House

Siding is up.  New windows are installed.  Foundation is repaired and if we ever see rain again, the basement does not leak.  Guttering is replaced.  Overgrown trees and bushes are cut down in  both front and back yards.  

New mattress and box springs have been delivered and the 15 year old mattress and 25 year old box springs have been removed from the premises.  The old mattress was prefect in the middle -- but both sides had been worn into deep cavities.  The dogs sleep in the middle.  The humans slept in the sloping sides.  Now everyone is on an equal flat, firm, and pillowy surface.  All the pillows have been replaced with fresh, non-allergenic ones. 

New plumbing has been installed in the tub so we now have a functioning shower.  We once again have flowing water in the house -- which was shut off for two days for water pipe replacements. Bathroom has been completely taken apart to facilitate plumbing work which was actually pretty dog-gone messy.  Linen closet had to have all shelving removed to get into the tub.  Now everything is cleaned and put back in place -- including all the sheets and towels in the linen closet. 

The air conditioner which has had heavy usage because of our hot, dry summer has been re-furbished, both outside and in.  The cool was getting less cool as the summer went on, but now we're back to lovely inside temperatures.  The new fan / light in the computer room is also  bringing a cooling breeze to the back of the house. 

New DVR from Dish Network was installed this morning -- along with wireless internet connection.  We had the Hopper installed -- a DVR that records 6 channels at once and allows one to skip commercials. 

It's time for a rest.  Cleaning is still on the agenda -- only the bathroom has been cleaned to the bone.  But most of the repair work is down - for the time being. 

Let there be -- TEA!

Many years ago, when Hubby was young and strong, he built a stereo cabinet for our house. Remember stereos? Record players, tuners, speakers -- we even had a reel-to-reel. He built the cabinet to contain all his "equipment" which, after five years of living together, he decided was safe to bring into "our" house.

Many people feel we have the best of all worlds -- Hubby kept his own house after we bought the little bungalow we share. For a while his adopted mother lived there. Then it stood empty after she died. Eventually he rented the house. Then a tenant who was on the wrong side of the law got in trouble with his drug-running buddies and they tried to burn the house down in retaliation. Actually, only the garage and back part of the house burned but because of water and smoke damage, the entire house had to be rehabbed. So we gave up on tenants and turned the house into an office . . . and Hubby, who must always be busy, keeps his tools and workshop there and runs little business ventures out of it. Actually, the current venture isn't so little, but that's another story for another time.

Anyway, back to the stereo cabinet. Hubby built a floor to ceiling (10 feet?) wood cabinet with spaces measured to fill all his equipment AND records. This cabinet is SO huge and heavy that it takes up half a wall and requires a team of men to move (it's made of wood, remember?). But then stereo equipment began to shrink. The reel-to-reel was the first to go. Then the cassette players. Finally we boxed up the records and sent them to Hubby's house along with the record player. Now we have the CD that plays multiple discs, a tuner, and hundreds of CDs which need racks to hold them, not shelves.

I began to turn the huge wooden stereo cabinet into display shelves. I collected those Christmas houses for a while. The top three shelves held them. I collected tea pots and the bottom two shelves held them.

And then I quit keeping house. Hubby, who had never kept house, didn't seem to notice. Clearly the dogs didn't care. The dishwasher broke and we didn't replace it for seven long years and during that time, I just didn't go into the living room. Well, I dusted it maybe once a year. And then I kind of stopped even doing that. The room was filled with blue glass and flowers and art work and winter houses and tea pots - and the job just became too massive to tackle without a dishwasher for the glass. Oh - did I say there was a baby grand piano in the room, loaded with art glass and expensive statuary?

Only Fritzy ever really visited the living room. And his purposes were less than altruistic. He made it his job to water the tea pots and tea cups on the bottom shelving. Whenever I'd actually go into the living room, I had to clear off the bottom shelf and empty the tea cups of his pee. You might want to re-think if I ever invite you over and offer you a fine porcelain cup filled with fresh brewed tea. I didn't clear off the shelves to stop him because I actually had no place to store the things displayed there. This house is crammed full to the rafters. Just when I'd think I finally had Fritzy trained not to pee on the bottom shelf of the cabinet, I'd find that he has sneakily discovered a new way to hide his activity.

