The Point of the Story

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Month: August 2021

It’s A Trap: The Unexpected Challenge Of Escaping A Bathroom

29 August 2021 / / 0 Comments
3 Min Read

I may not be the best at remembering song lyrics.

But I’m pretty sure it’s “When the lights…go down…in the shitty…”

Aaaaaaand….we’re back! After dropping a few posts about one particular day1Links to those 3 posts can be found here, here, and here. during the Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99, I figured it was time to resume my review of the beach house known as Eden Cove 9 (aka EC9).

Anne Frankly,2Yes, this is a punny reference to the illegal refugees who accompanied as to Oak Island, but whom I can never explicitly talk about. I’m so exhausted from trying to publicly catalog all the weird-ass things about EC9 and Better Beach Rentals, that I’m just going plagiarize myself in the last post with the following disclaimer:

“I assume you know what I’m going on about and jump right in to another round of idiosyncrasies from the 5 weeks my fam and I were refugees at this particular beach house.

In the off chance you are not familiar with good ol’ EC9, then you can catch up on what you missed here. Otherwise, let’s dive right on in…”

Level 6a: The Lighter Side Of Things

“No, Daddy, let me turn out the lights!” Oh, what a deceptively simple request…

We had just finished up bath time and it was time for our 3-year-old, aka The Younger, to head to her adjacently-located bedroom and wind down for the evening. Since she was smack-dab in the middle of her Let-Me-Assert-My-Own-Dang-Independence phase, I wasn’t surprised that she would be eager to turn out the bathroom lights all on her own. Naturally, I obliged and told her to have it.

Master Bathroom
Figure 1: To quote Hamilton again: “The room where it happened, the room where it happened…”

She headed to the nearest bank of light switches–the ones right next to the tub (which you can almost see across the way in Figure 1), and flipped a few of them. The result? Well, kind of like “two steps forward, one step back,” it was “one more light on, but, hey, two lights off,” with the net result of it being slightly darker in the bathroom.

“Oh, it looks like you need to turn off the lights over there,” I gently encouraged her, pointing across the bathroom at the switches next to one of the awkwardly-positioned sinks.

Undeterred, she ambled over and started flipping the switches into the “off” position, but befell the same fate as before, turning on more lights than off.

“Hmmm, that’s odd…okay, try the switches over there.” I guess I hadn’t really noticed before that there was yet another bunch of switches next to the other sink.

But, nay, after trying every combination of switchery, she was still no closer to having shut the lightshow down. We were both becoming visibly discombobulated at that point.

“Son of a biscuit, seriously, how are the lights still on?!?”

At that point, I was starting to get a strong escape room vibe, and I was expecting some secret passage to open up once we got the exact right configuration of switch positions. Was this what it took to finally be able to access the elevator, maybe?!?

“Okay, kiddo, don’t give up–we can do this.”

You know, I never really thought I would ever be in the position where I would have to muster up so much fake optimism and encouragement to help my progeny successfully turn off the lights in a single room, but then again, EC9 was proving itself to be a never-ending cornucopia of WTF situations that simply should never occur in this dimension of reality.

I was in the middle of having such an inner dialogue with myself when I spotted yet a fourth ----- set of switches next to the shower.

…and that’s when I lost my sh*t, flying into a fit of rage as I rushed from one set to the next, violently flipping switches on and off, all teaching my child how to properly take the name of any and all Lords in vain.

I was so sick of this purgatory by now that I was eager to just move on to some form of hell itself–and with my little cursing spree, I’m pretty sure I guaranteed my seat in Hades, no matter which religion turns out to be the true one.

Anyways…I’m proud to say that after 5 minutes of tomfoolery, we finally had ourselves a dark bathroom.

Yes, that’s right: a grown-ass man just gave himself and his toddler a Hi-Five for successfully turning out the lights in a room.

Oh, sh*t. Wait just a minute! Did we just officially enter the TwiLight Zone?

Hmmph.

