Tuesday Morning

Much of my house looks like this. This is — or was the breakfast room and a week ago at 2 AM Monday morning, a steady stream of water was pouring down off that ceiling fixture from a busted water pipe on the second floor.  The wall you see in the back had wood paneling over dry wall and plaster and now the wood paneling is gone and much of the dry wall and plastering have been removed.  My insurance company assures me they'll pay for the restoration but it's gonna be like that around this place for a while.

The trick, of course, is to go on with your life while all this is happening around you.  Like most folks who read Groo, I'm not sure what I do on that comic but whatever it is, I did it on one issue this past weekend and I got halfway through a script for something else.

You may remember that for a long time, I had many phone calls a day from folks who were either contractors who wanted to work on my home or who were representing contractors who wanted to work on my home.  Talk about floods…I was inundated with them.  The calls finally slowed to a trickle, partly because my turndowns were so emphatic but mostly because I installed some Spam-filtering software.  And I apologize that I seem to be hung up these days on "running water" terms.  That's how you get when you don't actually have running water…although some of it is back on.

But this past week, I had to turn off those Spam filters.  They work by blocking unfamiliar numbers and many of those unfamiliar numbers belonged to folks at my insurance company, the plumbing firm working here, inspectors, my insurance agent, etc.  So I'm fielding cold calls from contractors again…and the irony is that this is a time when I actually do need some construction work.  Just not from total strangers with no referrals.  (I think I have someone, by the way, thanks.)

I look forward to the day when my walls are back the way they're supposed to be.  I look forward to the day when I won't have men traipsing in and around my property with huge, noisy equipment.  But most of all, I look forward to the day when I can turn my Spam-fitlering software again.  As it is, I just got a contractor call as I was typing the previous sentence.  It came in mid-hyphen — between the time I typed "Spam" and "filtering."