My Birthday Drain

You know you are getting old when you are getting birthday gifts that aren't even things you can take with you when you move. This year, I got a drain.

Yeah, fools, you read that right, a drain.

The jackasses who built my house back in the Dark Ages thought it was a wise idea to slope this concrete pad leading to my basement toward the house. I have so many guests come over and say, "Thanks, I enjoyed standing in that lake welling up in your basement." It defies common sense and engineering. Even Luke, who is still in engineering school, took one look at it last year and said it was the dumbest damn thing he's ever seen (other than seeing the Bengals in person).

Every time it rains more than 15 minutes, I had to go downstairs and start bailing water out of the basement. Funny how the house inspector never noticed it on the two inspections he made of the property. It's pretty damn noticeable. Last year I spent $200 on this nifty little pump that helped most of the time, but I feared what would happen if the power every went out in the house, which is never paired with heavy storms, right? That pump and I hung out a lot between the hours of 2 and 5 a.m. I felt like I had a Wilson-level friendship going on.

At long last this year the wife decided to buy me a drain. Three dudes came over, dug up some dirt, whipped out the concrete saw, and in just a half-day's work this beauty was installed. Three of the next 5 nights, as luck would have it, brought huge storms all night long.

I slept soundly through them all. Let that drain do all the work. Ahhhh, nice.

My Recurring Date

So it seems that no matter what, every July 8 is going to be my birthday. Stupid calendar. I guess we have to mark the passing of time somehow. And since most everyone knows that I could care less about my birthday (or any other holidays and so forth), I thought it fun to poke around the interwebs and see significance, if any, has ever been put on the number 33. And luckily my research did not leave me to feel like I was trapped in a shitty Jim Carrey movie.

Some things you may not know (or even care to know):

In math, "33 is the largest positive integer that cannot be expressed as a sum of different triangular numbers. It is also the smallest odd repdigit that's not prime (unless we consider 1-digit integers to also be repdigits)." Eric and Kelly once crushed one of my repdigits under a big-ass boulder when they dropped it without telling me.

Also in math, 33 is apparently a Størmer number, which upon being looked up is not nearly as cool as it sounds.

In science, 33 is the atomic number of arsenic, something my sister has probably tried to poison me with once or twice. 33 is also the number of vertebrae in the human spine, so that's nice (although I'd like to get them all working together to help my golf swing).

Oregon is the 33rd state. That's cool. I've always dug Oregon. Good cities, good people.

For you religious folk, legend has it Jesus was 33 when he was crucified ("though not verified historically" according to to Wikipedia ... yeah, no shit), and he also apparently performed 33 miracles. Not sure I like either of those as forewarnings. Though according to some guy named Al-Ghazali, the dwellers of heaven will exist eternally in a state of being age 33, so if he's right I better have a damned good year.

In literature, 33 is the coming of age of a hobbit in J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," and since Kelly thinks I live in Middle Earth, that works out quite well. Just need to brush up on my ranger and spellcasting skills. The number 33 was also discovered to lead to the essential meaning of life (the Bible) in Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol." But that book sucked so I'm not jazzed about that at all.

On a total downer note, 33 is one of the symbols of Ku Klux Klan. So that stinks. Guess I can't expect everything to be peachy. But let's flip it and I'll mention that there are at least four brands of beer named 33, one of which is a Vietnamese beer that I actually have had many times, so that's cool.

Well there you have it. We'll see how the year turns out. Thanks for all the well wishes and reading along.