Ben There, Done That

One Of Those 'Crappy' Mornings

    If there is anyone out there that has sold a home, they can relate with the stress and hard work that goes into making sure that your home is ready at a moments notice to be seen by a potential buyer.  Now, add four kids and you can really start to see the monumental task at hand.  Not only do you find yourself struggling to clean up the home and do the small repairs and fix-ups, but you also have to run along behind your children, like a giant vacuum, sucking up all the mess that is left in their wakes.  So, on Wednesday afternoon, after a day of cleaning and organizing our home, Maggie tells me that the toilet is clogged again.  Before I proceed, I must give a short disclaimer for what you are about to read.  If you suffer from a weak stomach, nausea, headaches, and vomiting, please, stop reading and see your doctor.  In rare cases, death may occur (sounds like one of those pharmaceutical commercials huh?).
     Having a clogged toilet is nothing new in a home with young children.  If it can be picked up, it can also be placed inside the toilet bowl.  If it is paper, it is extra fun to watch the paper turn to mush and then magically get sucked away into that strange hole at the bottom. It seems that children are drawn to a toilet like a fly is drawn to...well, never-mind.  In fact, I bought a special tool that I keep handy for just such an event as a bad clog.

Oops, wrong kind of drain snake...

My special unclogging tool: A drain snake

    So, I calmly walk outside to retrieve my snake and proceed quite coolly toward the offending potty.  My confidence has come from several successful uses of my snake, so there was no need to panic about the potential buyer coming to look at our home in an hour right?  Wrong!  The snake didn't work the first go round.  So, using a bit more force, I attempted a second time to remove the clog.  After the fourth attempt, my cool temperament had long since defrosted, leaving a frustrated and short tempered man trying to frantically remove the blockage to no avail.  I tried to remove the snake to rethink up a plan when I realized that the thing was stuck fast!  Try as I may, it would not budge!  I tried flushing the toilet, which only turned the water a lovely soupy, chocolate color.  I tried wiggling and jiggling the snake, which only ended up splashing some of my chocolate soup out of the bowl onto the floor.  I tried tugging and twisting the snake, but only ended up stretching the coiled metal of the tool.  

    Completely defeated, frustrated, stressed out and smelly, I looked at the clock.  I had 30 minutes left.  Drastic times call for drastic measures.  I searched the house for a scoop of some sort and found an old plastic play bucket with some seashells in it.  Out went the shells and now I had a portable hand flushing device.  Bucket in hand, I returned to the toxic waste area and began emptying bucket after bucket of poop water into the bathtub drain.  I flushed the toilet and the process was repeated two more times until the water was several shades of brown lighter.  I then took out my hack saw and cut the drain snake short enough to allow me to close the toilet bowl lid.  The trapped and severed piece of drain snake would have to wait until the next morning, as I had to get to school.  I really need to give some props to my friends Clorox, Scentsy air fresheners, Soft Scrub, Bounty, Dawn, and any others that I may have left out.  With out you guys, I don't think I could have ever won the award of cleanest, most sanitized bathroom in under 15 minutes.  Thank you!

    The next morning, I felt refreshed and ready to tackle the toilet.  I had until 12:00 when another potential buyer was to come by.  No problem.  Then the phone rang again.  Yep, you guessed it, some realtor was picking up their client at 10:00 A.M. and wanted to come see our home!  I begged her to come as close to 12 as possible, and she said she would make our house their last stop.  After a quick check of the clock, I had about 2.5 hours until noon.  I quickly emptied out the reservoir water and then carefully emptied the nasty brown toilet bowl water into a large bucket and poured the contents into the outdoor garbage bin.  I removed the carriage bolts and lifted the whole john off of the floor and tipped it over on its side. Now for the yummy part.

    Donning a pair of surgical gloves, I reached my hand up the outlet part of the toilet to clear away as much of the junk as I could reach.  The cold, squishy feeling from the gloves as I grabbed the waste left me a bit queasy, but the smell did me in.  I started dry heaving and struggling to get some fresh air.  It was all I could do just to clear out the bottom six inches of the toilet drain.  Again I tried to remove the drain snake from the bottom of the potty, but I couldn't reach it!  I tried in vain to again free it from the top of the bowl and finally admitted defeat.  It was now almost 10:00 A.M., Maggie was leaving for her doctor appointment, and I needed to buy a new toilet, install it, sanitize and destinkify my bathroom in less than two hours!  

    Thirty minutes later and $144.00 poorer, I unloaded all four of my children and a new toilet into our house and began frantically installing the new loo.  Thankfully, Evelyn was very helpful with her younger siblings and I was experienced in toilet installations, because I was able to finish the job in less than an hour.  After another encore performance from Clorox, Soft Scrub, Dawn, Bounty and Scentsy Air freshener everything was back to normal by 11:30 A.M.  I loaded up the kids back into the van and managed to lock up the house just as the realtor was pulling up with their client.  I can only imagine what they were thinking, seeing a man with grubby, stained clothes, a scruffy beard and smelling like the sewer coming out of our home, but hey, what else would you see after having such a crappy morning?

