|
|
June 12, 2002
Ah. What's this? Oh. Hang
Ah. What's this? Oh. Hang on.
*snap*
There. That's much better.
Anyway: the Relocation Gods have accepted my offering of half a burnt Ballpark frank (they smoke when you char 'em, and did you know that it takes an average of 6.1 bites to eat one?), and have grudgingly initiated the first stage of my transfer to Somewhere That Has Not Exploded. Which is, as Colonel Richard Franklin Babbage declared upon hearing that his troops had managed to massacre 8,000 screaming Hottentots using just three boxes of ammunition and an old boot, a "Vewy, vewy good thing." Kudos to the hated British.
In other news, Ground Zero has remained exactly the same for nearly two weeks. It's surreal: so much commotion, noise, activity, smoke, smell...now all is still. One big concrete-lined hole in the ground, please, and make it snappy! Yes, I want fries with that. Idiot.
We shall see if the Gods bestow further gifts upon me, although they may indeed already be doing so in the form of extra fat about me middle. As it stands now, things are threatening to look up, and we all need that.
Further evidence of the overwhelming power of my own experience: I watched the entire first season of the Sopranos this weekend, which apparently killed John Gotti. I stand in awe of my own synchronicty.
July 03, 2002
The terrible thing about working
The terrible thing about working in big towering buildings--and post-9/11 my building is in fact the tallest in downtown Manhattan--is that, in addition to being targeted by the occasional airborne maniac, the damn things continually make noise. It's not the shooshing of the elevator shafts or the creaking of the steel bones--the place groans like a galleon on windy days--it's the thuds and bangs that get me. They echo in a peculiar way, which sounds pretty much like you'd expect a large explosion in Midtown to sound. It's nerve wracking. Fortunately, my nerves are being soothed by beneficent chemical concoctions at the moment.
Which is an excellent thing: buying a house, it is said, is number three on the list of Life's Big-Ass Stresses, after divorce and death of a spouse or some such things. They weren't kidding. It's not a big smack-you-in-the-head kind of stress, though...it's a sneaky, squirmy kind of stress that creeps up on you (damn--more bangs...sonofabitch) and tells you that you really don't know enough about the contracts that you've just signed and they're going to take all your money and leave you with nothing, or, failing that, you simply won't get the house that you've just spent the better part of a year looking for.
But, as I said: beneficent chemical concoctions. Legal, mind you, with a proper prescription. Little... shiny... happy... pills! Gotta love 'em.
A temporary fix for what is, no doubt, a lifelong affliction etched into my very molecules. But right now, all I want is to not be afraid of mysterious booms and to get my damn house. No big thing, right? Not to much to ask, hey? Right?
Right.
July 08, 2002
*Yawn.* Or, more accurately, AAUGH!!!
*Yawn.* Or, more accurately, AAUGH!!!
That felt good, so I'm going to do it again. Bear with me.
AAUGH!!!
There. Now people nearby are furtively dialing 911, so that They can come and get me.
A long weekend of weddings and familial gatherings has put the Big Kabosh on your regularly scheduled Sunday Spew, which is just as well because my head wasn't quite in that peculiar Biblical space, anyway. I'm smack in the middle of William Propp's excellent commentary on and translation of Exodus 1-18. It's wonderful to thoroughly read a tale wherein the Very Important Protagonist (who happens to be God, but never mind) tells folks what to do, and when they don't, Very Bad Things happen to them, and I'm not just talking about onions falling on their heads.
This is rewarding and diverting because, in the course of buying a house, I have discovered that many, many people do not do what you tell them to do, and when they don't, nothing happens, except that you don't get what you want. I want a staff that I can turn into a snake, so that the house-buying process will proceed in accordance with my will. Let my mortgage application go! Or there will be bloody water and frogs and mysterious ailments of the skin for all.
Anyway. This commentary on Exodus is the first of two volumes, and the author tells me in brief correspondence that he's six years away from completing volume II. Big Brainus Interruptus, that, but it figures--he worked on volume I for 35 years. Hopefully, he won't die before volume II is finished. I'll have to grab ahold of another commentary for Exodus 19-40, so that I can move onward through the ancient literature.
And now: a mysterious noise.
*ping*
July 19, 2002
Holy O'Moses what a Xanax-munching
Holy O'Moses what a Xanax-munching day this is, already. Actually, today's stress began last night; hence the extended Argh (TM). Again with the pesky humans trying to communicate and failing. A dozen people are involved in the buying of this house, and words and meanings all fall by the wayside in a slow-moving slurry of garbled intent. That's how it seems, anyway. I'm sure the reality of the situation is very different. After all, I'm just one perception-locus, and I don't have all the data yet. What I do know is that when I show up at the office on my day off, just to be here when a package arrives, intending while I wait to make required phone calls early in the morning to resolve myriad real-estate related problems, and the telephones are out of service... well, that's just more evidence that God, if there is such a thing, loves giving me the Big Thumb In The Eye. And that he thinks that's funny.
Which it is, really. But that's probably just the tranquilizers talking.
However: all of this is mitigated, helped out, and generally made better by the reality of having a Really Swell Partner, who is able to step up to the plate in the midst of her own ball of stress and handle things. Woo! How's that for a frappéd metaphor?
August 17, 2002
Still hot. More hot coming.
Still hot. More hot coming. Hot with rain. The urban jungle has never been more humid, fetid and insert-unpleasant-Latinate-root-id. This weekend promises to be a steam bath. Fun for the whole family. Bring the kids.
Can't wait to escape. Soon. Soon, my precious. No, wait. That's a different sort of obsessive creature, and besides, I'm not after jewelry. I'm after an abode! And space for my head. A place where my girlfriend is not harassed in my very courtyard, prompting me to go down and shout testosterone at youthful hooligans. Which was very satisfying, but so old. The problem, I have long maintained, is not the city. It's the people in it. The structures are just fine. It's all the humans, hiving it, brushing up against each others' psychic space until the line between person and monkey gets too damn blurred. Some people like it here. Some people, clearly, like people, of all sorts. I find an unpleasant experience unpleasant, not "diverse."
So, I'm off to bed now. Bed with the sleeping head on the pillow which is not as fluffy as it used to be and will be replaced when the bed that it is on is in the new bedroom of the house which is being bought, for me to live in.
August 27, 2002
Let's see...one more trip to
Let's see...one more trip to the dentist, tomorrow, for some drilling into my skull...a trip to Philadelphia to rendezvous with a generously donated automobile...also tomorrow...and, on Thursday, a trip to the new town, to stay overnight, and then the house closing on Friday at noon. We'll be meeting in front of Hop's Saloon, and will each march ten paces, turn, draw our lawyers and fire.
Huh. I'm busy. How grown-up of me.
August 29, 2002
The closing draws nigh. Posting
The closing draws nigh. Posting will be sparse for the next few days.
September 02, 2002
Now: we have a house.
Now: we have a house. Weird.
Next: everything in this hovel must be packed into small boxes by 9AM Saturday.
The fun continues.
I must also mention that,
I must also mention that, while the aforementioned fun continues, Astonished Head will be a bit thin. There's much to do...packing...phone calls...more packing...and packing.
But: once the move is complete and I can find a phone jack that works, I will regale my readers with tales of homeowning horror. And all the usual blather, of course.
September 06, 2002
A Man. A New House.
A Man.
A New House.
The Final Frenzy Of Packing Begins.
In Theaters Now.
One of the things that must be packed up is this computer. In fact, I'm packing it right now. When next I write, it will be from lovel
September 12, 2002
Moved in. Not unpacked. Spackling.
