Well, no use spilling my tail over chasing a cry.

So, anyway… I’m full boated. Just way too much going on in one place, at one time. Therefore, today’s blog is more or less one of those CBS Sunday Morning, “We’ll leave you with…” sort of interludes. If you don’t watch CBS Sunday Morning, basically their sign-off for the show is that tag line, followed by some video of something, usually serene.

In my case, however, I’m going to leave you with some pictures of my Friday, a few captions, and an advertisement at the end. (Hey, THEY always go directly into a commercial, why can’t I?)

Jack-hammering out the section of walkway alongside Hell House. The sewer pipe for the West end of the house comes out right around the middle of the window, about 5 feet below ground.

Concrete pad gone. Pictured here is one of the two holes in the ground that were revealed beneath it. Because of the pressure on the pipe and the fact that it washed out, it literally sluiced away earth and clay, creating these two chasms that went all the way down to the broken pipe. We dubbed them The Grand Canyon and The Mariana Trench.

Don’t let appearances deceive you. That clay pipe only looks intact. The sweep (turn) is broken at both ends, the 2 foot section near the bottom of the picture is shattered underneath, and where Scuba Steve is standing there’s another two foot section of pipe. However, it is another 8 to 10 inches down because The Grand Canyon had washed out beneath it, so it had broken off at each end and simply dropped to the floor of said canyon. This, of course, resulted in the poo, etc, pouring out of the cast iron pipe to fill the void. It was, to say the least, a might stinky. Good thing it was cold (38 and windy) that day. If it had been July, August, or even September we probably would have needed respirators.

We had a piece of the high grade PVC on hand from installing the drainage system at Hell House a little over a year ago. A trip to the commercial plumbing supplier garnered us a “boot” to go from Cast Iron to PVC, and then another “boot” designed to connect PVC to Clay pipe. Here we have Scuba Steve inspecting his handiwork in search of leaks while we were doing a pressure test. Once it passed, we back filled with pea gravel and all of the dirt. A replacement concrete pad will have to wait until spring or summer next year.

There you have my Friday. The joys of maintaining inherited rental property. All I can say is, DON’T DO IT! Have rental property, that is. The headaches aren’t worth it, in my opinion.

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That’s it from Merp Central for now. I have a ton of stuff yet to do, not the least of which is finish a writing project that is due soon! :-O

More to come…

Murv