For some inexplicable reason, the last three times I have gone on a business trip, there has been a flood in the house. Two of them were caused by my oldest son playing in a bathroom, and one was due to a faulty sprinkler system installation by the previous owners. I feel badly that my wife has to deal with these floods without me being around each time.
Guess what I have scheduled for this coming Wednesday through Friday? A business trip to Austin, TX has been graciously bestowed upon me by the manager of a different group at work. He's sending one of his guys to one of my customers so I get to tag along.
Note that appears unrelated but will tie in soon, I promise: My next door neighbor built a lovely house just over a year ago. He owned his own heating and cooling company which he has since sold for what appears to be a tidy profit based on his lengthy trips to Mexico and Germany with the family. He's a very nice guy, and I wouldn't mind someday having the success I imagine him to have.
I got a call today from a different neighbor that the next door neighbor's house had been flooded. I went over to help out and found out that he had been out for about 2.5 hours this afternoon (they need to sell the house so they can get a place with a mother-in-law apartment for one of their mothers, who is aging and in need of help. The realtor said they had a showing today so he took the family out during that time). When he came home, he found the front door slightly ajar with his own hose from the front yard sticking into the house either eighteen inches or six feet (I thought I heard him say six feet over the sound of many wet-dry vacs, but he held up his hands about eighteen inches apart). Someone had put the hose in his house and turned the water on about a quarter of the way. We were cleaning water out of the formal living room, kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms, and basement, and we quickly discovered water dripping through the tile flooring into the ceiling of the basement, through the ventilation system, and throughout the basement. He's got his basement ceiling torn up in a couple of different spots, and with the 20 to 30 plus neighbors who showed up to help, we must have dumped over 50 gallons of water that we'd picked up. I feel really bad for him to be going through this, especially when it was on purpose and when he's trying to sell.
Now for the tie-in. A certain part of me is hoping and wondering if his flood, which I helped clean up for about an hour, will count as the flood for my business trip this week. I'm not superstitious, but I feel bad for even entertaining the thought in the first place. I've told my boss, in jest, that if my house floods again while I'm gone, I won't go on any more business trips because they are too expensive to recover from. I have never had anything like what he had happen though.
I reduced my workout length appropriately to compensate for the work I did helping to clean up and due to the fact that I was dreading my workout all day. My muscles hurt, as expected when one first starts an exercise program. Luckily, my marvelous wife reminded me that I should take a pain killer to kill the pain this afternoon, and I'm doing better for taking that advice.
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