Mercury Rising

This wasn't how this post was supposed to go, but here's to you, you old bastard.

Suck, suck, SUCK!

I blame all of you who spoke of 19-0 before it happened. And then it didn't happen. Which is all your fault.

BLEAH!

Sunday Super-Quickie

1. I'm over here today. And if you can figure out what the hell I'm talking about, please, don't spoil it for the rest of us.

2. Speaking of Bliss, our girl's still OTR, apparently:


3. And our boy's still beardy! I tried to take his picture while he slept, because his hands were folded up under his chin and he looked all angelic 'n' shit. Well, as angelic as a beardy, gin-blossomed, wild-haired Mick can look, anyway.

But that boy's got a hairtrigger wake-up on him! The flash woke him, and in the 1/10th of a second before the camera clicked he changed into this:


Not so angelic 'n' shit any more, are we, Love?

Hey, um, don't tell him I'm posting sleepy-shots, okay? I don't even think he remembers that I took it...

One Is Silver and the Other's... A Multi-Scoped Submarine Taking a Dump

Ta da!

Ta da (with the lights on, and from the other side)!

Ta d-- oops.

You weren't supposed to see that.

Oh, what the hell.

Ta d-- oops (from the other side).

Half-done, see?

New!

Old.

New!

Old.

New!

Old.

New/old.

New/old. With a hole in it. Because at this point, why bother?

Old. With a wad of toilet paper jammed in the hole where the deadbolt used to be. Because one day the deadbolt spontaneously locked itself. From the inside. Meaning the basement. And there was nobody down there. Which freaked me out. And we didn't have a key. So I took a hammer to it. Knocked the deadbolt clear through the door and down the cellar stairs. But then basement smells kept wafting up into the kitchen through the deadbolt-hole. So I shoved toilet paper in there. And forgot.

Old. And really just too pretty for words.

Old. Definitely old. And stunning, don't you think? The water stain. From the leak in the back room that rotted the house, that lowered the price, that made it so we could afford to buy the AssVac in the first place. Leak's fixed. Room's fixed. This water stain is all that's left to remind us. Well, this, plus twenty beer-pounds around my hips and decidedly grey stripes on both my temples.

Let's Rorshach it, shall we? I'll start.

I see... A submarine. With an extra little up-periscope thingy sticking out the front. And dumping some waste or something out the back. Yes. Definitely a multi-scoped submarine taking a dump.

What do you see?

Are You Kidding Me?

This box...

...is in my yard.

(We'll talk later about the condition of my yard. Right now, I'm the outraged one, okay?)

I noticed it when I first got out of bed this morning (i.e., twenty minutes ago) -- except that, when I first got out of bed this morning, it was in the road.

Which means somebody walked by at 7:30 on a Saturday morning, picked it up out of the road, and threw it in my yard!

And before you ask: no. There is no way it blew in. Don't you see that gorgeous chain-link fence there? There really isn't even any way someone could assume it blew out of this yard in the first place. Don't you see that stunning chain link fence?

People suck. Townville sucks. I hate boxes.

Grr.


Home Depot called. Our new cabinets are in. We're going to pick them up in about an hour. I'll show more kitchen pictures and bring you up to speed for good this afternoon.

In the meantime, I think I'll throw the empty boxes in the road.

[Update: I can't get Johnny to wake up. He's got a cold, and he won't get out of bed. So it's coming on 9:30 and, needless to say, we have not made it to Home Depot yet.

Maybe I'll throw Johnny in the road!]

Picture Pages! Part 4: Pig, Sink, Dishwasher & Etc.

Pig:


Sink:

Dishwasher:

& here is where I dropped the camera but it still works and you will see later why I chose to take these particular pictures in case they might be the last I ever took but they aren't, so anyway...

Etc.:

And:

And You Wonder Why I Mention It So Often

Sometimes, this idiot...

... gets this door open (it's in the kitchen; more on this fugly later)...

