|
|
Tuesday, October 12th, 2010
| |
2:10 pm - It's Been a While
|
It's not that anything momentous has happened, I just somehow got out of the habit of posting over here. Mostly I've been happily vegetating and re-reading a lot of old adventure books in preparation for NaNoWriMo, which is next month. I've written first drafts through NaNo twice now, and find that it's a great way to keep my nose to the grindstone and actually get the thing done. Without that incentive, I rewrite and rewrite and never get anywhere. The new book is going to be a pulp adventure along the lines of Rohmer's Fu-Manchu. Of course, in this PC era minority villains are frowned upon, so mine will be a shady billionaire businessman of the white persuasion. I have a general idea of the plot and I've written down the names of the characters, the rest will have to wait until November 1st.
Renaissance eBooks released my last piece of commercial fiction in September. Since then, I've written one short fan fic piece to keep my hand in, and am about 2/3 done with a second one. Both are due in mid November, so I need to finish up by the end of the month. Otherwise NaNo is apt to find me writing about Nayland Smith trying to chase down Lord Voldemort. That does have a certain gaudy fascination but on the whole, I think I'd rather not.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Friday, September 3rd, 2010
| |
2:28 pm - Lucky Pierre has returned!
|
JM Stine, at Renaissance eBooks, sent a note this morning to let me know that J.D. Crayne's latest mystery, "Pause for the Cat," has been released and is available on the Renaissance Page Turner site. It will be out soon as a Kindle book.
Pause For the Cat
This mystery is sort of a combination of the science fiction convention background from "Murder at the Worldcon" and the cozy mysteries that take place in the author's imaginary town of Pomo. The setting for this one is a house party for science fiction writers, and you know what happens during the classic mystery house party!
I went to a lot of parties like that--called salons by the hostess--in the 1970s and '80s. Most of the attendees were Los Angeles sf writers, and occasionally we had visitors from out of state. It started with a buffet dinner, then there was a guest speaker -- we had an astronaut once! It was a chance to get together and talk shop, discuss some of the latest science news, and tip a few glasses.
I cannot, however, recall that anyone was ever murdered during one of them!
|
|
(4 comments | comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, May 4th, 2010
| |
4:09 pm - A Day of Maintenance
|
Last night I was peaceably eating dinner when part of the wooden table top fell off. The center of the table is an octagon, and the outer edge is made of eight curved segments. I guess the glue simply wore out. This morning I gathered up the jug of wood glue, a rubber hammer, and two spring clamps and put the piece back where it belonged. I'll let it set for a couple of days to be sure that the glue is cured. The only thing that bothers me is that, although I tapped the wood piece into place very carefully and the outer edges are flush, there is a crack along the inside join. I guess I'll have to put some wood filler in it.
Having done that, I decided to dismantle the front gates, one of which had been pretty well shattered by the tree that came down across the driveway last year. This past Sunday, my neighbor cut up the remains of the tree and hauled it off, so I thought I'd show that I appreciated that by cleaning up the driveway a bit. Taking the gates off of the posts was a bitch of a job, since the screws and nails were all rusted, but I finally got them down and dragged them up the hill and out of sight. I slapped a coat of white fence paint on the posts, and tomorrow I'll put the house number and the orange reflectors back up. I'm also going to mount two of my garden solar lights on top of the posts, and plant butterfly bush(Buddleia) next to them.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Sunday, April 25th, 2010
| |
3:26 pm - Changing Rates
|
I mentioned to my daughter that I was thinking about getting a thumb drive to transfer some fiction from my old Linux machine to my current Windows machine. She offered to get a 2-gig thumb drive and send it to me, since I live out in the middle of nowhere. Walmart is selling them for six bucks where she lives, in Los Angeles.
It's hard to explain to people how incredible that sounds. When Chuck bought our first computer (a Scelbi, which came as a kit) it came with 1K of memory. That's right, one kilobyte. We splurged a few months later and bought a second k, for around a hundred dollars. The Scelbi had no external memory and we programmed it by flicking front panel switches until Chuck bought a tape perforator and reader to go with it.