Well, if it is, it has to be the most boring episode ever…

Content created on: 27/28 August 2021 (Fri/Sat)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Three Farm-Tested Words Of Wisdom For Living A Happy Life

22 August 2021 / / 1 Comment
5 Min Read

Ignore those who will try to tell you “Happy wife, happy life!”

No, true happiness can be found in 3 very different words…

“Sh*t Happens, Okay?”

Oh, how that phrase–the battle cry adopted by The Bard and I during that hot, hot Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99–brings back memories. What originally sprung forth from a round of late-night conjecturing exactly what the hell the “SHO” in “Ford Taurus SHO”1As payment for all my hard work, Dad bought me my dream vehicular…a Taurus SHO. actually stood for,2Or to be grammatically correct: “…for which it stands.” “Sh*t Happens, Okay?” seemed to be slightly less gross than my girlfriends suggesting of “Sticky Hard-On.”

But then, as The Summer waned on, The Bard and I realized that it was the perfect description for the sh*t-show that constantly surrounded us as we toiled away on my family’s farm under Dad’s watchful eye. Nay, there was never a more apt mantra for maintaining a semblance of sanity through all the stray tires, busted transmissions,3I really need to get around to addressing the whole transmission situation, a la our work pickup, but for now all you need to know is that it provided a solid layer of “interesting” to that summer. and world-consuming forest fires we endured of those 3 months.

And to be clear, I’m referring to “Sh*t Happens, Okay?” There was nothing about that summer on the farm that should have been giving anyone a hard-on, of any kind…

Okay, so sh*t was happening alright. When I last left you, I was capping off a day chock-full of, um, “creative” fire-fighting techniques, that had left my eyesight barely functional thanks to all the smoke up in my contacts.

If you somehow missed out on those episodes, you can take a moment and catch up on them here and here real quick-like.

As always, I’ll wait.

…

…

Yeah, pretty messed up, right? You would have thunk that Dad would have taken not-burning-down-the-whole-countryside as a “win” for the day and we would have gone home while we were on top.

But noooooo. We had more ----- wheat to cut, so it was on to the next field!

In the course of moving all our equipment to this very important field ~20 miles away, I got assigned to Kountry Kommodities, our sweet semi-truck. Given that this was by far our fastest mode of transportation at the time, I wasn’t complaining too loudly about this. If I was going to have to drive anything with smoky contact lenses, at least I would be spending the least amount of time in misery rolling in ol’ KK.

Now, for some reason, Dad had me take the road less traveled, and not the highway like he and The Bard planned to do in the pickup and combine. While this sounds like an asinine detail, me traveling solo on some back road connecting Middle Of Nowhere, CO to Middle Of Nowhere, KS was more than enough for things to go even more sideways on me that day.

Ah, yes, now I recall the reason Dad had me take the less busy route: the transmission on the semi was starting to act up, so, you know, he better make sure that his youngest progeny is in Bum- ----- , Egypt if and when anything serious happens with the ol’ tranny.

Oh wait, did I spoil the surprise? C’mon, admit it though: you already knew in your heart of hearts what happened next.

Of course the ----- transmission went out on me in the middle of some lonely stretch of barely-paved highway, with ol KK slowly and dramatically grinding to a halt as it gave up the ghost.

So there I was, no cell phone, barely able to keep my irritated af eyes open, and nothing happening for miles in either direction. Well, this was a super-duper turn of events.

Nothing else to do, I started walking–no, “blindly stumbling”–down the road in hopes of finding some sort of human life that could help me out. Luckily–if you could call anything “lucky” about that day–the sole homestead on that road was only about a mile and a half away, and I ended up only having to blindly stumble for 20-30 minutes.

Some little old lady answered the door, and G0d bless that angel’s heart, she immediately took pity on me and took me in. After a phone call to one of my grandmas that lived about 15 minutes away, my personal angel gave me some wet towels to put over my head in hopes of helping soothe my very angry eyes.

In return for all her kindness, I repaid her the only way I truly knew how: as I waited for the cavalry to arrive, I regaled her with the tales of the clusterf*cky events that had led up to my showing up on her doorstep seemingly out of nowhere.

