Bunnies & Mud

(Subtitle "Sorry, Neighbor")

With our first home in this part of Arizona we installed our first above-ground pool - ten thousand gallons of summertime desert relief.

At the outset I offer this public-service announcement: If you have never owned a pool - don't.  Owning a pool is kinda like boarding a schizophrenic ostrich with AIDS in your sock drawer.   They are foul tempered, inherently unstable and impossible to please - very high maintenance. It would be less problematic (and probably cheaper) to marry a fugitive-from-the-mob albino stripper with a crack habit.

Not having learned from our own past mistakes, we installed this pool ourselves.  Of course I never do any major project right on the first attempt. Three factors come into play here:

- I don't have a crystal ball

- hindsight is always in 20-20 vision

- I'm an idiot.

So the pool installation job came out OK but not perfect - a little too close to the deck and a little un-level.  To correct these issues we decided to drain the pool for the winter, which will also save us the expense and hassle of keeping the damned thing happy off-season.

When the time came to eviscerate this watery nemesis of mine I submerged a long garden hose in the pool, covered one end with my thumb, and dragged that end to a remote part of the property.  Removing my thumb from the end of the hose I was delighted to see the siphon action began without a hitch.  I didn't have to inhale a gallon of chlorine-n-bug soup to start the siphon action! So far, so good.

In fact, as far as I can tell at this point everything is going VERY smoothly ... which worries me. There must be something wrong.

With a soft gurgle the hose began draining onto the ground in a strong stream.  I planned to run the siphon for only about an hour each day so as not to create a sea of mud in the yard.  My wife came out of the house to tell me what I was doing wrong ... errr ... I mean ... inspect the job progress.  Finding a nearby hole in the dirt perhaps 3” in diameter she tucked the end of the hose down into it.  To my surprise the water eagerly disappeared down the hole without soon bubbling back up to ground level.

Me: "We don’t wanna do that, do we?"

Her: "Why not?"

"Aren't we gonna drown some poor rabbit?" (The neighborhood has  about a gazillion cottontails and a few scraggly Jacks)

"No, probably a snake."

"Hole's too big for snake. Looks like bunny hole to me. I don't wanna drown the bunnies!"

After a few minutes of meaningful interchange (for one of us), she won. (duh)

She was completely confident that even if there had been bunnies living in this hole:

#1: the water will soak into the ground and not drown them (I'm not buying that one at all) and :

#2: they have more than one entrance to their burrows, so that if bunnies had been in there, they already escaped.

I hadn't seen any panic-stricken bunnies popping up onto the yard elsewhere.  I was skeptical.  I was worried about da cyoot widdle bunnies.

In much less time than I expected the pool siphoned away its entire contents in a powerful non-stop stream - but the yard wasn’t even damp. Ten thousand gallons totally disappeared down this very thirsty little hole.  Wherenahell did all that water GO?

I can only assume that either:

- my property covers a huge cavern (thus giving it fine potential as a future sink hole), or

- all this water is coming out somewhere else.

It was then that I realized she was right about one thing - I had been too worried about the bunnies.  Just because I didn’t see bunnies escaping somewhere on my property doesn’t mean they didn't escape.  Bunnies don’t do building lots, property lines, or fences.  Of course they had other exits for their warren, but nothing requires those alternate doorways to be on my land.  They dunno for my land, or his land, or your land. (there's a song in there somewhere).  Of course!  They just escaped into someone else's yard! Cool. Somebody downhill! Cool.. I’m at the top of a hill, all of my neighbors are downhill from here.

... but ... if the bunnies came out in someone's yard downhill ...

... so did the water.
 

*gulp*

I haven't asked around.  I haven't driven around to look.  I don't wanna see.  Nevertheless deep inside I just know that on this evening one of my neighbors was relaxing on his deck ...

... when suddenly his yard erupted in a cascade of pissed bunnies and mud.

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© 2006, Raymond Blowers

I never did find out where the water went.

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In October's Rumby Brainfart we'll discuss song parody writing, hopefully with some fun examples.  Until then:  

 

 

Heroism, Grace, and Strawberry Socks

(This piece was written in 2000, approximately. That is about 3 lives and 3 careers ago, but I'm still clumsy. It is kinda my niche in life. )

**********
 It is hardly a secret that I am ... uhhh ... no ballerina.

Recently at my day job someone was nice enough to bring us a huge bag of hot fresh bagels from a popular local yuppie bagel bakery chain.

I chose a warm plump sliced sesame seed bagel, slathered it with heaps of strawberry cream cheese, and reassembled it into 32 fugzillion calorie sammich of warm happiness. I poured myself a cup of ...*ahem* ...Diet Pepsi (don't say it!)... and headed back to my desk. I was tingling with that sweet anticipation you get when you're about to taste a long-awaited favorite.

I settled into my chair. Holding toasted happiness between thumb and two fingers I raised it toward my face. Oh wonderful, warm, high-carb, way-high-fat, toroid of joy!  All went well until what should have been the last inch of its final journey. At a distance of a scant inch from my teeth some bizarre, tiny, spasmodic, unidentified event took place. My bagel, thus far docile and compliant, suffered a panic attack and decided to resist - violently.

Fortunately this adrenaline-pumped bakery item chose flight rather than fight. Unfortunately, I chose to pursue.

OK, so I'm kinda clumsy sometimes. Once in a while I drop stuff - but it ain't quite that simple and to say "I drop stuff" is kinda equivalent to saying "Elvis may have been careless with his medications". I compound the damage because I can't simply drop something, I always try to catch the damned thing. Despite years of evidence I apparently believe inside that I still may save it - and that this rescue mission is worth whatever immeasurable & embarassing gyrations ensue. Inside me is someone so blindly optimistic that 53 years of humiliating personal messes cannot discourage my attempt to acrobatically and self-sacrificially rescue 57 cents worth of milk in mid-spill.

The smart thing to do would be to retreat. When do I ever do the smart thing?  Every inch in the gap between me and a toppling bowl of spaghetti reduces the inevitable laundry-stain acreage by more than 11%. But no, far too gallant am I to flee the cry of some plummeting Greek yogurt in distress.

Of course I never actually rescue anything, just make the mess 16 times as big as it should have been. This is why my house features, among other intriguing decor, marinara stains 6 inches back inside the heating duct - the one near the ceiling.

The bagel jumped in terror and as is my apparent destiny I scrambled to the rescue, grabbing for it as it rolled, bounced, slid, and careened in the general direction of the floor. It resisted my efforts, brushing teasingly against my fingers, 3 times even bouncing up on the way down  just to mock me.

Part of this bagel’s strategy was to divide itself, apparently to confuse me. It worked. “Split up! He can’t catch BOTH OF US!”  In 20 years of The Learning Channel I'd never learned  about 'baglotic division' as a predator-avoidance technique.

Ten seconds later I was left defeated, with strawberry cream cheese carnage on:

-my beard
-my right cheek
-the palms and backs of both hands
-my bare right forearm
-the top and edge of my desk
-a pile of invoices
-the right leg of my jean shorts
-my bare right calf
-my right sock
and my right shoe...
while the bagel lay cream-cheese down panting and trembling on the filthy warehouse floor in two separate locations 4 meters apart.

It took me longer to clean up than it would have taken to eat the damned thing. I'll never get the pink stain out of my white sock.

There is good news, though. Rest assured that you are safe from this miscreant!  That uncooperative oven-spawn has been sentenced to hard time in a sealed Hefty, and currently awaiting transfer to Pima County landfill.

... then I still had to go back and get a bagel.