Floppy drives, with eight inch disks, were a major innovation, and I can still recall how excited home computer users were when hard drives became available, even though they were several hundred dollars apiece and only held a few thousand k.
I have watched the entire home compute industry develop, from the days when a computer was a novelty and people asked what you were going to do with it, to an era when a home computer is an appliance and practically everyone has one. And two-gig drives go for six bucks at WalMart. Incredible.
|
|
(4 comments | comment on this)
|
| Sunday, April 18th, 2010
| |
2:32 pm - Cleaning Up
|
I declared that 2010 would be the Year of the Clean-Up, and I'm doing my best to comply. Yesterday and today I opened the eleven boxes that my sister-in-law sent to us after my other sister-in-law died. They've been sitting in the garage, unopened for nearly eight years. Most of them were filled with Japanese language study materials, and the local used book store is willing to take those. (There's also a copy of the first Harry Potter book, in Japanese. I'm going to keep that for the novelty of it.)
There were three volumes of the Japanese comic strip, "What's Michael?" and at first I merely thought it was interesting that she had copies of it. Last night I suddenly thought, "Hey, I think those are mine!" remembering that I had loaned them to her a decade ago. I retrieved them this morning, and sure enough there was a gap in the shelved books that fit them perfectly.
Three of the boxes were full of paperbacks in English. I'll hold onto those until I can check and see which ones duplicate books that I already have. There's a lot of Bujold, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Elizabeth Gouge, Ellis Peters, and other women writers that aren't familiar to me.
To finish off my day, I gave the old yo-heave-ho to a stack of song books that had been gnawed by rats before we cleaned up the downstairs. Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Chad Mitchell Trio... I did keep a few that were only nibbled, but the ones with vast holes in the middle and chunks chewed out of the edges are headed to the recycler.
The next thing I am going to do is dump the contents of the three-ring binders, which date back to my working days in the computer industry. Some of them are close to thirty years old. They're of even less use than the programming reference books, and those are already gone.
The Year of the Clean-Up continues.
|
|
(1 comment | comment on this)
|
| Thursday, April 1st, 2010
| |
12:53 pm - Senseless Census
|
A couple of weeks ago, the census forms arrived in the mail. My home is a single-family residence with a house number of 6551. I received three forms, two for the correct house number and one marked "6551-B" for a non-existent house or duplex or something. Well, hey. Hiccups in the system do sometimes happen.
I filled out one of the duplicates, marked the one for 6551-B "invalid address," and sent those two forms back. I tossed the duplicate form into a drawer.
This morning I got *TWO MORE* census forms in the mail, one for 6551 and another for 6551-B. Of course, all of the envelopes are marked "YOUR RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW" in big black letters. Okay. I'm going to send back those two plus the one from the previous batch, and let the census bureau figure it out.
Should I count all five of the cats?
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Saturday, March 20th, 2010
| |
5:21 pm - Me and My Miter Box
|
Adam the Contractor left two long pieces of moulding in the garage when he took off for Italy, and I had been thinking of using them around the inside of the downstairs door, the one that leads to the stairs. I took a look at the moulding this morning and discovered that it isn't the stuff that goes around doors, it's 3-1/4" baseboard stock. Well, shucks. Still, it is oak-finished (some kind of veneer), already varnished, and wide enough to cover the damage that Bubbles once did to the plasterboard. (That was in one of her frantic efforts to escape by clawing through the wall. I think she pictures herself as a fairytale cat princess, kept in durance vile by the evil witch.) I decided to use it anyway.
The project turned out to be very easy. I clamped the miter box and baseboard stock to the bridge railing (it's a little footbridge that goes over the creek) with a gigantic C clamp to keep it from moving, made my cuts, and nailed the moulding in place with finishing nails. The only hitch came when I realized that the moulding was too wide for the gap between the door frame and the switch plate next to it. I had to make a 1/4" cut-out to miss the plate. That wasn't hard, just two small cuts with the saw and a couple of whacks with a hammer and wood chisel. There's a small crack on the left side, because the wall isn't even, and tomorrow I'll cover that with wood putty. The moulding is quite satisfactory and the doorway looks MUCH better.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Sunday, March 14th, 2010
| |
4:57 pm - Little Chores
|
Today was bright, sunny, and nearly 50 degrees, so I decided to move the paving stones from where the hot tub used to be. I put those 6" x 12" pavers around the tub not long after we installed it a decade ago, so that we wouldn't be stepping on dirt getting in and out of the tub. Now that the tub is gone, I want to plant some rhododendrons where it used to be and the pavers have to go.
