Tales from the Shark Tank

I’ve been taking different routes to work, trying to find one that isn’t construction-clogged. Now that the downtown interstate construction is complete, the Powers That Be have decided to tear up the remaining routes in the northeast corner of town. I swear it’s a plot to isolate Geist.

So on my way in this morning, I saw a sign that made me blink. In front of a small structure that looked like a post WWII crackerbox house, it proclaimed the structure was “The Original Church of God”.

Really? In Indiana? I guess all the other (and older) edifices of Christian Worship on the planet must be counterfeit. It says so right there on that sign.

My husband, after a hiatus lasting too many months, is at long last employed again. He will be starting at the Carmel Borders on Monday evening, working full time.

It pays what retail normally pays, which is to say peanuts. I don’t care. He’ll be working weekends and evenings, which means we won’t see as much of each other, and that my occasional weekend trips out of town have come to an abrupt end. I don’t care about any of that, either. I did that when we had a newborn. We can certainly manage it now. Joseph still causes periodic sleep deprivation, but it’s nowhere near the gold standard set by a ten pound two foot tall terrorist in a crib.

Wick’s working. For that I’ll deal with almost anything. Since we don’t have to rely on this job for health insurance, he’ll bring home enough to make the house payment. I know about being burned out from law, and about taking refuge in a job where you can see people and talk to them, but the advice you give has no more major impact on their lives than what they buy. I’ve watched him struggle with the few things he’s tried to do professionally since January, and while I no longer need to offer to provide a safety net (yes, he had lost confidence that badly), it’s still a visible strain. He’s much better, but by no means all better. So this job is the right thing at this time for him. He came home from a half hour interview that stretched into two hours absolutely bubbling. It seems that he and the manager veered off into all sorts of interesting conversation, and that she forcibly pulled herself back into interview mode. She asked him how soon he could start, and considered it seriously when he told her tonight if he could call his wife. They settled on Monday, since there’s evidently one person who handles training, and she’s off until Monday evening.

I’m glad he’s excited. I’m pleased for him. But all I can feel tonight is relief.

Just a few of the things that have caught my eye over the past few days.

- The two cheerfully chatting women on wheels on a downtown sidewalk. One was in an electric wheelchair. The other was on rollerblades.

- A scrambled semi on the interstate. The trailer was standing upright, but the cab was twisted over on its side. The driver was standing beside it, hands on his hips. His coke can was standing on the sideways-turned tire, as if it was a table.

- The extraordinarily patrician, white haired lady in an elegant beige silk suit, climbing into an old Toyota, the bumper of which was lost beneath Grateful Dead bumper stickers.

- The Mercedes with the personalized license plate which read simply “CAR”.

- The Pooh flag flying from the steeple of one of the neighborhood churches.

- The driver who tried to go through a temporary lake (you know, the kind with with a street sign sticking up out of it?) that already had three stalled cars in it. He ended up getting out and wading back to the drugstore parking lot after his became the fourth car drowned. I couldn’t help but wonder why he thought he could get through in the face of such clear contrary evidence. It’s not like there wasn’t another (dry) way out of the parking lot.

Yesterday Indianapolis got deluged utterly. Evidently the edges of Tropical Storm Grace made their way north only to stall right over the middle of Indiana, dumping large amounts of liquid oxygenated hydrogen upon us.

We were lucky, really. Our subdivision is a bit of a high spot, and our house is on a rise in the subdivision. All the same, as I watched the water climb up my back yard and drown my raised garden beds, I gave serious consideration to taking a crash course in ark-building for my newest hobby. My son kept looking out the window and saying “Ooh, Mommy. The water keeps sneaking up on us.” I cracked up when he added, in all seriousness, “That’s bad manners, Mommy.” I agreed that it was, but that since I didn’t number Water among my foreign languages, I didn’t know how to tell it so. Then we got off into a discussion of what a language spoken by rain would sound like. He had some interesting ideas, I must say! His version of water-language was full of sibilants and shushing sounds.

Not everyone was so fortunate. A family we know sent out e-mail asking for help sandbagging their house, and eventually took their kids and went to stay with other friends. Another described the scene in her basement as “a geyser which turned into a lake.” She spent today hauling sodden, filthy carpeting out of the basement before it could start mold colonies. I drove through my in-laws neighborhood on my way to work, all of half a mile south of where we live, took stock of the high water debris, and called my in-laws the first chance I got. (They’re fine.) There’s a radio station I pass about another half a mile south. The parking lot was, as usual, full of suburban assault vehicles. Rather other than usual, though, the SUVs were drowned up to their roofs. I got turned back by police barricades no less than three times on my way to work, once by cars parked across the road facing outward with their rear wheels in moving water. Fall Creek, normally a quiet picturesque little stream, had to have been a good few feet above flood stage to drown that intersection like that. Normally you can’t even see the creek from there, and here the creek had coming looking for the road. A nearby office building was flooded half way up the second floor. The water had receded somewhat by the time I came home – the creek was no longer actually over the roadway – but it was still considerably closer to the level of the bridges than I am accustomed to seeing!

All in all, it’s a mess. I believe the only things travelling with any ease at the moment are probably the ducks.

Quack.