End Note

Johnny's home. I told him.

He says: "I don't like those kind of surprises." But otherwise he's okay with it.

He doesn't know about my obsession with the Dirty Jobs guy, though, so ix-nay on the ush-cray.

Phee-YEW!

And so that's where I was when I started posting.

Came home, emptied it out, cleaned it up, it's okay. We'll use it again for food. I figure my hands were in all that gunk as well, and I'm sure as heck gonna be putting food in them.

I learned that fingernails don't peel the paint off quite as nicely as they do skin off a sunburn -- but you know what does?

Girly screwdriver.

Well, Girly screwdriver, steel wool, and elbow grease. Not, altogether, any easier than using 5F5, but nicer somehow. I'd love to show you a picture of how the things came out but, you know, I didn't have time to get the batteries.

All that I have left to do are the sixteen screws -- and look what I just found to watch on demand while I do those:




Hubba hubba.

Not EXACTLY Like A Sunburn

I'm gonna need a tool or two, but I see what Tara's saying.

So anyway I go pick up Johnny, bring him a beer to soften him up for the inevitable. Even if the thing's okay he's gonna be pissed that I used his crockpot without asking first.

Shoot! Did I remember to turn the damn thing down when I was home? Ah well, it's too late now...

But when he's settled in the car he says to me, "I talked to another plumber about pricing the gas job. I'm supposed to meet him up the pub. Can you drop me?"

Huzzah!

While The Bits Drain In The Colander...

Oh, hell, the colander's not twenty years old. Or I don't think it is -- or honestly that much care. At least I remembered to grab something before dumping all those brass screws down the sink...

So I got hung up at one work and hung up at the other work and by the time I'm on my way home I realize that if I'm gonna make it home first to get the shoot out of the crock pot before I go pick up Johnny, I don't have time to stop at the grocery store like I had planned.

I run over my grocery list in my mind. What did I need? Is it important? Lettuce -- eh, no salad tonight. Stuff for Work Lady #1 -- can wait until tomorrow. Earplugs for this weekend (we're going away and so I have to actually sleep with Snorey here) -- I can get them tomorrow. Batteries for the digital camera -- the bleaders will live ("bleaders" = blog readers -- I stole it from Julie Powell).

So fine, no grocery store. Get home, clean crock pot, maybe clean hinges, pick up Johnny, grocery shop tomorrow.

But when I get home there's a message on the machine:

"Hey, Horse, it's Johnny. I'm here already. So when you get home, pick me up. It's 3:30."

It's 4:45.

AAUUUGH!

Okay, The Crockpot's Gonna Live

I washed it out with vinegar (and soap, and water) and dried it with a dishtowel (something I never do) and put it right back where I found it. He'll never know. Don't tell him.

So anyway I'm at work and then by sheer coincidence the lady that I work for starts talking about she wishes she had a crockpot because if she did she could leave something simmering on low all day and--

And suddenly I'm thinking "Low? Did I turn it down to low? Or did I leave it on high?"

See, the instructions that I found on google said to set the pot on medium, but our pot doesn't have a medium, so I figured I'd set it on high until I left and turn it down. But maybe I didn't remember about that last part. In fact, I was pretty sure I didn't.

And the reason this particular crockpot doesn't have a medium --and the reason that it matters so much to Johnny -- is that it's about twenty years old. It was a gift to him from the mother of an ex-girlfriend who is now dead. The mother, that is, not the girlfriend. The girlfriend's still alive. He almost married her, the bitch.

No, I'm just kidding, I never met her and I don't care, but I've got to save this crockpot.

Maybe I should never have used it in the first place?

Shoot.

Okay, dang, I really wish I'd had time to post all of this shoot as it happened, but I didn't, because I was in a hurry, which I still am, which you'll see why, but here goes...

First of all, I got all pissed off at the old guy across the street this morning because I thought he was standing out there with his hose in his hand watering his driveway (and, despite what I may or may not have posted yesterday, I mean that literally). I could see him out there, I could smell water on the pavement, and it hasn't rained in days. Why the hell would anybody need to be watering his driveway? Not that I'm so green as to be sad about the water waste or anything. I could give a shit. I just like to get all pissed off at the neighbors.

But then I went to look through the kitchen at a better look at the asshole, and I realized that the smell was coming from the crockpot. Turns out, when you put two brass hinges in a crockpot and turn the thing on high for two and a half hours, it smells exactly -- but exactly -- like a rainstorm on hot asphalt. If you take a ddep enough snif you can even taste it. Tastes like chewing tinfoil.

That made me laugh but I couldn't post then because I was late for work.

And now I gotta go dump the crock pot out and see what we're looking at before Johnny gets home.

More later...

You're going to just have to forgive the typos, I don't have time!

Progress From The Comment Trail...