Moving them turned out to be an archaeological project; not only had they acquired about 3" of oak leaf mold, half of them were covered with dirt from when the contractor put in the French drain. I scraped and dug my way down to the stones, levered them up with a shovel, and carried them off, one by one. (Those suckers are heavy!) I hadn't realized there were so many of them, and it took me nearly an hour to move all three dozen. I put them down on either side of the laundry room stoop, laying them in a basketwork pattern but not bothering to level them. I had to work around the sewer vent, but managed to do that with only one break in the pattern. I have a bronze statue of a fisherman in the garage that I think will fit over, and hide, the vent.
I also put up a hook for the hose by the outside tap, so the stoop looks a little more tidy now. (Those hooks were a really good investment. They're actually guitar hooks and came two to a shrink-pack from American Sales and Surplus. I have them in the tool shed, where they hold sacks of apples in the fall, in the garage, holding large clamps, and in the garden holding other hoses.)
It was a productive day!
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Thursday, February 25th, 2010
| |
3:27 pm - A very fine cat indeed
|
Renaissance eBooks has released my second vampire novel,
Fangs and Fortune
which is a sequel to "Lipstick and Fangs, the Memoirs of a Vampire Adventuress."
It was fun to write. My books are normally gentle, comedic, and suitable for family reading, so every once in a while it amuses me to write something that is vicious and amoral -- in a whimsical way, of course!
Having taken care of the vampire, I'm going back on my vow to never write another damned cat book. My publisher, bless 'er, wants a cat book. She LIKES cat books.
Sadly, the handsome black and white feline who inspired the previous three volumes is no longer with us. I don't know what happened to Pierre. He was an outdoor cat and his previous owner is my neighbor. He deserted her (and her other five cats) and moved over here about three years ago. I tried, once, to shut him in at night and keep him safe from local predators. He managed to push open the window, which I had forgotten to lock, ripped a hole in the screen, and made his escape. I never tried that again. The last I saw of him was a Friday in January, when he was rolling on the gravel, romping about, and then bounding ahead of me to the studio, where I always put out his food. My neighbor and I assume that he fell afoul of a fox or coyote. It's too bad; he was a very nice fur person. RequiesCAT in Pace, Pierre.
|
|
(2 comments | comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
| |
3:29 pm - One Year
|
Today is the first anniversary of Chuck's death, and what would have been his 72nd birthday. In those nightmarish weeks right after he died, I kept telling myself that if I could just get through the first year, things would be better afterward. It was a hellish year.
Thinking back about our life here, it seems to me that nothing particularly difficult happened for the first thirteen years. The worst thing I can remember is the time that the culvert up the hill from the house got clogged with sediment and flooded the garage. In 2008, Chuck had to have an angioplasty, and that was stressful, but he came through it with no complications. (I guess that was a shot of mortality across our bow.) Then came 2009, and it was as if all of the bad luck that had been dammed up somewhere came roaring and crashing into my life.
I survived. I survived having the power go out when a tree came down across the lines, and I survived the myriad little household failures that had to be repaired. At the time, they seemed more like major catastrophes. There were times when I felt like I couldn't possibly do it, but I did. I had the house remodeled, I learned to drive the truck, and little by little I've been cleaning up around the yard. (I used to tell Chuck that the place looked like something that belonged to Maw and Paw Kettle, and all it needed was a few frowzy chickens scratching in the dirt.)
The same thing happens to thousands of women every year. Somehow, they get through it. So did I.
|
|
(6 comments | comment on this)
|
| Sunday, February 7th, 2010
| |
2:55 pm - A Mystery Revealed
|
Having heard that people are sending spoons to an acquaintance with cancer, I pulled two silverware boxes out of the credenza to see what I might have. Behind the boxes--Lo, and Behold! --was my paternal grandmother's Bible, which I had misplaced some years ago. It was an inexpensive Bible, and came from Kress, which was what we used to call a "dime store." The imitation leather is cracking, and some of the pages are coming loose, so about ten years ago I embroidered a cover for it with mock medieval designs in chain stitch, using embroidery floss. It seemed to take forever. After I finished it, I put the cover on the book, put the book in a plastic bag, and promptly lost it.
