Poor, Poor Pitiful Me

I'm sure that those of you who know me will be shocked when I admit this, but...

It's possible I may have overreacted about the door.

Turns out that little piece of wood that fell out from behind the hinge when I took it off -- that little piece of wood that I picked up, looked at, went "hm, little piece of wood," and threw away -- that little piece of wood, it turns out, was a shim. Intended to push the bottom hinge out a little bit so the door would hang properly. John B. is here right now fixing it, and he says as long as I keep handing him beers then he isn't on the clock. (Can we have a moment, please, to thank the universe for sending us good old, head-biting John B.?)

John B. may have saved my ass again from my own idiocy -- but even he can't stop the wrath I brought down upon my own pig-head for being a horrible person and having un-christian thoughts about the Kid.

Remember how I couldn't muster up sympathy for him and his abscessed tooth? Remember how I'd said I'd had one of those myself once, and so I knew? Well, I did. Eleven years ago. Abscessed, root-canalled, drilled and posted, temporarily-crowned -- and then never got around to going back for the actual, real, permanent-type crown. Eleven years ago. It's been holding up just fine (for eleven years), so every time I thought about it, I figured why bother? (Plus, there was the little detail of no money and no dental insurance to help make that decision for me.)

But then, on Sunday, with my whole family at my house and a whole meal prepared and a whole (rocking) football game on television -- I took a bite of crusty bread and my eleven-year-old shell of a tooth broke clean in two.

Nobody who was here yesterday knew that it had happened. You see? How brave I am? With enough beers lined up for putting in me?

So tomorrow I have to go to the dentist for the first time in eleven years. Fun! The good news is that I do have this everybody-gets-it, Massachusetts-style health insurance now, and it does include dental. There's a little question about whether they will pay for "restorative" work if it's not one of the front six teeth ("top and bottom only," as the woman on the phone explained to me -- which, yikes, am I supposed to have teeth somewhere other than top and bottom? Middle? Sides? Tongue? Yuck?). So I may end up having to have what they so delicately refer to as "extraction"...

But maybe I'm overreacting here, too. Maybe I should just wait and see what happens tomorrow before I go throwing out my toothbrush. In the meantime, though, it's soup for dinner. Leftovers from the meal I couldn't chew on yesterday.

And it probably serves me right that the Kid has still not shown up to finish the job. And that the electrician's a no-show, too. Think I'll lay my head on the railroad tracks and wait for the Double E...

Is it just a coincidence that those are my initials?

Suck Like Sixty

I broke the vacuum – for good this time, I think.

Well, first I should say: I sanded the door – for good this time, I think. With the #60 sandpaper Johnny told me to buy. Once I saw what it was doing, I understood how it was supposed to work, and realized how stupid I was to have ever tried to do it with the dumb 150. The door actually looks pretty good, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I’d harbored a thought or two of stripping those last bits around the windows and trying it with a coat of stain. But I’m not that stupid.

Here is exactly how stupid I am:

That orbital sander makes a heck of a mess. You’re supposed to have a vacuum attachment, so that all the dust it makes gets sucked up through the little holes. Not me. I got mahogany-colored dust everywhere. I had pink tears and pink boogers and pink toes and pink underpants – not to mention pink windowsills and floors. At least Johnny’d had the wherewithal to shut the door to the back hallway I was working in, so at least I didn’t get pink dust in the kitchen. Since the furnace is in there and everything.

So I grabbed the vacuum, changed the bag, and set to.

Sometimes the vacuum makes this funny, squealy noise. I’ve never been able to figure out what it is. It doesn’t seem to affect the performance of the thing, but it’s annoying. I’ve discovered that if you lift the vacuum up a little bit at one end and let it drop back to the ground, the impact makes the noise stop. Sometimes you have to do it a couple times.

But Saturday I did it like three or four times, from increasingly greater heights, and I couldn’t make the damn noise go away. It was driving me insane. I’d been sanding for an hour and a half – for the second time – and, while the dust was settling, I’d been out (ahem) chopping up last year’s Christmas tree. I was tired. I wanted a beer. I had no patience. Stop squealing!

In the process of picking it up and dropping it a few times, I discovered that when it was off the ground it didn’t make the noise (I can’t explain it, but it’s true). Now the smart thing, I realize as I’m typing it, might have been to just carry the vacuum around with me as I worked (the smart thing, that is, other than just letting it make the noise for three freaking minutes until I was through). But what I did, since I had a step stool out there already for reaching the high parts of the door, was to put the vacuum on the stool.