Moved in. Not unpacked. Spackling. Refinishing floors. Getting up at 5:45 AM to catch the bus.
Very.
Tired.
More later.
September 13, 2002
Now I sit in an
Now I sit in an upstairs room, surrounded by boxes, my monitor perched on a cardboard monitor stand provided by U-Haul. I'm inhaling polyurethane fumes from the freshly-sealed floor downstairs. There are crickets outside, mumbling in the dark. I'm exhausted. I'm home. I escaped.
Almost. I still cling remora-like to the economic shark: my job is in the city. But now, when I come home, I'm not still in the city. The air here is cooler, cleaner. There's more green; we've got a bunch of trees on our little plot, including a big honking maple out front. And I'm still within walking distance of good Chinese food. The nearest movie theater is a drive-in (one of the few remaining in operation in the country).
I escaped.
I escaped!
Ha!
Take that!
Now to shower and bed. Soon: unstoppable blather.
September 15, 2002
Back before I started Astonished
Back before I started Astonished Head, when I was regularly perusing Andrew Sullivan's site and exploring the links he includes there, I swore that, should I ever create such a site of my own, I would never talk about my toilet. I couldn't conceive of how plumbing could become worthy of even a passing mention. That was before I bought a house. Now, I can well conceive of how plumbing might become worthy of mention. Mainly because it's expensive.
That being said, I'm still not going to talk about my toilet. That's where I draw the line. I'll talk about my cat, my medication, my nighttime psychoses and my dreams, but never will I ramble on about my porcelain.
I will say, however, that after an intriguing match decided in less than four rounds, I have installed a new bathroom faucet. I mention this because it is an excellent example of the old "for want of a nail" adage. The previous owners did not replace a washer in the hot water faucet. This caused the faucet to leak onto the sinktop whenever it was used. This water often overflowed the lip of said sinktop, slid down the side of the vanity, and pooled onto the linoleum. Eventually, the linoleum glue gave up the ghost, and the water seeped into the subfloor. The wood began to rot. The damp wood attracted carpenter ants which, while the sworn enemies of termites, do their own sort of damage. They built a small village. Now, the subflooring is soft, and will need to be replaced, which I will do myself to save hundreds of dollars in labor costs. Cost of the original washer? 15 cents.
Now: dinner, and bed, in preparation for many hours' worth of bus time.
September 16, 2002
According to my statistical elves,
According to my statistical elves, Astonished Head is a morning read for most folks, with a smaller number checking in at lunchtime...or, if they're on the West coast, first thing in the morning. Traffic dropped off markedly at the end of August, but then shot back up in September, which is astounding because I've had nothing of import to say for going on three weeks now. Yes--that does assume that I have indeed had important things to say at other times. So sue me. I theorize that people were on vacation in August, from which it follows that the site gets read in the workplace. Shame! Wasting your employers' valuable money. I am contributing to the manufacture of poor quality cars and inferior-style electronics.
Things are still a mess here at Peapod. But the living room floor, she is shiny. Satin, actually. The last of the polyurethane fumes have dispersed, and Bob the Cat seems only marginally dimmer than she was before the staining/sealing process began.
If I can dig out my reference books, I will soon have a fascinating piece about Minoru Yamasaki and why the Islamists were so bloody offended by our gleaming towers. As you might expect, the reasons go back thousands of years.
What else is new?
September 20, 2002
The very definition of a
The very definition of a minor annoyance: returning to behold your freshly-painted living room wall to discover that a dozen gnats, small flies, and no-see-ums decided to land on the bright white paint before it dried.
The corner of a paper towel and a second coat tomorrow should solve the problem.
Idiot bugs. Me no like.
September 26, 2002
Very light on the printed
Very light on the printed slovos today, my droogies. I must rearrange many boxes into a more habitable warren, and install the giant hamster wheel.
In the meantime, if you're bored, go here and play with the puppet: "It's momentarily diverting!" says local farmer Joss Wibble.
October 21, 2002
It's appropriate that, while I struggle with the bits and bytes of template HTML and Moveable Type's nifty Perl modules, I am also--still--in the process of painting rooms and refinishing floors. Late yesterday I removed the last of the horribly misplaced linoleum from the ground floor hallway.
Linoleum should only be in two places: the kitchen and the bathroom. Nowhere else. Ever. When we moved in, there was linoleum in the kitchen, the bathroom, the hallway outside the bathroom, and the bedroom. The bedroom. Utter lunacy. Fortunately, like so much of the other "work" that had been inflicted on the place, the bedroom linoleum was poorly installed, just tacked down along the edges. This prompted a gleeful orgy of linoleum-ripping less than half an hour after we closed on the house.
Not so the hallway. There, inexplicably, former owner Drunken Biker had decided to use many, many nails to fasten the underlayment to the oak flooring beneath before applying the terrible self-adhesive squares to it. So, I was forced to deploy the amateur home renovator's ultimate weapon, the clandestine North Korean nuke of tools:
The Stanley Wonderbar. Model 55515.
With this bar I peeled back well-adhered lineoleum. I smashed three-layer plywood. I wrenched inappropriate nails from their oaken embrace. I held it aloft and danced upon the splintered remains of my enemy floor surface.
You should get one, just to have around. Even if you don't have anything to renovate just now, it's good for smashing skulls and prying apart frozen porkchops, too.
November 01, 2002
Having said that, I am now off to wreak untold devastation upon the oaken floors of the bedroom and the hallway. No scratch or grotty old stain will be safe. Bob the Cat must seek shelter from the world-shattering noise of the hideous drum-sander, for my renovator's wrath has come, and I will visit it upon all who deny me a satiny-smooth Golden Pecan finish.
And yea, though I have smote thee entirely with 20 grit,
the sins of thy previous owners were great.
Verily, I say unto thee
that I shall execute my wrath upon thee even further,
with 36 grit, and 60 grit, and 100 grit,
until the stains of sin are evident no more.
And only then shall come the glory of the stain and the sealer,
only then shall the durable protection of my most holy polyurethane
be applied to thee,
with care and with brush.
For the sins of thy previous owners were great,
and they are much deserving of a smack to the crown of the head.
November 03, 2002
December 17, 2002
Winter is a peculiar time of year for me, equal parts welcomed and loathed. Welcomed for the stillness that it brings to anywhere that isn't urban, loathed for the forced introspection that it inflicts. I think that I liked winter better when I was younger, and hadn't yet acquired the entire chorus of clamoring neuroses that exploit winter's quiet to shout at me. I don't mean that winter reduces me to a Gollum-pale hermit safely holed up in my room with blankets nailed over the windows and muttering to myself. But there is something about the season that lends itself to a focusing inward, which is where all of the stuff that needs therapizin' hangs out.
Now that I don't live in the hated city, the essence of the season is even more apparent. Last night I walked out onto the crusted snow that covers our little patch of earth, made blue-white and luminous by the splotch of moon high in the sky. There's something about snow and moon together that I find soothing...the moonlight is softly thown back up into the air, and misty plumes of breath glow in the darkness like spirits. The crunch crunch of my feet in the week-old snow was intensely satisfying. I walked back, to the fence, and peered up at the moon, the bare trees, the lighted second-floor window of my office, and the semi-dilapidated shed that I'll have to get around to doing something with someday so that I can put a kiln in it.
