I was introduced to this concept when I was 10. We had just moved into a new house, and there had been a particularly heavy snow. Shortly after the snow started melting, I went down the stairs to use my model trains and was amazed to see two feet of muddy water instead of a floor. I thought it was kind of cool and made some paper boats to sail on the new lake in our house. It wasn’t until after the fire department came and pumped out the basement that the extent of the damage had been realized. We had been storing some boxes in the basement, still not yet unpacked, including all of our family photos (they were destroyed). This was the beginning of a long and largely futile struggle to keep the two apart. Sure, after reworking the landscaping around the house, we were able to stop the source of that flood, but really, it’s just a matter of time.

In 1994, there was a series of January ice storms which changed the back yard of our house into a hill of solid ice, gently sloping toward our house. We didn’t realize the problem with this until one night when it started raining again and we awoke at 4AM to find water pouring into the house and basement under a sliding glass door. The door looked like a fish tank because there was about 8 inches of water on the other side of it, with no place to go but inside. My dad and I went out into freezing rain, chipping away at the ice with a pick and shovel to give the water someplace else to go, but it was futile because the ice was too hard to break and the water only had one place it wanted to go. To the lowest open space around, our basement.

In 1996, while I was living in an apartment in Yardley, Pennsylvania, I was evacuated for not one but two floods: a river flood and a flash flood, which destroyed my car. This was when I learned that along with getting into basements, water loves a nice low-lying area, even if there is no basement involved. But if there is a basement nearby, water will try to fill it up also… during the flash flood, the basement of our apartment building had six feet of water in it, clogging up our heaters and water heaters. I moved out of the apartment to live with Mary in her row home shortly after that.

Living in the row home in the city was great because of all the things there are to do nearby. Being on top of a hill, I felt relatively safe from water, though I soon learned that water is all around, and just waiting to soak your stuff. First, a leaking storm water pipe destroyed almost all of my drawings from college. It had probably slowly dripped for months before I noticed that the floor next to my portfolio was wet. After having that fixed, I found out that being connected to other basements made our basement vulnerable. One day in the middle of winter, our neighbor’s water main burst, filling their basement with six feet of water. It sent streams of water flowing under the wall into our basement and the house on the other side of us for a day before we noticed. Fortunately, there wasn’t much damage as I was becoming increasingly paranoid about keeping anything down there. Then, one day I was cleaning the fish tank and a hose full of water fell out of the tank, starting a syphon which drained about 10 gallons of fishy water through the floor into the basement below, destroying Mary’s cassette collection. Nobody saw that one coming.

Shortly after that, we moved. Our settlement was on the day after Hurricane Floyd, when water levels at nearby Neshaminy Creek reached historic levels and came up to our neighbor’s yard. No water came into our brand new basement, even with the broken sump pump, so we felt relatively safe from flood waters. Still, I was pretty paranoid about storing things in the basement and keeping water away. I installed a new sump pump, put everything important on high shelves and kept all my paintings in plastic bags to protect them. Every time it rained I would go down the basement, and to my horror leaks would spring from walls onto the floor, which I was able to deflect into the French drain with aluminum pans. The water hose connected to our refrigerator ice maker found a chance to soak our basement when our kitchen was painted. The workmen pushed the fridge on top of the hose, crimping it and causing it to start leaking a week after work had finished. Only a few gallons of water managed to get into the basement before we noticed it, but the leak was lined up so most of it poured into a plastic box of financial documents, providing us with years of fireplace kindling.

The water heater tried to show us another way water could fill the basement, but fortunately we noticed the leak in time to prevent the impending flood. Still for every time we managed to stop it, there was always something new we hadn’t ever thought of. One of the weirdest ones was in July of 2006. It was a clear, sunny day and after I came home from work, we ate dinner. In our house, the washer and dryer were in the basement, so I was used to the sound of water running in the basement while we were doing laundry, so when I heard that noise while we were eating I didn’t think anything of it. After dinner, we went to a nearby park and went for a walk for an hour or two.

Returning home, the moment we opened the door we realized that something was wrong. There was the distinct, familiar smell of dampness in the house, along with the now louder sound of the rushing water. I quickly went down the stairs and saw to my horror that water was spraying out from a hole in the rubber hose connected to the washing machine. It wasn’t a small stream of spray either, it was spraying wide into the basement in all directions and with great force. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

Quickly I shut off the water to the hose, but by then gallons of water had drenched most of the basement. The new sump pump did its job by keeping the basement from filling up, so the damage was limited to the area directly in front of the washer. Unfortunately, this area was my main work area, which consisted of two desks with all my mail art supplies, unanswered mail, collage materials, my mail archive, my iMac for logging in my mail art, my printer/scanner for making color copies and the television I used to watch while I answered mail. Behind the desks was the work table where I made collage paintings, my drafting table and on the shelves behind that was a library of books I use while working. Everything was soaked. Fortunately I had protected my paintings in bags so they weren’t damaged.

I lost the printer/scanner and the computer, and most of the mail was soaked beyond recognition. Fortunately the TV was fine and my mail archive was a little wet but not badly soaked. The hole in the hose was only about 1/8", but that was enough for a lot of water to come out. Our plumber said it was a good thing it wasn’t the hot water line, because that’s much worse… steaming hot water which ruins everything it touches. He replaced our rubber hoses with stainless steel ones, something I never knew was needed.

This is the desk where I would answer mail. You can see how far the water went by all the wet things on the shelves in the back.

Once again, there was a whole new way for things to get ruined in a sudden and completely unexpected way. Still, these adventures with water were nothing compared to what other people have been through. I’ll talk more about that in part two of this story…

One of my four shirts. Francesca, unlike me, has about 100 shirts, including shirts for specific holidays. I think she has about 7 Halloween shirts.