If hashtags had been a thing back then, no doubt she would have posted #Blessed across all of social media for having been graced by presence that day.

Anyways…I must have blacked out–or maybe it just seemed that way since “vision” was no longer a skill I could include on my resume at that point–because the next thing I remember was it being nighttime as I was reunited with Dad and The Bard on the combine.

And it was the heartwarming moment you’re no doubt imagining it to be, what with me having disappeared without a trace for a good 4-5 hours and all.

…

Of course it didn’t happen like that all. Somehow, Dad was pissed out of his mind at me for the transmission going out. You know, like it was my fault that he doesn’t know how to buy and properly maintain farming equipment.

Therefore, to this day, I maintain that it was an act of grace on my part when, in the middle of our yelling match, I found myself screaming spitting a fireball of Truth at him:

“Sh*t Happens, Okay!?!”

And even though I couldn’t technically confirm it was my two eyes–y’know, on account of the smoke-laced contacts, and all–I just know in my heart of hearts that in the corner of the combine cab was The Bard, solemnly nodding his head in knowing solidarity…4In order to not kill the flow of the story, I haven’t explicitly include how that day finally ended. For some reason, I can confirm that around 11 pm we found ourselves working on some completely unrelated farming equipment at our shop in Rolla, and I remember thinking to myself, “This has to be the longest ----- day in farming history.” I couldn’t have been too wrong, now could have I?

The point of the story is just that: sh*t happens, okay? Sometimes it just does. And while some people love to play the blame game and insist that all the less-than-perfect bits o’life–like faulty transmissions or raging wheat fires, for instance–be somebody’s fault, I maintain that you’ll have much healthier relationships and be much happier in life if you accept that sh*t just happening without much rhyme or reason is really the default mode of this world. Trust me, any sense of control is nothing much more than an illusion.

I just pray that others can acheive this enlightenment without having to endure a summer on a dysfunctional family farm…

Content created on: 21/22 August 2021 (Sat/Sun)

Footnotes & References:[+]

…And Then Suddenly We Were World Famous Fire-Starters

15 August 2021 / / 0 Comments
5 Min Read

“We need your tractor. NOW, MOTHER ----- !”

I got to admit, this was not how I imagined my first tractor-jacking would go. I’ll tell you what though: don’t believe Hollywood’s lies. It’s not nearly as romantic as they make it look in the movies…

Of course. Of course.

Of course the Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99 would have to include forcefully commandeering another man’s farming implement. Exciting as that was, though, that only accounted for ~20% of the sh*t that went down that particular day…

But before we go any further, you really should get caught up on last week’s post if you haven’t already.

Yes, that’s right…click riiiiiiight HERE.

It’s okay. I’ll wait.

…

…

..

Okay, all caught up to speed now? But just in case you have the memory of the goldfish, let’s review:

The Bard–my partner in grime during the Summer of ’99–and I were helping my dad harvest the wheat from the two adjacent fields shown in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1: Two Fields, ~285.66 Acres. All about to go up in flames.

One important thing not shown on this map is that the Cimarron National Grasslands was kitty-corner adjacent to the southeast of Field 2. Not that anything with words National and Grass in its name would be important to this story or anything…

Anyway, in our attempt to burn the stubble in Field 1, The Bard & I nearly set Field 2 on fire. Despite our most valiant exhibition of “The Pimp Technique”, we were ultimately unsuccessful in putting out the unwanted inferno and had to be rescued by Dad, who successfully implemented the “Harvesting The Fire” method and saved Field 2 from premature destruction.

Or so we thought…

Where we last left off, we were all packed into the combine and halfway through taking care of Field 2, when, through my smoke-filled contact lenses, I spotted what looked like Haley’s Comet shoot out of the back of our mighty harvesting equipment.

And now, with Field 2 indubitably about to be ablaze, Dad gave us the very vague instructions to “get help” while he tried to speed-race through the field in an attempt to get as much grain–and therefore moneyz–into the bin before it all burned to the ground…

What do you when you’re in the middle of nowhere, before the age of cell phones, and your dad pleads with you to get help for the raging wildfire that is on the verge of devouring Morton County Kansas off the map?