Getting the CD player working this past weekend made me re-evaluate the stereo cabinet. Hubby has offered to remove it. I've thought about it, but he made it -- for us. It was a labor of love -- and trust (Hubby loves his music probably better than anything in his life, even now, when he no longer makes music -- I imagine he would trade me in to get his voice back - and I don't begrudge him that thought - if I had a talent like that I'd do anything in my power to keep it -- time and age are ugly masters). Anyway, I'm keeping the stereo cabinet.

My grad course this summer is about UDL -- Universal Design Learning -- which means making everything, including learning, accessible to EVERY one. This got me thinking about making our living room, once again, accessible to the family. The one thing I would like to do and can't, is replace the wall-t0-wall carpeting with that fake wood flooring you can wipe down in a jiffy. Old dogs, sick dogs -- we've had them. And frankly, carpeting with incontinent dogs is less than attractive. You just never get rid of the smell, especially to new dogs, when the sick dogs have gone on to better rewards. The guests might not know, but the new dog can tell immediately where the favorite pee spot was for the old dog. Consequently, under the baby grand is where every sick dog (young or old) goes to have accidents. And this old body of mine is less than agile in getting under there now. But the piano and the wood stereo cabinet are simply too big for us to move out if carpet is to be replaced. Hubby, not yet ready to concede that he can't fix this problem for us himself, has at least had the seed planted. The carpeting must go -- if not this year, in the near future.

The piano will probably go first. It was his piano; he acquired it for $50 and kept it in his living room during his bachelor days. When I first saw it, he had dirty underwear and a handgun laying inside the lid. We had it restored, refinished, and for 25 years it has been our prize possession, but now no one plays it. Hubby doesn't play and twelve years of piano lessons only gave me the ability to read sheet music - not to really MAKE music. My back is so destroyed with arthritis now that I can't sit at the backless bench for more than ten minutes or so at a time -- and consequently, the automatic knowledge that once made my fingers play specific notes is pretty well lost. We've talked about selling the piano -- but can't bring ourselves to advertise it. Lately we've talked about giving it to someone who will love it as we once did. Now, it sits in grand, dusty splendor, taking up most of our living room, untouched, untuned, and only the dogs visit it for nefarious purposes.

So . . . the winter houses are going to be mostly put away. The stereo shelves are so deep that I can leave a few for height interest. I found that the ugly plastic CD holders, if turned sideways, will fit in the spaces originally intended for the reel-t0-reel and cassette players. The cabinet is once again holding music as it was intended.

That leaves the tea pots. I found the last saucer yesterday that was still yellow from Fritzy's pee. It made me sad when I put it in the dishwasher. Poor little, stubborn Fritzy who died so young (okay, he was 10 -- but that's young now-a-days) from kidney failure. He had spent all eight years of his time with us filling up those tea cups. The new dogs don't water the tea cups anymore. They sniff them inquiringly (because clearly I hadn't cleaned up all that pee from last summer) but they don't add their own scent. Luie only visits the living room to leave a little something under the piano. Gus only visits if he's sick.

I'm putting the tea pots back on the shelves, only this time higher up. They will now go where the winter houses have sat. No dogs will get to pee on them. Holding each tea pot brought me a measure of joy I haven't felt in household things in some time which is why I'm leaving them out. The ones that didn't (only two, actually) were stored away with the houses (I found a couple of boxes -- Hubby can figure out where to put them in the garage after I have them filled.

Slowly, the stereo cabinet is cleaning up. The dust has been wiped away. The CDs are organized. The player works. The tea pots are slowly being washed, dried, and admired. At least one corner of the living room will be clean come July. Another era of our lives has passed, though. It's all bitter - sweet.

A picture from several years ago (not the stereo cabinet) showing how packed out little house is with stuff. The blue glass was mostly stored away ten years ago.

Art

I have three paintings that might -- or then, again, might not -- be valuable. I have no idea what I should do with them. It worries me at night, during those godawful 3 a.m. hours when I don't sleep. I think about these paintings that no one looks at and feel like I should find someone to love them. If they are valuable it would be lovely to garner some reward for having kept them from the Goodwill, though. And if they're just "starving artist" paintings worth $19.99 each, well, then, someone has empty space in their den right now and needs to be cheered by the artistic endevors of these gents who put their souls into their work.