In the warm months, wearing t-shirts every day is socially acceptable, and since I can get them from work, I don’t have to worry about actually going to a store and buying them. But, with the turning of the leaves, t-shirts aren’t warm enough and the four shirts have to come out. The four shirts are: a black (now grey) button down shirt from my high school years that doesn’t really fit all that well, two green and blue shirts that were given to me by someone about my height so they actually fit and a brown and black flannel shirt that Mary bought for me.

The main problem is my freakish height. At 6’4″, finding a long-sleeved shirt with well-fitting sleeves is extremely difficult. Also, I really hate shopping. Going into a store and trying on clothes is about the last thing ever I want to do. For my t-shirts and winter sweatshirts, it’s really easy to avoid shopping by buying them through work. For the two items I can’t get there, long-sleeved button-up shirts and jeans, I have to suffer with what I have. I wear the jeans until they are so worn out that they have holes in the knees, and then I’m forced to shop for pants, but the four shirts never wear out or develop holes. There was once a legendary fifth shirt, but it was damaged by ink at work a few years ago. Now it’s just used for yard work. I miss that one.

I have a decent supply of ill-fitting sweaters and sweatshirts to get me through the winter, but they’re a bit too hot for this time of year. Spring and fall are the times when my four shirts are worn constantly. It’s a struggle to match them with different t-shirts so that I can get through the work week without people noticing (I hope), but sometimes I can get a light sweatshirt or a fleece pullover into the mix and it works out, barely. Recent warming trends have only made matters worse; now that we get warm days in January, I’m really stretching my wardrobe to the limit.

It’s not that people don’t try to remedy the situation… sure, I’ve been given many shirts for my birthday or Christmas, but my freakish long arms usually relegate those shirts to the yard sale pile. Any that make it through the sleeve-length requirement will likely fail due to my pickiness, or the fact that they’re too nice to wear to work. I work in a place where at any time I could get ink on my clothes (see above) so I can’t wear anything too nice. I’ve got a couple of those in my closet, gathering dust because I don’t want to ruin them.

So, if you see me this month, I’ll either be wearing the one of the blue and green plaid ones, the brown and black plaid one, or the black one. Hopefully not for the second day in a row.

I think I installed the font, called “Pastor of Muppets,” at some point years ago for a freelance job, but have long since removed it. I tried a couple of times to figure out why it kept coming up that way, but every time I would check, the font wasn’t even installed in my computer anymore. Apparently it was still somewhere in my system because it kept popping up from time to time like this, making me hear James Hetfield’s voice in my head while reading instructions for installing software.

I finally realized that I had to fix it after I tried to look at a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation website and the official PDF I needed to look at came up like this, and it was completely unreadable. I searched online and found other people had been having the same problem, and someone revealed that the Metallica font was corrupted in some way and had to be deleted a certain way to be removed. Still, I’ll kind of miss it… it gave software License Agreements a certain sense of foreboding.

Me, Mary and Francesca at Shenandoah National Park in July, 2011

So here I am getting hip to this whole “blog” thing the kids are into these days. Well, back in my day, we didn’t have your fancy internets… we had something called the Postal Service, where a government employee would hand-deliver messages from person to person. Seriously, it wasn’t done with computers or anything. It was all paper. You couldn’t just post a link to your blog somewhere to send traffic your way, you had to seek out your readers and send your random musings to them, and you had to stuff it into an envelope and pay to send it with a 34¢ stamp. You’d wait around for a couple of weeks and maybe they’d send you something back, also hand-delivered by a government employee.

Those pages full of random musings were called “zines” and back in January, 1995, I started mine, which I called “Shouting at the Postman” for reasons which seemed good at the time. Zines were pretty popular in those days, and there were hundreds if not thousands of them around. The first one was a single double-sided page that I made 20 or so copies of to send out or give away. The zine was great fun to produce, and I used to enjoy writing, editing and printing each one, as well as reading zines people would send me in trade. I created a website for too. Eventually I was up to running off 250 or so paper copies, but I wasn’t interested in just stuffing envelopes, I wanted to know my readers so I would take the time to send notes and art to everyone.

The art came from something related to zines called “Mail Art” or “Correspondence Art” which I was involved with since 1993 or so. Short definition of mail art: it’s an international network of people who exchange artwork and ideas via the postal service. Mail art in simplest terms is one person sending another person something that they have created. In more complex terms, there are mail art shows where hundreds of people send in work according to a specific theme. Some zine people are involved with Mail Art, but most zine people are not mail artists and most mail artists don’t publish zines. If you’re really interested in Mail Art, you can read my article about it.

Anyway, around 2004 my personal life got too crazy and I no longer had time to answer all the mail, so I had to stop the mail art and zines. People have repeatedly asked me if I’m going to start it up again, but I still don’t have the time for all the mail, so that’s where “blogging” comes in. Maybe I’ll be able to write a little here from time to time, or maybe not. My time is still in short supply… I’ve had a total of about 20 things to post on my twitter account in the last 3 years, if that gives you any idea.

The funny thing is that these days, more zine-worthy stuff happens to me than ever. For example, as I’m writing this, our laundry room has a leaking sewer pipe under the floor. The leaking pipe has slowly eroded the dirt from under the concrete and is causing the floor to sag in places. Needless to say, we’re not pleased about this development. We’ve had a few plumbers out, and one of them sent a camera down the pipe to see the leak. He sent us an estimate of $12,000 to repair the damage. Fortunately our homeowner’s insurance will (hopefully) cover at least part of that bill, but we’re in the process of negotiating back and forth between them to see if it’s going to get done. That’s a whole zine issue right there… personal tragedy was the bread and butter of my zine.

So, no promises, but I’m hoping you’ll hear more from me…