Heck, I wouldn’t know!

So then it was a dang good thang The Bard had a good head on his shoulders, right? Upon receiving our marching orders from El Jefe, he drug my dazed and confused ass into our not-so-trusty work pickup1Oh yeah, I should get around to explaining that whole situation some time. and started hauling tail due north on the Dusty-Ass Dirt Road.

About 3 or 4 miles up the road–which translates to ~15 tractor/combine miles, mind you–we were fortunate enough to spot a random farmer out a-plowing his field. The Bard took a hard right and straight-up tore tracks across this strangers freshly worked plot o’land to where he was just tuttin’ along, minding his own biz. We bailed out of the truck, barely waiting for him to stop the tractor before climbing halfway up to the cab.

As you can imagine, we were met by one very confused country folk-man, and I was actually a bit surprised that he didn’t hesitate to open the door for us.

“What you boys need? Is something wrong?”

Now, honestly, I can’t remember what The Bard said at this point, but I do confidently recall two things: 1) it sadly did not involve the dropping of the F-bomb, and 2) whatever he said was clearly and convincingly communicated, and before we knew it we were all kicking up dust in a ske-daddle rush back to the source of all that smoke brewing off yonder…

We rolled up to our Field 2 rendezvous point right about the same time as Dad, who, while in mid-air leaping off the combine, yelled to The Bard, “get in there and keep cutting, dammit!!!”2Dear The Bard, I actually don’t know if this is accurate, and maybe you can confirm or deny it. Though, I’m pretty certain I was on the fire-fighting tractor, and I can’t imagine Dad would have let the combine sit idle in the meantime.

To the other farmer, he simply said, “Thanks, I’ll take it from here,” as they swapped out, and once I was mostly inside the tractor cab, he threw it in gear and got down to business.

At this point, we were mostly cutting our losses on the wheat crop, and were just trying to minimize the collateral damage to things like, oh, I don’t know, ALL THE CONTINUOUS DRY GRASS IN SW KANSAS, SE COLORADO, AND THE OKLAHOMA PANHANDLE.3…and NE New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle, too!

Don’t believe me? Just take a gander at this map I stole from an alternate timeline, outlining the hypothetical extent of our series of unfortunate events:4Source: https://www.thearmchairexplorer.com/colorado/comanche-national-grassland.php

Figure 2: We about to cause the Second Dust Bowl up in here.

Now, most plows aren’t meant to be dragged through the ground at speeds more than 3-5 mph,5Reference: https://www.quora.com/How-fast-mph-or-kph-does-a-farm-tractor-travel-when-plowing-planting-a-field-and-how-many-acres-can-this-be-done-in-one-1-hour but it turns out that you can get up to about 12 mph if you really need to. At least that’s what Dad taught me that not-so-fine day, as he made two laps around the perimeter of the field, saving the rest of the Continental United States that wasn’t a body of water from going up in smoke.

On the other hand, our “shallowly-buried irrigation pipe” that ran to the center of Field 2 in Figure 1? Well, we tried to save it, at least. I vividly remember wistfully looking out the tractor window as we vainly attempted to plow out a buffer along either side of it, only to see grotesquely twisted strips of melted plastic intermittently protruding from the ground, much like a broken bone sticking out of an arm or a leg…

Gratuitous and completely unnecessary analogy aside, that was actually a small price, given the potential consequences our escapades could have had, like, oh, say, MELTING ALL OF NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA OFF THE MAP.

“But how did you fare personally?” you kindly ask?

Surprisingly, by some miracle, we actually ended up losing very little of our precious wheat crop. And by “miracle” I mean the “level-headedness of The Bard, the executive action and thinking-on-his-feet of Dad, and the selfless-sacrifice-of-his-precious-agriculture-implement-without-a-second-thought of That Farmer Who I Had Never Met Before That Day.”

And while we’re here, you might as well give this crew a hearty thanks for, oh, I don’t know, SAVING THE ENTIRE ----- WORLD FROM BECOMING ONE GIANT FIREBALL.

