Derailed

My intentions to start eating right and exercising have gotten somewhat sidetracked from my original plan, but it is early in the game yet and I hope to remedy that within the next few days. Let me start at the beginning…

My plan was to be completely “ready” to start my new diet and exercise regimen starting on the morning of Jan. 17th, 2007. That meant I would have already planned my meals and workouts for the next 7 days, and my new gym equipment would be assembled and ready for use. This did not happen.

I had not planned to go to my cousin’s house near Atlanta on the weekend of Jan.12th – 14th to help her move into her new house, but I did just that. So the weekend that I was supposed to spend planning and shopping and assembling didn’t really happen. I did rush home that Sunday and bought my gym equipment, but that is as far as I got because I had planned a little “Settlers of Catan” party for that evening and didn’t want to disappoint my guests (By the way, I totally dominated them in the game). Assembling the gym took the next 4 days, which meant I missed my Jan. 17th start date. I was hoping to use the next weekend (19th – 21st) to do what I was supposed to on the previous weekend, but again my plans were altered.

Both of my wife’s grandmothers passed away recently and we were called in to help clean out her maternal grandmother’s house this weekend. Her grandfather had a lot of woodworking tools that nobody else wanted so I went for those, and Leia picked through the decades of other “stuff” that was in the house. We divided up the things that family members wanted and just boxed up the rest for Catholic Social Services. It wasn’t an easy job, and the tools were heavy, so by the time we got back to our house on Saturday around 7pm we were both pretty beat. We settled in for a movie (“Undertaking Betty”, which was silly but in a good way, I think) and turned into bed early. I got up at the crack of dawn on Sunday because I had a lot to do. I had to unload all of the tools and boxes of stuff from the U-haul tow-behind we had rented, then fill that up with all the boxes and styrofoam packaging that has been piling up in my house since we moved in a year ago, then take all that trash up to Raste’s apartment complex and toss it in his dumpster, then drive across town to pick up our car which we left at work on Friday, then drop off the U-haul, then head back home and pick up my wife so we could go shopping for the food we were going to cook for our football party in the afternoon.

Wait, if f#cking gets EVEN BETTER!!!

So my longsuffering friend, Stephen (AKA: Raste, Irion), comes to the house after I’ve unloaded the trailer and then stuffed it full of cardboard garbage and two old toilets, and we drive back up to his apartment and unload the junk. (Oh, did I mention that it was cold and drizzling rain ALL FRIGGIN’ DAY!) Everything goes well though. We fill up two dumpsters in a hurry and hit the road, run by work, pick up the car, drop off U-haul, back to house to pick up wifey. Surprise! My wife cleaned out the refrigerator. “Thanks Honey!” (This becomes important later.)  So off we all go to Costco. We find almost everything we need but still have to stop by Publix on the way home. No problems there either and we are back at the house by 1:30. Just in time. We live in the Central Time Zone so the game will be starting in half an hour. Plenty of time to grab a snack, marinate the flank steaks we bought, and then kick back and watch the game with Dr. Esquire and his Mrs, right?

Right?

RIGHT?!?!?!?!

WRONG MUTHA-F$CKAH!!! DEAD F#CKIN’ WRONG!!!

What went wrong? I’ll tell you what went wrong. The gahdamn kitchen sink clogged up. Seems like all the nasty food that my wife ran down the garbage disposal did not make it all the way out of the house and instead lodged deep within the tubular bowels of our home’s plumbing system. Woot! Well, not to fear, I have a plumbers snake, and I’ll fix that clog in a jiffy, right?

Wrong again f-tard! Go to the back of the class and prepare for a job in retail.

The clog wasn’t in the trap under the sink, nor could I get to it by running my 15 foot snake into the pipe on the wall. I decided to run to the Lowe’s which is only about two miles from my house to see if I could find a more robust tool with a longer reach. 20 minutes later I’m back under the sink with a 25 foot snake that I could hook up to my cordless drill, but still no luck.

About this time, Dr. Esquire and his wife show up. My arms are covered up to the elbows in black filth that smells like some sort of swamp mud. “Come on in and make yourselves comfortable. I was just gathering some of the ‘special’ ingredients for my world famous steak marinade.” They laugh it off and I decide to go with the “nuclear option”. I reassemble the sink trap, wash up, and then pour a bunch of Drano in the sink to sit. I’m hoping that by halftime of the New Orleans/Bears game that the drain will be flowing clear again. Sounds reasonable, right?

What, are you freakin’ new here or something? Don’t answer that.