One, a landscape of Pike's Peak, was painted by a distant relative, Frank M. Benedict. The painting, in wonderful shades of blues and grays, was given to my parents as a wedding gift. My mother did not appreciate the painting, though both Dad and I liked it a lot. Of course, we liked Pike's Peak a lot and Mother -- well, I'm not so sure. However, she always talked about Benedict as being a dilettante painter with little to no skill and a man who never made enough money to count in this life. I think Daddy and I liked the painting because it looked like Pike's Peak. Mother never saw beyond the fact that Benedict was a failure in her estimation. I should have used the flash in taking this picture -- but then you could have clearly seen that a plumbing problem made Hubby remove the ceiling (2006) which we never bothered to put back up. The Benedict painting is surrounded by a print of New Orleans, a strange metal engraving of London, and a Caribbean mask -- we're nothing if not eclectic.

The second painting is very 1950's in aspect, and again was passed on to use by my mother -- in point of fact it WAS painted in 1948. It is by a another landscape artist who was also a teacher at the University of Wyoming. My great aunt bought the picture, I think, because she thought that it would one day be valuable, she liked the pink color because she had a an all pink apartment, and she knew the guy (Don Wiest) who painted it, as they taught at the University together. The picture, lots of cream swirls on a blue/green and pink landscape is supposed to be (I think I was told) Vedauvoo National Park in Wyoming -- which I only visited once when I was nine and I remember it had interesting rock formations. My aunt took us to picnic there and I have an old black and white Brownie Kodac pictures of a chubby me on the rocks. Anyway, the painting is quite modern in aspect -- the rocks look like swirls of whipped cream. I brought this picture upstairs and photographed it in the light -- made for a heck of a clearer view.

Here's the real Vedauvoo rocks: they do somewhat resemble this painting, I guess.

The final painting is a wall sized mural and was painted by an African American, Hank Smith, to chronical a rich woman's party. It's supposed to be a painting "of the guests interacting" -- but mostly it's just globs of paint that look like they were thrown at the canvas. We're talking 1970 psychedelic art here. Anyway, Hubby was doing odd jobs for the woman who commissioned the piece and when he admired it, she told him to "take it away, please." And so he did. It hung in his house around the corner for several years but when his mother moved in, she thought the picture had an evil feel to it and asked that he remove it from her living room. Hence, this mural joined the other two in the basement. Again, as you can see, I should have used the flash in the basement.

I suppose it's criminal, really, t0 have all three hanging in the dark in a room no one visits except to pass through to the washing machine. Nobody ever looks at them other than the spiders. They should be sold to someone who would like them. Other than the one of Pike's Peak, I have no heart-felt interest in any of them. And according to the little on-line information that I could gather about any of the artists, only Frank M. Benedict every had much of a reputation (at least his reputation survived my mother's contempt). His painting is in the worst condition -- Mother smoked all the years we owned it and it is quite old (Frank lived from 1840 to 1930 -- probably painted it about the turn of the 20th century which makes it about 109 years old now). Having spent the last 20 years in my basement (since Mother shipped it to me) and not been appreciated by anyone, a good cleaning is clearly needed for it to show well. The Vedauvoo painting would look great in someon'es 1950's retro apartment but doesn't do well with my Victorian era furniture. It just took me 20 minutes to clean off the spider webs clinging to it's canvas. And the wall mural? My lord, it's big! I don't remember how we got it into the basement, but we'd need movers to get it out.

This is our upstairs living room. So just what the heck do I do with these three interesting paintings? Where's the Antique's Road Show when you need 'em?

Summertime Lessons

Things are a bit slow around our house. We seem to be experiencing summertime indolence. We have not exactly become slothful, but we certainly fall into the lethargic category.

Hubby motivated me to purchase for HIM a round-trip ticket to D.C. to visit his sister -- whom he hasn't seen in over 50 years. She doesn't like doggies, so I'm staying home with the boys. Fritzy is unable to travel, anyway.

I have been working on some lesson plans for the fall, mostly because I need to submit them by July 21st. Without a deadline, who knows when I might have opened my word processing application.