One of the things that always puzzled me about this particular tome, which my favorite aunt (my grandmother's eldest daughter) gave to her mother for Christmas in 1933, is a set of quotations that are written on blank pages in pencil, presumably by my grandmother. I had showed them to a few people, who did not recognize them, and they were always a mystery to me. They sounded like something out of a sermon or maybe a revival meeting.
My grandmother, who died when I was too young to remember her, was by all accounts a deeply religious woman with a great deal of family pride. Her younger daughter lived with the father of her children for quite a few years before she married him, and my grandmother falsified the date of her marriage on the Family Record page in this Bible, so the kids would appear to be legitimate. Lying in a Bible? Tsk, tsk, tsk. The dedication on the title page originally read, "from Frances & Grant." When the two of them divorced, Grandmother firmly wrote over the words so they now read "from Frances with love."
With that in mind, I supposed that those quotations were something that she had copied from a book of sermons or perhaps a collection of inspirational sayings. This time, I googled them. Nope, not a preacher. All three of them are from "The Lost Prince," a children's book by Frances Hodgson Burnett that was published in 1915.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Friday, January 1st, 2010
| |
3:59 pm - Looking Ahead
|
2009 was a bitch of a year. In retrospect, I am rather surprised that I got through it. But now I find myself almost looking ahead to this next one. I have learned to drive the truck (although I'm still not terribly adept at backing up) and all of the house remodeling has been done. A neighbor even sealed the top of the wood stove pipe so it doesn't leak rainwater anymore. I've gotten rid of a lot of stuff. I still have some financial issues to resolve, but I think everything will turn out okay in the long run.
My main goal for 2010 is to get rid of the obsolete computer hardware, books, and media. In general, I hang onto old books, but obsolete computer manuals really aren't good for much. They're paper and hence recycleable, so I plan on hauling them to the transfer station. It occurred to me the other day that getting rid of those manuals will give me back about ten linear feet of book shelves. That's not to be sneezed at.
I didn't do anything with the garden last year, except to weed whack (nearly severing the phone line in the process) but this spring I am going to plant the usual tomatoes, summer squash, and cucumbers. I have three temporary greenhouses (plastic covers over a metal frame), one of which I had disassembled, so I gave that one to my neighbor. I'm going to put the covers back over the other two this spring and try to grow some melons in them along along with the lilies.
I did move the medlar tree a couple of days ago. It's been in a half oak barrel ever since I got it, about five years ago, and is still less than five feet tall. I had to knock the barrel apart to get it out, and discovered that, in spite of all the rain we've had, the coir-dirt mixture in the tub was practically dry and the tree had a very small root ball. I dug a shallow hole for it (shallow because this ground is bloody hard), plunked the root ball into the hole, surrounded it with an edging of old bricks, and heaped dirt up over it. The rain will settle it in, and it should do a lot better. It's completely dormant, so I'm not terribly worried about its survival.
I feel optimistic about 2010; I really do. Knock on wood, anyway.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Monday, December 7th, 2009
| |
6:03 pm - A Beautiful Blett
|
My medlars bletted! This is the first time that's happened, and I think it was because of the freeze. Medlar is a small tree, distantly related to the rose, that was planted in medieval and Renaissance times for its fruit. Called "open arse" by country folk, the fruit is round, tan, and about 2" in diameter. They look a bit like over-sized rose hips. The popular name comes from the depression at the blossom end, which is surrounded by little hair-like projections. When it's ripe, medlar fruit is rock-hard and has to soften, like a persimmon, before it's edible. This is called "bletting" but a web site that I found says honestly that they have to ROT.
I bought the tree about six years ago and planted it in a half oak barrel. It has produced fruit regularly after the second year. It's only about five feet tall, and all its fruit ever did was stay rock hard and eventually wither. The blossoms are very pretty, by the way. They're white. five-petaled, and about three inches across. The big bumblebees that live around here love them.