Well, folks, my MasterClass in illustrating the rhetorical device of “hyperbole”6https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole aside, the real point of the story is: avoid growing up on the farm at all costs if you can.

And if you can’t avoid that fate, for the love of the harvest gods, at least don’t drag your semi-city-slicker7Yes, Dear The Bard, back in those days, you very much qualified as a city slicker in my book. Oh how the tables have turned now. friends into your literal dumpster fires UNIVERSE-CONSUMING BLAZES.

As much as I would love to say at this point, “Whew, what a crazy day on the farm! I’m glad that’s over!”

Instead what I heard was: “Welp, now that we’re finished up here, time to head the next field of wheat and start cuttin’!” Dad proclaimed like any true-working-hard-af-farmer would.

Wait, what? This ----- day is “to be continued”?!?

Content created on 6/12/13 August 2021 (Fri/Thurs/Fri)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Insider Tips For Fighting Fires Down On The Farm

8 August 2021 / / 0 Comments
6 Min Read

The field, the field, the field is on fire. We don’t need no water, let the mother ----- burn.

Burn mother ----- , burn…

“Smokey The Bear would be rolling in his grave if he could see us now.”

“First, now is not the time for your witty remarks, and two, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, FOCUS ON YOUR PIMP TECHNIQUE!”

You wanna take a wild guess as to where this already-convoluted conversation took place?

That’s right: in the middle of Kansan wheat field…

Oh, the Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99, that rascal. The idea of me going off to college later that Fall was starting to look like a foregone conclusion: if I wanted a shot at a higher education, first I was going to have to survive all the shots The Farm took at me.

Now you may be under the impression from the Unsurpassed Tractor Tale That Never Gets Tired and its sibling stories that these tribulations were by my hand, and my hand alone. Or perhaps you are perishing the thought that no one else out there has the honor and privilege of regaling their city-slicker friends with such anecdotes.

But take heart, my friend! Just like the catchy af slogan for the hip dating site onlyfarmers.com encouragingly informs us: “You don’t have to be lonely!”

And guess what?!? As you probably inferred from the ursine-of-PSA-fame-referencing, misogynistic-slang-dropping, semi-historically accurate conversation above, I wasn’t always alone/lonely in my existential struggle with our family agricultural enterprise. Sometimes there were witnesses. Or accomplices, depending on how you look at it.

Either way, my main partner in grime was The Bard,1Not his real name, and frankly, an uncreative alias. But I felt if I took this line of nicknaming one step further and called you–yes, I know you are reading this–Billy S.S., that it would be a bit too much to ask people to figure out that it was a derived reference to William ShakeSpeare–another name for The Bard (of Avon), of course. So…that explains all that. a fiend since our days in Kindergarten, fellow fresh graduate of Rolla High School, and, if things went well, future brother-in-law.

In addition to us dating a pair of Amazonian sisters that were both taller than either of us, The Bard would occasionally help me and my dad out on the farm that summer. And since this tale finds us in the thick of wheat harvest, he was naturally part of our 3-man harvest crew.

We were literally in the middle of harvesting two of our adjacent fields when things got, er…”interesting”. For context, I’ve drawn a little map of these fields, because these details will matter later on:

Figure 1: The Field Were It Happened
(That’s…that’s uh, a Hamilton reference.)

We had just finished up harvesting Field 1, and The Bard and I, the peons that we were, were tasked with performing a controlled burn of the wheat stubble, while Dad took the combine over to start cutting Field 2. Simple enough right? Since the stubble was surrounded on all side by either a road or dirt (see Figure 1), all we had to was just light a match and watch the whole thing burn to the ground.

Oh, that critical part about “surrounded by roads and dirt”? I need to make one tiny correction. Of all that’s going on in Figure 1, I would like to draw your attention to that Wee bit of overlap. Here, much like a Venn Diagram, Field 1 and Field 2 shared not an infinitesimally short border of a single point as they should have in a geometrically perfect world, but instead had about 50 ft. of common border.

