Singing In The Rain

My least favorite type of blog post to read is one going on and on with excuses why said blogger has not posted in a few days, week's, months or years. They usually boil down to the fact said blogger has been busy, and the truth of the matter is we are all busy, as that is simply the way life is these days.

So guess what I'm going to do today? Yep. Blog about the fact I haven't blogged in nearly three weeks.

I could say I've been busy, but I've already established the fact I hate ... but I've been busy blog posts. Besides, what kind of third-rate writer would i be if I couldn't come up with a better adjective than busy?Therefore if I have to explain my three week blogworld absence with a single word I'm going to choose FLOODED.

The raindrops, metaphorically speaking, began to fall with a freelance assignment I picked up. I have been writing high school football team profiles for a regional magazine. It's a decent enough paying gig and it is a subject I like so the articles are in no way torture to create, but the more I write the more I get paid and getting paid to write is a good thing. The magazine profiles more than 200 teams and there are three of us writers so I have been working on them as fast as I can to make certain I get a nice check.

And wouldn't you know it, but my muse decided to grace me with her presence right smack in the middle of this freelance gig so I've been churning out chucks of The Feedstore Chronicles at record pace. Also in a fit of inspiration I had a vision how to make the beginning of the chronicles stronger so along with the nearly 20K new words I created with the football profiles and the chronicles I edited and revised another 25K words.

And the blog suffered.

Then the real raindrops fell. And fell. and fell. And fell some more.

5 inches of raindrops in less than two hours.

Soon that plethora of water formed a lake on my back porch. Then it began to seep through my back door.

Within fifteen minutes the water completely soaked the carpet. Jennifer and I made a mad dash to move the furniture out of the room. What we couldn't move we put tupperware bowl around the legs to keep from getting ruined. Making this all the more fun was the fact it was around 1 AM and the tornado sirens were going off.

The very next morning I ripped out 500 square feet of wet, soggy and ruined carpet and pad. Underneath I found this old commercial grade tile.
The tile proved easy to get up taking less than two hours. The mastic beneath not so easy. Some 25 hours of scraping scrubbing, sweating, and yes swearing, I know have a bare concrete floor which i plan to stain to look like natural stone in the very near future.


I find it ironic that I lived next to a creek for better than a decade and now once did I ever have an issue with flooding. Yeah that abode did burn to the ground, but it never flooded. So then i move to town, on a sort of hill no less and my entire living room floods. No It is not a flood that would impress Noah, Nashville, or New Orleans, but it was more water than I certainly wanted.

I had the fire and now the flood. I'll be sure and take pictures to post when the plague of locusts arrive.
Oh, but I haven't ran out of excuses yet.

Next, the family and I went on a little mini vacation to Colorado. I plan to blog about our mountain adventures in greater depth but for now I'll leave you with a shot from Garden of The Gods in Colorado Springs.