Bathroom Renovation

Every fall, for the past couple of years, we’ve been doing something to upgrade our little house. We’ve definitely outgrown the starter home we bought almost fifteen years ago. Back then Little One was a clump of cells in the Mrs.’s belly, and I, not allowing the merest scent of paint fumes to waft her way, painted every room in the place that summer before our family grew from two to three.

Four years later Patch came. A shared upstairs office was transformed into a toddler bedroom for Little One and the basement was refurnished (painted, drop ceiling installed, laundry corner walled off) for our desks and PCs. Then, the clothes came. Since our tiny little starter home was built in 1942, when people either didn’t use closets or only owned two sets of clothing each, we had precious little space to put them. School clothes, summer clothes, winter clothes. Jackets. Rain jackets. Boots, shoes, sneakers. Toys, toys, toys. And, of course, my six hundred books.

Where was I going with this?

Oh, right. Though we’ve outgrown our starter home, New Jersey economics has prohibitively forbidden us to move up to a larger one, at least in this area. So we’ve made due over the years. And in addition to regular maintenance and upkeep, we’ve done some improvements to the house. For instance:

2014: Had a new roof installed.

2016: Replaced the rusted out furnace.

2017: Added siding instead of repainting the exterior, saving us some serious energy $.

And every odd year I’ve painted a room a new color – master bedroom, Patch’s room, Little One’s room, dining room.

Now, for 2018, we’re having our upstairs bathroom redone. It’s a bathroom that could fit comfortably in a pre-World War II submarine, but it’s ours. The floor tiles were coming undone. The light fixture flickered. There was no outlet in there to use a hair dryer. The fan had stopped working years ago; indeed, a vigorous coating of rust continually mocked me with the taunt of potential mold damage. And the damn terlet overflowed twice a week no matter what preventive maintenance I tried to do (“Girls! Poop, then flush. Wipe three times, then flush. Wipe three times again if necessary, then flush!!”)

Fortunately, my cousin’s husband is in the remodeling business, and he’s taking good care of us. In less than four hours he and his guys completely demolished the bathroom. Down to the wooden beams and nails. It’s amazing. What would have honestly taken me a year took them a little over three hours. He said that there were three layers underneath the tiles and walls we saw. That meant, over the past three-quarters of a century, that bathroom got smaller and smaller every time they renovated it. So now I might get two, maybe three inches in every direction. Psychologically, I’m going to feel I’m in the bathroom of the Taj Mahal. Going forward, two of us can be in the bathroom at once if need be. What a luxury!

Unfortunately, that upstairs bathroom holds the only shower in the house. Said shower currently does not exist. We have a bathroom on the ground floor, but it’s a half-bath: toilet, no tub. So I cleaned out the laundry room last Friday, brought down a stool, a pail, a basin, and a bunch of beach towels and sorted them by the big sink next to the dryer. For the past couple of days we’ve been washing up down there. It’s serviceable and survivable; I don’t stink, but I don’t exactly feel spring fresh, either. Tonight I’m going to shampoo and condition my hair in the kitchen to try to feel somewhat human again. The girls have friends who will let them shower over at their houses, and we have generous relatives a few towns over offering their facilities. But we don’t want to impose.

This week my cousin’s husband is getting permits and having the plumber and the electrician get over to do their part. The tile guy is going to deliver our new toilet, vanity, and tub, and, uh, tiles. Classic black-and-white checkerboard. A working fan is going in, and it will be moved over away from the shower so it shouldn’t rust right away. The whole ETA on this thing is another two weeks or so, especially playing the whole permit game with the town. I’m expecting a new bathroom by Thanksgiving, so I’m hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

So there’s that. Pics when it’s all done. Right now I’m ready to get into a bathing suit and have the girls hose me down on the deck, but it’s currently 55 degrees out. Oh well. Training for the zombie apocalypse, I guess. When’s the last time you saw Rick Grimes take a shower on that damn show?

A Conscious Metaphor

Came across this neat little idea on the internet while researching a bit on the introduction to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (okay, I was looking for help understanding what the hell I just read 20 pages of)

To paraphrase what I heard …

Consciousness is like a hole in a wall. It’s an absence, a void, a bit of nothingness – until something moves behind the wall, past the hole. Then you can see it. You can grasp it. Rather, this thing called consciousness does.

Still not sure I grasp it. But I like it.

Sixteen

That’s the number of languages J.R.R. Tolkien understood: Ancient Greek, Latin, Gothic, Old Norse/Old Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Anglo-Saxon/Old English, Middle English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Welsh, and Finnish.

Seventeen, if you include Esperanto, which he taught himself as a young teen.