The Return of Ben-Man

    So, some of you may not know that I happen to moonlight as a superhero.  Yep, you read that last part correctly.  Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, faster than a speeding locomotive.  It's a bird, it's a plane...no!  It's Ben-Man!!!!  Anyhow, all joking aside, my brother (sidekick) and I did something on Saturday that may be akin to saving a life.  What is it you ask?  Well, why don't you sit down and get comfy, as the tale is about to be told.
    Twice a year, in April and October, my extended family travels up the SR-87 (beeline highway) outside of Sunflower.  We have adopted a mile of highway wherein we collect all the trash along both sides of the road, in exchange for a nice sign and a customized message.  I'm sure many of you have seen these signs before, as they are quite common along Arizona highways.

Brian R. Bowles is my late uncle, and a man that I have always looked up to and admired.

On Saturday, we again had the opportunity to clean up the highway, so a small group of six, myself included, traveled to our mile on a very cold and wet morning to began our bi-annual clean-up.  My brother, Dan, and I started on the southbound side of the highway and worked north.  Seeing strange and interesting items along the roadside is actually quite common, and more than a few times large bills of money have been found.  However, on this day, Dan and I found something a bit more interesting than a nice heavy metal collection of cassette tapes from the 80's. 

    I bent down to pick up my hundredth piece of paper and was about to send it to it's impending doom but paused.  I did a double take and saw that there was ink showing through the very soaked and very tattered piece of paper.  Curiosity getting the best of me, I turned over the paper and carefully opened the delicate sheet and tried to read what was written.  I was able to piece together words and phrases only, things like, "didn't want it to end this way" and "Tell Mar that I love her".  I realized immediately that this was no ordinary piece of paper and called Dan over to have a look.  We both concluded that it had to be a suicide note, and we started debating whether or not we should contact the police or something.  We both decided that it didn't have enough real information or details on it to alert the police, but Dan decided to keep the paper anyways.  Back to the beer bottles and soda cans.

    A short while later, I found the second sheet of the suicide note.  This sheet, although just as wet as the first, was actually completely intact and contained people's names, instructions to the man's family upon his death, life insurance info, and a phone number of a man named John Phillips.  Now, we both realized that we had something with substance and the gravity of such an act as suicide took full hold upon our minds.  We felt both sickened and saddened for the man's decision.  We felt both worried and empathetic for the family that was left behind to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.  Now, instead of looking for tire shrapnel and old Gatorade bottles filled with "lemonade", we started looking for a discarded weapon and a body...gasp...right next to a bridge with a 150 foot drop to the craggy creek below.

    i don't think that I ever looked down over that bridge guard rail so many times on any of our other clean up dates, but I sure did this time as we walked across it.  Much to our relief, nothing but a winding stream of water could be seen wending its way along the rocks and trees.  But wait!  There!  just off the north bridge abutment was something bone white in the bushes.  My mind started spinning as I approached the object.  Was this the body?  Then, relief as I soon found that the skull I found was that of a horse, not a human.  Now hypersensitive to anything remotely resembling life along the roadway, my service experience could not end quickly enough (and not just because I was feeling very wet and very cold).

    We finally finished the mile and quickly got back into the car to travel home.  Our suicide note was now drying out in the back seat and we started speculating about the reasons why the note was there.  Perhaps the guy got cold feet and tossed the note out the window.  Perhaps the unstable and distraught widow angrily tossed the note out the window as she drove past.  Perhaps the widow tossed the note to get rid of the evidence that could prevent her from collecting on the man's life insurance policies.  Whatever the reason, we all came to the same conclusion.  We were going to call John Phillips, the man's "one true friend".

    Dan called the phone number listed on the note, and the voice of John Phillips spoke, asking him to leave a message at the tone.  Dan left the message and a few minutes later he got the return call.  John was aware of the man's financial problems, and was in fact a good friend, but didn't hear about any tragedy befalling his friend since he last spoke a week prior.  He told Dan that he would call his friend and his friend's wife then let us know what happened.  A few minutes later, Dan again got a call from John saying that his friend's wife didn't answer the phone.  Fearing the worst, John then called the friend's cell phone.  The friend answered the phone and said that he was doing fine.  Apparently it was cold feet. 

    Although John didn't confront his friend about the note at the time, he told Dan the next day that it just didn't sit right with him, so John called the friend again and confronted him with the story and the suicide note we had found.  The friend admitted to John that he did indeed pen the letter and that he tossed the note out the window back in November.  John had a long, heart to heart talk with his friend, and told us that what we did was a very good deed, and that he was grateful to us for bringing the issue out so that those that loved the man would be able to get him help.  We are heroes!  But, cough cough, you already knew that part.  Now, where did I put that blasted cape...

   

Creative Whim, or Whimsical Creativity?

Perhaps no one is as shocked to find my fingers fluttering over the keyboard on this, my first post, more than I.  For all that know me, the very thought of such a deed as blogging would stir up thoughts of insanity and instability.  Still, however, I've found a secret desire hidden deep within to express the thoughts and feelings of my life onto paper (even if it is electronic paper).  The creativity, I cannot promise, will always be magical. The frequency and length of the posts may leave much to be desired.  However, what I can promise, is a good story, a touching experience, a kind word, a heartache, love, loss, and laughter as these and many other emotions cross my path and enrich my life along the way.  So, without further delay, I give you Ben There, Done That.