No, the clog was not magically removed by the powers of Drano. Even better, I went down into the garage to check out the piping from underneath and noticed a bunch of water leaking down. Hmmm. I didn’t remember seeing any water leaking out of the pipes upstairs. Where could that be coming from?

From the dishwasher. See the dishwasher drains into the food disposal, which drains into the sink drain, which was (I’m sure you remember) CLOGGED! So when my wife ran the dishwasher after the drain got clogged there was nowhere for the water in the dishwasher to drain to. Instead of going through it’s normal cycle of draining out nasty water, then refilling with fresh, it was just adding more and more water to the machine and overflowing. We didn’t notice this from upstairs because I guess it was just barely trickling over the kickplate on the machine and wasn’t making any noise. AWESOME! I opened the dishwasher and sure enough, there was a bunch of nasty water in the bottom right up to the level of the bottom of the door. It was like that movie “The Perfect Storm”, in which several bad things combine together to kill an entire boatful of innocent fisherman. I never thought I would someday have something in common with Mark Wahlberg.

There was nothing I could really do to fix any of these problems at the time so we just watched the entire New Orleans game (which was sad, ‘cause I wanted them to win) and then I headed out to the grill to cook up the steaks. My guests graciously offered to just go out to eat so we wouldn’t have a kitchen full of dirty dishes that we couldn’t wash, but I was determined that SOMETHING was going to go right and forged ahead.

The steaks were delicious. I sliced them up thin and we did a kind of “make your own fajita/burrito/thing”. We had avocado, Spanish rice, salsa, sour cream, various cheeses, refried beans, your choice of corn or flour tortillas and of course the meat. It made for a very tasty, if messy, dinner. There was some very pleasant dinner conversation and I think a good time was had by all. The party broke up around 7ish. Dr. Esquire and his wife have a house full of animals that needed their attention, and Stephen had to get back to his girlfriend, so by 7:30pm the house was empty and I was standing in the kitchen looking at a stack of dirty pans, dirty plates and a double-sink full of nasty water/drano/food particles.

There was only one thing to be done…

No, I did not “wait until the next day and call a plumber”. What the hell is wrong with you? Please stop guessing that I would do something sane. I assure you that mode of thinking will always put you on the wrong track.

…I went downstairs to see if I could find another way to attack the clog.

I found one. My kitchen sits over my garage, so all of the plumbing is exposed and very easy to get to. I easily located the sink and where it tied into the main drain. There was a convenient cleanout access that could be removed easily since it was only attached with a couple of screw clamps. I figured I could simply remove the clamps, drain the water, then feed my snake straight into the drain without having to navigate any turns. Ten minutes later and it’s “ding-dong the clog is dead”, right?

Just shut the f#ck up will you.

So I change back into my work clothes (aka: old jeans, sneakers and t-shirt), set up my ladder and get the appropriate sized nut driver. I even had the foresight to hang up a tarp between the drain and the wall so that whatever came out of the pipes wouldn’t splash all over the garage door. And then I got to work.

First I loosened the screw clamps and began to very gently work the pipe cap off. A trickle of fetid, black water began to seep its way out so I asked my wife to hand me a garbage bag so I could try to keep the mess contained. The plan was to put the bag over the end of the pipe and then slowly work the pipe cap off. The bag would then trap all of the nastiness. This plan failed in spectacular fashion.

I can’t tell you exactly what happened, because my mind has attempted to blank out all memories of those horrible few seconds, but suffice it to say that after I got the cap off I was immediately doused in a torrent of the nastiest liquid I have ever seen and smelled. The ladder, the lower half of my shirt, my jeans and my shoes were completely soaked in a putrid slurry of spaghetti pieces, eggshell bits, ground-up vegetables and other stuff that I couldn’t even identify. It was like getting puked on by a sewer-dwelling alligator with a bad case of sour stomach. I wanted to give up right then, but I resisted that intelligent thought and forged ahead through sheer bloody-mindedness. “In for a penny, in for a pound”, as the say.

I changed into an old rain suit that I have and donned rubber gloves. I had come this far and I wasn’t about to give up. Besides, the worst was over. The pipes were empty now.

I fished my 25 foot snake into the pipe, foot by foot, until I finally encountered some resistance, nearly 22 feet into the pipe. At that point I couldn’t really get any pressure behind the snake to push through the clog. I twisted it over and over again, hoping that the auger head would break through somehow, but to no avail, I could not break through the clog.