Otherwise we mostly putter around, doing a little of this, seeing a movie here and there (Wall-E was charming to me and Hubby slept through it; Kung Fu Panda pleased us both), and trying to keep up with the wash. This has given me some time to reflect on the deep, meaningful, and pertinent knowledge that I've gained from my summer of leisure:

1. Sometimes it's important to purchase new cookware. The stuff we have been using from the 1970's and '80's does not cook nearly as efficiently as the new stuff on the market now. I can get a full spaghetti pot of water boiling in less than five minutes. Who knew cookware had so improved?
2. Laundry that sits in the basement for more than three weeks does not wash itself, darn it!
3. More laundry trivia: the dryer heats up the house fiercely on hot days even when it is located in the far reaches of the basement; the new containers of laundry soap sold at the big box discount store are too heavy to lift; if the basement leaks during torrential rains the dirty clothes on the floor get dirtier and smellier.
   
4. "Stumbling" on the web is an unending source of amusement. Witness:
   

   A teenager was stunned to find that a baby bat had been curled up inside her bra for five hours - as she was wearing it.

5. Playing BigFishGames can also eat up enormous amounts of time and provide hours and hours of solitary entertainment (especially the hidden object games); these games are especially entertaining when one can't sleep.
   
6. Melon seeds can clog up the sink even when one has a heavy duty garbage disposal.
7. Eating the main meal at noon (or thereabouts) means one can have ice cream for supper.
8. It's important to get up and celebrate a "feel good" moment with a terminally ill dog even when that moment occurs at 3 a.m. -- plus he might agree to eat some roast beef just because you've gotten it just for him, chopped it, and are hand feeding it.
9. Reality TV shows are boring; I'm too old for the stuff shown in MTV and the WBC (except for Reaper, of course); and nearly all the CSI shows are too graphically violent for me.
10. Procrastination is just too, too easy.
11. Prices are just too, too high.
12. The weather is too, too wet.

And finally -- the summer is just flying by. It was only June 15 minutes ago. Drat!

Inflation

The talking news heads called yesterday, Friday, June 6, Black Friday. The price of oil rose $13 some dollars per barrel, an all time increase; more jobs were lost in May than any time during the last quarter of a century; and, due to these two pieces of bad news, the stock market plunged.


This morning, after spending two hours hunting down really cheap bargains at the neighborhood garage sales ($3 for a lamp/table combo; $10 for a padded, swiveling desk chair, $1 each for an assortment of education VCR and DVD tapes; 25 cents each for a trunk-load of classical literature), we headed out to the $100 store. You know the drill: no matter how much or how little you purchase in one of these huge box warehouses, you end up spending at least $100.


But inflation has hit the warehouses, too. Today, 18 items (watermelon, fiber laxatives for the dog, Ritz crackers, round steak, pork chops, milk, bing cherries, etc.) ran $237. It's now the $200 store.

Ungalvanized

For the past 60 years our little bungalow has had galvanized pipes which meant, of course, that the corroding in them decreased the water pressure just a little more each year, until this year, when we suddenly were down to a mere trickle, if that.

Also the pipes were springing leaks at an alarming rate. When Hubby was hospitalized in April of 2006 the second night he was there I came home to a flooding basement. I had to sneak into the hospital at 1 a.m. to ask him just where the heck the shut-off valve was to the water (I was too stressed to remember -- and the hospital phones to patient rooms shut down at midnight).

This month Hubby found a another, newer leak in the basement. He's frustrated by his lack of strength to fix these things himself, but he's more than capable of supervising help. In came a little crew that he'd gathered (I don't ask myself where these men come from, I just accept them as they parade through and then camp out in the basement) and they spent the next four days fighting pipe leaks in the basement.

Each time one pipe was fixed, another one sprang a leak. Initially, they determined that three major leaks existed but as they removed one corroded pipe after another, they sort of lost count. I'd like to say we put in copper piping, but we didn't. We went plastic all the way -- so much cheaper.

For two days this week we had no water in the house. The first night we couldn't even flush the toilet, much less take a bath. The second night they saw to it that at least the toilet would semi-flush. Dishes piled up in the sink, everything under each sink was unloaded and strewn on the floors, and pipe joints appeared everywhere. Also, they drilled new holes in the floor to bring new piping into the bath and kitchen, creating mounds of nasty sawdust.