What with one thing and another, I didn't get around to pulling the fruit off of the tree this year until after Thanksgiving and a couple of hard frosts. There were about two dozen of them. I tossed them into a fruit bowl next to the bananas, and a couple of days ago I noticed that several of them had skins which had turned dark brown, and they felt soft when squeezed. Good glory, they had BLETTED!! I peeled back the thin skin and tried the pulp.
Hmmm. Well, it's nothing to cheer and stamp one's feet about, but it's not bad. As the web site claimed, it tastes a bit like unsweetened apple sauce, with a squeeze of lemon juice added. I can understand why the people of the 16th Century were partial to them, especially since they are ready to eat after all of the other orchard fruit is gone. In an era before refined sugar they must have been a real treat. I'm looking forward to next year's crop -- and I'll leave them on the tree until after a hard freeze.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Friday, December 4th, 2009
| |
8:38 am - The End of the Cube
|
Back in the 1980s I bought a little square plastic clock radio, black and white, which had the name CUBE written prominently on its side. I bought it for my office at work, because I liked to listen to classical music while I worked. Back in late February of this year I decided that I wanted some sound in the house, which was far too quiet after Chuck died, and remembered that I had seen the Cube on a shelf in the garage. So, I retrieved it and set it up on the kitchen window sill.
I remember when everyone's kitchen had a radio. My parents' radio sat on top of the refrigerator, and we listened to things like "Amos and Andy," "Chandu the Magician," "Red Ryder," and other popular radio programs. That was in the hey-day of radio programming, and we listened to it even after we got our first TV in 1949.
All my little Cube could pick up reliably during the day was the local Spanish language music program. But at night, "when the skip is in," I could get news programs from the Bay Area and sometimes Sacramento. They had the usual tendency to fade in and out, but one becomes accustomed to such drawbacks. Then, alas, the Cube began to succumb to the ills of electronic old age. Considering that it was over twenty years old, that wasn't surprising. First, the clock gave out. It began to gain a couple of hours every twenty minutes or so. Then its red display started to flash ominously. I put a piece of tape over the display, so I wouldn't be distracted by it. Next, there were odd interludes of static, punctuated by unaccountable periods of silence. Finally, it took to producing a strange soft throbbing sound, even when the radio was turned off. I realized that it was sounding its death knell. Sadly, I unplugged it, took it out to the trash sack in the garage and gave it the old yo-heave-ho.
Yesterday I went to Radio Shack and bought the last clock radio they had on the shelf, for $24.95. It's a Phillips, which I have never heard of, but it has a big green seven-segment display that I can read without my glasses and it sits proudly on the window sill with a curvy aerodynamic silhouette. If it lasts as long as the faithful Cube, I'll be delighted.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Saturday, November 28th, 2009
| |
12:59 pm - A Very Nice Thansgiving
|
It was a very pleasant holiday. My dearest Chazpure and Odogoddess drove up from Los Angeles, and a friend of theirs from the Bay Area joined us as well. It had been a long time since the friend had eaten a "real" Thanksgiving dinner, so I did the whole traditional thing, with roast turkey, cornbread dressing with giblets, home-made cranberry sauce, baked fresh yams, biscuits and a relish tray. We had home-made apple pie for dessert as well. We were, also traditionally, as stuffed as the turkey.
I joined four HP fan fic exchanges this year, but I turned in the last of those last week, so that was off of my conscience and I was able to plow ahead on my NaNoWriMo novel. My house guests had fan fic of their own to write, have been heads-down over their laptops, and did not need to be entertained. I was free to wallow in the improbable plot lines that evolve through NaNo. I hit 50,567 words on Friday morning and posted the text to the word count validation program. Winner! That gives me a nice cozy feeling of accomplishment. I still have plot left over, so I'll be working on the book for the next week or so. After that, I'll let it rest for a month and then start making my revisions and corrections during January. That will be a nice way to start off the new year.
I also squeezed in a few pages for a monthly electronic science fiction apa that I joined a couple of years ago.
