It's ALIVE!!

Okay, by now you're surely getting tired of this.
This is the last post about it, I swear.
But I have tell you.

THE WATER SOFTENER IS FIXED!!!

And I fixed it!

After my little episode of gushing water and exploding seals, I did actually manage to get the thing back together. And lo and behold it works! I don't know how, but I fixed it.

Who wants to touch me?

I SAID WHO WANTS TO TOUCH ME?!

Living in the shadows

Contrary to popular belief, I have not dropped off the face of the earth. I have, in fact, been working second shift, learning to be a field engineer. Okay, I'm not really, but I'm taking the basic class, and having alot of fun with it.

Still, I find that it is very odd working this schedule. There are things about it that are undoubtedly great, like not having to set my alarm clock. I can get up at 8, or 9, or 9:30 or 10. Pretty much anytime before 2:00 in the afternoon, although thankfully, I have not yet reached the point where I spend all of my time sleeping.

The real problem is that I feel like I'm living in a kind of shadow world. I'm out roaming while everyone else is working, and as they are heading home to their families, I am heading in to work. The worst part of it is that I only see my wife for literally moments at a time each day. I'm asleep when she leaves for work, and she's usually asleep when I get home. And of course, it has totally killed my social life during the week. That's why it seems an exceedingly lonely way to live. I think the only way to make this work is the way it worked for Michelle when she worked this shift during college. That is, you, your spouse, and all your friends have to work the same shift. That way, when you're all done with work, you can go out and close down the bars, then sleep late the next morning, and not have to be at work until 3:00. That would be great.

The only consolation I have is that there are at least 6 other people, my classmates, who have to do the same thing. But at least I get to go home to my own bed at night, while they have to go back to a hotel room. See, this is what always spoils my pity party. I have the uncanny ability to see that there is always somebody worse off than me.

Well, enough rambling for now.

As you read this, I'll either be bored out of mind trying to watch daytime television, or working late into the night.

Pity me...

Old but not so faithful

Well, if you haven't guessed it by now from my other posts, I'm having a little problem with my water softener. Okay, I'll admit it. I am obsessed with the damn water softener. It's driving me insane. I hate the hard water and all the terrible things it does to my clothes, my dishes, my skin, my water heater, my pipes...

Hello. My name is Matt and I have a broken water softener.

Michelle keeps telling me to call Sears and have a guy come out and fix the thing. But something inside me won't let me do that...yet. I grew up on a ranch. I watched my father and grandfather take equipment apart and put it back together, literally with spit and bailing wire. My father is a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. But he's good at many. He taught me basic auto maintenance, carpentry, leather working and even a little bit of welding. He's the kind of person that would be very valuable in a post-apocalyptic scenario. He qualified expert on every weapon they put in his hands when he was in the army, and he can still outshoot me without even trying. He's the kind of person that could build his own house from the ground up, hunt down dinner, kill it, grill it and set it on a table that he built with his own hands. Sadly, very few of these skills managed to sink into my brain.

Nevertheless, I came home this afternoon, put on my grungy pants, clipped on my MP3 player, and with Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" blaring in my ears, I marched out to the garage to set that mother straight. I had read some stuff about water softeners on the web, and studied the exploded parts drawings in the owners manual, so I felt reasonably sure that I could manage to reduce the thing to its component parts. I figured I'd let the Good Lord handle the rest.

My first goal was to open up the housing holding the rotating valve that let water flow into and out of the softening tank. Or whatever it's called. So, I went into my tool cupboard, got out my ratchet, found the right socket and proceeded to loosen the screws holding the top of the housing together. The first one came out with no problem. However, about halfway through loosening the second screw, I started to hear an ominous sound...

It started as a little bit of a whine, like built up pressure beginning to slowly escape. The noise started to get louder, and I started to worry. That's when I heard the first hiss. Before I could reach for the ratchet and the other screw, however, all hell broke loose.

Water started to geyser out of the screw hole where the first screw had been. Suddenly, I was no longer in my garage. I was one of the main characters in Grey Lady Down, my submarine under enemy attack, water lines rupturing and alarm klaxons screaming. Under extreme pressure, water was shooting four feet straight up into the air, splashing off the garage ceiling and drenching me and everything else within a five-foot radius. Desperately, I jammed the first screw into the screw hole and started to tighten it down as fast as I could. This, of course, stopped the water shooting straight up in the air, and caused it to shoot out in all directions, until I managed to tighten the screw down enough to seal the housing back together.

I stood there a moment, cold, soaking wet, and pondered my own stupidity. Then I reached over and switched the valve on the main water line to "bypass". Ya know, the valve with big bold letters on it saying "Press here to bypass before performing maintenance." Yeah, that one.

Hell, after that, the rest was a breeze.... Okay, it wasn't a breeze. But I managed to get the thing apart and look for anything that might be causing it to malfunction. Like a family of octopi living in the main housing. Unfortunately, I didn't see any multi-armed bandits living in my valves. So I cleaned the thing as best I could, put it back together--yes, I did get it back together--and set it to recharge.

I don't have alot of hope that it will work. But at least I've satisfied myself that there isn't anything else I can do to it. My only hope from this whole episode is that maybe, just maybe, this is how my father learned to be so handy. Maybe these little trials by fire, er, water that is, will someday turn me into someone who can keep his house from crumbling around his ears.

...

No, I'm not buying it either. I'm going to go put Sears on speed dial.

I'm not worthy

This afternoon I stopped in at Brackenridge Childrens' Hospital to bring some dinner to Michelle who was watching over an infant with some serious medical problems. I won't tell you about the case, because it's too tragic, and it opens up a dark place inside me and makes me want to do some very bad things to some of the people involved in this case.

