One LOTR and one decades-old NFL reference in the same post. ZING!!!

It’s been more than a month since the gutter was ripped off our place by heavy rain, tearing away part of the roof and cleaving several chunks of masonry. While it looked terrible from the outside, who could argue that an indoor waterfall, cracks in wall, bubbling paint and a basement full of muddy stinkwater doesn’t raise the resale value.

Well, the G does. So after several professional phone calls from me and some blistering emails from her, we are finally getting someone from the condo association to fix it. Not that I couldn’t fix it myself but we do pay condo fees for something other than shitty flower arrangements and access to no pool.

The work will require patching up a crack that runs the height of the entire wall and allows us to see into the neighbor’s kitchen and seeps blood maybe. All we need to do is kick back and supply the same color paint so they can match the walls. Too bad that bucket was sitting in the same water that flooded the basement in the first place and got rusted to hell. I have since poured it directly into the storm drain with in the hopes of killing every blue crab in the Chesapeake Bay.

So it was off to the Home Despot to try to match the wall paint with their magic paint matching machine. And since we couldn’t bring the wall itself it’s a good thing that the water damaged has enabled us to tear huge sheets of paint directly from the surface all the way down to the base plaster. Tastes good too.

The G got tasked with standing in line since she is the expert on colors. (She experienced “red” when someone cut in front of her and then acted like they didn’t see the huge line) I got tasked with goofing off in the tools section. And it’s there that I found the most unnecessary piece of hardware ever cast from the minds of NFL Players Inc.



I can’t say I’m a particular fan of Ray Lewis but given the option there is no other player I’d want on my house key. And I wasn’t given an option because it was the only player they had, for some reason. While there were other “sports” (re: NASCAR) themed keys, Ray-Ray was the only athlete making a personal appearance.

If this were 800 years ago, this key would obviously be magical. Either Ray Lewis’s spirit is now protecting our house or it allows him to enter unmolested and slay us like hobbit-shaped pillows at the Prancing Pony. Its only power today is to break off in the lock and ruin your day.

*********In this space, I have attempted to make four closing jokes about football and sharp, dangerous tools and murder. Although none of them have been particularly funny or satisfying the punch line to all of them is Ray Carruth. Ray Carruth, ladies and gentlemen, Ray Carruth. *********

The end.