By putting on blinders and shutting down, I managed to exist through the chaos. Suddenly, Hubby claimed they were done. "You can take a bath tonight, Babe," hubby proudly announced. I trudged through the debris now littering my bathroom floor and cabinets, and dutifully turned on the water -- and -- AND -- a full stream of hot water poured -- NO GUSHED -- from the faucet. I hadn't seen that much water in . . .well . . . maybe fifteen years.

I'm still learning how to adjust the new faucets (hot water actually must now be mixed with cold - what a unique thought!) while I'm slowly cleaning up the messes (there's even plastic piping in the living -- I ask you, how did they get the pipe into the living room?). But it's wonderful to have fully functioning water streams in this house. This has been a great Christmas gift.

The View from My Window

Grad classes started for me on Wednesday. I had been looking for info on the class right up until last Sunday when I finally wrote my advisor and asked exactly when classes started and when mine met. She responded immediately so I never checked the on-line schedule again.

Wednesday night I found out that a book had been assigned, about a quarter of the class had the book, and it had to be sent from a small town in southeast Kansas up to the big city. Even worse, next Wednesday's assignment was from the book -- reading two chapters and then writing from an lesson that was only printed in the book. Bah!

I rushed home, ordered the book by next day mail -- and it came this morning (which was a day late but I'm still not a dollar short, so okay, no complaints). I delved immediately into the chapters and found the book, not exactly exciting, but sensible -- which is probably the best that can be hoped for in a grad level text. At the end of the reading I started the writing process. About three hours in I began batting flies. It's deep summer here in the heartland and I live in a hermetically sealed house fueled by cold air-conditioning. Flies do not get a chance to enter my home.

Now here's the backfill. This week, after years of dithering, Hubby gathered his crew and they tore off all the ugly siding that Hubby had put on the front of the house in the 1980's (not the sides or back -- he only put the ugly stuff on the front -- he painted the rest and it looks fine -- but the front of our home slowly weathered to ghetto hideous because he never bothered to stain said front paneling). Then in the early 1990's someone shot a b-b pellet through the smaller front window and we never replaced it. The glass cracked and cracked, until finally half the glass fell into the front yard. The dogs clawed the front door into muddy tatters. The garage door began to disintegrate - and since it was the only thing painted, the paint started to peel. Last year, for a reason only known to Hubby, he pulled all the guttering down along the front of the house -- and then the aneurysm hit and whatever had been planned was put on indefinite hold. I have never complained about the front of the house, believing that my griping would give him cause to complain about my housekeeping - and the less said about that the better.

But on Thursday I came home to a Pepto Bismal colored home-front. When I recovered enough to find my voice, I realized that what I was looking at was insulation. The new paneling was neatly stacked in the driveway, with the huge dumpster that had also been delivered. Wow! The front also has had awnings over the windows -- large metal things that gave us shade from the afternoon sun -- but they were over 50 years old. In the front yard lay the awnings, with the tops all covered in slimy green gunk (which, thankfully, I hadn't been able to see from inside the house or the street).

The view from inside the house was completely different with the awnings gone. The sun poured in -- and it was bright all day long. I could see way up the street and way down. The big picture window has an incredible view which I had never realized before - and I've owned this house since 1974.

On Friday more insulation and some paneling went up. This morning the crew was hard at work by 7:30 a.m. Thankfully, the doggies know the crew and only barked when the pounding sounded like the postman was trying to get inside the front room. I scurried into the office and went to work on my paper, ignoring the din.

However, the flies got annoying so I finally wandered out from lair -- and found all the windows off the front of the house. The kitchen had a brand new window already installed, a lovely, clean white framed window with screens and inside locks - and EVERYTHING I've never had before.

But in the living room the picture window was gone. Open to the street was my whole house. The neighbor kids were congregated in my yard, peering in. The lady two doors down waved at me as I stood, peering out, in my nightgown, hair uncombed, teeth unbrushed, scratching. I had gotten so used to the privacy of my little domain, windows with awnings, covered with shades AND curtains, it had not occurred to me if I could see out -- THEY could see in.

New things are good, right? I've just got to make some adjustments.