Later, I toddled around for awhile on my bicycle in the town darkness, which revealed just how out of shape I've become since I moved...I went from 16 miles on the bike a day to zero, and put on all the weight I'd lost and then some, probably in part due to Paxil's wonderful Puffing Effect. But for just a moment, as I looped past the snowlit expanse of the golf course near my house where I can't fly my kites, I felt that youthful wintery fascination again: quiet, solitary, and inward, but not the kind of inward that feels huddled and sad. The stillness felt good; the cold wind-forced tears on my cheeks were bracing. For a moment, all was right with world, and I didn't care about terrorists or war or politicians.
And with that, I finally put my finger on what's seems so off about my writings of late, which is that they're not off at all. It's not the season for being punditious and clever. It's the season for shortened days and stillness. It's the season for sleepy Solstice rites and icicles. And so I'll not resist the change. I'll write about snow and moonlight and night air, and leave the punditry to those of a more fixed nature.
January 29, 2003
Having said all of that, I feel as though I am coming to the end of a long stint of unfettered political ranting. I must do that every so often, or I start abusing the cat and taking shots at the neighbors; very ugly.
But all this cranial spume detracts from other tasks--like writing the next episode of Theophany, for one thing, and the ongoing operations at Peapod for another. Peapod is the little house where I live, and I am slowly removing from it all signs of its former owners, one of whom was a big drunken biker-type nicknamed "Bucky" who has left slip-shod traces of himself throughout the structure.
Hey, look! Someone fished telephone wires through the wall by kicking out the bottom eight inches of sheetrock and paneling over it! Bucky was here. Look! There's a big hole in the bedroom wall about the size of a head, with a little fist-sized one next to it! Bucky was here. Ah! There's a body-sized piece of wallboard missing from the stairwell wall, hidden behind still more paneling! Bucky was here. Huzzah! The upstairs room is walled with roof sheathing instead of wallboard! Bucky was here. Every window frame in the place is rotting and leaks cold air like a 60s-vintage VW minibus! Bucky was here. Wow! The moldings have been torn off of this doorframe, and never replaced! Bucky...was...here. And on, and on, and on. If I ever meet the guy I'm going to tell him that I found the half of his ass that he left when he moved, and that he should take it back.
The plus side of it is that when we're done, it will be a new dwelling, very much ours, and imbued with the satisfaction of a full-assed job well done.
Tomorrow: the frightening tales of the Bedroom Door and the Hallway Of Spackle.
February 16, 2003
 I've got my respirator. My airway is protected. I've got my goggles, too, to cover the precious peepers. I've got plastic taped over the doorways. But my arms are bare, and I know that the dreaded powder will work its way into my shirt and my pants. First will come the initial symptom: the itching, and then the terrible red rash. I'll be lucky if I survive.
No, not a chemical attack by Muslim fanatics with Iraqi-supplied weapons.
Today, I sand spackle in the hallway, and it is a grim, dusty business.
After the initial frenzy of activity when we first moved into Peapod, there has been an extended lull. At first, there was weeks' worth of floor sanding! And painting! And brave attempts to cover up years of neglect with extra-thick primer and multiple coats of Whimsical Blue. Then...all was quiet.
Then came: The Door. See, the previous owners--the man of the house being of the crashing around violently while inebriated sort--had at one point smashed in the original bedroom door, fracturing its lock-side stile. Then, for reasons unknown, he chopped off the bottom eight inches of the door, perhaps a failed attempt to get it to fit into one of the smaller attic room doorways upstairs. At any rate: the project, like so many others in the house, was abandoned, and the door banished to the basement. The bedroom door was replaced with a another door, the Piece Of Shit model manufactured by Cheap N' Hollow Doors.
When I decided to clamp and glue the old bedroom door to repair the damage and restore it to its rightful place, I didn't know about the missing portion of the bottom rail. This I cleverly discovered after said gluing and clamping, when I noticed that although the door was the right width, there seemed to be a slight monstrous gap between the top of the door and the top of the jamb. This would not do! And was made amusing only by the fact that I had not primed and painted the door before discovering the unholy handiwork of Bucky.
So I, brave and intrepid new owner of various power tools, high-tailed it to the local woodmonger and procured a piece of spruce, which, with much drilling, gluing, dowel-pounding, and cursing, I caused to become affixed to the bottom of the mistreated door. Then followed many days of sanding, and trimming, and moderate mangling, all finished up by priming and painting. At which point the bedroom door jamb needed to be rebuilt, suffering as it was from the enraged drunken foot of Bucky. This required the purchase of the Porter-Cable 10 Amp Variable Speed Tiger Saw with Case. This is, truly, a devastating weapon, and will be used to cut apart the old front porch in the Spring, which should be great fun.
Once the jamb was repaired, I made merry with the chisel, and lo! Mounted new brass hinges upon the jamb, and then hung the door, so that it swings to and fro with wild abandon. A door reborn! There was great rejoicing. Never mind that the door is somewhat narrower at the top and bottom than it is in the middle. 'Tis a door, and it opens and closes, which must be fulfilling for it, being so forlorn and cobwebbed in the dank basement as it was.
But the hallway remained...shorn of its terrible brown paneling, dotted with spackle, it mocked me by its very unfinished nature. Today, though, I have cried enough! And let loose the dogs of soft foam sanding blocks. There will be the stink of primer in the house tonight, or I am no man! And by Monday's eve, fresh yellow color will glow, and the white of the semi-glossed trim will semi-shine. This, I declare!
And I mean it, I do. Even now spackle dust is sucking life-giving moisture from my hair and beard, and is working its way throughout the entire house. Soon there will be vacuuming with the Amazing Handy Shop-Vac. And then the brushes shall be unsheathed and the latex pigment will spill, hot and copious. Take heed! Thou trembling home, thou unfinished domicile, thou half-done dwelling! I shall take thee to task with rough paper and brushes of fine horse-tail, and I will be avenged!
For what, I'm not sure, exactly. But watch out! There's work to be done.
February 18, 2003
So. Our total was 20 inches at 5:30PM yesterday, and it stopped snowing around 11:30PM, so that means it's probably somewhere aroung 24 or 25 inches. I'd go out and measure, but I've already been outside, hacking away at a three-foot berm of hard-packed, ice-flecked road-snow that Mister Plow graciously deposited at the end of our driveway. Which wouldn't have been so bad, had I not done the same thing yesterday afternoon. Then I flung the car against the high canyon walls of ice that bound my drive, until I was able to shoot out into the street at forty miles an hour, whip the car around in a perfect one-eighty, and speed away, spraying black slush into the faces of gawkers.
Actually, I stalled a bunch of times, got out, shovelled some more, stalled again, and then headed vaguely off in a direction I didn't want to go because I had spilled a big pile of blocky snow into the road in the direction I did want to go. This was all before coffee, and was the cause of much indignation.
The car needed to have a suspicious front-end rattle checked, which turned out to be (of course!) a pair of cracked and broken transaxles. As the prospect of a wheel folding up at highway speeds is less than joyous, the car will stay in the shop until tomorrow, which means still more Snow Days at home! Too bad we've already eaten the cat.
All the same, it's an unexpected but welcome "mishap." Money spent to stave off vehicular carnage is money well spent, and when your reasonably-priced, honest mechanic is a couple of blocks away, the inconvenience level hovers just above zero. The back yard is white and bright, there's food in the house (which, I suppose, we could have eaten before tucking into the cat, but we were panicking), and painting to be done.
Oh, that--yes, I was supposed to have it done last night, but around 5PM or so, when we read on the MTA's site that they would be running one--count it, one--train into New York this morning, making all local stops, we decided that today was a Snow Day. So, I finished the second primer coat, the first semi-gloss trim coat, and the first ceiling coat, then called it a day with my masculinity unimpaired.