I stood there and watched my wife feed this child, and hold her and watch over her. When I left, I made it all the way out to the front entrance of the hospital before I started to cry. If you knew what I knew about this case, you would, too.

I've often wondered why Michelle and I have never felt ready to have children. Tonight I realized why. Michelle already has kids. In fact, she's got about 50 of them. They're her kids, and in some way, they are mine, too.

But this entry isn't about me. It's about a person in whose shadow I don't feel worthy to stand. There are only a few of those people in this world. Michelle is one of them.

Each day, while I sit at a computer and page through PDFs to see if the callouts are correct on that illustration of the 304S chamber lid, this woman goes out and faces the worst that our society can throw at her. She stands firmly between the abused and forgotten children of this world and those that would do them harm. And she doesn't stand alone. There are hundreds, thousands of these people all over our country. They truly are unsung heroes.

While firefighters and policemen are displayed on posters in front of waving flags and talked about with reverence and awe, these women, and yes, a few men, go to work and try to sort out the pieces that are left after the Cops cameras stop rolling.

Michelle lies awake at night wondering if one of the teenagers on her caseload is out walking the streets, if one of her 10-year-old kids is going to keep acting out at school, if that county judge is going to make an assanine ruling that doubles the amount of work she has to do on a case, because they forget that when their mandates come down, it's the CPS caseworker who has to pick up the slack.

It's the CPS caseworker that drives 50 miles out of her way when the foster parent can't make a meeting. It's the CPS caseworker that digs into her own meager salary to get that extra pair of shoes that the kid needs, or that final toy request that didn't get filled on the angel tree at Christmas. It's the CPS caseworker that wakes up at 3 AM to go out to the scariest neighboorhoods in Austin to pick up three little kids because APD picked up another mother who was turning tricks for a hit of meth.

And she doesn't ask for any thanks from us. Her reward is truly just to see that child smile, to know that they finally feel a little safer, that they have a full belly and a warm bed.

I once remarked that CPS is like the CIA, and I really believe it. When CPS is doing their job right, we forget that they are there. We forget the sacrifices they make every day to take care of the little people that we all too often forget about.

I've spent time with these folks. They work hard. They drink hard. They love hard. And they do it on tight budgets, tighter salaries, and with little or no thanks.

Michelle Meehan Kimbrough is a CPS caseworker, and I am proud to tell people that. I am proud of who she is and what she does, and I'm just happy that I get the chance to be the shoulder that she cries on and the person that gets to encourage her when she needs it.

I love that woman more than life itself.

Even if she doesn't know how to fix that damn water softener.

Here come da judge

I have returned!

To the ether that is. I'm still trying to get into the swing of this blogging business. I'm not used to just sitting down and writing, even though it's what I do all day long. Still, I just got back from the gym and exercising my physical muscles, so I thought it was about time to exercise some mental muscles, too.

Today I once again delved into the seedy underbelly of our society, slogging through the slime and muck of our city's most loathsome arena.

That's right, I had to report for jury duty.

Oddly enough, this is the third time I have been called upon to do my civic duty since I moved to Austin. I say “oddly” because half the people I know that have lived in Austin for ten or so years have never been called up for jury duty. I secretly suspect that this is some kind of punishment engineered by my mother for not going to church. But that’s another blog entry…

The first time I was some sort of federal court thing that kept me on the hook for like two months, forcing me to call in every Friday afternoon to see if I would be required to report the following Monday. It was like being on parole or something. I couldn’t make any long-term plans for that whole time.

The second was only about a year ago, when I was called up for the criminal court. This consisted of standing and, on occasion, sitting outside of a courtroom for several hours twiddling my thumbs until the judge called us all in, thanked us for our time and informed us that all of the defendants had taken plea bargains. It was a great way to spend an afternoon, let me tell you.

This time, however, I managed to go quite a bit further. I actually got into the voir dire process. For those of you who haven’t watched enough “Law and Order,” that’s the part where the lawyers try to figure out who’s too nutty to be on the jury. Or maybe just nutty enough.
As it happened, I was potential juror number ten, so the odds were pretty good that I was going to get picked. It turns out though that I had some biases that I really wasn’t aware of.
I always assumed that I was the kind of person that, when asked to do so, could be fair and impartial and put aside any preconceptions I might have. But I guess not.
In this particular case, I was faced with an individual versus a corporation. Not a large corporation, I don’t think, but a corporate entity nonetheless. And the individual was a VERY old woman.

So I had to stand in front of a judge, flanked by lawyers, and admit, under oath, that while I would do my very best, if selected for the jury, to follow the instructions of the judge and the letter of the law, that I could not absolutely guarantee that I could be impartial when it came to putting the welfare of an old lady against the much deeper pockets of a corporation. Even when I’m not sure that the corporation really was negligent.

For some reason that bothers me a little, and I can’t really pinpoint why it does. I knew that the guy next to me and the guy behind me were going to be dismissed when they started talking about frivolous lawsuits, and I was really put off by the plaintiff’s attorney, who didn’t seem very good at all this trial business.

But I really thought that as a rational son of the New Enlightenment, I could allow logic to reign and rule impartially with only the facts as my guide. I realize now that I was wrong.
Or perhaps I am not wrong. Perhaps the law is wrong. Perhaps there is more to justice than simply following the letter of the law. But that’s not for me to decide this time. Frankly, I’m a bit relieved. Twelve of my fellow citizens must now bear the burden of deciding how society will sort out this little vignette.

Good luck to them.