Well this week has been a real crapfest part II (6/12/2020)

Month #1
Month #2
Bathroom Hijinks (Month #3) part 1
Bathroom Hijinks (Month #3) part 2

An update on my housing situation:

9:00 am: I am summoned back to my house to hear that my plumbers need an additional day of work with the excavator to remove all of the broken piping underneath. This will double the costs.

11:00 am: They admit that they finally got contacted by the gas people that, thankfully, there is no gas main.

11:30 am: They find a gas main. Apparently it's not on the records.

1:30 pm: The damage turns out to be the holy tree has not only destroyed the sewer pipe but our neighbors sewer pipe they helpfully fix (for free apparently) as well as our water main, which is probably poisoned. It's just we didn't notice because we drink bottled water. They manage to replace all of that.

2:00 pm: Everything is finally fixed. But the entire yard is destroyed and the tree has to be completely torn down. The Lorax is sad. Oh and can we pay immediately our $8,000 bill?

2:30 pm: I've been trying to get in touch with my insurance people the entire week so I drive to them and find out their office is shut down. They are now all working at home and haven't left a forwarding number.

3:00 pm: I have to go to my mom for help in order t contact the insurance people, which is very embarrassing and requires listening to a lot of people before she finally puts me in touch with the people I need to do. I must promise to visit more.

4:00 pm: I make numerous trips to bring back stuff to the house so it'll be an easy leave of the hotel tomorrow. Also doing a bunch of laundry at my mothers because I can't exactly use the basement.
Then I remember I have ANOTHER contractor coming to visit me at 5:30.

5:00: The contractor arrives early and checks out my bathroom above the sewage. In a completely unrelated problem, the toilet is on rotted wood and will have to have the base replaced. Notably, I had the bathroom repaired earlier this month and they said this was a problem but I'd tried to take the cheap way out--shame on me.

6:30: I come home and Kat reminds me I was supposed to get dinner. I go out again.

8:30: Somehow it ends up taking two hours. Day over.

   

    Needless to say, this is a pill of a week. I'm glad that the sewer system is fixed in my house but that doesn't actually help with the bathroom as its rotted support means that the fixing is not nearly over yet. Ironically, virtually every single problem in my house stems from the downstairs bathroom. I've mentally decided that it must have a Moaning Myrtle-esque ghost inside it.

    Ugh, even Harry Potter has been ruined by this week. I actually wrote Joan Rowling to say she needs to really re-examine the kind of message she's sending to her readers. I doubt she'll read me as I'm (measured by Twitter followers), .03% as famous as she is. However, that still doesn't mean its not disappointing.

    As for the rest of the past couple of weeks events, it's more than I can really take in. I don't live that far from Louisville and the death of Breonna Taylor hits closer to home than George Floyd's. However, my wife regularly visited Minneapolis to hang out with her favorite author, Pam Godwin. So she's been glued to the set, watching the city she dreamed of moving to descend into chaos. A couple of years ago, a white supremacist killed an elderly black couple in a Kroger I visited before (and only did that because the church he planned to attack was locked).

    Given the subject of these protests are police brutality, you'd think that final bit wouldn't be relevant but it is as there's a lot more going on than just the police's response to minorities. Much of the South's Civil War memorabilia (I refuse to call them monuments) has been vandalized and I'm pleased to see that. My ancestors were Confederates and they were assholes for fighting that cause. Several times in my life, I've considered going down to Stone Mountain to clean off the graffiti someone put up on the mountain of Confederate faces.

    Despite my Gary-esque political reactionary nature, for me, the best way to deal with this would be to create a national bureau of policing. It would provide guidelines for police handling of suspects, investigate police brutality, and also keep a registry of the past behavior of officers. Sadly, under the current President, that's not going to happen. Defund the police is a pretty good slogan but I have a different perspective on them than perhaps other parts of the country.

    In Appalachia, the vast majority of "ethnic" crime is white supremacy based. We have Neo-Nazis, Hell's Angels, white militias, and KKK-derivatives doing the vast majority of organized crime. Justified got some complaints for depicting our murderous meth-dealers as racists but it's about the only show on television that shows it like it is. The police still deal with them, though, and they wouldn't go away without them. As I said to someone on the forum, "Whenever I talk about Nazis in the modern day, people assume I'm being hyperbolic. No, I mean the swastika tattooed psychopaths who will kill you if you don't fit their ideology. There's a dozen of them in every city in my state and some closer to low hundreds."

    The fact so many people are willing to risk infection in this time of plague goes to show how deep the emotions are running (and justifiably so). I really don't know how we're going to reach November but I hope that it will result in the voting out of both Donald J. Trump as well as Mitch McConnell. I would have preferred Charles Booker of Louisville to be Kentucky's Democratic Senatorial candidate but I'll settle for Amy McGrath. Either way, whatever pushes out the Evil Turtle. As for the Cheeto? Well, I think he's done no matter what. If he can lose my mother's vote as a die hard seventy-year-old Republican, he doesn't have a chance with the rest of the nation.

    Good luck everyone, stay safe.