He is credited with constructing in his works anywhere from fourteen to twenty-one languages. The discrepancy depends on how one defines a “language” – do a few lines etched in a runestone qualify? Off the top of my head I count seven – Quenya, Sindarin, Numenorean, Hobbitish, Dwarvish, the Black Speech, and, uh, did the Eagles speak their own language? Not sure. It’s been about a year and a half since I cracked upon a book written by the Professor.

Anyway, this small but wonderful bit of trivia regarding Tolkiennish linguistics reminds me that I still have The Fall of Gondolin, a birthday gift, waiting patiently on deck. And I have an unused Amazon gift card waiting to be spent. Maybe I should take the plunge and pick up something off my bucket list, something from The History of Middle-earth perhaps? Hmm? I think so.

I’ve also just begun another bucket-list book, about which I’ll have more to say in an upcoming post.

Celebrityhood: 2018

The political is everything; everything is political.

A little late to the party, but I saw this two or three weeks ago and filed it away:

Climate Change

Oh, this climate can’t change fast enough for me! Over the past 72 days, since the beginning of August, it’s rained 60 times here in northern New Jersey. It’s like south Vietnam up here. All the shrubbery in my backyard is twice as tall, trespassing onto the deck and throughout the yard. We’ve been infested with aggressive giant mosquitos nonstop, so bad that letting the dog out back for a five minute walk entails half a dozen bug bites. Acorns the size of golf balls in the road. Moss has carpeted my porch and garlanded the house’s foundation, and the land is so watersoaked I’m fearful that big oak tree in the south east corner is going to tip over into Patch’s bedroom.

Not to mention I’m starting to get sad. I mean, SAD. You know, that disease where the weather pisses you off. Er, depresses you.

That fall nip in the air, when any trace of humidity dissipates with the greens of the foliage, that’s what I want in lieu of this rain forest that’s straddled my state these three months now. That’s one of the things I enjoy best in life. I want to go apple and pumpkin picking with the girls this weekend but don’t want to get drenched like I’ve ran a half-marathon.

Now, New Jersey basically has a six-week fall and a six-week spring. Summers last four months and winters five. After fifty-one years, I’ve reconciled myself to that. But not this endless shower of rain. Can I walk from my car in the driveway to the front door without expecting a Bengal tiger – or a Viet Cong – or the Predator that stalked Arnold and pals – to rip me to shreds from the steamy overgrown jungle that’s my front yard?

Thank god I put my foot down fifteen years ago when the wife wanted to put a deposit on a house that required mandatory flood insurance. As a kid I remember my basement periodically flooding, remember my mother twisting water-drenched towels into buckets, remember fishing out my G.I. Joe dolls (salvageable) and the few comic books I ever owned (unsalvageable). And I thought, never again. I now live in a house on the middle of the hill, and in all the rain – probably 500 rainstorms or so over the years – it’s never once let a single drop into the basement.

[knocking furiously on the closest piece of wood he finds]

So the constant rain has given me a pounding headache. I’m grabbing something cheap and trashy to read and will be avoiding human contact for the rest of the night.

Carry on. And please, bring on the climate change!

Government Schools (Sigh)

Handout in my 5th grade daughter’s Friday Folder.

Notes:

(1) Always check spelling, guys.

(2) When we don’t send our children to school on December 25, it’s because it’s Christmas Day, not an opportunity to develop professionally. Now, what are we celebrating every second Monday in October?

Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Argh. Every time I tap on the laptop keyboard the screen goes black. With a little prodding, i.e., further tapping and/or lowering and raising the screen part in tandem, it comes back to life. Sometimes. Then, two weeks ago, it stopped coming back to life. Frustrated and busy with other things, I let it lie like an ancient antique artifact * on my desk.

Today, with some time on my hands, I took it apart, pulled out the battery, blew all the dust and debris from the interior guttage, and re-assembled. It seems to be behaving itself right now, though I am typing this very, very gently. Perhaps there’s a lose connection somewhere inside I can’t see or get to. Who knows? Well, I guess a computer tech would, but I don’t want to drop a couple hundred bucks to find out. Let’s just see how the laptop responds over the next couple of days.

With that in mind, expect some posts over the next couple of days. I am overflowing with ideas, though I haven’t actually written anything. Plan on being busy tomorrow despite having Columbus Day off, so maybe I’ll take finger to keyboard and see what magic, if any, happens. And hope that this friggin’ Dell – only three years old – performs to expectation, i.e., normally.

* = Remember OOPART, from a blog post back in August of 2016? Coined by cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson, it stands for Out Of Place ARTifact. It refers to such anachronisms as the Baghdad Battery, but could apply to my laptop if, say, it was discovered in the year 800 A.D., when Charlemagne was crowned king of half of medieval Europe.