Tara said...
Cook that hardware in a crock pot...it really DOES work great! And it's fun too...the paint peels off like skin when you've gotten a bad sunburn.
August 1, 2007 8:18 AM

EGE said...
Really? In what, just water? Or dry? On high or low? And for how long? Can you still use the pot for food after? Help! I want to try and I'm too lazy to google!
August 1, 2007 8:23 AM

And then EGE said...
PS I googled it. Tune in later...
August 1, 2007 9:01 AM

And then Tara said...
I have a rule (that has been put into place far too often) around "once a kitchen tool has been used for home improvement, it doesn't go back into the kitchen"... Once you see what's in the crock pot, you probably won't want to use it for food ever again.
August 1, 2007 9:24 AM

EGE said...
Whoops. The page I found on google said the crock pot would be fine and I already threw them in. If I ruin the crock pot, Johnny's gonna KILL me...

That's what you get for doing your own research. Anybody got an old crock pot just like Johnny's that you can get to my house before he gets home from work?

Maybe it will be okay. It usually is.

NOT.

La la ...

I Forgot!

I did something yesterday!

Remember this door?



I took it off its hinges and carried it to the back hall for stripping. That's as far as I got. Oh, well, actually I took the hinges off, too. And here's how grossly humid it still is here: I could scrape the painted-in screws clean with nothing but my girly screwdriver. I planned to hit the hinges with a bit of 5F5, but I had real work I was trying to get done and I decided that was more important.

(Didn't get that exactly finished, either. But I tried and, well, horseshoes and handgrenades, I guess... )

Anyway, that doot was heavy ("doot" = typo I like so I'm keeping. As in "Doot, that doot was heavy"). Johnny said it would be, but I didn't believe him. He said there was no way I'd be able to carry it by myself, so of course I had to. I damn near put gouges in the archway and the floor, until I devised a way to carry the doot by one knob and one window, and bearing a large part of the weight on the large part of my right hip.

And then of course when I got it to the back hallway it was facing the wrong way, and this doot -- being an outside doot -- is wider than the closet doot I had been working on, so there wasn't room to turn it around, so I had to carry it back out and start again, this time on my left hip.

Very good for a wonky back, this, what?

Oh, and speaking of that other doot? I am not fretting over this one. I'm painting it. It's already been decided. But, since I half-stripped it already I've got to go whole hog, because we've already seen how good I am with patching...

Yesterday: Accomplished (I've decided to quit counting days because I only managed to rack up like ten of them in the whole month of July, and that's just shameful).
Time: 45 minutes (I know you won't believe me, but those are the heaviest freaking screws I've ever seen, and they were painted in there...)
Cost: Nothing
Getting To Play With 5F5 Today Instead Of Heat Guns Because I Finally Finished (Well, Sort Of) The Work I Was Doing Yesterday: Priceless. Oh, you don't know the half...

Day 13, Project Three: Deep Breaths

I am so proud of me!

See, I lied to you a little bit yesterday. Not about the goats or the train or about time being an endless song or anything important like all that. But I didn’t exactly fold up my house and quit in a fit of pique like I pretended.

Okay I did … but then I smoothed it out again and started over. Let me explain:

After I posted my snit yesterday, I had myself something to eat and a half hour of quiet time, at which point I was ready to allow as how I’d probably not die if I tried to accomplished something Puritanical after all. So long as, whatever I did, I could do it on the couch, while watching Scrubs reruns on Comedy Central. Preferably with a glass of wine.

And then I had an idea that was so monumentally bad even I could see the flaws -- could see them even I did it. Could see them even as I envisioned it before I so much as moved a pagan pinky. “Ooh,” I thought, “This is a bad idea.” I’d go so far as to say that it was dangerously stupid. But in the end nothing terrible happened, so I don't have to, like, take a lesson out of the experience or anything. (Still and all, I don’t see any reason why Johnny ever has to know…)

I spread some newspapers on the coffee table, threw an old t-shirt on top of them (rag bag, dwindling!), dumped the coffee can of painted hinge-parts out on top of it, donned my trusty mask and cracked the 5F5. Right there on the stained-and-varnished coffee table, over the “oriental” rug (I think it was made in Egypt, does that count?), which was itself the only thing protecting our brand-newly refinished floors.

La la...

Metal is so much easier to strip than wood is, it’s practically fun! You paint the poison on there and then watch as it just bubbles up and crawls right off the brass like a caustic little caterpillar. And then, when you’re done, you can take it to the sink and wash it to get the last bits of goo out of the corners. Look:


(And that, that it’s sitting on, is the selfsame coffee table where I stripped it. See? It’s fine.)

I like this job! I think, before I get around to stripping the other doors (and I may never get around to stripping the other doors), I’ll take all the hinges off and do them anyway. Maybe tomorrow!

No, no, Prudence. Remember what we said about planning for tomorrow? Besides, you’ve got to finish the job you started first.

Yes’m. Yes, Goody. I know.

