EchoBooming in Birmingham

Pick an excuse:

Football season.
Apathy.
My ear infection.
My ceiling falling in.

Oh, you don’t know about my ceiling falling in?

It all happened two saturdays ago (9/23/2006)…

Fairlyn got me up way earlier than I wanted to, so we went to the living room and I put on some baby einstien for her, and I found a nice spot on the couch for myself.

I was about 3 seconds into my early morning nap when I heard what sounded like a tree branch falling outside. I poked my head out the door, looked around, and saw nothing. However, when I turned around I saw this:

Directly above my daughter’s head.

I scooped her up, called DrWife into the room, and then started moving furniture out as fast as I could. I enlisted the help of my neighbor for the large stuff (thanks Jeremy!) and in under 30 mins, the room was empty.

While Jeremy and I were moving all of the furniture around, DrWife went to the Home Depot and returned with some painters tape and two rolls of plastic sheeting. I sealed off the room (to prevent the dust and insulation from spreading all over the house) and taped over the air registers so that I could minimize my cooling losses after the ceiling fell.

About 2 hours later (while I was finally getting that early morning nap) the first section of the ceiling fell (DrWife was at the grocery getting food for the Blazer-Tailgate later on that day, and Fairlyn was sleeping). I didn’t even get up to inspect the damage until DrWife returned (in my mind, there was no use… I was snoozing comfortably and there wasn’t much else I could do at that time).

I took a few pictures and moved a few pieces of sheetrock away from the front door so we could open it again, thought about how much this all sucked, and then started getting ready for some UAB football…

Right as we were walking out the door, we heard another section of the ceiling fall, again ignoring it until we got home.

Here’s a few more pictures of the final damage:

Sunday, my dad and I spent a few hours cleaning up the mess and putting up plastic sheeting over the gaping hole in my ceiling, and Monday I started the claim process with my insurance company.

They called me back that afternoon and said:

DENIED

Why you may ask? Because there was no “cause”. The Ceiling just fell for no reason, and not because of water damage or something else forcing it to fall down!

The nails were still in the rafters, there was no sign of water damage or anything else other than insulation in my attic.

What did I learn from this experience?

Lie to your insurance company. Tell them that you are an irresponsible homeowner and that you store crap ON the sheetrock in your attic. Throw a bucket of water in your attic if your ceiling falls for no reason, that’ll get ‘em to cover it!

I finally found a contractor that I can trust (I used to work with his wife and DrWife’s brother played baseball with his stepson) and he came over this afternoon to poke around my house, and hopefully he’ll be back with me tomorrow and I’ll know what the damage is going to be…

Today is my first half-day back at work since Friday.

My punctured ear drum turned into “every bacteria on the planet invade 3choBoomer’s ear canal and have a good ol’ time”.

This quickly escalated from some funky yellow stuff oozing out of my ear on Thursday, to 9/10 on the pain scale by Sunday night.

I had Otitis Externa (an external ear infection) and the swelling that resulted from that had closed off my ear canal setting up a great place for the infection to start exerting pressure on the entire right side of my head.

Thankfully DrWife had a few Darvocet laying around from her postpartum recovery and I was able to take one of those every 4 or so hours so I could sleep. And sleep I did until about 3pm Tuesday morning. All this time I was waiting for an ENT appointment at UAB. Apparently they are really busy and couldn’t work me so I took things into my own hands an got an appointment at the ENT’s office that fixed my broken nose back in highschool (apparently some dude didn’t handle it too well that I took his girlfriend)…

Anyway, my visit to the ENT proved fruitful. He basically pried my ear canal open with a tiny speculum like device and sucked all of the goo from my ear (what a great sucking sound that was too). Then he proceeded to stick a wick down into my ear the size of a telephone pole so that the medicine could wick itself down there past the swelling.

The resulting pain from the ear probing sent me close to passing out (the fact that I did not eat breakfast that morning didn’t help things much). The doc and the nurse saw my vasovagoal reaction and quickly reclined my seat and kept me under observation for about an hour. Since then I have only taken one pain pill and I’m feeling much better.

The doc’s got me on a cocktail of antibiotics to fight off this bug that in his words “eats antibiotics like Ketek and Amoxicillin for breakfast”. I got two shots yesterday (one antibiotic, and one steroid) more of the same today, and more of the same tomorrow. I’m also taking two different antibiotics by mouth daily, and I’ve got two different antibiotic ear drops that I use in my ear a total of 6x per day.

He’s taking this infection pretty seriously I’d say. Big shout-out to Dr. Sciacca (pronounced ShockA) and Alabama ENT Associates for their service and the professional courtesy they extended to me since there was a fubar in my new medical insurance (which has caused my wife and my self to lay out at least $400 on prescriptions and doctors bills over the last week).

Oh and if you’re up for a cheap good show tonight The Uglistick will be playing a low-dough show at WorkPlay tonight for only $5!

Last weekend I took my first trip to the great state of Minnesota. My good friend Jason got married in a little town by the name of Fairbault (Pronounced FairBo).


Click the pic for a link to Mere’s photos of the event, and click on Mere’s name for a great re-hash of our entire trip

Thankfully while I was out of town the Alabama Democratic Party (or what’s left of it) Did The Right Thing© and upheld Patricia Todd’s election to the House District 54 seat. Read more about the near debacle here and here.

And finally, my ear drum went kaplooey this morning. This is after I began having ear pains and congestion ONLY in my right ear just a few hours before my flight to Minnesota. I fought the pain all weekend by alternating between 600mg of Ibuprofin and 1000mg of Tylenol every 4 hours (the extra lengthy Episcopal wedding made me miss one dose by nearly an hour, but I made it).

I went to the doctor Monday and he told me that I had no infection, but he wanted me to take 120mg of Sudafed 3 times a day. So after tweaking for nearly 36 hours straight, I woke up this morning with my ear leaking some clear fluid! DrWife quickly diagnosed my blown eardrum but we’re both pretty clueless as to how it happened.

I guess I need to can find those kiddy earplug things that you have to wear if you get tubes in your ears so my inner ear doesn’t fill up with Lake Martin this weekend.
Anyone know where I can find those?

The Birmingham News will have to wait another two weeks to find out if their plan to tear down their old building for parking will be approved by the design review board.

The person representing the News was extremely detailed in his description of the planned parking lot, focusing on details such as the type of brick to be used along the sidewalk and the 10 feet of grass between the road and the 120 something parking spots. He acknowledged that it was a very sensitive issue and that the News hoped to lessen the loss of the old building with the grandeur of the new building (which is dead sexy in my opinion).

There was a good bit of vocal opposition for the demolition of the old building by a few members of the board, with one of them stating that the News wanted to replace a “landmark with a parking lot”.

Ultimately the vote was tabled until the next meeting (the second Wednesday of next month I believe) because two of the key members of the design review committee were absent (the head of the committee, and the head of the Auburn Urban Design department).

edit: Dre’s on top of the details.

Thanks to teh madman for bringing this one to my attention…

Internet celebrities nerds come together in order to save Net Neutrality. Watch the video below and please help me figure out who the “boom-box” lady is…

I recognise the Tron Guy, the freaky Peter-Pan dude, the Back Street Asian Singers, the dancing baby and the spongmonkeys but what is up with that other chick?