First Up!

This is my first entry on this site. I know it's pretty much bare bones at this stage, but I just wanted to get something rolling. For those of you who are uninitiated, I have been blogging at my original site, Rupture the Rapture for a couple of years. I have ceased posting there as I felt I had painted myself into a corner. I want to write and be read by those having broader interests than just atheism/religion.

I am an atheist and I will still deal with that and related issues. But I am a lot of other things as well. As is obvious, I am of a certain age - nearly 62 years - and have concerns regarding the maintenance/deterioration of my mind and body as I approach what some laughingly refer to as "the golden years."

Politics will be at issue here at IB. Like it or not, this has so far been a long and at times fascinating presidential season here in the good ole US of A, and the real campaign is just beginning. I will almost certainly be voting for Barack Obama come November, but there are and will continue to be issues that will ebb and flow over the coming months worthy of comment. I welcome jabs from right and left, from Ron Paulistas, Ralph Naderites, Greenies, or whoever.

In a lighter vein I always like to find humor wherever I can. We all too often take ourselves and the world much too seriously. When looked at in a certain light, most of what we say and do is a bunch of silliness. For those of you (there must be, I don't know, four or five, at least) who took the time and effort to peruse at least some of my Rupture rants know that I find the ironic and ridiculous in things like trips through airport security or knee surgery.

I welcome, in fact I am pleading, with any of you to comment early and often (you know, like voting,) whenever the spirit moves you. Don't be shy. If you think I'm an idiot, or a son of a bitch, let me know. I won't mind if you let me know that you agree with me either. (Stranger things have happened.)

I know this amounts to a rather inauspicious beginning. I haven't even thought this piece out very well. But it's the best I've got right now.

Just as an update, to bring my situation current in some respects, here's the latest poop from my end, er, I mean ... well, you know what I mean.

I had been invited to be an editor over at Blog Critics Magazine in the politics section - I even had my name listed as an editor for the last few months. However, I never managed to edit anything. I felt that I was biting off more than I could chew. It required, I believe, a computer literacy that I don't possess. So, ultimately, I passed and my name is no longer in lights at BC. Que sera sera.

The incredibly bad weather that has plagued much of the midwest in recent weeks finally caught up with us last Saturday. We had around 7 inches of rain at our place from Friday evening through Saturday afternoon. It proved too much for our house which has remained dry since it was built around 1961. My science guy brother in-law said that our basement foundation and floor succumbed to "hydro-static pressure." At around noon water began spouting up through our floor drains by the gallon. A portion of our carpeted basement was suddenly under 3 to 4 inches of water with no obvious means to stop it. We have 3 (count 'em - three!) sump pumps, but one failed to function. It finally ceased to rain some time in the early afternoon and the flow subsided, but we still had volumes of water trapped in the basement.

I won't go into all the gory details, but eventually, using a small electric pump borrowed from my science guy brother in-law and 2 gigantic shop vacs I frantically purchased at our local Lowes store, we managed to get most of the water out. (We figured that we dumped something like 80 to 1oo gallons of water from the shop vacs into the main sump pit. I have no idea how much water the little pump moved. Since then my wife has been trying every trick in the book to save our precious Berber carpet. (Ironically, we obtained this carpet from some friends whose basement flooded a few years ago. The carpet had been pulled out of their basement by the good folks at Servicemaster. We trucked it over here and fortunately had several consecutive warm dry days during which I dried out all of the 6 or 7 pieces on our concrete drive. We found a carpet guy who brought some mongo commercial padding and installed the whole lot for about $450. This carpet now runs for around $40 a square yard. If we can't save it, we'll probably have to revert to trash bags and newspaper for our basement flooring. Of course, we have no insurance. We're not in a flood plain, or we weren't at any rate.

As I write, my wife has given up the ghost, and is having my younger son, who flew in last nite from Florida, pull up and remove the carpet. The smell is becoming pervasive - kinda like a few dozen cats wandered into the basement and tinkled in every corner.

In the mean time, Monday morning I had my left knee surgically mauled, I mean - repaired, at Methodist hospital here in Indy. I had been living with what I was convinced (and later proven correct via a series of MRI images) that I had torn my miniscus which I had done to the right knee a couple of years ago.

Apparently, the damage was more severe this time around, and I also had a nasty bone spur which the good doctor filed off as well. Consequently, the surgical trauma was greater and the recovery will be slower, more drawn out, and, of course, more painful. This being Thursday afternoon, I detect little, if any, improvement and will likely be constricted to crutches for several days to come. This really sucks. Thanks be to science for Vicadin. On the up side, I've been sleeping great.

Enough of that.

In the future, I hope to be writing of things like the upcoming election, religion and the election, gay rights and the election, but also things like Indy getting the 2012 Super Bowl, the fall from grace of the Indiana Pacers and the Indiana University basketball program. (Note that I am not a sports nut perse, nor am I any kind of expert, but I have some interest in such things and how they may impact life here in Naptown.

I will also endeavor to further discuss a recent trip my wife and I made to Germany to visit our older son. I wrote a couple of pieces about the trip over at Rupture which I invite anyone who stumbled in here unknowingly to give them a read.

I may from time to time steal a post from Rupture and re-post it (them) here if I believe it (they) might have some timely relevance, or perhaps if I'm just feeling lazy.

As I mentioned, I will endeavor to flesh this site out more as time goes on. I will add a blog roll and other features; perhaps a nice toaster oven. But for now I will include one site which I heartily recommend, that being a complicated salvation by my blog friend Zoe. If you have or are contemplating leaving the church, or have an interest in womanly concerns, or just the world in general, ACS is the place to be. She does good stuff there.

Till later,

TLS