The Grinding Noise of Doom

I've taken so many trips back and forth on the Chinatown bus that I have a pretty solid routine. I know when to hold my breath, what seats to avoid and how to shake off a weird person who is eying the spot next to me.

I also know when to pull out my computer, slide in a DVD and let the world around me drift away.

At least I used to. Last night something totally horrible happened. The disk drive on my laptop went out. Now when I put in a disk, instead of hearing the twirling noise that indicates my movie is about to begin, all I get are a few weird grinding sounds. Then the thing spits out my rejected flick.

I've spent a few hours trying to coax it back to life, but it's useless. It's broken and I'm now doomed. Doomed to sit on the bus, smelling the person eating the pungent Chinese food, listening to the guy loudly chatting on his cell, waiting for the nearly three hour drive to come to an end. I have to endure all of this when I could be finding out how the Mad Men will try to win the American Airlines account or how Dexter will beat the rap.

Doomed.

Or I guess I could haul around the portable DVD player I own until I figure out how to get my laptop repaired. Either way, I'm not happy.

A Little Pruning

I'm sure one day not too long ago our three-tiered backyard was beautiful, colorful, orderly, but now it goes something like this...

Five-foot weeds dominate the first tier, the second tier is vines and even taller weeds and the third tier is trash trees and other scary things. It's quite easily the most overgrown monstrosity in our nice little neighborhood.

It's so daunting that we have, for the most part, simply ignored it. Except when trying to spot our favorite groundhog Frank. But armed with the neighbor's pole saw, our own little hand saw and a whole lot of naivete, we decided to lop off a few dead branches.

Two afternoons later our overgrown backyard looks, well, a lot like it did before. And we know this is most likely the project we will never finish. But one log at a time, we will try to make it a
little more presentable.

Finding New and Exotic Places for Cat Naps

What can I say? This is what happens when Leah leaves the drawers to her dresser open. Good thing she owns a dozen or so lint rollers.

Frank the Berry Thief

Meet Frank.

He's the groundhog who lives in our forest-like backyard. Or at the very least our yard is one of his favorite haunts. Leah has seen him numerous times and was able to snap these photos.

She's also the one who named him Frank. "I don't know. He just looked like a Frank," she says.

At first, we had no clue what it was. All we knew was that it was bigger than our cats, furry and Leah wanted to pet it. We described it to one of her law school friends who then asked us "When it runs, do you see the fat undulating down its back?"

Yeah!

"Groundhog," she says.

Groundhogs, aka woodchucks, are pretty common in these parts I take it. They are part of the rodent family, live in dens and are not fond of foxes or dogs. They eat mostly grasses and berries.

And that explains what happened to the three precious raspberries that were growing on our vine. Damn Frank! I really wanted to try one of those berries.

Last weekend, while I was working in our home office, I heard a rustling outside and was fast enough to see him dart under our fence and into the neighbors yard. Work-be-damned, I grabbed the camera, steadied myself and waited.

And waited. And then grew bored and went back to work.

A few minutes later the rustling kicked up and I saw Frank's fat ass running the other way up our terrace and into the bush. Frank is not only a berry thief that Leah wants to pet but he is also fast.

We will let you know if we snag any better pictures of our new backyard friend.

Torching the Toilet as Time Ticks

“IT’S ON FIRE!”

That’s Leah screaming from the room next to me, while I just sit here and try to come up with slightly moronic things to say like “That’s OK honey. Just keep going.” I’m hiding because I really can’t take the stress of all of this.

I have to jump on a bus to DC in a few hours and right now the water to the house is shut off. It’s a toilet removal gone bad. Let me start from the beginning.

As we continue to remodel the basement, my job today was to yank the toilet and sink out of the little half bath. Only problem is that unlike your fancy, updated toilet, ours doesn’t have a shut off valve that works or a little flexible hose that delivers the water to the commode.

Nope, ours has copper pipes that run from the wall right to the basin. Earlier in the day, I had to cut the pipe and removed the toilet. Only then did I realized that the valve I bought wouldn’t work.

Tick tock. The bussing hour approaches. We jumped into the car and rushed to the home improvement store to pick up some new supplies. I probably asked Leah what time it was on at least four occasions. She remained calm. I was jittery.

We got a valve that you solder or “sweat” on to the copper nub that is now protruding from the wall. We also got a little heat resistant blanket. We’ve tried this whole soldering thing before and you remember how well that worked out. But we remained confident.
I got the torch lit and Leah prepped the area with the flux. Then I gave it a go, but to be honest I panicked. I cut the heat too early meaning the solder didn’t melt and create a seal. What I did do was annoy Leah. That made me even more jittery or is that jitterier.

Anyway, after I told her she was right. I lit torch again, handed it too her and got the hell out of dodge. Meaning I stepped out of the half bath and turned my back to what she was doing.

That’s when she screamed that she caught the heat resistant blanket on fire. The blanket was wrapped around the other copper pipe connections and the wood paneling on the wall. But unlike me, Leah stuck with it. Melted the solder. Sealed the valve. Saved the day. And for awhile relished the victory.

She couldn’t savor it too much because the clock was still ticking and she wanted me to remove the sink. At least the sink had shut off valves. Just as Leah was complaining that whoever put this in was too lazy to update the toilet too, I was removing the cleaning supplies in the cupboard below the sink.

That’s where I found a toilet shut off valve identical to the one we raced to the store to get and a little flexible hose that would connect to the basin.

Damn. She was right. They were too lazy.

