Graham Sedam Writes

It is with a heavy heart that I write this series of posts. There will be three in total as it has been over two months since this debacle began, and those months have been filled with "banging my head against the wall" types of experiences. The full extent of the catastrophe has been frustrating, but we just kept picking away at it one day at a time. Overall, we were lucky compared to some. *That's a very generic paragraph that could apply to a ton of things. A little more specificity, Mr. Vague?* We had biblical rains for twenty-four hours starting on September 21st and ending sometime during the early morning of the 22nd. Our neighborhood experienced around five to seven inches within that period. When we've had heavy rains in the past, or a very wet spring due to snow melt and rain, our sump pump (or sub pump, based on your preference) would kick into action and leave us with no worries about our basement getting flooded. While the monstrous storm raged...

A few weeks ago, my two older kids had a "fall break," aka MEA, aka my kids don't understand how aka works, which leads to head-scratching laughter. Basically, the teachers have meetings and hold conferences with parents. So, we met with their teachers and learned about how the year was going from their teachers' perspective. The teachers also get our perspective and that helps them handle the students on an individual basis. It's nice to know where improvement might be needed and to clarify certain expectations. For the most part, we walked away with warm fuzzies. I also walked away from my older son's conferences with some stomach contents on my shirt. Thanks, baby boy. That's still better than when he rained spit-up down on me as I held him up above me that same week only days prior. I didn't get any in my mouth, but my nose wasn't so lucky. I walked upstairs to my wife and could only mutter "help" in a very defeated tone. I mos...

There's a series of posts that have stemmed from one post I've been working on that is based on my family's time spent during MEA (2016). I decided to take a portion of that and post it as a stand-alone post last week, An Inconvenient Poop , and have done so this week as well. When we were out and about on the Tuesday of MEA week, I noticed that I'd lost all network bars on my phone. I wasn't surprised due to the fact that we were indoors, even though we were on the top floor of a building and there was a sizable sun roof above us. Plus, that phone had been restarting itself every once in awhile for about the past six months. The frequency increased when I put Kaspersky security software on it. You know, to make it more secure... I had almost finished an email draft regarding our water damaged basement ( post coming a-la-future ) when the phone started getting crazy and restarted itself about five times in a row. I put the phone away and continued with our fam...