The fact that we can even make such decisions without turning on the television is, to me, amazing and fabulous. Using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's website, I have access to six different local radar displays (static and animated loop), and that's just the radar that covers my house. I also have access to hundreds of other local radars, plus four different color-enhanced national radars. I get to read the very same Hazardous Weather Outlook and Short Term Forecast reports that weather-folks do. In short, I have on my desktop weather services that, ten years ago, most local television weathermen had only recently given their hairpieces to obtain. It is a wonderful thing to look at a radar display, then glance out the window and say with with confidence and authority, "The trailing edge of the storm has just passed Middletown, and we should see the snowfall tapering off within the next hour or so." When the white flakes fade away on cue, I have become master of my micro-climate.
I now return to covering the walls of our abode with pigmented latex.
February 26, 2003
Hmm. I think I'm on to something here...it's time to get down to bidness. I find that there are some clarifications I need to make about the post on 2/25, and because they have to do with the nature of evil, I do believe that yesterday's effort is the first in a series. More on evil, heading your way! But probably not today.
I will write about evil tomorrow, as I wait for the delivery of our new Maytag dishwasher, which will replace the old and--dare I say it!--evil GE dishwasher. Who thought that putting fancy membrane switches and electronic doohickeys in close proximity to high-pressure jets of really hot water and steam was a good idea? In any event, after smiting the heathen appliance with the righteousness of the Porter-Cable reciprocating saw, it is cast out. So I will contemplate the plumbless depths of anti-creation while my dishes are made nice and sparkling clean with little or no effort on my part.
Mmmm...meaningless void.
February 28, 2003
I was writing about evil yesterday, truly I was. But then the new dishwasher arrived. And in the course of installing it, I became engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the dread spirit of Bucky, which lurks yet behind the walls of Peapod, lurching through the dark and hidden places, exercising its slurred incompetence wherever there is wiring or plumbing to be found. So great became my wrath that I took a hammer to the extra dryer in the basement that was kindly left "for us" by the previous owners, lo! did I smash the hell out of that thing. There was much shouting. Pieces flew far and wide, and many glorious dents were made. This was immensely satisfying because it, too, was a white appliance, and because it had some connection to the previous master of the house.
In the end, I triumphed: the day was mine. Even now, a load of sparkling dishes and cutlery awaits unloading, all spotlessly clean though no hand has touched them. A marvelous age we live in!
Plus, because some plumbing needed to be de-Buckied, I finally got to buy a blowtorch. Can't be all bad if you get a blowtorch out of the deal, right?
Now: on to tedium.
May 19, 2003
I spent the weekend enjoying mindless slaughter and deploying vicious chemical weapons.
Am I Uday?
No.
I am a homeowner. And I am become death, destroyer of worlds.
Well, ant- and wasp-worlds. Oh, and I mercilessly thrashed dandelions and poison-ivy vines, as well.
Due to the presence of Bob the Cat and and a kitchen light that I left on for four years straight, my Queens apartment was essentially vermin free. Odd for the city, particularly for a building as old and a kitchen as ill-maintained as mine. But true, nevertheless. And it's not as though the pests weren't in the building: after the folks across the hall moved out, I snuck into the empty apartment to have a look. The bathroom floor moved when I turned on the light, so I high-tailed it out of there and laid an impenetrable barrier down across my threshold using Black Knight, the most devastating roach spray known to humanity (made in Kansas, chock full o' phenothrin, ask for it by name). And I remained secure and largely bug free.
I don't live in the city anymore, and the ecosystem of my home has become much more complex. The basement is the realm of freaky ur-spiders--brown recluses. They don't look like proper spiders at all; their legs are too long and their bodies improperly small and pinched-looking. They spew ill-formed grotty webs everywhere and this time of year many of them clutch small fuzzy white balls that are either the result of or the precursors to their toe-curling mating process, whatever that may be. I don't want to know. But they and their hideous offspring will be dealt with by my five-horsepower shop-vac. The basement is also home to soft millipedes--liquidated individually by pinpoint assassination; they're tricky, stealthy buggers--and the occasional errant wasp, which we'll get to more of in a moment.
The perimeter of the house is now under assault from ground-based sappers--carpenter ants--and aerial soldiers--wasps of various descriptions. The ants' sole purpose is to eat my goddamn house. Actually, it's the termites who want to eat the place; the ants just want to chew it up and spit it out so they can live in its beams and flooring. But we've got the termites licked. Fifteen subterranean bait stations full of yummy virgin pine, a veritable termite buffet, await those bastards. As soon as they snack the bait will be swapped for a high-tech low-toxicity poison that will prevent the colony members from molting. Presumably they will then explode. The system cost a lot of money, and I eagerly await the first evidence of termite feasting, so that we can demolish their cities, ravage their queens and make their grubs orphans before they pop and die.
But back to the ants: the previous owners, being drunken and overly fond of motorcycles, thought it would be a good idea to let the ants chew up a significant portion of the front porch, and then burrow into the bedroom floorboards. No more. Now the tiny savage monsters will get tasty splotches of strategically-placed honeydew spiked with fipronil, which they will carry back to their queen and share amongst themselves. Then they will keel over and twitch and die while I laugh and dance upon their broken bodies. Ants don't always forage for sweet stuff, though: their dietary requirements vary depending on the time of year. So I also have tasty protein granules. These, too, will be brought back to the colony, a prelude to more laughing and dancing. Those who think they can escape by travelling to the roof decking via the maple and the pine trees will also face miserable chitin-shattering death spasms, for I have a ladder. I will go where they go. I will think as they think. I will do as they do. Their tiny agonies will be as music to my ears. I will laugh on high, but will climb back down the ladder to dance in a safely victorious manner.
Peapod's eaves are open, and the lack of soffitting is an invitation to various airborne nasties who want to hang paper nurseries under the edges of the roof. For these wasps, I have overwhleming, high-pressure poison with which I gleefully saturate them from twenty-five feet away. They shall not prevail! This weekend a full dozen fell before my chemical wrath. Grim faced wasp-officers drove in black sedans to paper houses in the countryside, bearing the tragic news to patriotic wasp-mothers and wasp-fathers. Their progeny had made the ultimate sacrifice.
But I am merciless. I am highly motivated and well-equipped. Unwanted itch-making vines are mutilated by the Porter-Cable 10-amp Tiger saw as it tears through their thick and woody roots. Their oily leaves wither in the sun, and I revel in their slow, dehydrated anguish. For good measure I spray their ruined corpses with bottle-deployed defoliant from Bayer-Purcell Laboratories, the same non-staining, red-tinted death I bring to sinister dandelions...they may look bright and cheery, but they'll kill you soon as look at you. I triumph over their mangled, curling, dying stems.
They won't win. Any uprising will be put down without remorse. I will choke the lawn with their dead, though it makes my fingertips numb and blinds my cat.
For I am a homeowner. My house is a house of death unto the crawling, flying, stinging and inappropriately blooming things of the earth, and my house shall prevail.
May 30, 2003
 And then, today: a pastorale, performed with lawnmower, compost pile, and pitchfork.
Or, as much of a pastorale as you can have with a car wash on the other side of your back fence.
Grass grows really fast, or at least our small patch of it does. More accurately, our patch of grass grows at a pace that easily outmatches my motivation to mow it. Whether that's objectively "really fast" or not I don't know, but I tend to doubt it. Nonetheless, following a strange restless night during which the power was out for two-and-half hours, prompting fears for a 'fridge chock full o' fresh foodage (mmm...cow-brisket...), I dragged myself off the bed, threw on the duck boots, and fired up the mower.
