I live in crazy times…

Life has been crazy the last few weeks. I’ve also broke a new record this week. What you may ask? Well, multiple records actually. I’ve now had the pleasure of having the most things break on me within a couple days, followed by the most repairmen at the house all at the same time with their hands out groping for cash.

Last Thursday I had a repairman show up to replace the microwave/oven we just bought to replace the one that broke a few days earlier. While he was there, a tow truck pulled up to tow away one of our cars because the key assembly decided it no longer wanted to put up the daily routine and went on strike. While both of these guys were there toiling away, another truck pulled up to take our ride-on lawn mower to the shop.

It needed a repair after the mice made a nest in the carburetor and cylinder head area over the winter. They actually used the air cleaner as a litter box, very ingenious for something with a brain smaller than a pea. I wonder if I could convince them to stay in the reflector bowl of one of my strobes so I can give it a 4800 watt second pop out of revenge! The last time the mice got me, they built a nest in the generator on our motor home. That was a $6,000 repair! This time, its only $475! Bastards!!! It’s a brand new zero turn mower with only a few mows from last year.

And with all that going on, another repairman from the same appliance dealer as the oven guy showed up to replace the motor and rollers in the dryer, which happened to die 3 days earlier.  Yes, its been an interesting couple weeks. Everything just seemed to go south all at once. But no, we aren’t done yet!

We have 5 bathrooms in our house. The his and hers in the master bedroom is being converted to one larger bathroom, and at the moment is totally gutted and ready for framing, floor, tile, fixtures, etc. So we are down to three bathrooms. The upstairs bathroom, well, teenagers live up there so us adults don’t venture into that neck of the woods at all if we can help it So it’s basically unusable.

So that leaves us the two bathrooms downstairs. Well, the toilet in one of the baths downstairs has some issue with plumbing leaving it weak in the flushing department. Until we get a plumber to take a look at it, we don’t use that one either. So with 5 bathrooms in the house, my wife, my son, and I all all sharing one bathroom downstairs. My daughter gets the upstairs bathroom all to her self (who wants to share a bathroom with a female teenager!).

Lets see, what else is on the list from the last three weeks. The light above the garage blew, the phone lines all over the house went south with strong random noise, so we have a phone line running from the termination box in the garage, through the garage door, and into the laundry room so we don’t have to stand in the garage to make phone calls anymore. The basement is torn apart while it’s being re-finished, with sheet rock dust everywhere. The power window on the car my daughter is driving quit last week and rolls down, but will refuse to roll back up. Lets pray for no rain.

What else… It has been wicked busy at work and I’m having a hard time keeping up with the workflow. We are switching out our PC’s for MAC’s, and everything is in various states of disarray during that process. My data, contacts, schedule, e-mail, files, forms, etc, is all spread over. It’s stuck between two laptops and a desktop, and in multiple applications while I merger it all together on the Mac somehow.

I can’t yet get syncing to work to my Blackberry on the Mac, which has quickly become my soul mate. I’ve got 8 copies of each contact in my database, and its chocking the Blackberry until I can find a quick and easy way to remove the 7 duplicates without having to do it one by one. I’m back to using a paper calendar until I can trust the appointments are not ignore or duplicated during a sync. And my memos, notes, and tasks won’t sync at all. Not having everything at my finger tips while on the road really hurts. I fully understand where the term Crackberry comes from. Yes, it has become my drug of choice, and its now broken so to speak.

I’m also moving our studio from an old antiquated building 5 minutes from my house, into the dark recesses of the city. So on top of all the chaos at home, my office, studio, and professional life is adrift, in transition, and another mess to be swept up. I’ve been working non-stop morning till late evening for the last few weeks. Its spring, and my motorcycle sits idle in the garage covered in dust, the airplane grounded, and I haven’t even visited the lake across the street yet.

But one thing remains stable. I have an itch to go out and shoot. The weather is good, and I’ve got a couple interesting projects coming up that will get me outside, shooting, and soaking up the springtime. It may be work, but its also a good stress reliever. I think I’ll also plan a trip to Boston to shoot the streets in the wee hours of the morning. Always an interesting trip, peaceful, quiet, and somewhat surreal at 3am.

I just hope, and pray, that my cameras will continue to operate without issues, failures, or complaints, as they have for years. The last thing I need right now is for my stress relivers to give up the ghost!

~ by sfaust on May 30, 2008.