House Under Siege!

Loud explosions are bursting outside. Bombs land on the roof that shake the interior, hurting my teeth fillings. My house is falling apart, debris landing in the yard. Men are shouting outside, overhead, some of them yelling at me in a language I don't understand. And I sit inside my house with no electricity, cowering in fear.

Nope, I'm not in the war-torn Ukraine. Instead, war has been declared on my house, my land, in a puny little suburb of Kansas City in Nowhere, U.S.A!

Now that I've vented in my finest drama queen fashion, I suppose a few explanations are in order (although, I gotta say, it's much more fun being a drama queen).

Everything happens at once. It started with the tree in our backyard splitting off a huge branch and then crunching up our fence. I already told you about my woes with the filthy rich arborist robbing us blind, so I won't go into that again. But with all the torrential downfalls of rain we've been suffering (shut up, Global Warning deniers!), recently we discovered a leak in the house. Which lead to an inspection of our roof. Which lead to a jaw-dropping estimate to replace the roof, especially since "the last guys that put on your roof didn't do it right. They just done slapped the new roof on top of the old wooden roof. Which is illegal now."

Crikey! "Illegal?" Are the roofing police coming for us? How're we supposed to keep up with what's legal and illegal in roofs? Between shootings and Covid, these days it's hard enough trying to stay alive without worrying about roofs!

So, we decided to take the deep, ever-so-deep plunge into our credit card, and get a new roof. Because we didn't want to end up in roofing jail.

Now, of course, with a faulty roof (which insurance refused to pay for, par for the course), comes the inevitable wood rot caused by our friend, Nature. We also got an estimate for that. Once my wife managed to get me up off the floor, we decided to get that tended to as well. Ka-chinggggg!

In keeping with the unkind and nasty Fates' sense of mean-spirited humor, our refrigerator and dishwasher decided to die at the same time. Ha ha. It is to laugh! Joie de vivre!

Here's the kicker:  every stinking one of these guys decided to do it all at the same time. Either due to weather or again, the nefarious Fates giggling over their pawns in the game of Life, everything coalesced at once.

But wait! There's more! The day before Hell reigned down on our (used to be) quiet and (not quite so) humble abode, the doorbell rings.

I hold back our two dogs, "Rowdy" and "Rumpus," and finally get outside to talk to some Orange shirted city employee.

"Hey there, Mr. America," he says, "we're from the city works department and we're working on a beautification project. We're going to fix the curb at the end of your driveway starting tomorrow. Should take about a week."

"Yow!" I say. "Um, can you postpone your beautification a bit?" I listed everything happening. 

He tells me, "sure we'll start on another house down the street."

The next morning, I'm awakened by loud trucks, back-up whistles, horn honks, yelling men, screams, total chaos. Sure enough, the street crew's going to work. I toss on some jeans, run outside flailing my arms, one of the dogs hot on my heels.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold up, guys! You're not going to start on the driveway today, are you?"

Dumb question because one of the eight member team is holding a jackhammer up above the street. The rest of the guys are looking at me quizzically, either because they don't speak English or I appear insane in my "Who farted?" T-shirt. You'd kinda think that both of our cars being in the driveway may've been a tip-off clue that they shouldn't start yet, or at least ring the doorbell, but no, that's not how the street crew rolls.

One guy finally speaks up. "Right. You're having tree work done later today, so we're supposed to start on your driveway."

"No, no, no, nyet, nada, nunca, noooooooo! The guy yesterday said you'd start down the street."

"Right. We're just going to cut the street apart."

Clearly, what we had here was a failure to communicate. "But...but...we need to get our cars out of the driveway later."

Blink. Blinkety-blink-blink. "Right," says Foreman Clueless. "We're just gonna cut the street."

Giving up, I go inside, keeping an eye out on what they're doing. Later when it came time for me to leave, the eight all-stars grumbled and groused because they had to move while I parked both cars in the street.

And these guys stretched out a simple one day job into nine days of miserable dislocation. Every morning, they'd work about 45 minutes before adjourning for Happy Hour. Clearly they were getting paid by the day, not by the hour.

Which made us very, very popular with the neighbors. Since we couldn't park in our driveway, that took up two street spots. Factor in a thousand large and larger street crew vehicles , a ginormous tree devouring monster truck, various delivery vehicles, multiple roofers' autos along with massive supplies being dumped into our poor abused yard, you couldn't even drive through the street, let alone park on it. As I said, our neighbors just love us!

That's just the chaos outside. Inside was just as bad. The electricity went down a couple of times. I'm kinda a modern guy. Without electricity, there's not a lotta fun to be had. I suppose I could've cut my toenails by candlelight, but that's about four minutes shot.

Also, I walk around the house in my underwear in the mornings, part of my routine. Kinda hard to do when there are people climbing all over your roof, up the side of the house, peering into windows, and knocking at the door.

Once, I was getting dressed upstairs after my shower and I see some guy knocking at the small window trying to get my attention. Quickly, I pull on pants and open the window. 

In a surreal exchange, he says, "Hi. We're here to do wood rot repair."

Huh. Honestly, I would've thought the front door may've been a better introductory point, but what do I know?

And I never thought that wood rot repair would be so noisy. Imagine a thousand dental drills amplified and held up to your ear.

Finally, the various crews wrapped up and a cease-fire was called. With the white flag of surrender waved, peace once again dropped over our abode like quiet, ever so blissfully quiet, falling snow.

Until the next calamity, natch. And don't let the old saying, "everything happens in threes" fool you. It's more like "everything happens in nines."

And, hey! While on the topic of having a very disruptive life, meet Richard "Tex" McKenna. Between bullies (peers and teachers both) and burgeoning love, he's having a hard time in high school, but when you consider he's just found out he's a witch, things really get screwy. Not to mention a mysterious serial killer who's offing various bullies. This and so much more can be found in Tex, the Witch Boy, my very first novel, recently resurrected from the dead by The Wild Rose Press. (My wife still thinks it's her favorite book of mine.)