Mundane, I know, but a welcome contrast to every single aspect of the city. There: millions of people I don't know in close proximity. Here? Frank the Tractor Collector. There: a near-total absence of greenery, which immediately reminds me of small trees knocked over by buildings. Here? So much greenery I have to kill some of it and chop the rest of it down to size lest it overwhelm me and become living space for small creatures. There: Showers of soot, unexpected bird droppings, and dead newborn pigeons from ill-secured cornice nests. Here? Showers of vibrantly green maple seeds and squirrel nests.
It's true: Flick and Flack have two or three adolescent squirellettes, now, and despite having two fine high-rise apartments in the pine tree out front, they elected to pile a bunch of leaves into the hollow spaces of the porch roof and move in. Some broom-thumping and the expert use of a handheld super-soaker pistol convinced them to change neighborhoods. The next day, the lower of the two high-rise nests was all over the sidewalk. Wild rodent nesting material is its own ecology: fleas, small flies, squirmy unidentifiable grub-like things, and other sundry nest-guests abound, plastered with droppings and bits of fluffy fur insulation. Flick and Flack have been raiding the box pile in the deck out back, so the mess was also full of sodden cardboard, and bits of faded Christmas ribbon that they stole from the trash.
The message, I think, was clear: if you forcibly relocate us we will knock our other house down.
That's Squirrel for pbthpbth! I guess, and still vastly preferable to anything that might fall on your head in the city.
June 26, 2003
Oh, blech. It's wonderful to have a room upstairs...it's wonderful to have an upstairs at all. But now I feel the heat. See, this weekend, summer officially arrived, and bang! Like that into the 90s. NYC will hit 97 tomorrow, with a Heat Index of Melted Brain.
Fortunately, I won't be in NYC. I'll be here, deciding whether I can survive with the cross-breeze from the Lowes-purchased dual-fan window ventilation system (two at $19.99 each), or whether it's time to bust out with the air conditioners that are, at this moment, corroding in the damp basement.
Alternately, I could just hole up with a bottle of gin, a like quantity of tonic, eight limes and a bucket of ice. Then I wouldn't care about the heat at all, nor clothing, nor running through the streets.
Gin is the Devil's drink; it gets one tossed out of jazz clubs and turns one into an ass at weddings. The. Devil's. Drink.
In all likelihood I will spend tomorrow watering things. There's this lovely place in Vermont that will sell hundreds of millions of flower seeds to you for ten dollars, or some such thing. I myself have scattered an honest quarter-million seeds in various patches of dirt in the yard. These have sprouted into nondescript green sprouty things, but in four weeks they will resemble...tall weeds. Then they'll bloom into many, many colorful flowery things.
Except the sunflowers.
I purchased the Sunflower Mix: Wild Sunflowers, Giant Sunflowers, Red Sunflowers (a randy flora, also called "Crimson Thriller"), Double Dwarf Sunflowers, and Mexican Sunflowers. I planted the Giant Sunflower seeds along the back fence, behind the growing carpet of northeastern wildflower sprouts. They would, I reasoned, grow into a neat row of tall, impressive...well, giant flowers.
An hour or two later, I headed to the back fence to do some watering. Wow! I thought. They've already cracked open! No...wait. They've been cracked open. And eaten. Ten pairs of neat little half-shells, all in a row. So: no impressive row of tall flowers.
At first, I blamed Flick or Flack or one of their brat kids, all of whom have moved back into the front porch roof and do not know how close they are to being gassed, clubbed and napalmed.
Then, an observant yet utterly incompetent Bob the Cat alerted us to the fact that Guido the chipmunk has taken an efficiency apartment in one of the old cinderblocks under the deck. Guido had been raiding the local patch of shade-tolerant wildflower seeds I planted near the basement door. Bob, perched on the deck, should have rained down like death from above, an unstoppable juggernaut of claws and teeth. But she just sat there, very alert and fat.
Still...I suspect the squirrels. The back fence is one of their thoroughfares; I often see them tripping along it on their way to the deli or the bar or wherever it is that squirrels are always off to. Doubtless they spotted a seed or two and mowed them up as free snackage.
Bastards.
So, tomorrow I will tend to the survivors, and also the potted domestics on the deck, which at the moment include wheat, oats, rye, lettuce, catnip, thyme, lavender, and tomatos. The first five are for Bob to munch on (she prefers oat grass, and loves lettuce but can't quite figure out how to eat the fluffy sprouts, so she just rubs her face in them and makes like Pacino with a tray of cocaine). Our garden plans for an extravaganza of climbing roses and exploding colorful blooming things is still taking shape, along with plans for refurbishing the old siding, the front porch, the roof, putting a little path in, planting some trees to block out the car wash, and adding a bomb shelter cum wine celler. Such is the maintenance of a wooden cave.
And now to bed, maybe with a stop by the television on the way there...maybe a glass of seltzer...some cheese and crackers...or a stromboli. Mmm.
July 14, 2003
See, here's the thing about gin (The. Devil's. Drink, you know). Alcohol is a poison--the Temperance Unions were right about that--but it's got a really long, shallow dose-response curve. Which means: sure, it'll kill you, but you've got to drink an insane amount before you die of alcohol toxicity, and it would help if you've been locked in the trunk of a car and are the sort of person who really needs to belong to a fraternity. This is in contrast to something like nicotine, which will kill you dead at 40-60mg, or the venom of the Australian taipan snake, a mere 2.3mg of which will throw an average-sized man off the mortal coil and onto his ass right quick.
Then there's Juniperus communis, the common juniper, the "berries" of which some twisted deviant decided to toss into the distillery along with a hodegpodge of other herbs, thus creating gin (he, in turn, got this idea from a demented Frenchman, Count de Morret, who developed juniper wine in the 15th century). Juniper "berries" are actually the cones of this particular species of evergreen, and in accordance with rumor they are indeed poisonous, but all you'll get from eating a bunch them is a raging case of diarrhea and a boot to the head for being an idiot.
That being said I have found that gin, unlike the other clear spirits, produces a cold and camphor-like sensation in addition to its potent, head-muddling inebriative qualities. This is a uniquely deep, aromatic drunkenness which can lead to near-total anesthesia, tattoos, and sticking pins into your scalp.
I, of course, have no tattoos. But you see my point.
Or do you? This is actually supposed to be about plumbing.
The future is, indeed, plastics. It certainly isn't lumpen, corroded, multi-ton lengths of cast iron. Once again, plans for turning Peapod Manor into, well, a manor have been somewhat delayed by the need to have bourgeois things like working toilets and the luxury of taking showers without standing ankle-deep in soapy effluvia. And so, we spent a couple of days this weekend with Ed the Plumber, who removed the aforementioned lumpen iron and replaced it with many lengths of shiny black ABS plastic pipe, all chemically welded together into a functional, properly-inclined arrangement. It is the Darth Vader of drain systems.
During the course of this operation, the spirit of Bucky was ever-present, although--technically--the poor arrangement of the cast-iron drains was the fault of the original builder of the house (who, as I understand it, is 85 and lives the next town over...if he were, say, 75, I'd find him and berate him). But it was Bucky who elected to live for 20 years with a back-inclined tub drain--leading to the previously mentioned effluvia footbath--which led to a completely blocked roof vent, which was in turn the cause of the expensive problem alluded to here shortly after we moved in.