But really, how much trouble could 50 ft. give us anyways?

Uh…turns out a lot. Let’s just say our attempt at “controlled burn” spun out of control pretty quickly:

“Oh man, the fire is moving quicker towards Field 2 than I expected,” one of us noted with a bit of concern.

“Yeah…no, we’re about to be in over our heads if we don’t slow it down,” the other responded.

“Oh. Sh*t. Too late!”

“Uhhh…grab whatever you can from the pickup–we need something to beat it out with!”

“I think you meant to say ‘with which to beat it out’.”

“NOT NOW, DUDE! You pedantic ----- sucker…”

Moments later, the both of us found ourselves with faces of full of smoke, furiously trying to smack out the flames with burlap work coats we had found behind the seat. Yup, you heard me right: we were using the lesser-known yet surprisingly effective “Pimp Technique” to fight our fiery foe: beating it like it owed us money.

Not that I would recommend it to anyone though: given that the fire was less than arm-lengths away, we also had the delightful privilege of enduring moderate-to-severe smoke inhalation, and what felt like 3rd-degree sunburns. Yet we persisted.

It’s not like we had a ----- choice in the matter, now did we?

“We’re losing the battle! Go get Dad while I stay here and keep beating it!” I hollered over to The Bard.

The Bard scampered back to the pickup, but didn’t get the respite from the smoke he was indubitably hoping for. Nay–and lucky for us–Nostru-Dad-us had actually already foreseen the potential shenanigans in our future and had been keeping a side-eye on us. Sensing that a hub-bub was most likely afoot, Dad was halfway across the field, hauling ballz in the combine in our general direction.

When he got there, Dad–being the problem-solver he was–lowered the combine all the way down til it was scraping dirt, and started cutting as much of the blazing stubble as close to the ground as he could. Fortunately, after a few passes in the Overlap Zone he had it all under control. My Dude had literally saved our bacon.

I was so happy that I found myself crying tears of joy.

No, wait. Those weren’t joyful tears. My eyes were watering like one of Kansas City’s many beautiful ----- fountains, all thanks to the copious amount of smoke that had gotten all up in my contact lenses business while I had been busy Big-Pimpin’…

“Great balls of fire! Uhh…guys, I think we might have a problem…”

My smoky eyes might have rendered me largely sightless and useless, but I was pretty sure about what I had just seen.

With our fire-fighting duties fulfilled, The Bard and I had nothing to do, so there we were, the two of us crammed in the cab of the combine with Dad. How did we perform such a Tetris-Level-20-like feat, you may ask. Well, The Bard got to enjoy the privileges of the extra mini-seat found therein, while I, on the other hand, contorted myself into the only space left: the floor of the cab with my back against the front window.

And thanks to my rear-facing position, I was able to spot what sure the hell looked a lot like a meteor go whizzing out of the back of the combine.

Upon hearing my cry of consternation, Dad whipped our trusty implement around, and sure enough, there was a tiny, tiny patch of fresh stubble burning mere meters behind us. Apparently, some of the burning stubble that Dad had “harvested” early had just been smoldering somewhere deep inside the combine for the previous two hours, and finally decided to make a dramatic exit out the rear, a la a fire-breathing dragon.

Okay, so, maybe not a fire-breathing dragon. More like a fire-farting dragon.

“Oh. Oh sh*t.”

You know it’s never a good sign when you hear your dad’s voice tinged with panic. In this case, Dad was probably panicking because now he had a fire in the middle of Field 2, which was only half okay.

Sure, the 50% of Field 2 that was now stubble needed to burn sooner or later.

But the other 50%? It was still Amber Waves of Grain. By my calculations, that was about $9136.80 about to go up in smoke.2On July 12, 1999, wheat was selling for about $2.43/bushel. Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/2534/wheat-prices-historical-chart-data. The average per-acre yield for Kansas in 1999, was around 47 bushels. Source: https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/k3569432s/ft848s81t/37720f99x/CropProdSu-01-12-2000.pdf And for you yungen’s out there, that’s approximately $14,900.55 worth of today’s coin.3Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1999?amount=9136.80

That was no bueno. No bueno AT ALL.