I can’t explain why it didn’t make the squealy noise from atop the stool, okay?, but just trust me that it’s true. Why would I lie? I’m admitting all the stupid things I do, aren’t I? I hardly have to make shit up…

So the squealy noise stopped and I carried on vacuuming. Doo-de-doo, behind the door, under the radiator, all the little decorative bits… now all that’s left is the far end of the floor and we are finished! I gave the hose a tug to wheel the vacuum down the hall and reach those last few feet, and

CRASH

The vacuum, which was for some reason propped up on a stool, came flying straight out through the air and landed, nose first, on the porcelain tile.

Whoops.

I carried on anyway, running the wand all along the few square feet that were left, and somehow didn’t even notice that there wasn’t any suction till I pulled the endy piece off to get at the corner.

So now the wandless wonder’s broke for good. I forgot to mention when I wrote about this the last time that we do have a little Roomba robot that Mom gave us for Christmas a couple years ago, but it doesn’t do so well with area rugs and anyway, for a while now it’s mostly just been going “toot-de-toot-toot” and spinning around in circles (I swear to god I never dropped the Roomba thing from any height at all).

So now we’re down to just this sort of dustbuster thing Mom gave us for Christmas last year. And a broom. Oh, and the shopvac—

Which, now that I think of it, may have been the better choice for cleaning up construction dust in the first place…


PS I have to go to work today, and I think I am the only person on the planet. So I might could use a joke or something when I get home...

Holy Crap

I actually did it: I sanded the g-d door. Yesterday afternoon. I didn’t even know I was going to, but before I knew it, it was done. I cleaned up the mess and everything.

And now that I have, now that it’s over, let’s examine the particulars of spin-sanding – shall we? First off, you have to have the proper pads. Second, in a perfect world you’re wearing goggles so’s you don’t get door-bits in your eyes. Third – well, I don’t know what third base is because I’m a good girl.

I had four different kinds of pads, but none were exactly right: too big, too small, the holes don’t line up, not sticky. I chose the one that seemed most likely to stick to the spinner (too big). I couldn't find anything on the package to tell me what grade it was, but when I peeled the backing off, it said it was 150 – so way not anywhere close to the 60 Johnny gave me. But oh well.

I stuck on the pad and turned on the machine (goggles? I don’t need no stinking goggles!), put it to the door and—

Did someone say "spin-spun hypnotic vortices"?

…and then the pad went flying – ptew! – straight down the hall.

You know what? I was right. I’m just not cut out for this spin-sanding thing.

So, even though I wasted three days sitting around convincing myself I wouldn’t have to, I picked up the non-power #60 after all.

Scratch-scratch. Sand-sand. Rub-rub…

Yeah, no. This ain’t what’s gonna happen.

I tested out the other kinds of pads, but the 150s really were the only ones that stuck, so I just resolved to pushed harder and never let it come up off the door while it was spinning. I held on to the bucking thing for dear life – especially up around the top bits where the windows are – because I was convinced I’d lose control and send the damn thing through the glass.

The glass survived, but being so close to it reminded me that, even if I was the Spin-Sand Mistress of the Universe, I was still going to have to hand-do the edges by the windows and all the decorative panel corner crap.

God do I hate sanding!

And so on and so forth until I’m on my hands and knees with the vacuum cleaner, sucking up all the mess I made. Once I’ve got the dust off it, the lower right panel doesn’t look exactly sanded after all, so I hit it with the #60 and now it looks like crap, but who cares? It's getting painted!

And that’s it. I’m done. I considered carrying the door back to the kitchen, but screw it. I’ll move it if the Kid shows up, but otherwise I’m painting it right there.

After all, how many times should I have to haul the thing around?

PS Kid called. He’ll be here at 9:00.

Like School On Sunday...

...no Kid!

I just got home from work, and there's a furnace in the yard. There's a note on the table telling me that there's a furnace in the yard. But there's no Kid.

I don't know. Maybe we got our wires crossed. I guess, now that I thought about it, all he said was that the furnace would be here on Friday. I guess, when I play the conversation over in my mind, he might not have actually said he'd put it in -- but it was a reasonable assumption, don't you think?

His note says he'll call us later, so I'll just sit tight. He doesn't have a cell phone (ahem) and I don't want to bother his wife if he's not home yet.

(Here's a hint for those of you whose spouses don't work in the trades: wives aren't secretaries. Nor are they liaisons, ombudsmen or punching bags. If you call and ask for your plumber or your painter or your candlestick-maker and you're told that he's not home, you leave your name and phone number, say thank you, and hang up. We don't want to hear it. And if you offend, annoy, or otherwise piss us off, we can make it so much worse on you.)

Meanwhile all the back-hall stuff's still in the kitchen, and it's not raining after all. Oh, what the heck. I'll go down cellar and find the spin-sander and listen for the phone. If I find it soon enough, I'll take the door outside and have a go.

