Heat Wave? Who the heck cares about a heat wave? I live in Florida, for Pete’s sake. That was my response when people warned me about my trip to Washington D.C. “You know it’s hot up there,” they said. “Oh, jeez, really,” I replied. “Not chilly like it is down here.” “Be careful,” said my mother. “Take short, shallow breaths and try to wear as few clothes as you can. Eat a lot of ice and just remember, you grew up without air conditioning. Oh, and if you start to blackout on the street, don’t fall in some garbage. Look for a park bench. You don’t want to get a disease.” Good advice, mom, good advice. I’ll just try to walk around naked and only on streets with benches.

Dear Diary, So this marks my big week off at home, with nothing to do but play with the kid and do some house projects I’ve been planning since Ford invented the Model T. Nothing too big or difficult. Should be fun. And the temperature is only 160 degrees outside, so maybe the elastic in my underwear won’t melt to me like last year. Can’t wait. Gonna’ be exciting. So let’s get started. Day 1 Today I began work on what should have been a quick and very routine project: moving the hot water heater from its roost in the kitchen pantry. Time allotted: 2 hours. It should have been a piece of cake, despite the fact that I have no idea how to disconnect or reconnect a water heater. It weighs more than a Hummer, is well over a decade old and appears to be wood-burning, not electric or gas. I decided to wing it. I drained it by running a garden hose from the pantry, through the kitchen, out the dining room and off the porch. Lizards and birds scurried for cover when the steaming water started pouring out. A small, manageable flood developed in the kitchen, but was quite sizable by the time it reached the dining room. Not sure exactly how that happened, but thank goodness the floors are wood as they soaked up the water. I’ll fix the buckling and mildew smell later. After the water came red-rust sludge. This struck me as a little […]

It’s quite a relief to know I don’t have a demon (as once suspected) living in my walls. I’m not a big believer in ghosts or UFOs, until I have something in my walls, sewer line or attic. Usually, it turns out to be a squirrel, but at first I always suspect spirits … or worse. Take the other night, very late in the evening, when my wife jumped up in bed. “What’s that noise?” she asked. “Can you hear it? A buzzing in the wall?” Indeed it was. I had heard it the night before, but chalked it up to critters. It’s funny, though, how when you’re woken up in the middle of the night by your wife who hears a strange noise, it takes on added significance. This was a dull noise, almost a hum, and yes, kind of a buzz. Suddenly, it was a little worrisome. What WAS that noise in the wall? Wasn’t there an Edgar Allen Poe story about just such a thing? Oh crap, now I’m freaked out. What could it be?

It’s time to insure your home insurance. Do they sell policies like that? Floridians might need them if the hurricanes keep coming, the rates keep rising and companies keep evacuating from the state. I’ve been listening to my mother talk about this quite a bit recently. Her homeowner’s insurance in Tampa went up $1,000 this year, and there’s another increase looming. She wants to sue them, not for price gouging or raising rates, but specifically for being jerks. I don’t know that it will stand up in court. So I tell her insurance is a business, and all businesses need to make money, but she’s not listening. Then it occurs to me: What am I doing defending insurance companies? My rates are going up, too. But it’s all made me much more interested in my own policy, specifically what is and isn’t covered. If you’ve never read the excluded losses in your policy, take a look as it’s not only critical, but also fascinating. I read mine the other day and wondered if they had been written expressly for me as a way to head off stupid, house-damaging things I do. Strange stuff I thought only happened to me is on there, like this uninsured loss: “settling, cracking, bulging, shrinkage or expansion of the structure.” Shoot, that’s been known to happen all on the same weekend at my house. Plus elongating and elevating.

I’m going to break one of my column writing rules today. There aren’t many. Mainly it’s things like try to come within at least one or two letters of spelling a word correctly or know what day your column is due so you have plenty of time to come up with an excuse for why it’s not ready. This week it was, “I sprained the three fingers I type with.” But the one rule I always adhere to is: Never write about the dentist (they can cause too much pain), the water department (if you like to bathe, don’t mess with people who can cut off your water), anyone who prepared your food (need I say more), or most of all, your barber. Don’t mess with anyone who can buzz “Big Idiot” in the back of your head. But my barber is moving to another state and can’t shave my noggin’ anymore. Freedommmm! I’ve been going to Price’s Barber Shop since I was in college, and for that long, Genie’s been turning me into a respectable member of society. I go in about every 4 months looking like a Yeti, she wonders what in the world she did in a past life to deserve this, and then fires up the chain saw. Cutting my hair is a lot like trimming a pecan tree: you need special equipment, you need a pole saw, you need a truck with a basket on the end of a crane, you need to start drinking […]

So, I wanted to … wait a minute … hold on … Sorry about that. I’ve been a little distracted lately. I don’t really finish my train of … uh-oh … be right back … It’s really become a problem because … oh, Damnitt! … talking to you people and I missed a goal. Now that’s just great! Yes, it’s World Cup time at my house. That would be soccer for those of you who honestly could care less, and would rather watch ink in a ballpoint pen go dry. Hey, that’s your privilege. But me, I’m becoming fanatical. I’m one of those strange Americans who is hooked on the spectacle — 32 of the world’s top teams squaring off in Germany to decide whose supporters can drink the most beer. I mean, to see whose supporters can get arrested as the worst hooligans. Actually, to see who will be crowned world champion in the beautiful game.

“So you want to do it?” Mike asked in an over-excited way, like a kid on a school yard planning to jump off the roof and looking for accessories. I smiled, but secretly I almost threw up. Run another marathon? “Uh, no,” I told him, and he looked disappointed. “I want to live.” Mike works with me and he took up running several months back because he doesn’t like his knee caps and liked the thought of heat stroke combined with the kind of hyperventilation that putting one foot in front of the other for multiple miles brings on. Now he has gotten it in his head that running a marathon might be a cool idea. He’s already registered for the Marine Corps Marathon in D.C. I wish him all the luck in the world and hope he survives. I’ve run a marathon before, several years ago when I was younger and lacked common sense, or a cluster of brain cells. One day I will run another one and have sworn to complete the New York Marathon. But it takes a certain mindset to convince yourself that going out and pounding yourself for 26 miles is a sane idea. And it also takes the kind of innocence of that kid on the schoolyard who believes that jumping off a one-story building somehow might be a good idea, and won’t shorten him by 18 inches.

So much to do, so little time to want to do it. Yes, the summer jobs around the house loom. They haunt me in my sleep, calling me and taunting me. “You’ll never finish us. You’ll start three and quit after getting a splinter, sissy boy.” It’s quite frightening to get visited by these ghostly visions on a nightly basis. Lawnmowers that need oil changes. Trees that need trimming. Talking pipes and a belching bucket of plaster that eats a ham sandwich and throws putty knives at me. “You’ll never start us!” A driveway. The unfinished plants by the street. Some plastering in the baby’s room. An upgrade to the backyard spigot. A shower each morning. Grass that makes my neighbors jealous. A cure for cancer made from butterfly bushes. A ladder to the sun. Figuring out what all that crap is on my desk. Throwing out all that crap on my desk. Banishing weeds to Oklahoma. Developing a magnet that will repel leaves and dust from my front porch so I don’t have to sweep anymore.