In Which Monty Python Proves It Could Always Be Worse

I’ve had a lot going on in my life the last month or six, most of it less than ideal. There’s been everything from broken teeth to t-boned cars to lost positions at work to broken snowblowers. I’m trying to stay positive about everything, but at times it gets difficult. Just sayin’. And then on Monday someone sent out an email to all students on campus that our university president had died of a stroke.

Whoa.

It turns out that the email was from a hacker, but it still hit me out of the blue. The university’s going through some massive changes at the moment. The last thing we need is to have to do those without a leader, setting aside the “any of us could die at any moment” thought that naturally follows those sort of events.

My house, it turns out, didn’t want to be forgotten either. We have a front porch area that we left unshoveled this winter. Why bother? We never use it. Well, today I found out why we bother. Snow and ice had blocked up the spaces between the boards, making that area into its own little icy swimming pool. All fine and good, except for the fact that one side of that swimming pool is the front of my house.

Water was flowing its way into my front room.

I got out there with a hatchet and went to work on six inches of ice, trying to get a way for the water to flow out. Nothing was working. And I’m way past the point where I’m just going to sit back and keep struggling. So what did I do?

I went into my garage and got the power drill, then drilled through the wood to make new holes for the water to drain. Not the most elegant of solutions, perhaps–but when you consider that we’re planning on ripping down that porch eventually, then it becomes much less important to keep it in pristine condition. So it started draining, and I got to traipse inside and mop up a bucket of water.

It really could always be worse.

Why am I still sane? Little things. The new Diablo expansion came out, and I’ve been playing that. I play games or read books with my kids. I watch a bit of Cheers, and on the way in to work, the follow Monty Python sketch came on. I’m sure there’ll come a time when I just look back on all of this and boast about how my life was worse than everyone else’s. Fifty years down the road, just think of how I can embellish the facts . . .

Happy Thursday, peoples. See you tomorrow.