Bailing
I was totally looking forward to Sunday afternoon and evening at Smoke Farm for the Philosophy Camp reunion, but I had to bail.
Literally.
Saturday night’s Pineapple Express roared into town dropping something like two and a half inches of rain, which was about how much standing water we had in our basement Sunday morning at 5:30AM when I went down to check on how things were.
I spent a couple hours in my pajamas scooping water with a pitcher usually reserved for margueritas and then much of the rest of the day vacuuming up pools of wet with our brand-new Shop-Vac that Jen bought after waiting outside for Lowes’ hardware store to open with a bunch of other folks who apparently had similar early-morning needs to ours.
It sucked—the experience figuratively and the vacuum literally—but after seeing pictures in the paper this morning of people’s houses that were flooded above ground by overflowing creeks filled with raw sewage, I’d have to agree it wasn’t so bad.
And all the vacuuming seemed to help the Steelers, who crushed the Cincinnati Bengals 23-7, even though the offense never quite seemed to get in gear.
So, all in all, it wasn’t so awful, just another of the glamorous aspects of home ownership that makes paying a mortgage so worthwhile and which ensures that one will keep doing one’s part to keep the economy thriving—at least at big-box hardware stores.
I had been looking forward to reading and talking a out Nietzsche, Plato, and Emmanuel Levinas with Philosophy Camp alumni, but this was a different sort of lesson in the practical application of ideas. Or perhaps, more appropriately, it was applied Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher for whom everything, essentially, was water, and who famously claimed, “You cannot step twice into the same river.”
With all due respect, I think he might be wrong about that: I stood in pretty much the same river for six hours yesterday.
Literally.
Saturday night’s Pineapple Express roared into town dropping something like two and a half inches of rain, which was about how much standing water we had in our basement Sunday morning at 5:30AM when I went down to check on how things were.
I spent a couple hours in my pajamas scooping water with a pitcher usually reserved for margueritas and then much of the rest of the day vacuuming up pools of wet with our brand-new Shop-Vac that Jen bought after waiting outside for Lowes’ hardware store to open with a bunch of other folks who apparently had similar early-morning needs to ours.
It sucked—the experience figuratively and the vacuum literally—but after seeing pictures in the paper this morning of people’s houses that were flooded above ground by overflowing creeks filled with raw sewage, I’d have to agree it wasn’t so bad.
And all the vacuuming seemed to help the Steelers, who crushed the Cincinnati Bengals 23-7, even though the offense never quite seemed to get in gear.
So, all in all, it wasn’t so awful, just another of the glamorous aspects of home ownership that makes paying a mortgage so worthwhile and which ensures that one will keep doing one’s part to keep the economy thriving—at least at big-box hardware stores.
I had been looking forward to reading and talking a out Nietzsche, Plato, and Emmanuel Levinas with Philosophy Camp alumni, but this was a different sort of lesson in the practical application of ideas. Or perhaps, more appropriately, it was applied Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher for whom everything, essentially, was water, and who famously claimed, “You cannot step twice into the same river.”
With all due respect, I think he might be wrong about that: I stood in pretty much the same river for six hours yesterday.
posted by Professor Dave at 9:53 AM
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