Real Life Stuff

Is way less fun than baseball.

There’s a story behind this…

I promised to deliver my thoughts on the National League last week, but I went radio dark instead, and I’m afraid I have nothing on the senior circuit today either. However, I have reasons.

You see, what had happened was…

Real life has been kicking my butt for the last two weeks. Not in a somebody died or I got diagnosed with cancer way, so I fully realize it could be a lot worse, and I’m trying not to complain. But it still feels like I’ve gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson in his prime.

The fun started a week-and-a-half ago when our hot water heater suddenly dropped dead. This is a pain under normal circumstances, but given that we were officially closing on our house a few days later and paying all the costs associated with that, the expense came at a particularly inopportune time.

That said, not the end of the world. Replacing it was taking longer than I preferred, but we were getting by showering a few blocks over at my mother-in-law’s house, and we got the papers signed for the house. Even if we couldn’t take a hot shower in it, we officially became homeowners last Thursday.

Less than twenty-four hours later, however, the electricity meter on the side of our house blew up. (See picture above.) I was at work at the time, but my wife and youngest son said it sounded like someone setting off fireworks outside the window. 9-1-1 was called, and the fire department arrived within minutes.

No one was hurt, and it burned itself out before the flames spread and did any more damage to the house, so we were lucky on that score. But the power was turned off, obviously, and they also shut off the gas to be on the safe side. We had to postpone the water heater installation as well. And all this went down on a Friday, just in time for the weekend to slow the whole process down.

In the meantime, we’re temporarily homeless,* and outside of Saturday and Sunday, a lot of time has been spent on the phone attempting to coordinate all the steps required to make our home inhabitable again.^ I don’t know if you’ve ever had to deal with this sort of thing, but there is a lot of red tape to cut through and different entities to get on board. It’s not just hiring an electrician to replace the box and wiring. You have to get an inspector, then get the power company to come out to flip the switch, not to mention a tree-trimmer, plumber, and the gas company, and the real challenge is to get any of them to adopt the same sense of urgency you feel.**

*That sounds more dramatic than it is. We’re crashing at my mother-in-law’s, not living under a bridge. Thankfully, she’s not the type of person to hold this all over our heads, but even so, we’re gonna owe her a lot of favors before this is done. That said, she’s earned them all. I think it’s fair to say she’s earned MVP honors for this entire episode.

^My wife deserves most of the credit for this. Part of that is due to the fact that she’s off work in the summer and has more time to spend on the phone, but regardless of that, she has stepped up big time. She deserves all the praise.

**If only I could somehow make everyone involved sleep next to me on my mother-in-law’s floor, I have a feeling that would get them moving.

We’re hopeful the power company can squeeze us in before the July 4^th holiday. That way, we can at least get back into the house, even if we still don’t have hot water. A week ago, no hot water felt like a major disruption to our lives. Now it would feel like a luxury if that was the only problem we had.

So you can see why baseball hasn’t been a high priority for me lately. I still have thoughts on the NL, and I’ll share them eventually, but I just haven’t felt like writing much over the last week. I’m not trying to make excuses, and I’m really trying not to sound like I’m whining. Like former Royals manager Buddy Bell once said, “it can always get worse,” so I don’t want to tempt fate. I just wanted to explain the situation.

With any luck, I will be back next week, from the comfort of my own home, and possibly even having just taken a hot shower, to dispense the kind of baseball insights you signed up to receive. Until then, I hope your holiday is shaping up better than mine. But before you go, if you want to help with the cost of getting my home back up and running in some small way while also getting something in return,* why not click on the link below to pre-order my upcoming debut novel, Shivering in Hell.

*I wish I could say I was going to use the money to do something really fun that the ’86 Mets would appreciate, but as this post should make clear, any cash I pull in for the foreseeable future is going to be spent on much more practical and necessary expenses. Oh well. Such is life.

Pre-order Shivering in Hell on Kindle or in paperback

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Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. If you, like me, celebrate America’s birthday by blowing up small parts of it, be careful with your fireworks, stay hydrated, and have a great time. I will talk to you again next week, unless real life continues to interfere.