Crying time

This morning I drove to a pet shelter and surrendered two kittens. A cat who was obviously someone's pet adopted me this year and gave me three kits in a litter. I have raised them in my kitchen for the past two months. They already had personalities and would look for me hearing my voice when I entered the kitchen. I was already in tears by time I got to the shelter. I just cannot give them all the attention and care they deserve. It is so hard to say goodbye to someone I love.

Just over a year ago I lost a new pet to a car, after an agonizing, painful day and night at emergency. On March 15 I held my dear sweet Natasha in my arms while the vet administered the euthenasia drugs after seventeen years together. Her brother Boris is showing signs of his own age. I thought we were all going to make it into retirement.

I am keeping mama and Curious George, but even as I assume responsibility I know I think love will last ... but I am wrong.

I can't take such heartache.

Everything takes longer than you think

Cut the power, pulled the medicine cabinet, opened the wall. That's all.

When you hit drywall with an ordinary carpenter hammer you can usually turn it sideways to maximize the damage, you get a nice satisfying "Smock!" - and the whole head goes clean through. Usually. Not here. I hit this wall with the business face at half-speed and nothing happened. Took three tries with increasing moderate force and all I got out of that was a half inch hole. Knocking out a small rectangle took twenty minutes. Very ugly. Just what the hell kind of drywall IS this?

Well, got my keyhole saw out thinking that I would have to saw the wall away then noticed that it is a full one inch thick. What? ... ah, I see what you did there ... THIS stuff is regular wallboard and a double layer of plaster over it. Always wondered why the walls in the rest of the house were crappy ragged peeling away and the bathroom the only square, smooth room in the joint. So I grab my trusty jigsaw and start to trim it out with power, arrgh! and of course this fills the air in (both bathroom and sunroom) with choking fine white powdery dust. Just freaking lovely, and you can trace my track by the footprints all over the house, of which there are many because, you see, whenever you are working on two sides of the same wall from two different rooms there will be many, many occasions you need exactly the sidecutters and gaze longingly at them sitting peacefully on the table out of reach in the other room through the hole you just opened.

Note to self: Google "plaster dust hazards"

And now a note on the beautiful subtleties of home improvement. Today was a day I once again fully understood the admonitions in my favorite renovation books that taking on an old home destroys family and domestic bliss. I spent all day and this is all I have to show for it. But I take my time because that is my basic currency these days; I can trade my own labors for speed. Here is the backside, the sunroom ... a number of things to take note of here, some of which really piss me off:

• "T" framing in opening to be removed for glass block, no big deal, but notice the angle cut below it. That is where the original stud was cut out when the add-on kitchen was built. Trouble is, this is a load bearing wall and there was NO provision for taking the strain. I will have to construct a doubler above to bridge the opening and place a cripple stud above it to lay the strain off against the two studs they did not cut on either side.
• Whole lot of bastard framing goin' on.
• This is LUMBER here, folks. An honest 2" by 4". Rough cut. None of this dimensional, nominal stuff you buy at Lowe's. Probably milled on site back in the 19teens. Compare the darker studs with the amber one at right used to frame in the bathroom closet I removed. I can smell the pungent pine sap every time I saw or drill.
• The white and yellow wires lower left are new, installed by me. The outlet box lower right (seen from behind) was original to the house, the wires I cut are visible above it. I got to it just in time.
• DAMNIT. Look at this. The top neutral wire isn't covered by the outlet screw, in fact I do not know what was holding it at all. When I put a screwdriver to the screw there wasn't any torque to it. It was twinned with another to jump the power off this outlet to an overhead light, which isn't in itself wrong, but myself I would run one pigtail under the screw and splice the second circuit into it somewhere back inside the box. Not try to get two #12s under a screw post meant for one.
• Second side, the hot, are covered ... BUT ... the "buttonhooks" faced two directions! DAMNIT. The bottom one, the wrong-way one, will always be squished out from flush contact with the screw terminal when you torque the screw. How much time does it take to get the righty-tighty?
• I am so anal retentive over such stuff that I will often take a half hour just to install one outlet when I rewire. Take care not to nick the conductor when I strip the insulation off . Twist the buttonhook with my needle nose "just so" that I get a 3/4 turn and you can't see copper protruding from the screw when I'm done. Torque it down to specs, always. Wrap a turn of electrician's tape around the outlet terminals before I stuff everything in the box. Use #12 gauge when the code says I can use #14 gauge, #10 when it says #12. Loose connections cause sparks, sparks cause fires.
  
• Note no fire blocks anywhere between studs. And, this place was balloon framed, which means the studs run from the foundation footer all the way to the roof joists. One spark and everything goes. Bring hotdogs.
  
