(3:49PM) It's been a while since I actually took an afternoon off from work, but had it not been for one of my golden retrievers that doesn't fetch I would still be at work doing my thing. It was several weeks ago that some lesions developed on his backside that I didn't really give a lot of thought to and over time they spread to different places. A few days ago I started to get a clue as to how bad it was getting and decided to take him to a vet to get checked out. Since the vet was off this afternoon, I left the pooch there so that the vet could look at him first thing in the morning. I'll be calling tomorrow sometime to find out what the deal is both in the way of the dog's prognosis and also in how much it's going to cost me. The wife wanted me to get an estimate first before having the dog treated, and I wonder if something ever happens to me, and it will, will she ask for an estimate first before she decides on whether I'm worth it or not. Of course I know that there's a difference when we're talking animals versus people, but there are a lot of people who say that animals are people too, and I've seen my fair share of people who are animals, so I think it's only fair that we give the pooch the benefit of any doubt.

I guess my wife is going to be working late tonight, and that means I'll probably be batching it, but that's not a real biggy. I can make a baloney sandwich as well as the next guy. I can also do dishes as well as the next guy, but I'll think about it for a little bit before I attempt to tackle what's been sitting in the sink since sometime before I got home. Since it's somewhere above ninety at the moment I think I'll wait until a little bit later in the day to fire up the mower to do some taming of the lawn. It would be an opportune time to shed the shirt and jeans in favor of just a pair of shorts to do the mowing thing, and in the process work on a tan that is something other than white. As with the case of poison ivy, I have an aversion to pain in other forms as well, and one of those is sunburn. Taking that into consideration, my shirt will stay on and my jeans will too, more than likely.

(5:59AM) As can be seen, I'm toying with blog titles and can't really decide on one that I feel kosher with, but I guess it doesn't really matter. It's what's after the title that matters the most, if it matters at all. The current attempt describes it pretty well for the most part because that's pretty much the way it is. It's the same old thing on a different day, and like a beer commercial I once knew, it just doesn't get any better than this. I guess the anticipation of taking some extended time off has me in this indifferent state of mind where work is concerned. The big order for Botswana is just about complete so the pressure of that has dwindled down to a point of nothing, and that helps to reduce the stress levels. My hope is that the time off will do some of that too, but being around the in-laws has always been a means of raising them rather than lowering them, but we shall see.

Due to a lack of verbage to toss I think I will grab my coffee cup and make my morning pilgrimage, but I shall return to toss some more of the lame and mundane a little later on down the road, and I'm gone.

(6:09AM) I'm feeling on the mellow side, and I'm not really sure as to why. Maybe it has to do with it being the first day of July, and maybe today is July Fool's day. I know, there's no such thing, but there are a lot of things that exist now that at one time were no such thing, so maybe July Fool's day could be one of those things. I'm sure before this day is over I'll probably feel like a fool in some way, so I may as well get prepared for it. Another reason for the mellowness might be because it's a four day work week, but that just makes for a longer weekend upcoming. The other half is working on Friday and that will afford me a lot of free space to go fishing or do the blog thing, but if I want to really get industrious there's always the mowing thing, or I can spray fruit trees again. I still have remembrance of the last time I was getting doused with insecticide, and it's moments like that that I'd like to forget.

Something else that comes to mind, whether I like it or not, is next week when the wife and I will be joining up with her brother and his wife along with her sister and her husband to go to some place in southern Missouri. The wife's brother wanted everybody to go trail riding, but his horse trailer only holds four horses, so that means that two people are going to be left out, and I have already volunteered myself to be one of those people. Rather than doing the trail riding thing I'm going to take my fishing paraphernalia and see what I can snag in the nearest mudhole I can find. I may find myself accompanied by the wife's sister's husband, and I can tolerate his presence a lot easier than the wife's brother. I hope he brings his fishing gear because I'm only bringing one fishing rod with me. I have never had warm fuzzies when it comes to letting someone else borrow my fishing gear because most of the time it comes back all jacked up and I get the pleasure of having to either untangle something, or I have to just chuck a fishing reel because it was trashed beyond repair. It has happened more than once, and I wasn't happy either time.

I have been spending considerable time in another blogging locale, but I think I'm going to shift my focus back to where I once belonged, namely this place. There's a lot less drama in this place. As a matter of fact, the drama that used to be is just that, used to be. There is none now, and that leaves me with nothing but time on my hands to toss verbage in this place where the words go down a one way street and there's nothing coming back, and it's meant to be that way. I know what somebody might be thinking. You want to make a comment or something and can't, and that rubs people the wrong way, but I just want to let the words flow out without regard to what might be going on in the mind of someone else. Maybe it's just a mood thing, and life can take you to a place like that sometimes. I've been there more than once or twice, but beyond that I lose count.