We all paused for a moment in a state of shock as we watched that tiny, tiny patch quickly grew into a monstrous beast. Then Dad snapped out of it.

“Okay, I’m going to try to speed-cut as much of the remaining wheat as I can before it burns to the ground. I need you two to…well, fuck, I don’t know what exactly I need you to do–just go get help!”

To be continued…(yes, there is more to this particular god-forsaken day).

Content created on: 6/7 August 2021 (Fri/Sat)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Luxury And Lies: The Truth About That Better Beach House

1 August 2021 / / 0 Comments
6 Min Read

They claimed they spared no expenses when they built this place.

If only they had spared me their bullsh*t…

I’m going to have to apologize about the lack of foreplay upfront.1I’m also going to have to apologize for the lack of better analogy than “foreplay”. Sorry, Mom. I’m so exhausted from trying to publicly catalog all the weird-ass things about Eden Cove 9 (aka EC9) and Better Beach Rentals, that I’m just going to assume you know what I’m going on about and jump right in to another round of idiosyncrasies from the 5 weeks my fam and I were refugees at this particular beach house.

In the off chance you are not familiar with good ol’ EC9, then you can catch up on what you missed here. Otherwise, let’s dive right on in…

Level 5: A Real Smorgasboard of Random WTFs

“Three microwaves?!?” Our 3-year-old couldn’t have been more excited to find that our home for the next month had not 1, not 2, but 3 microwaves!

Of course, would you expect anything less from the place that unabashedly bills itself as a member of “the most luxurious town homes on Oak Island“? No, you wouldn’t.

Clearly you would need a fancy built-in drawer microwave in your kitchen, which just screams “luxury!” at you and any of your guests. Also, the bright-ass clock–which you can’t turn off for some reason–makes for an excellent source of light pollution for anyone who might be desperately trying to get some sleep on the couch in the living room, as they take refuge from a vengeful smoke detector.

And what says “I’m so ----- rich” better than completely unnecessary excesses? That must have been the motivation for having a duplicitous countertop microwave in the kitchen, mere feet from the first one. Or–alternate theory here–the first doesn’t work, because hey, it’s EC9.

Lastly but not leastly, is the coup de grâce:2a French phrase that apparently didn’t mean what I thought it meant, but Ima use it anyways the wet bar area featuring–wait for it–another microwave! But this time, with a twist: the plastic trim around the buttons was falling off, and when maintenance was asked to fix it because, hey, you can’t feel fancy with things literally falling apart around you, guess what they thought would do the trick? Good ol’ duct tape. NOPE. I ended up buying some super glue and fixing it myself because it was starting to depress me.

Oh, and by the way, Microwave #3? Never could get it to work. Yet, this turn of events surprises me not…

Exorcising with a screwdriver and a can of WD40:

When we first showed up to EC9, it didn’t take more than one night to convince us all that the place was haunted. Fortunately, it turned out not to be the case, and instead every single door suffered from one of two problems. Either the hinges were squeaky as hell–like, for example, the bathroom door on the kitchen/living floor that everybody used and would open super-slowly by itself if not shut all the way (I’m telling you, “well-maintained” is one word that should never appear in the same sentence as “Eden Cove 9”).

Or, if the door didn’t creak, then it indubitably would look something like this:

Figure 1: Welp, I guess we won’t be using that closet…

That was supposed to be the door to our closet in the master bedroom. But, as you can see from the gap in the upper right, it was not exactly square, and it was ----- near impossible to actually get into it because of that.

The door from the master bedroom to the master bathroom suffered from this as well, but unlike the closet, we really needed to be able to use that door. So halfway through our first week there I made a trip to the local Lowe’s and bought a Phillips screwdriver and a can of WD40. When I got back I set about doing what the maintenance team I guess could never be bothered to do, and did some basic up-keep on the hinges throughout the house.

