Low Quality H2O

"Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put it in a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot and it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend." - Bruce Lee

I have always thought of water as being awesome. You can drink it, you can shower with it, you can swim in it, and you can even Chinese Water torture with it. Definitely something innate in human nature that draws us to water, something about water that fascinates people to the core. I think the first chapter of Moby Dick talks about this exact subject, but I'd rather not think about that book right now.

Anyways, some of you who are loyal readers of my page may already be thinking to yourselves, "Here we go again... another one of Dudo509 Blogspot's retarded tributes to some silly topic, like the Sun, Britney Spears, the town of Darien, the White Sox, or salads." Well, you would be wrong.

This time, I would like to take the time and effort to bash water, instead of praise it. The reason? It's Friday night. Actually Saturday morning, around 3 or 4 am, when my sister calls me up from Darien to tell me that the power went out and that our basement is flooded with 3 inches of water. Me, half asleep, tells her that there's nothing we can do about it right now, so go back to sleep and we'll take care of it in the morning.

Of course, now that I'm fully awake, I can't stop thinking about our flooded basement, so about another half hour later, I decide to just drive home and check on the basement myself. On the way back, I noticed that there's not a lot of cars on the highway at 4-5 in the morning, other than FedEx and UPS trucks.

As I drive into Darien, I notice that the entire place is dark. Stoplights and streetlights are completely off, store signs unlit, and my block looks like a scene out of a zombie movie. Then I get to my house and realize that with no electricity, the garage door won't open. Under my breath, I curse the state of Illinois for letting our most talented homegrown Power Engineers slip away to north of our borders. "I bet all of the 'Sconz is up and running right now," I say to myself.

With our storm door locked, I end up having to call and wake up my sister to open the door for me. We go down to the basement, and sure enough, there's at least 3 inches of water there, maybe 4 at this point. I hear a clicking noise in the corner, which was the backup sump pump futilely trying to start. Stupid thing wasn't working, only making stupid noises. Otherwise the basement wouldn't have flooded. Oh well.

So I figure that I better walk through the basement and unplug everything, and make sure to move anything valuable to higher ground. Since I didn't have rubber boots, I ended up getting an old pair of shoes and tying plastic bags around them, something I remember doing back from Camp Edwards in sixth grade. I think I looked pretty weird at that moment, with plastic bags around my ankles, jeans rolled up to the knees and everything. In fact, my sister decided to take some pictures of me to record exactly how stupid I looked.

The good thing was, there wasn't a lot to unplug, and nothing that valuable down there. The bad thing was that the "plastic bags around shoes" idea stopped being effective when I was about halfway to the other side of the basement.

Anyways, we went to sleep, and by the next morning, the power had come back on, and most of the water was pumped out. All was good again, except that the pieces of carpet were still soaked, there was dirty residue covering all the tiled areas, and the whole basement smelled disgusting, kind of like an old fish tank.

So as I alluded to earlier, this weekend's flooded basement experience caused me to become more aware of the uglier side of water. Yes, it is still a great beverage, and yes, I still think oceans are cool, but it is definitely not fun to clean up the mess left by dirty rainwater in one's basement. The worst parts about water I learned this weekend:

- Soaked pieces of carpet that reeked like a mother hugger. Trying to carry them from the basement to the garage to the driveway to the deck without messing up the rest of the house was not easy or fun.

- Soaked cardboard boxes. Like the silly aliens in Signs, water is like kryptonite to cardboard. Not only that, but if you have the corrugated cardboard, you get a nice surprise when you pick it up and all the water trapped inside rushes out. Fortunately, most of our stuff down there was in plastic bins or plastic bags, but there were still plenty of things stored in cardboard boxes to make life miserable during the cleanup process. I might have to write an "Ode to Plastic" sometime.

- Mopping up the dirty water that had collected all the dirt, dead bugs, rust juice, etc. in the basement. Squeezing out the concentrated filth into the bucket and dumping it out was not pleasant.

In the end, I realized that Bruce Lee was right. The worst enemy to deal with in a fight is water. Specifically, old nasty floodwater. Virtually impossible to catch and manage, with an overwhelmingly bad smell to boot. Definitely a battle I would just like to avoid in the future. Anyways, my body is so sore and blistered right now that I'm not sure I could fight a mouse (not my expression, one of my managers likes to say that).

*****

McNown League 2004

The weekend was not entirely without positives, however. The 2004 McNown League draft took place last night and I'm actually feeling pretty happy with the results. Didn't like being in the 4th spot, but a good start was having LaDainian Tomlinson fall to me somehow (Priest, Ahman, and Portis were taken 1-2-3). Starting lineup for my team looks like:

QB - Aaron Brooks
RB - LaDainian Tomlinson
WR - Terrell Owens
Flex - Domanick Davis
Flex - Tiki Barber
Flex - Peerless Price
TE - Boo Williams
K - Jason Elam
D - Ray Lewis
D - Keith Bulluck
D - Rodney Harrison

Not expecting a whole lot out of Owens this year, but I wouldn't mind seeing him prove me wrong by busting out. Also, I like having Aaron Brooks at QB, but maybe that's only because he's never been on my team to frustrate me personally. Other than that, the flex looks a little weak beyond Davis. I'm not that worried though, because I think everyone else's flex is kind of weak too. Just means we'll have to fight it out on the waiver wire is all.

September 9th is only 10 days away. LET THE NFL SEASON BEGIN...