I just hope he calls before the game starts, cuz they say my boy's playing tonight!

Please, Panthers, don't hurt 'im!

Doorn't You Forget About Me

I finished heat-gun-stripping that door, when, Tuesday? And I was going to sand it, but I didn’t want to sand it and later find out I’d missed a step and had to sand it again. ’Cuz I’d kill it. I’d kill it, and its fucking parents would sue me and it’d be a big mess and I don’t care enough about it to bother…

So I waited to ask Johnny.

And Johnny said “Just sand it.”

So I killed him.

No, no, nobody’s dead (well, the spider that was crawling on my arm in bed last night – he’s not so much alive anymore. But nobody that didn’t come from hell to begin with has been sent there lately, is what I’m saying.)

Seriously, Johnny says all I have to do is sand and paint and I’m done. That’s it. This whole dirty job will be done with. But he says I have to use the spin sander.

I don’t trust myself with the spin sander. I’m afraid I’m going to leave little spin-spun hypnotic vortices all over the door in little Hurricane Erin patterns. Like the floor in this one apartment that we rented, where someone who obviously didn’t know what he was doing apparently thought refinishing hardwood was a job any monkey could accomplish. Stupid monkey…

I asked Johnny if I couldn’t just use sandpaper, and he said probably not but seriously there was no way I could screw it up. He’d get the spin sander for me and the pads I’d need before we left for work, so I could have at it in the afternoon. This would have been Wednesday afternoon.

Except he couldn’t find the spin sander. And if he can’t find it, I sure as hell don’t know where to look, because have you seen our basement? He did bring up a piece of rough (#60) sandpaper for me to use, but I wasn’t going to sand with paper if I was only going to have to go over it again later when the spin sander showed up…

So the #60 paper has been sitting on the windowsill in the back hall for going on three days. Right next to the door (going on, erm, three weeks? longer?). I was going to have at it yesterday, but when I got home from work there was a message from the Kid. The furnace is coming today! Which meant I had to clear out the back hall so they’d have room to lug it through. And you know the rules: anything related to the furnace project counts as a house-job for that day.

Oh, Prudence, you are so smart!

You might remember that I did this once before, but Johnny put everything back one afternoon because we didn’t know how long we’d be waiting for the furnace and he was tired of having to reach over the bookcase to get himself a Jammie Dodger in the night (he’s not that tall, my Johnny, and he does love a sweetie in the wee smalls). So I took the hour that I’d set aside for sanding and watched my Secret Dirty Boyfriend with it instead. During commercial breaks I moved the door, shoved the bookcase, sorted the recycling.

(My SDB was in another wetsuit, by the way, and I’ll tell you this: I don't know if he’s a big gay homosexual or not, but I’m fairly certain he’s no son of Isaac – or Ishmael, for that matter – if you know what I’m saying.)

So I can’t sand that door this afternoon, because it’s in the kitchen. I could take it outside, but it’s raining (too bad). Prudence did say that anything to do with the furnace project counts as work, and writing checks can be damned exhausting…

I’ll tell you what? Well, actually, no. I was going to say I’d at least find the spin-sander if it killed me, but the Kid’s going to be down cellar all afternoon, and I wouldn’t want to be in anybody’s way…

CONTEST ALERT: Anybody want to explain that first paragraph for those who weren't in high school in 1985? I'll write a poem for whoever gets it first. (PS The title's another hint. Hey, it can't always be Shakespeare...)

We Are Not Amused (okay, maybe we are)

We're taking the day off.

We're taking the day off because yesterday was such a nightmare, and we had such fun this morning playing Uncle e.e. instead of really writing, that we decided to just play hooky for the afternoon.

(We also, apparently, got crowned Queen of Somewhere, because we can't stop referring to ourselves as us.)

We're taking the day off because we allowed Johnny to convince us to let him finish the closet, and crossing something off our list of things to do is nearly as good as actually doing it.

But we got him to admit that it's a bigger job now than it would have been if we had never touched it in the first place, so we're giving him one week nag-free before we start complaining. About the closet.

And we're taking the day off because Johnny found this dozy bugger:



out here:

and we have no idea how he escaped. He's filthy but he isn't squished or drowned or eaten by coyotes or plain old run away, so we just need to sit and cuddle him a while.

Oh yeah, the front door's green, now. Different from the picture up above. Johnny painted it last year or so. That picture up above is from the town assessor's website. It's so old that, well, just to give you some perspective: you can't see the side of the house from that angle anymore because of the giant trees that grew up since the time that shot was taken.

You also might notice some differences between the colors of the stairs and shingles around the door in the two photos...

We'll get to it, all right? Sheesh.

(And by "we" this time I mean pretty much mostly Johnny.)