For now, though, since I couldn’t drink the wine I wanted while I was working with the 5F5 at the coffee table (not with a mask on and everything, I couldn’t), I poured myself a glass of Menage A Trois California Red (very nice, by the way, though maybe you should take this beer-drinker’s wine review with a grain of salt). Then I sank into the cushy wing chair, watched “Creature Comforts” on the tv, and giggled to myself all warm and thick and sweet, like a big old pot of oatmeal…

Day 13: Accomplished
Time: Two episodes of “Scrubs” -- one hour exactly
Cost: Nothing (thank god)
Everybody Pinky-Swearing To Not Tell Johnny What I Did When He Gets Home: Priceless

Day Four, Project Three, : Philips, Flat Or Flowery?

First of all , let me just say: Happy National Homeownership Month, everybody! I’ve been waiting for this ever since I first read about it in the Economist magazine, and now the moment’s finally here. Can’t you just feel the love…?

Okay, back on your heads.

Now that I’ve done it, I realize that taking a door off its hinges is not exactly a thing-a-day job. It took all of thirty seconds. But I was afraid maybe the hinges were so paint-fused together that I’d have to hit them with the 5F5, and if that had been the case I didn’t want to have to do anything else today. And I only have to do what I decide to do ahead of time -- them’s the rules. (Rules which, by the way, I’m making up as I go along and which may change later and I’ll thank you not to point it out to me if they do!).

First of all, I really should have taken the door down before I stripped the frame. But the stripping was taking so freakin’ long that I couldn’t stomach the thought of making the job any bigger. Two years is quite enough, thank you. I figured I’d get to all the un-seeable bits later (and it takes some kind of rationalization to consider the half-stripped coat-closet door, which is literally two feet -- okay maybe three feet -- from your face when you walk in the front door an un-seeable bit. But there you go). And then “later” just never came around. Until now. Damn.

I can’t back up far enough to take a full picture of the door without losing it in a busy portrait of the messiness that is my house. I tried, and what with the wood’s mottled, brown-and-white, half-stripped appearance, well, it came out looking like a pile of laundry in the corner. Or a cow. (And again I say: so long as I do one thing every day, nothing in the rules that I make up says I have to clean -- you should just be glad I don’t have real cows wandering around in here. Although I might. Who would ever know…?). So here’s at least a photo of what the half-stripped doorknob area looks like:



Not a bad looking knob, what? Every door in the house has these exact same ones. They -- whoever, somebody -- tore off the woodwork in the dining room, built an addition over the bulkhead, decorated the bathroom in Pepto-Dismal pink... but the doorknobs, all of them, they left alone. I like them, and the hardware, too. Ooh, in fact, now that I think of it, I really ought to take the hinges off, oughtn’t I?

Okay, I’ll go do that now.

Well, there’s another minute and a half down. Boy, howdy, I am really cooking! It must be this screwdriver Larry bought me…

Larry’s the fella Johnny works with. He bought this screwdriver for me because he was tired of listening to Johnny bitch about his going missing all the time. Honestly, I hated it at first. I’m not generally one for the girly-pink, do-it-herself crap If I’m going to use a tool (and believe you me, I used my share of tools when I was younger), then I want to use a proper tool. So Larry's girly screwdriver stayed in its shrink-wrapped plastic for a really very un-gratefully long time (and please, if you’ve got an explanation as to why in god’s name anyone would need to plastic-wrap a screwdriver, I sure would love to hear it).

But one day I couldn’t find the red one -- a.k.a. “Johnny’s” -- so I finally bit the bullet and unwrapped the flowers. It turns out it’s not so bad. It turns out it’s actually an honest tool. It’s just that it’s all pink and flowery. Which means Johnny won’t touch it. Which means the flowers actually turn out to be a good thing. So now I keep it in my nightstand drawer (so I always know where I can find it) and I use it for everything. Well, not everything -- not “nightstand-drawer” kind of everything, for example. In fact, ew. Now that I’ve had that thought, maybe I should try to find Larry's girly screwdriver another home...

Anyway, aside from it’s intended purpose I have used this flowery thing for stripping paint (it gets the detail of the decorative woodwork better than a stripping tool) for opening beer bottles (but that’s not really fair, I can open beers with anything: spoons, cigarette lighters, magazines, seat belts, table tops, maracas -- wait, seat belts? How did that one get in here? No, no, I would never do something as unsmafe as that... Okay, fine, yes, I did it. I opened a beer bottle with a safety belt. It's not like I was driving. And besides. I really was younger once, you know). And now I’ve used Larry’s -- oh, hell, I might's well just admit it -- my girly screwdriver for prying painted-on hinge pins off of closet doors. I do believe I’ve actually come to love its power-puffiness.

Here’s a picture of it:


Oh, yeah, and that pile in the corner of the shot? Those are the hinges and screws I just took off the door. And that’s probably where they’ll stay until I get around to stripping them: right there on the corner of my desk. So there. I’m the rule-maker-upper of this here manifesto!

Oh all right, fine, I’ll go get a coffee can. But if I can’t find them when I need them, then I’m holding you responsible. You and your stanky keep-the-house-clean rules …

Day Four: Accomplished
Total Time Spent: Seriously, about a minute and a half. Let’s be generous and call it three. Or, as Prince would have it: III.
Total cost: Nothing, nothing, nothing!
Frilly, girly screwdriver that Larry gave me: Priceless