• Two wire, no ground. Rubber insulation crumbling from age. Jesus

Also today: Pickup would not start, dead battery. Lawnmower quit on me halfway through. Finally had to stop to think about dinner and I just could not stand myself. I stunk. So I rigged a shower using a sprinkler head and a wire deck chair. Can't say I recommend it but at least it has been in the 90s every day for a week and if you stink bad enough you don't think about the 60 degree water. Much. Interesting getting to all of the bitty parts, though ... let's just say I know something about how a bidet must feel.

End of the trail

long day's journey into night

Been off work a solid week for the first time in perhaps ten years. Not sure I know how to do this. Unless I serve something I wake up restless and unfocused. I am going to have to learn how to serve myself.

Work on the house is rewarding enough but at the end of the day it is still just me, an old old country place, and a passel of fleabag cats. Boris is of an age he looks now only for a warm place in the sun to sleep, and the small can of premium wet catfood at precisely 5:30pm. I stategically placed cardboard boxes near ledges and the bed he likes so he can get up without having to try to leap. Please don't tell him I told you that. I watch him stagger and stumble and stutter enough now to feel how it is for him. Seventeen is an awfully advanced age for a cat.

Here is the backside of the bathroom wall, where it faces the breakfast nook. (Bonus: zombie red-eyed kitten supervisors.) I plan to cut the power circuits tomorrow and rip out the medicine cabinet to open the wall between the studs. Enough to rough-in a four high by three long 8x8 glass block opening for light. The bathroom is such a hole. Then I will have to offset the waste line and hot/cold supply valves since I never liked the fact you could rest your chin on the bathroom sink while sitting on the can.

Funny how things have changed the last hundred years. No ... not broadband internet, cellphones replacing Western Electric, flat screen HDTV, Department of Homeland Security changes ... the fact stair bannisters in this place are a full six inches lower than you expect from a modern townhouse, and this bathroom is smaller than closets you find in homes built today. At least I can move the sink away from the pot. Humans a hundred years ago were different than you and I. They predominantly spent their days outdoors. And they were shorter.

I haven't shaved this whole time - Hell, I haven't bathed. I drove to 7/11 this morning to crap. I have to use a bucket from the kitchen to fill the tank to use the crapper at home. While there washing my hands I observed in the restroom mirror silver whiskers are hanging from wattles I never used to have. It occurred to me when I got home my selfwinding Rolexstopped right where I left it when it got too hot and sweaty to bother with anymore. A few days ago, don't ask me which. Then I remembered how pleased I was my old schoolhouse clock is re-energized and penduluming nicely again with just one swing after a few years' rest. The cretins I let use my house in my absence even broke the glass out of the dial face. How on earth does that happen? Obviously they had no need for such a quaint antique. No doubt they wore digital Casio LCDs.

I considered briefly being perturbed over the noise the clock makes, a background, gutteral "tock-TOCK!-tock" marking constant time here. You can hear it from anywhere in the house. I really don't like external drumbeats driving my internal clock anymore. Not at all. Not after living my whole adult working life with the precise moment I eat, sleep, shower, work, shit, quit, move, relax, talk, walk, wake, make, breathe, leave, love, live dictated by the military. They assign people twenty-four by seven by three sixty five to enforce such rules. I used to be one of them. And, I was very good at it.

Nope. By nature, I like getting up near sunrise every morning to spend two hours doing no thing. Nothing but listening to NPR Morning Edition sitting on the porch glider drinking my coffee. Doing the Sudoku and the crossword next in fresh gel inkpen only after I ensure the hanging birdfeeder in the purple crepe myrtle tree out front is freshly charged with safflower seed. The cardinals and goldfinches count on me.

Then I realized if not for the daily newspaper I wouldn't know what day it is.

Gotta serve something.

Wolf Creek

Bought this old place in 1997 when I was transferred to Virginia. Lived in it three years before I got called away someplace else. I had a string of oafs live in it over the past seven years, just trying not to let it burn to the ground. I'm 50 now, and told I have to retire from the Coast Guard so I am trying to adjust to being home fulltime. Got a lot of work to do and so let me get started ...

My ugly pink bathroom.

My water was rusty colored and there were some soggy spots in the yard, then one month my water bill shot up over $100. The place was plumbed in the 1950's when the old black family who owned this place embraced indoor plumbing and abandoned their outhouse. I know this because I found newspapers stuffed into the joists over the bath when I was tearing into some wiring. Daily Press, 1955 The expected lifespan of galvanized pipes is about fifty years.

So, I tried to get someone to give me estimates on the job. Peculiar thing around Tidewater is that the custom McMansions make so much more money than the miscellaneous $2,000 small job that it is near impossible to get a tradesman to stop by. So when Phil Moore of Moore's Plumbing said he would replace my water main with 3/4" copper and terminate it to a manifold under my kitchen sink like I wanted, and he could start Thursday, I just said "go ahead." I was afraid I wouldn't get another offer.

Now it's the hottest part of the Summer and I don't have a shower. I got the kitchen back in service but there is a little work between now and then. I'll keep you posted.