I see my time is dwindling again, and it always does that when I'd prefer to have a few extra minutes to toss. Methinks now is a good time to do the morning java journey, but I'll be back at some point before the day calls it a day, and I'm gone now.

(8:56AM) There are days when being at work is better than being at home, and yesterday would have been one of those days, but the disaster would not have gone away regardless of the day. Sunday started out like most Sundays over the past year with the wife getting up to do her thing in order to head off to work at at place where you can do it and they can watch. Right before she got ready to leave she asked me if I had seen the basement and I told her I had not. She asked me when I had been down there last and I said something along the lines of two or three days ago. She then told me to go down and have a look, and when I did I was dumbfounded. There had been water everywhere and the bottoms of boxes were soaked along with the carpet where I had my weight benches located that pretty much just sit there and gather dust now.

It's hard for me to really capture in thought what was going through my mind at the time because I was immediately trying to figure out what in the wide, wide, world of sports I was going to do. There was no doubt that I was going to be spending my day cleaning up the mess, or at least trying to, but I also knew that this wasn't going to be a one day exercise. I also knew that I was going to be throwing some stuff away that I didn't really want to, but neither would I want to be holding onto for future reference. At the time I did not know the source of the water, but we had had some storms come through a couple of days earlier and my first thought was that that was probably the source of the apparent deluge.

I went back upstairs and told her that I would try to get things cleaned up, and that would put the brakes on my plans to mow the lawn. It was just one more thing I would have on my mind because she also wanted me to power wash the back deck. For me there is never really a dull moment at home unless I want there to be one because the little woman always has something pending on the "honey do" list, but I try to avoid that list as much as I can because a guy has to have a weekend off once in a while otherwise why bother calling it a weekend? It just becomes a continuation of the same thing you had for the last five days. Oh sure, it's in a different locale, but as I said earlier, it makes that other locale a more favorable place to be, and that just isn't right.

(11:51AM) After the little woman left for work I began to address the problem in the basement. I still had my sweats on from after having gotten out of bed and the damage of the night was still intact. I went ahead and brushed my teeth, but I decided to wait a little bit on doing the shower thing since I was going to get funky anyway. I went downstairs to further assess the degree of damage I was faced with, but I tried not to dwell on it too much lest I start throwing something out of frustration. I have been known to do that sometimes, and I know, it's an anger management kind of thing. I have a lot of my stuff stashed in boxes in the basement, such things as books, writing materials, electronics components, and things like that. Since I've been married over the last twenty-seven years that's been the story for me. I've always wanted to have a study or someplace where I could keep my stuff on bookshelves, anyplace without having to keep it in the basement, but alas, it has never been that way. So when I realized that once more I was going to see more of my stuff getting tossed I was not a happy camper.

The first thing I did was move one my weight benches so I could pull the carpet out from under it, then I went through the fun of trying to roll it up so I could take it outside. I also opened up as many windows as I had in the basement, and I opened the double doors to try and get as much air circulation going as I could. I had a fan I had brought down, but I had it on the other end of the basement doing its thing of drying things out. I had a smaller carpet under beside another weight bench, and it was easier to remove than the first one. After having removed the carpets I used some old towels I had found in the garage to soak up the water that had not gone down the drain that was in the basement. It was a painful way of getting the excess water up, but the mop the wife had bought many moons ago wasn't cutting it for me, so I had to go with something that would get me where I wanted to be quicker. I guess I will have to continue this later as the bell has just gone off, and I hate it when it does that becaues that takes a link out of my chain of thought, not to mention that it means I have to go back to work, but I'll mention it anyway, and I'm gone now.

(2:03PM) There I was having wrestled the carpet, soaked to the max as it was out of the basement. One of the other things besides the water that it was saturated with was the numerous remains of last year's lady bug outbreak. I don't know how they got into my basement, but they found a way and exploited it fully, so that was something else I was going to have to contend with in restoring the carpets back to their pre-flood condition. I had some lawn chairs in my garage that I used to try and elevate the carpet in such a way so as to facilitate the drying process, and that was another struggle trying to make that happen, but I did. After that exercise I proceeded back to the basement where I began the arduous task of soaking up water with the towels once more. I was having to hand wring the water out of the towels, and my hands are feeling the results of that now. They've been sore for most of the day, not to mention certain other parts of my body.

