Two steps forward, one step back

Our favorite plumber hooked up the new sink this morning but, of course, there was a snag.

The drain is clogged. He doesn't do clogs, ever since one went wrong and cost him six hours of free labor to fix.

So I have a clog specialist coming from Carmel on Wednesday - $93 or it's free.

Better than last year, but still pathetic

It's time to tally my BMW motorcycle mileage for the year. It's depressing, but not as depressing as 2017.

I rode the K1200GT a modest 520 miles and the K75S at least 290. I say at least because the speedo and odometer are wonky and didn't log several of the miles ridden. That gives me a total of <810 miles, which is 5.6 times more than the record low 114 miles I logged in 2017.

Once again, it was cash flow and other time commitments that kept the bikes in the shed. If we could sell or have full occupancy of our commercial building in Arkansas, this would be transformed overnight, but there has been no movement on that front and the utilities and insurance and taxes continue to eat into our disposable income.

Getting unstuck

Morgan and her fiance Edgar and Austin pitched in to help us remodel the upstairs bathroom - a major step in getting our house back in shape.

The lack of a functioning sink in the upstairs bathroom has been a factor in our not being able to move our bed out of the dining room and into an upstairs bedroom. Yes, we've been sleeping in the dining room since we moved back to Thorntown in August, 2017.

We remodeled the downstairs half-bath as soon as we moved back, putting in a new waterproof faux wood floor, vanity and sink, shower stall and stacked Samsung washer and dryer. We bought enough of the waterproof flooring to do the upstairs bathroom and that's what happened last week. The new vanity is in place and we're waiting for a plumber to hook up the sink. He was supposed to come yesterday morning, but his mother-in-law is at death's door and he needs to support his wife and her family. We can wait. We've waited more than a year already. What's a few more days?

Our upstairs bedroom still needs some final plaster skim coating, paint, and crown molding and then we can move the bed in and get the rest of our dining room furniture out of storage and start using the house as it was supposed to be used.

Afflicting the wrong people?

I've been a working journalist off and on since the autumn of 1966 and always strove to be objective and free of bias.

I took pride in the notion that our job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

But I heard that credo picked apart on the radio this afternoon and came to the disturbing realization that it implies a bias to always champion the underdog. It suggests that the underdog is always right and the successful/comfortable are always wrong. The more you think about it, the more glaringly liberal and intentionally subversive it becomes.

What if the little guy is a fledgling Hitler or Stalin or Mao? Are they automatically entitled to better treatment in the press than the Pope or a Franklin Roosevelt or a Harry Truman? Does success always equate to corruption? I think not.

The more I chew on it, the clearer it becomes to me that a lot of us have mistakenly believed our job is to disrupt the social order just for the sake of doing it.

How depressing.

Still at it

I just did a mental inventory of my contemporaries from the old Indianapolis News and came to the conclusion that I am the only one still writing for a newspaper on a regular basis.

It certainly wasn't by design. When I took early retirement from The Indianapolis Star in October of 2000, I figured I was done with newspapers.

But then I married a newspaperwoman 19 years my junior who dragged me out of retirement to write and shoot photos for the Crawfordsville Journal Review, the Jonesboro (Ark.) Sun and more recently the Lebanon Reporter.

I can't complain because I've been able to play newspaper and see my byline in print on a regular basis, but pretty much on my own terms.

Who knew that the callow youth shown here around 1967 would still be an active journalist 51 years later?

Here's my Thorntown Community Christmas Party package on the front page of today's Reporter.

Finally being occupied after 16 months

Sixteen months after we closed on our former home in Arkansas, it appears the buyers are finally moving in.

Former neighbors reported the new owners did some remodeling, including extending the master bedroom and bath about 10 feet into the back yard.

I was beginning to think they never planned to live in it, but just wanted to flip it.

My day

I wrote three stories yesterday - two that made it onto the front page of today's paper and the other destined for tomorrow or beyond - so I decided to devote today to loose ends around the house.

One of the loose ends involved driving into Lebanon to buy an air filter at Menards for the Honeywell air purifier I got from the Vine Program a few months ago.

I stopped at the bank and the post office and about 3 miles east of town I was startled to see the sun roof on my Lexus opening. I struggled with the controls and found that I could get it closed, but only temporarily.
It kept re-opening at random intervals - not a good thing when it could snow or rain at any moment. I called Tom Wood Lexus in Carmel and they said they would be waiting for me.

I got there at 1:10 p.m. and was greeted and seated in the comfortable waiting room. I told service writer Brett Sullivan about my problem and also asked if it would be possible to replace the 2 burned out high beam headlight bulbs.

Two hours later, I was on my way home. They fed me coffee and a free turkey and cheese sandwich from their snack bar, and charged me $104.01 for bulbs and labor, but nothing for reprogramming the computer.

Considering that I didn't have an appointment, I am absolutely gob smacked at how well I was treated. I think I'll be back.

But I never did get to Menards.