I feel incredibly productive!
This has been a very nice holiday and I hope that all of you who celebrate Thanksgiving had one that was equally enjoyable.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Friday, November 6th, 2009
| |
12:30 pm - Small Victories
|
Tuesday morning I took Truck to town. It was one of those do-it-now impulses that I am prone to, and I reasoned that 9am on a weekday morning would probably give me the least amount of traffic to contend with. (Not that there's much traffic out here at any time. If I pass three cars on that road it rates as rush hour.) There are some curves on the winding road down into town that I don't even like in the Toyota, since they don't have a shoulder and there is a steep drop on the outside. However, I reminded myself that Truck is only six inches wider than the Toy, and off I went. No problem. I drove to town, turned around in the museum parking lot, and came back--for a total round trip excursion of twelve miles. Now I feel a lot more relaxed about driving the thing.
This morning I bagged Chuck's three-piece suits for the trash. He worked for IBM for 17 years and I worked for Xerox for 18. When we moved up here, we both brought along our suits, and I packed my high heels as well. Naturally we never wore any of it, but who was to know? My suits are still in boxes in storage, somewhere, but his suits were hanging in the closet covered with a film of dust. They were beautiful wool suits, and Chuck got them from a Hong Kong clothier who was recommended to him by another IBMer. We called the guy Hong Kong Harry. He came to the Los Angeles area every six months or so and took a motel room. Customers came into have their measurements taken, selected what fabric they wanted, and handed over a check. About a month later some absolutely gorgeous wool suits showed up in the mail.
I kept putting off doing anything with the suits, telling myself that I could offer them to the local Little Theatre group, or maybe recycle the cloth. Some women do that; cut their husband's old clothes up into largish squares and sew them together into comforters. I finally faced the fact that I was never going to do either of those things, so away they go. It has only taken me nine months.
|
|
(3 comments | comment on this)
|
| Thursday, October 29th, 2009
| |
3:46 pm - A Little Too Helpful
|
The remodeling project is complete! I have a kitchenette downstairs where I can make hors d'oeuvres and mixed drinks if I want to throw a wild party. The stairs and half of the upper deck are roofed over, and so is the new redwood deck that Adam built downstairs. He finished on Tuesday, packed up his tools on Wednesday,(leaving the place looking rather empty -- he brings along everything he could conceivably need) and left this afternoon for Italy.
Filled with enthusiasm, I went to the hardware store this morning to get a couple of gallons of white paint for the deck railings. I was looking for fence paint, but they didn't seem to have any. A helpful clerk spotted me peering at the paint cans and asked if I needed assistance. I explained what I needed. He proudly showed off his white house paint at $29 a gallon and pointed out that it contained silicone. Okay. I guess that's good. I said I'd take two gallons.
"Flat, semi-gloss, or gloss?" he asked. That was easy, flat. "Do you want white, or TRUE white?" he asked with a gimlet-eyed stare. Responding to my dubious expression, he explained grandly that all white paint has black in it. Now, I am aware of white that tends toward blue, green, red, or anything else you care to name, but white with black in it is usually called GREY.
Sensing my hesitation, he trotted out his Explain to the Little Woman manner and showed me two sample swatches. One of them was a nice brilliant white and the other was... grey. At that point I gave him my best fluttering-eyelashes look and said, "Maybe I'd better ask my husband exactly what he wants," and left.
I went to Mendo Mill, the local builder's supply, and bought two cans of their white Barn and Fence paint for $17 a gallon.
current mood:  amused
|
|
(3 comments | comment on this)
|
| Friday, October 23rd, 2009
| |
6:39 pm - Don'cha Love It When Things Come Together!
|
Adam The Contractor has about a day's worth of work to do on the roof, a couple of hours on the kitchenette, and however long it takes to install a new exterior door. He's also going to put in a Malibu lighting system along the stairs, so I won't be as apt to slip and break my neck on dark nights, and replace some wood that's afflicted with dry rot. He expects to be done by end-of-day on Tuesday, and is leaving for Italy on Thursday. We both reflect on the niceties of fate, which fitted my projects to his available time.
