Let me begin by saying I’m already looking forward to 2023.

I honestly don’t know what happened. The New Year started with a quiet evening at home, doing our best to stay awake until midnight, watching an embarrassingly cheesy show from the Space Needle and then going to bed.

New Year’s Day was pretty smooth. Got to watch some of the Rose Parade coverage, saw the float from Torrance (where I was raised), watched some pretty good football games and did what you’re supposed to do on a typical first day of the New Year.

That’s where it stopped. Or, if you look at it this way, when it all started.

On Sunday, I was hanging with someone who complained that he and his wife had been experiencing headaches lately. Wait. What? You mean, like you weren’t feeling well, and you came HERE?

Shortly afterwards, we found out he tested positive for COVID. We had only been around him for 45 minutes, but you never know. So far, we’re clean, passing our first test. One more on Friday and we will have somehow dodged that bullet.

But then it got worse.

Monday morning, I got up at the usual time, 4:45am, and headed downstairs to my office. I noticed a reflection from the carpeting as I got closer. By the time I stepped on the ground level, I was standing in 2-inches of water. Our entire downstairs was flooded. Our sump pump, apparently inspired by Antonio Brown, just decided to stop working. Melting snow and pouring rain didn’t help and our entire lower level was underwater.

At first, I went into “Fight the Battle” mode. I tried to get the sump pump to return to life, but without luck. While trying to move things around downstairs, the paper shredder popped open and scattered shredded paper bits into the water. To this day, anytime you walk downstairs, you leave a trail of paper bits all over the house.

I went upstairs with my laptop (as my main PC that I do everything on drowned a painful death) and wrote my contribution for Radio Show Prep, as I do every morning. After that, I bolted over to Home Depot and bought a new sump pump and a 9-gallon shop vac. I hooked up the sump pump to a hose that emptied in the bathtub and started sucking up water with the shop vac. I was getting nowhere. I basically found myself just keeping it even.

Thus, the beginning of our first big adventure in 2022. An inspector came out and said, “Yep, you’re screwed.” A crew is downstairs as I type this, beginning the dry out. Then there’s a packing crew coming tomorrow to take everything out of the rooms and put into storage. Then the serious dry-out begins, followed by repairs, recarpeting and painting and then bringing everything back.

Oh, and did I mention my iPhone went into Satanic mode Monday afternoon and I’m waiting for a replacement to come into T-Mobile so I can reconnect to the world. It was writing gibberish in texts, jumping from one program to another, all on its own. Linda Blair would have been proud.

I went into T-Mobile and they said they had never seen a phone behave like that before. Wasn’t dropped. No water damage. It just went ballistic. So, they ordered one for me and I picked it up the next day. But when I got home to finish restoring it, my password didn’t work. So I had to clean it, restore from scratch and see what happens. It’s been several hours and it’s still not done. Then, because it’s a new phone and new access, it’s not connecting with Facebook. Oh, I can launch the program and put in my password, but then it wants an authenticator code. It doesn’t send me one. Now, I’m trying to figure that out. I’m basically locked out of Facebook right now.

With my main PC down, I’m doing this all on a laptop. With my downstairs studio gone, I’ve set up a portable microphone with my laptop and recording my daily radio shows while I sit perched next to my bed in the bedroom. Yep, living the dream.

With a lot of my production and writing projects, I have to download files from the cloud; everything now takes three times as long to do, and each day this week has been a serious struggle.

It’s gotta get better, right?

Or will 2022 just be 2020, too?

Tim Hunter

P.S.–I do feel like I’m tempting fate, posting that picture before the week is actually over.