I was real proud of myself after that, especially for fixing the bedroom-bathroom door. My pride party was short-lived though, as we soon found out that the only thing that had been keeping it shut was the friction with the door jamb when it was off-kilter…when Frank & Anne escaped from their hiding spot in the bathroom and nearly made it out the beautiful balcony doors and onto the roof–OOF!

I thought to myself that would be no problem, and I could just adjust the hinges a bit more so the door would latch when we shut it. But, like Icarus, I flew too close to the sun, and ended up stripping all the wood out where some of the hinge screws were and made things worse–oh, so much worse! In order to get into the bathroom after that, we would have to firmly lift the door knob straight up with all the might we could muster, then throw a shoulder into it, hoping that we had lifted it high enough and wouldn’t dislocate a shoulder.

I attempted to fix my original “fix”, but that ended up only making things worrrrrrrse, and yes, it eventually reached full-on “fiasco” status…

“We’re from the 80s, and we’re here to help:”

From what I could gather, these “newly constructed” townhomes–upon which “no expense had been spared”–were built sometime around 2014 or 2015. Not “newly constructed”, but fairly recently nonetheless.

Pray tell then, how did this hi-tech bit of home audio equipment end up throughout the home:

Figure 2: “Paging Dr. Mix-a-lot, paging Dr. Mix-a-lot…”

Or, how about this very exciting, state-of-the-art piece of home audio equipment:

Figure 3: Wow, a Compact Disc player–for me?!

Now I hope you’re starting to fully understand the Huge Lie that the proprietors/vacation mongers of this insanity-inducing place have been trying to shove down people’s throats: if you’re “newly constructing” a building and “sparing no expense,” then why in the hell are they scavenging home sound systems from early 90’s (at best)? Hmmm? Like, did they run over budget so badly that they had to go hit up the local Habit for Humanity?

Actually, I would like to rescind that comment about Habitat for Humanity. I don’t want to drag their good name into this whole mess. They at least have standards, and wouldn’t accept crappy 90’s tech, much less try to resell it to the public. I mean, I tried to give them our old dishwasher, but they wouldn’t take it…because it was a 2007 model.

Oh, and I need to include one last tid-bit in regards to their paging/sound system. I never could figure out why there was a doorbell just outside the main doors on the first living level. You know, the doors to the balcony. Why was there a doorbell on the balcony?!? Are guests getting drunk and locked out there, and have to ring the bell in order to get someone to let them back in? If you have a better theory, I’m all ears…

Here’s your sign:

One morning I was out for a stroll, and I decided to take a closer look at the big sign just out front that seemed to be promoting the Eden Cove complex.

For your contextual pleasure, I snapped a photo of it for you:

Figure 4: So much to unpack here…

First off: see, I told you they were going all-in on the whole “luxury” angle. Secondly, I hope by now you’re laughing your ass off about them touting there circa-1992 “Centralized sound and paging system.”

But the real fun is when you take a closer look and discover just how on-brand these people are with their half-assery. And lucky you, I took a picture of those-there floor plans on the right, so you can take a closer look for yourself as well:

Figure 5: A Sample Eden Cove Flor Plan

Now, it is very important that you don’t adjust your television sets. The crappy resolution you see is not from my camera, but exactly how it was on this mini-billboard. It appears that the hapless executive assistant over at Better Beach Sales–sister company to our infamous Better Beach Rentals, took a screen shot or picture of the floor plan, then tried to blow it up to billboard size. And not a single soul there could be bothered to think, “Hey, this might just make us look like a troupe of complete ----- idiots to the outside world. Maybe we should call in someone who knows how to run one of the fancy, new-fangled computers and fix this?”

Nah, why the hell would these nincompoops actually give a darn about details?

Details…like my favorite of them all: take a look back up at that last picture. It kinda undermines their whole luxury schtick when none of those ----- -faces can spell “Bedroom” right. And it wasn’t a singular typo, either–they are straight-up selling 4-“Bedrom” condos over here!

Man, and these guys want you trust them with all your Oak Island real estate needs? Sheeshus funking crust…

Content created on: 31 July/1 August 2021 (Sat/Sun)

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