... and spends the entire day up here:

...meaning the attic, in case some of you don't remember my post about the F.O. stairs.

It happened again this morning. I woke up, I put the coffee on, the door was closed. But when I went to get coffee, the door was open.

Shit!

I opened up the door and sure enough, there Dummo was.

"Ah'm up here, Momma! Looka me!"

Idiot.

So I shut the door, figuring in a few minutes he'd come back down. In a few minutes, I opened the door again.

"Ah'm up here, Momma! Looka me!"

Idiot!

So I shut the door again. And I dropped off Johnny, and I came back home, and I worked out and I wrote a bit and I went to work and came back home and wrote some more.

And then I noticed that the bread machine was still on the kitchen counter, where it's not supposed to be, so I opened up that attic door to put the bread machine on the shelf where it belongs and--

Shoom! Out comes Dummo Cat.

Oh crap! I left him up there all freaking day!

The problem -- which speaks volumes about the both of us -- is this:

I am less concerned about the fact that he spent nine hours in the frigid cold, than I am that the litter box was not the first place he went when he came down.

Crap! Shit! Defecation!

If you thought I had a fixation on such things before, we've got ourselves an attic-mission now.

Picture Pages! Part 3: Stove (and cabinets and counter and drawer-handles)

Look!

It works and everything!

You may notice, however, that the range top is no longer flush to the counter, as Johnny and Andy spent three hours with shims and levels making sure it was.

That's because, six months after we installed it, the ignition broke. One by one the burners simply failed to light. Clickclickclickclick... clickclick... clickclick... nuthin.

I didn't call the manufacturer until the last one went. I was fishing for a match just like they did in the olden days (i.e., me, when we lived in our last apartment), and I thought: "Hey, wait a second -- I have a warranty! And I know where it is and everything!"

So I called, and Maytag sent their repairman over (I may have said in an earlier post that the stove is Whirlpool, but if I did then I was wr... I was wr... Well, anyway, it's Maytag).

Turns out the Maytag repairman isn't really the Big Guy from WKRP like in the old commercials. He's really a little guy, and he's Korean. He's good, though. He had the problem fixed toot sweet (or however you spell it) and when he was done, he said:

"You really ought to raise that up and level it. That's dangerous!"

I kept my cool, though. It wasn't his fault he had to pull it out to fix it, and it wasn't like I'd warned him about the shims. He pushed it straight back in, because that's how it's supposed to work, and when he did he fouled up the whole three-hour system.

But it wasn't his fault. So all I said was, "I know." Because I didn't want him to think I didn't know. And then I couldn't help but add: "It was level, before. We'll get it back that way later."

"No it wasn't." He said. "Now sign here."

That lying Maytag bastard!

Why do you have to be like that, Maytag Repairman? Are you honestly that lonely, sitting around waiting for a call, that you don't know how to act when you get in company? That stove was freaking level. Dead level. And it's not your fault that it isn't, now. I don't expect you to stick around for three hours and make it right again. So why you gotta get all up in my grill?

What I said, however, was "Oh." And I signed the papers.

Then, just to show him, we never did level it off. Ha ha.

No, really, the logic was as follows: it took an entire afternoon to level it the first time. And who knows, we might have to pull it out again when the exhaust fan or cabinets go in on top. So why bother to spend another afternoon making it right? Just leave it till we get around to finishing the second half of the kitchen, and we are really-truly done, done, done, done, done.

Right?

Apropos of nothing: in that top picture, you can see the counter and the cabinets and the four-dollar drawer-handles I picked. I've nothing more to add on any of those.

Oh, but Johnny says "Nuh-uh. We can so open the oven drawer!"

So that's where the broiling pan's been hiding all these years! What do you know? I guess I was wr... I was wr... Well anyway that's as far as it will open, and that can't possibly be as far as it's supposed to go.

So I think I was still half-right, after all.