During the course of spending time with Ed talking about plumbing and What's Wrong With Liberals and Why Bucky Needs A Beating, I happened to glance up into a sheltered nook in the basement beams. I saw the butt-end of a plastic soda bottle tucked away up there. So I pulled the plastic bottle down--and discovered a homemade bong. You know, the kind you make with the barrel of a Bic pen and a soda bottle, with a bit of brass plumbing if you've got it, or some artfully arranged tinfoil if you don't, all sealed up with electrical tape, and then eventually you realize that when you're pulling hard on it you're actually burning the plastic of the Bic and inhaling toxic gasses...?
Maybe you don't know.
Anyway, it was one of those. So, the list of Things Bucky Left Behind now includes: one porn tape ("Midnight Snatch," tucked away above the inside of the bathroom closet doorframe), a beer can and an empty pack of cigarettes (both found in the duct housing when I replaced the furnace filter), and one homemade bong. Not to mention the holes in the wall, the rotted floorboards, the shoddy roof repairs, the half-assed home improvement projects, and so forth.
Which, I suppose, brings me back to The Devil's Drink. The day of the closing, we went to the house for the first time, with our freshly-mortgaged keys, and within half an hour a van from the local telephone company showed up. The repairman said that there was a problem with our lines, which we were very impressed by, because we hadn't even been in the house long enough to unpack a phone. The cause of the phone trouble? The "self-wired" lines in the house were a tangled, shorted-out web of telephone wire, speaker cable, and wet string. In the course of welcoming us to town, the telephone man told us a bit about the prior owners. "That guy," he said, "spilled more beer in a day than most people drink in a week."
Uh-huh.
As it turns out, that simple fact would explain alot about the state of Peapod Manor. I can just imagine...over the course of twenty years, so many projects were begun, and then the day just wore on...Eh...it's too hot today.
Fortunately, Bucky is alive and well somewhere in Florida with his motorcycle. If he were dead, I'd be worrying about some Stephen King-style situation where I inexplicably quit my job and go to work as a heavy-equipment operator, then buy a Harley and start smoking Marlboros and leaving empty beer cans in the heating ducts.
September 08, 2003
Yesterday was our one-year houseversary: on September 7, 2002, we moved into Peapod Manor with all of our stuff and Bob the Cat. We celebrated this weekend by having some houseguests over. We picked apples, peaches and plums, visited the best of the local wineries, and ate wine-drenched London broil (grilled to perfection by me) and fresh apple cobbler (baked to perfection by Pea).
Now that I don't live in a New York Habitrail, I find that I like having guests, especially guests from the city. They remind me how very, very fortunate I am to live in a 940-square foot mansion and complain about the occasional boom-boom car stereos at the car wash beyond the backyard fence while sipping grappa made ten minutes from where I'm sitting on the deck. I own trees! Towering green growing things on my little piece of earth. I've got a shed full of bicycles!
When we first moved in, we noticed large piles of old furniture, busted air-conditioners, and has-been televisions in front of many houses on our street. That, as it turned out, was the town's Annual Large Item Trash Pickup Day. Needless to say, we missed it. And so, for the past year, we've had to store all of the atrocious paneling that I yanked off the walls, the cheap old doors, the mold-musted crap-carpeting, the flimsy molding, the miscellaneous wood scraps, the two-ton pressboard filing cabinet I discovered in the basement and against which I wielded my mighty Tiger Saw so that I could haul it out in easy-to-carry pieces, and the flimsy dresser that the previous owners thoughtfully left for us in the upstairs closet.
Yesterday, after our guests had gone--stuffed full of marinated beef and cobble and local produce, with cheerfully-induced wine-related headaches--I carted all of the aforementioned krep! out to the curb in my Trusty Wheelbarrow, finally claiming the Shed as property of the Peas, thank you and goodnight. All that's left now is the extra gas dryer in the basement and--having discovered that a major appliance and a hammer makes for marvelous stress relief--I think I may discretely dispose of that item, piece by piece, along with the household trash.
By this time, Peapod Manor was supposed to be a blue, white-trimmed, copper-roofed cottage bedecked with cedar bloom-filled window-boxes and graciously landscaped with fruit trees and trellis-climbing roses.
My office is still full of boxes. Pea scraped some of the peeling wallpaper off the dining room walls, and we decided that it would be much better to smash the walls and replace them. Last week I finally got the new ceiling fan in the bedroom to stop wobbling by acquiring a certain screw from a helpful Lowes person, to replace the one I dropped into a heating duct last winter while installing the fan. The house is still covered with dingy concrete/asbestos siding (It's heavy! It's brittle! It's mesotheliomal!). The front porch is still the the rotted remains of a decadent ant-banquet. The basement smells funny and turns anything that was once organic into a thriving colony of parti-colored mold (it's true--even rubber and nylon).
But it's ours.
And we probably wouldn't be here if a certain group of villains hadn't knocked down some tall buildings two years ago this week. We had been looking for a new place to live, sort of, for a couple of months...maybe we'd rent a place, we thought, in the town we so enjoyed visiting on long weekends. Then the world changed, and it suddenly became Very Important for me to leave the enormous bull's-eye that I had always known the city to be. Five days before the first anniversary of the attacks, we did just that. We spent September 11 unpacking and refinishing floors and attempting to grasp that we had just bought a house.
We still have trouble with that, sometimes.
But much less trouble, I suspect, than we would have trying to grasp that one of us went to work one Tuesday morning and never came home.
Our blessings are many, and we are thankful.
Now, I must go downstairs and be nice to the person who had wonderful dinner waiting when I came back from my night ride, because I've been a curmudgeon while I finished this.
My blessings are many, and I am thankful.
September 12, 2003
Over the past seven days at Peapod Manor, I have:
- Installed 16 shelves in various rooms
- Put up two towel bars and a bathrobe hook, each with wall anchoring systems designed by a one-handed monkey that has been neurologically experimented upon in a desperate attempt to find a cure for Demented Chinese Engineer disease
- Repflaced the kitchen pfaucet with a new one (by Pfrice Pfisfterf, of course)
- Installed the first of three brand smackin' new basement windows. This involved shattering glass, smashing concrete, building a window frame, smashing more concrete, breaking some stuff, pounding on some other stuff, lots of sawdust, some brandy, some billion-year polymer adhesive, some Great Stuff expanding foam, and a big tub of Quickcrete. Rinse and repeat twice more.
Doubtless, this handyman's frenzy has much to do with the recent two-year anniversary. This time last year, I was refinishing floors with a vengeance, fixing up walls, painting rooms, and generally wreaking home improvement wrath upon the unbelieving structures of my new domicile. It took my mind off of...well, everything.
Thus, and so, this year. An unexpected bonus arrived in the form of a mortgage escrow overage check, some of which will go for a new stove (if and when Lowes gets the stove that we've been wanting for the past year back in stock...as soon as we got the money for it, poof, off it went...), the rest of which went for the basement window project. Thus we improve the economy and defeat terrorism...or something.
Next up will be the long-awaited Utter Devastation Of The Dining Room. Having discovered in the bedroom that some walls are better smashed and replaced than patched, spackled, sanded, spackled again, sanded some more, primed, and painted, I will avoid the same mistake. This will also give us the opportunity to add insulation, if missing, or replace it, if crappy.
We've been here through one cycle of the seasons, now. A descendent of Hortense, the tiger-striped Araneus cavaticus spider who guarded the Manor during the Fall of last year, has made an appearance. The Hortense species must be of the autumnal variety, and territorial, to boot: there was only one Hortense last year, and I suspect there will be only one Hortense II this year. She will get big and fat and then, sometime in December, will grow pale and slow, and will finally die in her big orb web, leaving Hortense III somewhere, hidden and unseen until next Fall.
