"The Books Don't Balance"

Next week: Vacation in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

I had the MRI yesterday. It actually wasn't that bad. Noisy & confining, but otherwise not too bad. They give you the film when you leave. I took one look at my brain and realized I have no idea what I'm looking at, but it looked a little creepy. Anyway, the doctor won't look at the film until my next appointment. After the vacation. I hope to catch up on my reading and brush up on the National Football League in preparation for August's draft in New Orleans. I've been told explicitly I need to step up my game. SI NFL Preview, here I come.

So I went to the Doctor about my loss/distortion of my sense of smell. I was going to include some useful links with more detail, but I just scared the shit out of myself reading about this on the internet. So I'll just give you what I can remember. This is fairly common (said the eye, ear & nose doctor). He sees about two cases a week. It seems likely to be caused by a very mild cold I had about 2-3 months ago, which probably caused some infection of my smell nerves (yeah, smell nerves. I would look it up an exact term, but it's just too frightening), here's some medicine, should get better in maybe 6-12 months, 50/50 whether it will return to normal & oh, we want to do an MRI of your brain. I know how this is going to go. Yup, your smell nerves look fine, but I want to talk to you about what happened in college. You've done some serious damage to yourself, son.

Awakenings

I plugged the Xbox back in to determine the error code and it worked perfectly. I played for about 5 minutes I turned it off, and turned it back on and it started making those noises again. The TV displayed error code 7. And as you can see, that's not good. It worked one more time before it seized up again. The whole thing reminded me of Awakenings with the God-awful Robin Williams. Nurse Beth captured my initial feelings to the tee.

Nurse Beth: Dr. Sayer
Dr. Sayer: What is it?
Nurse Beth: It's a fucking miracle

Then I was sad like the people in the movie. As a side-note, the Xbox functions as our DVD player so something must be done soon.

Syd Barrett has passed. Dr. Jones, a few words please.

Props to Eugene on this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HH0awSk7i8Q

A Period of Great Turbulence

The Xbox was making some strange noises before the power surge. I thought maybe Ally had stuck something in there, but, in any event, it still worked. That is, until the storm. A couple of weeks ago last Thursday, a violent thunderstorm moved through the Baltimore area. In fact, I was on the computer at the time, which in retrospect appears to be an error. Because, as I know now (and probably did at the time, but ignored), "IF INDOORS... Avoid water. Stay away from doors and windows. Do not use the telephone. Take off headsets. Turn off, unplug, and stay away from appliances, computers, power tools, & TV sets. Lightning may strike exterior electric and phone lines, inducing shocks to inside equipment. " Ka-bow. Lightning strike. Must have been very, very close. Everything goes dark for an instant. In the dark, two sparks, pop, pop, from my computer. I jump out of my seat like a scared little girl. Lights go back on, but the computer is dead. Won't turn back on. Need to take it to the shop. Next night, Xbox working fine. The day after that, horrible error message explaining it needs service. Later that day, new tower electric fan from dies. Won't turn on. We blame poor manufacturing and exchange for new fan. Computer guy says, it needs a new power source (or something like that), motherboard is shot, and memory is gone, Will cost (with tax, etc.) around $300 to fix. So nothing can be saved? Nope, nothing. Bust. My back-up procedures are, well, not good. $300 is well on the way to a new computer, and Dell is happy to finance over 6 months, so might as well. Oh, but before ordering the new computer and getting the fan exchanged, the great flood. Three days after the lightning strike, another storm. This one knocks out the power to half the neighborhood. Torrential rains follow. We sleep. I get up and go to work. Power returns around 11 am (or 13 hours later). Erica calls to ask about potential flooding. She says all the neighbors are outside waiting for their power and talking about their flooded basements. No way Erica, our sump pump has a battery back-up. Did I ever mention our home is built on top of a spring (that's what the plumber says) or at least very close to the top of the watertable? Well we've got two sump pumps (each attached to a different circuit in case of a short) and a battery back-up. Erica calls back, yup we're flooded. I've come to learn battery back-up lasts only two hours. Anyway, I come home from work to this:
It's about 5 or 6 inches and very cold. Mixed in that water is a cat box, bug traps, CDs, tapes, paint cans, etc. Nasty stuff. In the first picture you can see the carpet floating. I run some extension cords to sump pumps and the whole thing clears out in about 3-4 hours. Then I go to work on the soggy carpet. I call the insurance company leave a message. Somebody calls me back, asks what happened. I explain. Somebody will call you back. Somebody calls me back and asks what happened. I explain.

Somebody will call you back with a claim number. Don't do anything else until someone calls back. Nobody calls back . Erica calls a couple of days later, they don't have a claim number yet. I call back the next day. They don't have a claim number, "I was going to call you that but I don't have your phone number". They have our old number in the system, you think they would have made a note to use the number we left them and they had contacted twice on.

They suggest I call the national number myself. So be it. I do. While I'm on hold a commercial plays telling me that all insurance companies are the same until a claim is made and that's where State Farm is different then the rest. I'm discovering that first hand. I get someone, I explain again. Somebody will call me the next day with a claim number. They do. Anyway as of today, I've got industrial fans and dehumidifiers in my basement. The carpet padding has been removed. And on Wednesday the insurance adjuster will pay us a visit. There was some personal property damage, but nothing irreplaceable. Sometime in the past couple of weeks while all this was going on, Erica and Ally picked up the stomach flu/bug. And I'm relatively busy at work. I'm worried about teflon in pots and pans. I didn't used to worry about these things, but lately I do. Hopefully unrelated, but quite a bit more troubling, my sense of smell has been diminished and/or distorted. Sometime ago I had a cold, lost sense of smell, I think it was around this time I was painting with oil-based paints in confined areas. Hopefully it was the paints and not a tumor. Anyway, some things I can't smell and some things smell and taste completely different, like coffee and peanuts. Otherwise, I feel fine. I'm seeing a doctor on Friday. But in a bit of good news, when I went to pick up the dead computer from the shop, the guy asks me if I want him to copy anything from the hard drive. I thought the guy I talked to said everything was lost. Nope, just the motherboard, power source and memory (i.e., ram), but not the hard drive. Hmmm, this would have been helpful before I bought a new computer. Yes, save it.

More Photos can be found Here

W Circulation on the Decline

Well, that's not a pretty picture.

I'm Back

I've been busy, but more on that later. In the meantime, I'm trying to clear out my 75+ work emails, including some Gems like this from Eugene.