Over the course of the exercise I was involved in I kept wondering how the basement could get as flooded as it was just by the heavy rains of a few days earlier. Granted, I've seen where the water will sometimes come through the walk-out doors, but even then not to the degree that the entire basement would be flooded. Then the horrid thought struck a cord in my mind that maybe it hadn't been the rains, but rather the septic tank backing up instead, and here I had been wringing out the excess water in the towels by hand. Yes, I know what you're thinking, and I was thinking it too, but afterthought is just that, and I was far enough along in my cleaing efforts that by the time that thought crossed my mind I went ahead and kept right on keeping on with ridding the basement of standing water. The more I think about it the more I think my latter perception was probably the correct one, and when I mentioned something to the wife later about it she informed me that I was to burn the carpets because she was not going to have that back in the basement. She got no argument from me on that call, but from her position on that I knew that a lot of my stuff would also end up getting pitched, but reading a book with pooh on each page would just be uncool no matter how you look at it, and break time is over all over again.

(5:50PM) OT is usually otay, but it makes for a fairly long day. Because I had a dentist's appointment at 3:30 today I had to put a halt on the overtime thing to get a permanent crown put in, or put on, which applies. When I was in the last time he told me he wouldn't have to numb it, and I was hoping he was right. When he pulled the temporary crown off I could feel certain uncool sensations and when he started to probe around on the tooth with the temporary crown removed the sensations were even more uncool. Being the trooper that I am I tried to keep my reactions to a minimum, but he could tell there were a few moments where I was feeling the pressure, but it was more like the pain. After the initial encounter with a sensitive spot he made a point to steer clear of it, and I was hunky dory with that. Surprisingly to me, it didn't take very long at all for him to do his thing, but while I was sitting in that chair a few minutes seemed like a lot more than a few.

Now that I'm home I'm getting adjusted to this thing in my mouth, and so far it isn't half bad. I think I'll be able to live with it, but for $375 I ought to be able to live with it just fine, and that was my part. Theoretically, the insurance was supposed to pick up the other half. The little woman wasn't very thrilled with me having a crown put in, but there's something about having gaping holes between my teeth that just doesn't do me well. As one gets older one tries to hold onto what was original equipment as long as one can, because once it's gone it's gone, and in the case of teeth we're talking about either gumming something to death or doing the denture thing, and I'd just as soon pass on both.

With those thoughts having been tossed I guess my next plan of action before the day becomes history is to power wash the back deck. Why the little woman wants me to do that I don't really know. It isn't like she's going to stain it this week. Personally, I don't think she's going to stain it at all. When the time comes she'll pick out the stain she wants, she'll buy it, bring it home, and tell me that she wants me to do it. I've been married long enough to know by now how the game is played, and I still have no clue what the real rules are. I think they're made up as we go, and they're always subject to change without notice. I think I've tossed enough verbage on this for the time being, so it's off to do my thing now, and I'm gone.

(6:06AM) I didn't hear the sounds of thunder and the crackle of lightning last night, but the weather boys are calling for rain today, and that is something we don't really need at the moment. In reflection, I couldn't remember a year being this wet since the year my mom passed away, and that was in '93. The last five years had lower than average rainfall amounts such that we always seemed to be on the verge of a drought situation. The same cannot be said for this year. The lakes and ponds are full and the rivers are topping levees in various places, and I keep my fingers, toes, and eyes crossed in the hope that the local levees stay intact so that I can get back and forth to work. As I drive to and from work I will take a look at where the river level is, wondering when the water is going to start falling. I think it's starting to fall now, but it would be easing on the nerves if it could drop by more than an inch or two a day.

On another note, it's a Friday and it's a payday, but since money is no object to me since I never see it, it's probably going to be nothing more than the last Monday of the week. It may also be the last day that I work ten hours, and the little woman is going to love that. She has pointed out to me that our bank account is actually showing signs of having significantly more in it than we're used to, but that is all due primarily to the overtime I've been working for the last three months. Why they've let me do it this long, I don't know, but I've checked with the main guy to see if he still wants me to work the OT, and he told me that he did. Since we're going into the new fiscal year, that could all change abruptly. The little woman has voiced plans for new flooring, and for painting the inside of the house, and for a new mattress that will only get slept on, and it's as if she thinks that OT lasts forever. Should I surprise her now or later by saying that it just isn't so? I'll have to give that some thought. In the meantime I'm feeling tapped out and right now I could use some wake up swill, so I'm going to grab my mug and see what I can find, and I'm gone.