This year, we will rake the leaves as they fall, instead of letting them pile up. Last year, we let them pile up, and then the snow came and stayed until March, leaving us with earthy black slabs to peel off of the suffering lawn instead of fluffy crunchy brown flakes to toss into the compost pile.
Some things are altogether new, this year: I've got wildflower patches to mow after the first frost, thereby sowing next year's small colorful meadows. There's a grill on the deck, for winter blackening of meat...deer, and mastodon. We know when to put the plastic over the windows, and when to turn up the heat, and when to break out the Insanity Salt for the serious ice melting.
Fall officially begins in a week or two, but it's already here...the final ripening in the air, the incipient harvest, the apples, and--just behind it--the turning inward, the long sleep, and the clear, muffled air of winter.
I'm so pleased to be in this place. It's a refuge for both of us, and Peapod Manor represents what we did for ourselves following the devastation of two Septembers ago: nothing less than a complete reordering of our lives together. At a time when the worst was suddenly all too possible, other things--good things--seemed less impossible.
And so, here we are: building windows, smashing walls, greeting familiar arachnids.
If not for that day...
It is too strange a thing.
September 26, 2003
Ahhh.
Now, I rest from my labors with a glass of Black Pearl, made from grapes grown and vinted not three miles from my house by Francesco Demarest, former coal miner, former grappa-fueled bicycle racer, now gracing his hillside with newly planted vines and producing the best of the local wines.
Downstairs, dinner is cooking on the 4.5-cubic foot fruit of said labor: a new gas stove, replacing the sparking, flame-belching, broken-down electric behemoth with the faux-wood trim and the black and white "digital" clock that came with the house ("all applicances sold AS IS," said the description in the real estate listing). One burner coil was cold and dead, one was on its last lukewarm legs, and the other two were wobbly and dangerous. I just set a pot of 'fridge-chilled filtered water for my Reishi mushroom tea on the new stove, and it was boiling in four and a half minutes. With the old electric, I would compose clever three-act plays while waiting for the water to bubble.
Bless you, rotted ancient ferns and decayed former dinosaurs, whose ten-thousand-millennia decomposition produced blue-flamed gas with which to cook our lamb steaks! And blessed also be teflon tape, which allowed me to properly pipe said blue-flamed gas into my new appliance with very little in the way of anoxia. And, of course, eternal blessings and the burning of the choicest fat-wrapped bits of prize bulls to Lowes, from whom all nifty home improvement products and appliances flow.
Downstairs, now, Pea coaxes her fresh-from-the-shelter kitten Julep, encouraging her to be be less afraid of Anything Taller Than She, which is everything. Bob the Cat--no longer the Cat, but merely a cat in the house--is outside on the deck in the dark, sulking and stalking the night chickens from up on high.
Yes--we have chickens. They're not ours. They escape periodically from a neighbor's coop up the street, and wander around free and dumb. Not ordinary chickens, mind you...they're of a mildly fancy sort, with odd neck-ruffs and strange wattles. Not quite show chickens, but certainly fowl interesting enough to an apartment-raised cat whose greatest prey is the vicious and terrible Stray Moth.
Bob, having become master of her new domain as she settled into comfortable, rotund middle-age, is now about to be saddled with a four-month-old who already adores her based only upon her pawprinted scent throughout the house. So far, their encounters have been limited to earnest approaches by Julep and hisses, growls and unmitigated hatred from Bob. But that will pass. Soon, there will be amusing acrobatics and wrestling matches.
Ahhh.
The weekend. Tomorrow: the installation of basement window number two. A new batch of concrete to complete the installation of basement window number one. Perhaps a bike ride.
As someone recently commented here, the best revenge is, indeed, living well.
Even more enticing, then, to realize that you don't have to be wealthy to do so! 940 square feet becomes a mansion, local wine produced by an eccentric retired Italian surpasses the rarest Bordeaux, a fat calico cat becomes a sleek prize hound, random fancy chickens in the yard become red foxes in the brush, and the humble bicycle becomes a noble hunting steed. All out for a weekend of rich leisure!
All we need now is a household staff...oh, wait.
That's us.
Ah, well.
I'm still an absurdly, undeservedly happy bastard.
October 13, 2003
We gots leafs in the gutters, Paw!!
Go n' git mah gun, Junior! And tell Ma to open up a likker jug! We got some shootin' ta do!
w
We had gutters put on the Manor about a month after we bought it, and fifty years after it was built. Fifty years without gutters does wonderful things to cinderblock foundations. In many places, fifty freeze-and-thaw cycles have revealed the blocks' cindery origins, as their surfaces flake and crumble into chunky gray powder...fortunately, there is QuickCrete. I plan to cover the entire house with a hefty layer of it.
Elsewhere, wayward rainwater has eroded the mortar and, occasionally, delightful rivulets of it audibly trickle down the wall inside. I sit down there with green tea and a potted bamboo plant and pretend I have a restful Japanese garden in my basement.
Owning a house involves a series of regularly scheduled tasks. Mowing the lawn is a fast-repeater in the sunny seasons. Gutter-cleaning is a slow-repeater: twice a year, if you're on top of things. Our new gutters haven't been cleaned yet, but they're now full of parti-colored leaves which will soon turn into rich, fragrant muck-mulch if not removed.
But we're still better off than our elderly neighbor, who I haven't actually met, despite living next door for over a year. I'm sure there are reasons for that...he was inside for most of that time, and I hardly ever saw him. His wife died at home a couple of months back, after what I presume was a long illness. He might have been tending to her. Since then, I've seen him outside more often: stooped and shuffling, but wielding hammers and circular saws to build a new picnic table or replace a set of basement doors.
He needed to build the basement doors because of the gutter above them, which has turned into a planter. It's choked with green growing things: small maple saplings, grown from seed, some pokeweed that's produced a nice crop of hanging purple berries. Needless to say, all this gutter-borne fecundity restricts the proper flow of rainwater, which has been dripping onto the basement doors below, rotting the wood. Come winter, the gutters will host spectacular sheets of glistening icicles.
I noticed recently that there's a bright blue tarp spread over a portion of my neighbor's roof, which means that the half-dissolved asphalt shingles have finally allowed so much water to reach the decking beneath that it's rotted out and is now letting water into the house. Like its owner, the place has settled into creaking senescence.
Which is more than sad...it angers me, somewhat. Because the house is often full of relatives: a daughter, I think, and her kids, plus her friends or cousins, and an able-bodied teenager, another cousin, perhaps. They're content enough to hang out while the house falls down around grandpa's white-haired ears, to let a forest grow in his gutters, and allow his basement doors to collapse into the space below. After his wife died, the place was bustling. There were twenty-five people there for a couple of days, including half a dozen young fellows. Someone mowed the yard, cleared some brush, whacked some weeds. But the house itself remained as it was, with its dissolving roof and its plastic-taped windows and its skewed gutters.
Perhaps there's a reason for that. Maybe he's the sort of old man who doesn't want any help and refuses all offers. I don't really know. But when we got two feet of snow last winter, I shovelled his walk and his patch of driveway without ever having met the man, because it cost me nothing but some small effort and a little time.
My mother lives on the opposite coast, and is doing alright for herself. Still working, and paying the local handyman to build her a deck and enclose her garage. The things that I do around my own house--plumbing, painting, installing windows and such--I could do for her, as well. And would be, if not for the continent between us.
