(this is) durkin.org

Reilly has recently discovered Jimmy Buffet.  Currently his favorite song is “Shark” (aka “Fins”), followed closely by “Cheeseburger in Paradox.”

I posted a bit dramatically a month ago that things had been a bit rough, but then did not elaborate.  And continued to not elaborate for some time.

The streak has ended, however, and the previous two posts pretty well cover the majority of the mess that was May for us.

You know, October used to be my bad month every year (I mean before I got married in October, of course), but it seems lately that the tenth month is not so bad for me/us.  Perhaps May is looking for a shot at the title?

“It’s just a little rain.” Famous last words, spoken by yours truly about 15 minutes before lightening struck a tree in my neighbor’s backyard.

I happened to be home for lunch, and was in the kitchen at the sink when the Incident occured. MR was somewhere in the front part of the house (I think) and Reilly was in the den, looking more or less out the window. Once the tree was hit, things happened very quickly: Flash of light outside, a Crack! noise, various flashes and pops within the house as power surged and failed and then the unnerving quite that always happens during a power loss. Reilly was terrified by what he saw and was crying and yelling about the tree, Dobbs was freaked out by the sudden darkness and the noise (from brother, tree and storm), and MR and I were a bit stunned as we slowly started to piece together what had just happened:

The tree was struck, split and fell onto our powerline, ripping our connection and meter can off/out of the wall and pulling our breaker panel wildly askew. The surge in our house¹, instantly knocked out the power in the back half of our house, and shifted additional power to the front of the house². The surge did a couple of other things:

• It fried MR’s laptop, a TV, several baby monitor combos, an alarm clock and a cell phone
• It killed the transformer in our HVAC unit
• It melted the cable connection at the point where the external cable attaches to the internal
• It burned a hole in our water main. True story.
• It tore out an iron spike that connected our powerline to the house, moving several bricks in the process

The entire thing was out of a movie. When the firefighers arrived³, it was just like that scene in ET where the NASA guys show up all in their HASMAT suits and stuff: they walked right past me, did not speak or look at me, and moved up to the house. Quite scary.

Long story short - in about three seconds in a relativ ely benign storm, our house got beat up. We are still getting quotes to fix the bricks and the landscaping from the watermain work, etc, but we do have power, water and a roof over our heads, so we try not to complain. Oye.

1. Caused by some possible combination of simple power surge and lightening. «
2. The home was originally built as a duplex, so had dual electrical wiring. «
3. Because I called them, because the whole house smelled like smoke. «

We lost Oscar on Friday, May 19.

Poodle had been very sick for about a week; he spent most of that week at the vet. MR picked him up at 6:00 on Friday and he died around 8:00 that night, with MR and I.

Oscar was with us for seven years. MR and I found him one day on the way home from work the summer before we were married. I remember taking him to the vet that night, and holding him in a blanket later while we named him. He was devoted to MR, a terrorist at the dog park, very good with our children, and master of all that he saw.

He is, and will continue to be, missed. Reilly has not asked about him yet, but Dobbs continues to look for him every day. I miss him, too. Honestly. Oscar and I had our differences, and worse, but in the last couple of months I think we made our peace. MR misses him the most - they were best friends and loved each other dearly.

Farewell Fierce Poodle.

OK, so it’s not the greatest shot, but its the only one I have from his first official swim lesson.  That’s Margo, his teacher.  She said he was a little Michael Phelps.

Reilly is three now, and we are warming him up to the idea of dropping the pacifier habit. He is big on dinosaurs right now, and we have discussed giving the pacifiers to the baby dinos.

Over the weekend my mother mentioned that she used a similar tactic with me - she gave me a toy tractor in exchange for the pacifiers. The first night, when I went to bed, the full weight of the trade I had made must have sunk in… She says I stayed in bed for ten minutes, then went into the living room, threw the tractor on the floor and emphatically said - “I hate this tractor.”

Then I went back to bed.