There haven't been many glitches. The first one was when he installed the faucet in the new sink and it only dribbled. He took it apart, removed a bunch of grit (probably washed into the system from my rural water supply), and put it back together. The second glitch was a bit more serious, as he discovered that the wiring to the outlet where the new stove goes was only 10 gauge -- too light for the current building code and a fire hazard to boot. Undaunted, Adam ran a new 8 gauge line from the breaker box to the outlet.
The new door is a proper exterior one, metal sheathed and painted white. The door it replaces is an interior style with wood veneer, and should never have been there in the first place. Since it was not under cover, the bottom of its frame rotted out over the years, to the point where I shoved a wad of steel wool in the hole to keep out the mice. Besides rodents, the new door will also keep out the millipedes, which are harmless but disconcerting, being six inches long and creepy.
The cats and I are all looking forward to this project being done. Adam's tools are spread all over the downstairs, along with a medium-sized compressor. He forgot to turn the compressor off one evening when he left, it came on automatically at about 8pm, and I went downstairs to find Bubbles mildly apprehensive and Neo looking like she was staring death in the face. After that, I moved the cats back to the studio at night. Only a few more days, and they'll have their downstairs quarters back again. We will all rejoice.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
| |
9:22 am - The Rains Came
|
For the past several years we haven't had any significant rain until November, but last night a large storm rolled in and is supposed to give us at least an inch of rain. The fire season is over! Now all we have to worry about are mud slides and floods.
A few days ago Adam the Contractor mentioned that he's working as a part-time English teacher in Italy, plus doing night work as a casino security guard. He says that he'd like to open a small hotel with inexpensive rooms and internet connections. A laudable goal, but it sounds to me like he is planning on getting out of the construction business all together. That being the case, I told him to go ahead with the kitchenette that Chuck and I had decided to put in downstairs -- small sink, two-burner stove, and compact 'fridge. I had planned for him to do that the next time he came back from Italy, but the next time he's in town, he might not want to do any construction at all. It turned out to be a really good idea, because now he has indoor work to do while the weather is bad.
Chuck and I planned to put in the downstairs bathroom and a kitchenette against the time when we would be too physically feeble to use the exterior stairs, although I have put off that evil day for a while by having the stairs roofed over. In the meantime, friends and relations who come by for a visit will be able to make a cup of tea or heat a pot of soup in the kitchenette.
|
|
(2 comments | comment on this)
|
| Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
| |
9:39 am - Winterizing
|
Several weeks ago I bought a length of black foam insulation for the standpipe on the slope -- the one where I had to have the faucet replaced. Since yesterday's and today's low temperature was about 34 degrees I decided I had better not put it off any longer. So, I got my insulation, scissors, and duct tape and headed up the slope. (I knew to use duct tape because when I bought the insulation the clerk asked me if I had any. Of COURSE I've got duct tape; country living depends on it!) The insulation, I discovered, is scored so that it can be opened up like a fillet. I cut two pieces, put one on the top, one on the bottom, and wrapped the two together with tape. Total time expended -- about five minutes.
The other project was to repair the cottage window, where two of the four panes of glass had fallen out. The glass isn't broken, but I decided that it was too cold to try tapping in glazier's points and puttying the frames. I found a largish scrap of translucent greenhouse plastic, grabbed a jug of roofing nails, my trusty scissors, and a hammer, and covered over the entire window. Total time expended -- about five minutes.
I still need to repair the back of the greenhouse, where some creature -- probably a raccoon -- ripped two large holes in the plastic sheeting a couple of nights ago. I thought I had thwarted the beast by putting three-foot-high wire fencing across the back of the greenhouse the last time I repaired it. Obviously not. I am thinking of either putting in another row of fencing above the existing one, or covering the entire back of the greenhouse with wooden trellis.
I do not have to worry about winterizing the stairs and deck; the contractor is taking care of that. Since I was still feeling flush after a munificent tax refund, I'm having my favorite contractor roof over half of the deck, the stairs, and the small slab where the door leads into the downstairs. That means I can go through the downstairs, up the exterior stairs, and inside again without dealing with the rain or snow. It should cut down on the chances of me breaking my neck on the icy stairs.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
|
|
|
|