Thursday, December 27, 2007

Christmas Day Crisis

I haven't attended a Catholic mass in some time. But my girlfriend Meg is a tremendous musician and has been playing gigs over the holidays as a classical percussionist. She lives in St. Louis where Catholic churches are on nearly every street corner. We both were raised in the Catholic faith, but being scientists and freethinkers, we haven't exactly ascribed to the ways of religion. Anyway, I found myself at mass, supporting her musical passion, and couldn't help but think of something I heard my favorite folk singer say the last time I saw him in concert. He said, "I have been thoroughly churched out as a child." But that is really here nor there.
We were looking forward to cuddling up with a movie before we had to attend the usual family Christmas dinner. I went to use the bathroom before laying down to relax when disaster struck. The toilet reservoir wasn't filling up with water after flushing so I removed the lid to manually depress the flapper. Instead of placing the lid on the floor, I rested it on the edge of the toilet reservoir and stuck my hand in to fix the flapper. That is when the porcelain lid fell behind the toilet and shattered into pieces. But that wasn't the disaster. The water input line to the toilet was poorly constructed and consisted of 3 inches of PVC pipe sticking out of the wall. The lid hit this pipe and broke it completely off. Immediately water began pouring out of the wall. Imagine a garden hose on full blast. This was the amount of water spilling out onto the bathroom floor. I reached behind the toilet to turn off the shutoff valve, but the valve was in between the toilet and the broken pipe and not in between the broken pipe and the wall. I called out for Meg and she ran into the basement to find and turn off the main water valve to the house. While she was doing this, a major amount of water was shooting out of the wall and running into the hallway, flowing down the basement stairs and into a floor vent nearby. While she acted fairly quickly, the 5-8 minutes to took to locate the main water pipe was long enough to release a substantial amount of water. I had tried to put some towels over the pipe and even grabbed a pot from the kitchen in a vain attempt to catch the water and dump it into the bathtub. The only pot that would fit behind the toilet was so small that it hardly mattered. We went into the basement and water was dripping from the ceiling and even through the light fixtures. Once the water was turned off, the crisis was over, but only after was several minutes of sheer panic. To wrap up the story, her dad came over and helped me locate the pipe to the toilet in the basement rafters. Being Christmas Day, we couldn't find any stores open so we cut the PVC pipe and stuffed it with a random lawnmower axle bolt and copious amounts of epoxy. This temporary fix held and we were able to restore water flow to the rest of the house and began mopping up the water in the basement. This fiasco took the rest of the afternoon. I went on to the party and had the best possible time I could have with lots relatives I wasn't related to. The bottle of Jack Daniels her brother-in-law received for Christmas helped me put the past behind me. Luckily, Meg's roommate and owner of the fairly old house was very understanding and mentioned she planned to remodel that bathroom for some time. Now that time has come.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Inspiration for poetry from unusual places

Peeing on the Fly

Although it may seem like
I’m talking about peeing on the move
I’m really speaking of a topic
Which you may not approve

There was a house fly in my bathroom
I swatted my towel at it in vain
I somehow managed to stun it
And it dropped to the floor

So I did what any sensible person would do
I picked it up, dropped it in the toilet, flushed, and closed the lid

Never did it occur to me, that the fly might not get flushed down
Yet when I returned to expel the warm nitrogenous waste that was causing considerable abdominal pressure,
I was surprised to see that darned fly,
Swimming helplessly in what one would presume is relatively clean, treated water

So I did what any sensible person would do
I peed on it like an interrogation technique,
simulated drowning on Musca domestica

But the fly, ever determined,
managed to fight its way to the edge of the treated-water/piss pool
Where it regained composure before I could redirect the firehose in its direction
Imagine my horrified expression,
when the piss-soaked fly,
flew out of the toilet,
and out of sight.

Monday, December 10, 2007

My latest song - Blessed Is

This is my latest poem, which I wrote on the guitar. I didn't include the chords, but the whole song is G, C, D, and Am.

Blessed is the man who goes without food without clothes
Blessed is the man no longer young not yet old
I don’t have the strength to walk that long and lonely road
Sometimes the world makes me want to crawl in a hole

Well a love once lost can still be found
I’m gonna sniff it out like a big ol’ red tick hound
Well I don’t mind dying buried in the ground
Under the earth, soft and still, without sound

And it chills me to the core
And it kills me to explore
And it wills me to be more

Blessed is a world without war without pain
Blessed is a world where every loss is a gain
All is not gone, fields planted with seeds of grain
Wonder will grow from sunlight from the rain

But we can all walk the vision we see the best
Cast out from our minds we can throw the rest
Build a place for peace not just speak in jest
Take the ones we love hold them tightly to our chest

And the gift is not boughten it’s homemade
It’s the kind of thing that does not fade
Everything I have everything I gave

Sunday, December 9, 2007

I need a new car

I killed my first deer tonight, but it did not involve a firearm and it was not intentional. Driving through Ozark country on curvy, two-lane backroads is a hazardous endeavor. I had narrowly missed a deer the last time I made the same drive and this time I just missed the first deer but nailed the second one with my driver's side headlight. The deer was sent flying and flailing in the ditch. It was pouring rain and there are no shoulders on Ozark highways so I went to the next turnoff to access the damage. Door would barely open, headlight demolished, hood crinkled, steam rising from engine. Combine that with the fact that the speedometer didn't work, the tires were bald, and there was a severe oil leak, looks like it's totaled. I'm glad I only paid $200 for the car!

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Getting on the bandwagon

I thought I would keep up with the times and post my rants and raves and rambles as a blog, seems to be the thing to do these days. So let's start with the basics, I am an Assistant Natural History Biologist for the Missouri Department of Conservation in the Ozark region of southern Missouri. My office is in West Plains, but I live in Alton, near the beautiful Eleven Point National Wild and Scenic River. There is a lot of cool shit around here, from spring-fed rivers, to dolomite glades, to tremendous numbers of caves, to all kinds of species of conservation concern. And my job is to go out and find them, observe them, and document them. You can view photos from my time in the Ozarks at:
http://uillinois.facebook.com/album.php?aid=
2242306&l=aaed7&id=1956768
and
http://uillinois.facebook.com/album.php?aid=
2278514&l=11d49&id=1956768
Make sure you paste the whole link. Stay tuned for more...