And so, tired, wet, smelly and completely dispirited, I decided to call it a day. I reassembled the pipes, hosed down the mess, hung up my soiled clothes and trudged upstairs with only the barest glimmer of hope in my heart that perhaps my efforts had been enough to loosen the clog and allow the drain to flow freely. I stood at the kitchen sink, turned on the water and waited for it to back up. It took nearly a full minute, long enough to get my hopes up a bit, but then I heard the telltale “death gurgle” and saw the water rising up the drain. And now there was literally nothing left to do but shower up and call in a professional.

I got up early on Monday, called a plumber, and then waited. And waited. And waited. I played some “Age of Empires: Age of Kings” on my DS, but my heart really wasn’t in it. The plumbing duo of Jeff and John showed up just before noon. I showed them where the cleanout was and explained where I thought the clog was. They nodded and then completely ignored me.

First they tried to run their snake from the kitchen, which I already knew wouldn’t work. Because of the way the cleanout was added where that connects to the main line, the snake will always turn the wrong way and hit the dead-end of the cleanout. ALWAYS. But hey, they were working on a flat fee, not an hourly rate, and I was missing work, so who cares? Eventually they took my original advice and went downstairs to use the garage cleanout.

The professional was able to remove the cleanout cap and catch all of the water in a bucket WITHOUT drenching himself. At first I felt bad about that, but then I remembered I’m a computer programmer and he is a plumber. It is only natural that I would screw it up while he would have no problems. (It still stung my pride a bit though.) Their pipe snake had a much larger diameter, was 75 feet long (oh grow up), and was powered by a sizeable electric moter. Within 10 minutes my pipes were clear.

The pros put everything back together, ran water in the sink for about 5 minutes, and pronounced the job complete. I wrote them a check that was almost enough for me to buy the machine they used (I know because I had seen them at Lowe’s the previous day) and then they hit the road. By now it was after 1 o’clock and I hadn’t had lunch yet. I knew that by the time I got to work it would be 2 o’clock and debated just calling it a day, but I figured if I at least made a show of going in that my boss would probably let me get away with not making up the time later in the week. It’s a pretty laid back culture at my work, which helps take some of the stress off of disasters like this.

Monday night I finished tightening all of the bolts on my new gym and resolved that I would actually use the machine first thing in the morning. And I did. My back and shoulders already hurt like hell from two weekends of lifting heavy boxes and power tools, as well as from working over my head on the pipes in the garage, but I did my upper body workout anyway. I could have used the “I’m tired” excuse, or the “I’m not prepared” excuse, or the “I had a bad f#ckin’ day and I deserve a break” excuse, but I decided to look at it this way: If I can get up after an experience like that and do my first workout when I am already dog-tired and beaten down, then I figure I should have no problem getting out of bed and doing my workout on a regular day. It isn’t the way I planned my first workout to go, but life so rarely goes according to plan that perhaps that is for the best. I can’t have the mindset of “I’ll work out and eat right so long as I’m having a good day, and I’m not sore or tired, and nothing unexpected comes up.” This has to be something that I start doing everyday, no matter what. I may have started 6 days later than I planned, but at least I’ve gotten started.

Tomorrow morning I get to start on my cardio routine, and tonight I have to actually get my diet plan and shopping list together and hit the grocery store. I may have been able to find the will to hit the weights, but I have not had the time to do my shopping. But tonight I am making time. I still have a bunch of dirty clothes that I need to wash (I’ll try to post up a picture later. Really gross) and I need to hose down the garage floor, but that stuff can wait a few days. It isn’t going to get any more disgusting if I wait. Getting a good start on my diet is much more important, so even though I’m tired and would just like to go home and veg-out in front of the tube and do nothing, I’m going to break out my dusty Body-for-Life book and plan out my menu and workouts for the next week, if not the next two weeks. Then I’m going shopping, so that tomorrow all of my obstacles will be cleared. The food will be ready, my weight machine is ready, and good ole Billy Blanks will be ready to kick my ass in some cardio. (Yes, I do Tae-Bo. It’s a long story. Shut up.) More importantly, I will be ready to take another step in my fitness journey.

Oh wait, did I forget to mention that my wife went to the doctor today for a follow up on her sulfite allergy and found out that she may actually have (a) some sort of autoimmune condition that is causing her hives or (b) a thyroid problem or perhaps even (c) some kind of chest and sinus fungal infection. Yippee-ki-yay-muthah-f#ckah!!! Bring it on! I’ve already been bathed in liquid sh!t this week, and now I find out that my wife’s “allergy” might be something more serious? Is that all you’ve got?!?! You’re going to have to come up with something better than this if you want to stop me from getting in shape! I’m doing my Tae-Bo tomorrow morning if the gahdamn roof caves in on my house! You hear me! I am not going down without a fight!