I am gonna be sore tomorrow

If you read the Middle-Aged Woman at Unmitigated, you know how my day started.

If you don't read her, you should - but more importantly, you don't know that I was summoned to our basement around 7:30 this AM to deal with standing water in the basement. I was left in charge of the problem at that early hour (made to seem more so by my late-night -or should I say- early-morning blogging the previous night) because my little Snoplum was going to the dentist with The Girl and The Boy (my 19-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son).

Anyway, I spent most of the first 3 hours of the day sucking up water off the basement floor with a shop vac. That activity is not, in and of itself, very taxing. But lugging a shop vac full of water up the basement stairs every few minutes to dump out the dirty water can really get the old sweat glands pumping. In addtion to sucking and lugging, I contacted our good friend, Handy Jeff, to see if he could provide counsel regarding sanitation considerations during the cleanup.

To top it off, I had volunteered to help our Ministerial Intern at church, Tommy, move. This is a guy who is making great personal sacrifices to attend seminary and, hopefully, become an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church - so I thought it was the least I could do. Let's just say that the basement incident put me off my original schedule. Anyway, I finally got to his house a little before 11 AM - and found that Tommy and I were the only members of the moving team present. (Both Tommy and I were stiffed by the people we had contacted requesting assistance for the move. It didn't help any that the weather today was nearly perfect; at least until mid-afternoon when the storms moved in.)

The bottom line is: I worked with Tommy for 10 hours moving two truckloads of his stuff to a storage facility. Later in the afternoon, we did get some help from Tommy's son, Chris, and his friend, Rebecca. But the first (and fullest) truckload was handled by Tommy and me exclusively.
So - the day didn't turn out quite like I planned. I had visions of buying a Mother's Day gift and, possibly, catching the J. Geils Band show at The Fillmore Detroit tonight. But the water's gone and Tommy is well on the way to being moved out of his house.

Your final score tonight is: Plumber guy - 288 (dollars), Jim Styro - 5 (which represents the number of times I sweated through this T-shirt I'm still wearing today. Look at the salt stains!)

Hey, at least I can take a shower.

(Ooo, I almosts forgot! Happy Birthday, Jim Charlie.)


Take care.