Making the Basement Less Gag Inducing

Some days you just wake up thinking that you need to lay about 300 square feet of tile in your basement to cover the pink and white vinyl squares that make your ladyfriend gag.

It happens, I know.

But I would say recognize how big a project you are getting yourself into. Cause this doozy has cost us two weekends so far, we are still not done and this is only about half of the basement.

Here is what this beast looked like when we started.



I carefully laid out tiles to make sure I knew how they would run from end to end and side to side. (Turns out my math was way off and this was a waste of time, but at least I gave it a go)

Then I broke out the tile saw and got to work. I made most of the cuts, while Leah handled the trowel and thinset.



We started near the fireplace, since we thought people would likely look in that direction often and as you can tell we used spacers in a totally failed attempt to keep the grout lines kinda even.

That is two spacers for each side of a tile, four sides to a tile and we put in place a whole bunch of tile. Let me do the calculations, that adds up to exactly 1.6 s*%t loads of spacers.



And one cat. Damn Ralph couldn’t help but be all up in our business the whole time. He has to be the center of attention. Unless the job involves fire …. or the vacuum. He’s not a big fan of the vacuum.

This past weekend we mixed up 25 pounds of grout, stuffed it into a “grout bag” (which looks like something you would use to put a frosting on a cake) and gooped all the spaces between the tiles.

It went better than expected and that usually means disaster. Turns out the light brown grout dried a chalky white, which means we get to use some special acid to take off the excess minerals. But that is for another weekend. If we wet the whole thing, you can see what the final product will look like.

We think it is an improvement. At least Leah doesn’t gag when she sees it.

The Fall of Gotham

So I'm sitting on the Chinatown Bus doing my thing, which this week involved watching The Dark Knight special features. When all of a sudden an older woman in front of me pulled an ear of corn out of her bag, shucked it and started gnawing on the thing. Then when she got all the kernels off, she did it AGAIN with another ear of corn!!

Uh, that really wasn't the point of this story, but it was just too weird to pass up.

So I was watching The Dark Knight special features and I have to say they are quite underwhelming when compared with the cool stuff on Batman Begins. But probably one of the more interesting features is six episodes of Gotham Tonight, a fictional TV news show where the host is convinced Gotham city officials should hunt and arrest Batman.

Like any good fictional TV news show, it had a ticker running at the bottom of the screen that displayed headlines like "Harvey Dent promises to rid Gotham of organized crime" and "The Gotham Times revenue down 18 percent because of declining ad sales and sliding standards."

WHAT! The newspaper in Gotham is having a hard time selling ads and newspapers when a guy dressed like a bat is beating criminals to a pulp every night? Not to mention some creepy terrorist tried to release poisonous gas through the water system recently, all the nutjobs broke out of Arkham Asylum, the monorail crashed and now some guy with paint all over his face is killing people with no motive?

Damn it. I know newspapers are having a hard go of it right now, but this is just ridiculous.

Follow the Lines

I'm waiting for two tourists to figure out if they want a cappuccino or a lemonade and my eyes are darting around the floor.

Looks good, looks good, looks... wait a minute. That tile is totally crooked. What loser blew that one? Next thing I know the person behind me in the coffee line nudges my shoulder and says it's my turn to order.

---

Leah and I are in a dark and crowded theater watching Public Enemies, when I lean over and whisper in her ear "subway pattern, looks pretty good too" pointing out the wall tile in a bathroom in some 1930s era hotel. She responds "I was thinking the same thing."

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What can I say, all I see are grout lines and tile patterns these days. Especially after we spent the entire July 4th weekend laying hundreds of ceramic squares in our basement. We haven't even hit the halfway point, but I gotta say it is already a big improvement over the white and pink linoleum. I promise to post pictures next week. I'm hoping to grout it by then.

I'm not about to brag though. If a skilled tile guru walked into our basement he or she would gag for sure. One section has perfect grout lines, the middle of the floor has tiny ones (probably half the size we hoped for) and the far end has mammoth spaces between the tiles. We tried to keep it perfect. We used spacers and the whole bit, but we are total amateurs. Hacks really. Amateur hacks who wing massive tile projects and hope they work out.

Leah tells me our work is "good enough." I'm sure it will be fine, but I need a little more reassurance than that. So I scan every tiled surface I come upon, looking for imperfections. Every uneven grout line, every crooked square makes me feel a little better about our own attempt and all the work that lies before us.

Biting the Hand That Pets You

It starts all nice and cute. Ralph rubs his big fat cat body against my leg in the morning as I lumber into the kitchen to start the coffee. He wants a little attention. I want caffeine.

But then his ears start going back and his pupils dilate. He gets closer to the floor and starts stalking my ankles. Moving back and forth, looking for a sign of weakness before he attacks!

DAMN IT, RALPH!

He wraps his clawless paws around my leg and bites me. Nothing too hard, but enough that I swat him good. But then he doesn't stop. He wants more. I'm trapped in the kitchen holding a cup of coffee by a manic ankle biting cat.

I try to explain that I'm not a supersized t-shirt wearing rat. He doesn't seem to care much though. I try to tell him that the reason we got another cat is so he would have someone to attack. He lunges again.

He will bite Leah's hand if she pets him longer than he wants, but he doesn't go for her legs. It has to be the fact that mine are covered in hair. He also stops once I put on socks and shoes.

So my options are wear pants all the time. Sleep in socks and shoes. Shave my legs. Or have gnaw marks on my ankles.

Hmm... I will have to think this over as I sip my coffee.