Back on my feet again

Two weeks ago today was one of the worst days in a decade for me. (You have to put these things pre- and post- Shooter Wife marriage and the birth of my kids, really. My worst day after those three events doesn't hold a candle to what happened before.) I woke up to find a quarter-plus inch of standing water in my beloved Man Cave. The carpet tiles were a total loss, and while I was lucky in retrospect to avoid damage to the furnace, the hot water heater, the washer, the dryer and a whole litany of other things, it didn't feel like luck at the time, and really still doesn't.

That feeling of non-luck extended to when my homeowner's policy decided that a blizzard that freezes your gutters, leading to a thaw/melt that finds holes in a bilco door, is a foundation flood, rather than a snow occurrence. (Travelers, by the way. We're appealing, and they aren't, if you catch my drift. Also, yes, yes, I know, all homeowner insurance companies are thieves, and I was an idiot to not immediately call an independent claims adjuster, seeing as those are the only people who have ever gotten money out an insurance company. Live, learn, hate. The whole thing fills me with bile.)

Anyway, the last two weeks have been spent more or less Man Space-less, and moving piles of crap from one place to the other, since everything had to vacate the Cave, or at least the part of it where new carpet was coming down. I'm a fussy little control freak under the best of circumstances, so you can imagine how much fun I've been to live with for the past two weeks.

Anyway... today the carpet came, and we reset the room, and I feel like I can finally start to breathe again, really.

It's not just the fact that I like the new look of the place. (Truth be told, I was never a huge fan of the old stuff; the padding was pretty meager, being carpet tiles, and while the light color helped make the room look bright, I'm much more a fan of the dark green. Eagles and poker felt color, don't you know.)

It's really that when the place was stripped of the carpet and all possessions, it just looked a lot like, well, what it looked like when we moved in 3.5 years ago, and the place wasn't finished. So not only was I deprived of the place where I feel the most comfortable (most of FTT is written in the Cave, all of the sports viewing is done there, my auction live drafts happen there, and it's also where the poker gets played)... it also stripped away a key feeling that's necessary for sanity and happiness.

That is, that you are making progress, and that today will be better than yesterday. And today was better than yesterday. I liked this room before the damage. I love this room now.

When I was an original musician, I had the opportunity early in my career to record at a top-tier studio. It's my worst record by leaps and bounds, because when you are in a place like that, everything sounds good... even when it, well, doesn't. There is a real danger, frankly, in going to good gear; it can fool you, and make it extremely unlikely that you can settle for anything less later. The latter is the much bigger problem, really.

The last two weeks have been living with bad gear. And man alive, am I glad that's over.