Timing is Everything

On Wednesday evening, Rick and I watched a Through the Wormhole television program that focused on our "sixth sense."  The show very convincingly showed experiments that seemed to confirm that people have an intuition or a sixth sense that allows us to anticipate certain things.  Data from an ongoing experiment with people across the globe showed, for example, that people's anxiety levels escalated dramatically SIX HOURS before the first airplane struck the Twin Towers on 9-11.  And we all know that feeling of being watched before we discover that someone is staring at us, or of being "spooked" when we are in danger.

I do not know if watching the program influenced me or not, but I awoke Thursday morning, and my first thought was, "Something terrible is going to happen today."  It was just a feeling of dread, not based on any facts or interaction with anyone.  I will spare everyone the details, but we actually had four irritating, rotten, unanticipated things happen to us that day, and by the end of the day Rick was ready to put Gladys on the market and to drive back to Wisconsin. We eventually were able to work things out, but it took us the whole day to do so.  We did nothing but solve problems and thus did not make much progress on the house.

Dunedin is permit happy. You have to have a permit to do almost everything on your house short of painting and washing the floors.  Most people just make sure that if they do home improvements, they do it under the radar.  If people hire work done, however, then the contractor must apply for a permit that the homeowner pays for.  These permits are not cheap.  They usually range from $75 - over $200.

Today was a better day even though we woke up to torrential rains.  We were anticipating the gutter inspector coming yesterday, but she never showed up.  We anticipated the HVAC inspector to come today, and he showed up on time.  He did NOT pass the HVAC permit because Arthur Air messed up how they put the breakers in our electrical panel, so now he will have to come back on Monday.  Instead of putting the 25 amp breaker in for the air handler, the technician took out our 30 amp water heater breaker and put in the 25 amp breaker in its place.  So the water heater had our 25 amp breaker, and the air handler had the water heater's 30 amp breaker.  The inspector let us know that Arthur Air was not a good company.  He never said anything, but his facial expressions and his body language said it all.

When he learned that they did not pull a permit for the work until after it was done, he told us that the company will have to pay four times the normal permit fee.  He also almost giggled when he found the electrical screw up.  He told us that we could call them, or he would do it.  We told him that we have gone five rounds with Arthur Air already, and that Arthur Air did not like to even take our phone calls.  He said, "Oh, they'll take MY call, I assure you.  I'll give them a call."  He must have called because Arthur Air sent technicians out this afternoon to correct the error.

The rains continued to pour down, and the inspector noticed that we still had the permit on the window to be signed off for the gutters.  He called the gutter inspector, and she happened to be in the neighborhood, so she was at our house within 10 minutes.  She had to use mirrors to check to see if the gutters were installed correctly, and she certainly did not need a hose to see if the water was flowing correctly!  She got drenched, but at the end of the day, we now have a sign-off on the gutter permit. 

Timing is everything because our newly-installed gutters kept Gladys from wetting herself again.  Dunedin actually got 5.6 inches of rain today, but the back door and garage door did not leak one drop, and the front doorway was not hidden behind a waterfall. Yeah! City streets flooded, our backyard flooded in two low places, but Gladys stayed water-tight.

After dinner this evening, we took a short drive to Steve and Chris' house just to make sure that it weathered the storms well.  It did.  The mulch out front was a bit up on the front porch where it must have floated over the edge, but we saw no standing water and no damage to any of the landscape in the back.  Ironically, on the way to their house we saw a bunch of wildlife splashing in one of the roadside ditches.  We both did a double-take because one of the birds was a roseate spoonbill, a strange-looking bird with pink feathers on its wings and a long beak that ends in a spoon shape.  It is never seen this far north.  But there he was, having the time of his life in a ditch on Virginia Street.  See, Steve and Chris.  You miss all of the summertime fun!

When we weren't interacting with inspectors today, Rick changed out the rest of the switches and receptacles in the house.  We now have electrical fixtures that should not burn down the house, and the rains have subsided enough that we probably will not float away tonight.  Florida just continues to baffle and amaze us each day.