But you can be damned sure that if she lived next door, she wouldn't have trees growing in her gutters and a tarp on her roof to keep the rain out.
Sometimes, people just baffle me.
October 23, 2003
Sigh.
Big, congested, stale-mucous laden sigh.
Initially, plans for this week involved removing walls. Stapling insulation! And new wall-sconces, oh, yes! Perhaps even refinishing a floor...!
Then, the reality of relative energy levels sunk in, and the projects were reduced to gutter-cleaning and replacing the remaining basement windows. Maybe measuring the lengths of the half-century old copper crap that passes for our plumbing in preparation for replacing it with shiny new pipes made from recycled Stormtrooper armor.
Then, I got sick. Starting, of course, the last day before my vacation was to begin, and continuing until, pretty much, right now. The sore throat has gone, the grand bolii (that's the plural of bolus, you know) of unmentionable lung-glue have restricted themselves to a few early-morning appearances, and the random fever spikes have vanished.
But, I still feel like a well-abused sock...damp...a little smelly..scruffy...mrrgh.
So, the gutters are now linear baskets o' autumnal cheer, with small flashes of yellow and red peeking over their edges. The remaining two examples of fine iron-framed basement window style remain in place, dappled with condensation and rimmed with the yellowed ExpandoFoam! I used last winter in a desperate attempt to keep the outside air, well, outside.
Even the grass needs mowing, for Baal's sake.
Never mind making the matching doors for our offices; that's right out.
Outside it's chilly, gray, a little windy. Matches my mood nicely, actually.
I think I'll go to my Local Music Store, and see about some trumpet lessons.
December 05, 2003
The first snowfall of the season. We've gotten about an inch of waxy, fluffy snow over the past hour, and it's coming down steadily. It seemed like a good time to try out the replacement i700. Decent pictures, considering that I took them with a telephone.
Have a good weekend, everyone.
December 06, 2003
The same view up the street, about sixteen hours later. We've got a good eight inches on the ground now, and it's still falling. (I replaced the earlier blue-tinged photo with this one, following my discovery of the White Balance option.)
December 08, 2003
 Well, the snow has come and...stayed. We got about a foot, give or take, and yesterday I and my spine shovelled out the driveway and exposed the hidden concrete of the sidewalk. Peapod's roof is frosted with a hefty layer of white and the gutters, now clogged with frozen sludge, are bearded with dripping icicles.
I must be older, and in worse shape, than I was last year. This morning, my vertabrae were protesting, and the flaccid muscles in my side, so rudely awakened from their fattened slumber, were aching in disturbing ways that evoked images of lungs protruding from beneath my ribcage.
This year, like last year, I never quite got to the leaves before they vanished beneath the snow. But unlike last year, we had a series of terrific windy days in early November, so the leaves blew out of the yard, and were mostly piled up against the fence or atop the flower beds along the edge of the house. Our compost pile will suffer, but our lawn--such as it is--won't.
And unlike last year, the now-crunchy snow hasn't really perked up my contemplative winter soul, probably due to the large mugs of jittery graham-cracker coffee I've been pouring down my gullet. My long-suffering corpus, with its Expando-Gut™, its resultant aching feet, its strangely twitching musculature and its generally entropy-laden demeanor, has come to dominate my incarnative experience.
Whoa. Somebody get a stout club and beat that one back to the wordy hell from whence it came.
What I meant to say was that my body is distracting me with its aging. I can't seem to stop the process, and it's really quite annoying. If anyone has experienced this sort of thing themselves, do drop me a line and let me know how you've managed to stop it.
See, where I come from, no one ever gets old, or sick, or infirm, decay is nonexistent, and time itself is a plaything that makes for an amusing way to pass...well, it. This whole "physical world" thing you've all got going on here is really getting tedious. But, eventually I'll kick off, and then I can get back to lolling on the eternally green grass on the other side of the river, contemplating the sea of air.
January 27, 2004
 This is the storm that is coming to kick my ass. Or, rather, a bit of it. A bit of the storm, that is, not my ass. I didn't spring for the longer-range base reflectivity system when I got the radar dome for Peapod's roof, so the range peters out somewhere around Scranton. But the primitive weathercreatures on the television tell me that this storm stretches all the way across New York state and over Lake Erie. Massachusetts is going to get hammered, which is good, because I don't live there.
Meanwhile, in my small yet frightfully important corner of the world, the snow is doing an excellent job of acoustic dampening. The air is cold enough to make the snow waxy and fluffy, and it's falling thickly, lending the night air that wonderfully muffled winter silence. I had to plod out into the yard with my trusty PDA/cellphone/camera/home knee surgery kit to get a picture of the falling snow backlit by the incredibly annoying sodium-arclights from the very pit of Satan's Ass that adorn the carwash out back, but the dinky camera wasn't quite up to it. Instead, I captured an atmospheric image of the shed, which I am calling The Shed By Night With Snow Falling That You Can't Really See.
 No travelling for me tomorrow, no sir. I will transform into Telecommuting Man! My mutant ability is to bill hourly while never leaving the house (a power also used, incidentally, by Courtesan Woman!) Which is just as well: if I did manage to get across the savage frozen mountains, escape the icy slide off the side of the road into certain death and Honda-entombment, and then actually reached the train station, I'd just stand around outside waiting for the lovely mechanics of NJTransit to coax the trains into motion while my nose turned black. Any time it gets Bittterly Cold, or snows, or Tom Cruise farts, the entire railway system collapses into a smoking heap of fifty-year old underfunded infrastructure.
I knew it was going to be a bad railway day tomorrow when my homeward train passed through the main switching interchange outside of Hoboken station this evening: fire! Fire everywhere! That's how they keep the switches from freezing, you see...natural-gas powered burners to heat up the rails. It looked like the aftermath of a plane crash, only without the wreckage...and there were train tracks...so...well, it was a bunch of train tracks on fire, actually, and it didn't really look like anything other than what it was.
But I won't have to struggle with railway similes tomorrow, because I'll be safe and warm here in Peapod Manor while the hapless commuters are stuck somewhere in the wilds of North Jersey, contemplating snacking on their seatmates as the temperature in the train car...slowly...drops...
March 04, 2004
I've written well over a thousand words since Tuesday's post, but the essay drafts are mustangs...wild, barrel-chested creatures of the scrub-oak'd desert, untameable, tossing their wordy manes in parenthetical defiance with their rolling eyes ever-set on the next tangential idea!
And so forth. Maybe something will come of them. Maybe not. Who can tell?!
Spring is springing, and the front dirt has emerged from beneath its crust of dirty-pebbled snow. Front dirt, because there hasn't really been grass on it since we moved in, a double-wide trailer-looking oversight that will soon be remedied by a trip to Lowe's and the purchase of a sack o' seed, a walkabout seed caster, and some straw. Up the street, the second-to-last eyesore in the neigborhood is being gutted and renovated. Now it's up to us--the lord and and lady of Peapod Manor--to wow everyone with our complete home refurbishment. That will involve the removal of decades-old crap-siding (in a lovely shade of Filthy White, by Glidden); restoration of the original wooden siding beneath it that hasn't seen the sun since 1958; painting of said siding; and maybe the annihilation of the front porch and its replacement by something less utterly rotted and awful.
Gah.
The last weeks of February were a long, wire-drawn expanse of wretchedness during which every cell of my body cried out More light! We need more light! Leap Day was a cruel joke.
But now, ah now! The mud. Buds on the tips of the tree limbs, some of which will shortly be hacked off to achieve that maintained-tree look that's so popular with the kids these days. The cats have got their new walking jackets, wh |
