Outside Greeley

Today's post, dear readers, is by our very first guest blogger here at Thalashouse. Not only a guest blogger, a mystery guest blogger. Never fear, the mystery will be revealed in good time, but to give up the ID of the mystery guest blogger now would spoil the story. So bear with us, enjoy the suspense, and read on...

There I was, minding my own business (and aren't we all when these things happen to us?) outside Greeley, Colorado. It was a fine, Chamber-Of-Commerce weather kind of day, and I was whizzing along just enjoying the sunshine, the wind-beneath-my-wings feeling, and just starting to think of grabbing some grub. That was when I met Thal. It really couldn't have gone worse. First off, I don't know if you know this but you should if you don't, she rides this big, screaming, red and chrome monster of a motorcycle. Second off, and this is important, she wears this terrifying, shiny, dragon-painted, red helmet that really flares in the sunlight. So the glare surprised me, then the dragons surprised me even more, and the next thing I knew I was getting sucked into the slipstream of that screaming monster she calls a bike. I got spooked and dove for cover, and unfortunately chose a refuge that was already occupied. After the first brain-rattling impact it took me a bit to gain my bearings and figure out that I. WAS. NOT. ALONE. You humans have these terrifying things you call "arms;" they're wobbly in places and bony in others, they branch into five crushing death heads at the end... really, they're awful and we don't know how you can stand them. Thal assures me the initial impact stunned and hurt her, too. My mother will be pleased, my exoskeleton is something she really prides herself on.

Right, so, blinding impact - then I realized I was trapped up in this tube-like cavern alongside one of those arm things. It kept trying to crush me! I fended it off with a flurry of quick stings and breathlessly started to climb. Wobbly parts, bony parts, back onto more wobbly parts... It was getting pretty tight in there and the arm kept jostling around like it was trying to squash me. I was terrified, so I stung the nearest wobbly part out of pure petulance! I kept climbing toward the dim light filtering into the tube, but it just kept getting tighter and tighter, and there looked like there was no way out! I honestly didn't think I was going to get out alive about then. I made it up the arm and out onto a hard-ish part Thal says was her shoulder when the wind suddenly dropped off.

There was a great jostling, commotion, shaking of the earth, some frantic yelping, and then suddenly I was free! The blue skies were overhead again! The wind was beneath my wings again! I flung myself into the air and executed the least graceful takeoff known to wasps the whole world wide. But I made it! And, so, reportedly, did your regular blogger. She will be returning to you as soon as the swelling in that arm goes down.

*This post inspired by my good friend Sidecar. And a wasp up my sleeve.

Ever have one of those days?

Almost three weeks ago now I was trying to leave on a trip. A pretty long trip, actually, some 2300 miles of travel with some sightseeing miles piled atop that. All on the motorcycle, which makes me happy, but with only one day between landing at the airport and taking off on the bike, which does not. Great as my boss is, great as my job is, sometimes the schedule just gets jammed up like that.

So, you know I recently had some bathroom remodeling done at my house and it didn't exactly go smoothly. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the plumbing had one more nasty trick up its sleeve. We had a new countertop installed in our master bathroom. We had new drop-in sinks added to that countertop. That meant we had new faucets added, as well. Because the old ones were losing their cool factor around 1985, so you can imagine that they were well into negative cool and on their way to retro cool here in 2009. Most of the time, this is a non-event. You don't have to write about replacing faucets because you simply open the cabinet, turn off the water supply to the sink, swap out the fixture, turn the water back on, and voilà ! There is water.

Of course, this is not how my house works. The counter-installing guys removed and hauled away the old sinks and counter surface, as requested. However, they neglected to mention that the reason my newly-tiled bathroom floor was not filling up with water is because they had turned off the water to my entire house. Now, luckily for me, there was a shiny new house-water-turner-offer valve, because this would have been a big problem prior to my aforementioned plumbing fiasco. It turns out that the little knobs in the cabinet under the sink that are supposed to turn off so you can change the fixture and otherwise maintain your plumbing DO NOT WORK. To be fair, they might work at your house. They worked in my old house in Manchaca (thank you, Papa Dell!) but they do NOT work in my current house.

In fact, rather than "turning off" the water under the new sinks in the new countertop, they function to just make it really mad. So, like a garden hose with a toddler's thumb stuck in the end of it, these knobs spray water everywhere. All over the bottom of the new sink, the inside of the cabinet, the underside of the new countertop, the newly-tiled floor, the bowl I had optimistically placed under the valve to collect any water drips, and my eyeglasses.

At this point, you might note, if you're really paying attention, that I'm on my 1-day furlough between landing at DFW airport and taking off on the bike for a long trip. So, you know, some laundry would be great, but a shower would be essential. Meaning that Rose had to go to Home Depot and find parts and fix the sink. You see what I did there? I separated that into THREE tasks. First: go to Home Depot. Second: find parts. Third: fix sink. When step 2 doesn't work, step 1 and 2 must both be repeated before step 3 can commence. And so steps 1 and 2 were repeated... THREE TIMES. I do not fault Rose for this. I have been told by every person who has touched the plumbing in my house that it is non-standard.

After the first attempt at finding parts using her "meh, this looks right" strategy, Rose chose to use my strategy of "read everything and choose accordingly" on her second run at Home Depot. This was unsuccessful due to catastrophic failure of the labeling system at Home Depot. You'd think that if the Library of Congress can correctly catalog 142 million items, Home Depot could correctly label a handful of plumbing supplies. On her third attempt, she used my father's "buy one of everything and if nothing fits you'll have enough spare parts to rig it" strategy. Unfortunately for me, Rose has used this (repeatedly) as evidence that Reading Doesn't Work in the complex world of home repair and wrench slinging.

After three trips and more frustration than it should really be possible to experience on a Friday afternoon, however, Rose emerged victorious and we had a shower and some laundry going. We had a couple of beers to reset the frustration meter back to zero, and THEN we started packing!

Sunny Sacramento

Open letter to my pants:

O, jeans, you know how much I love you. You're my comfy, faded, hemworn best friends. You keep my legs warm in cold movie theaters, you protect me from the freezer cases at the grocery store, whose frosty fingers seek to molest my shins. With you, I never have to shave! Who are we kidding? I wouldn't shave anyway, but you protect the sensitive eyes of the easily offended from the sight of my leg hair. You fit me whether I'm retaining water or not, whether I've eaten dessert or not, whether I've swum that extra lap or not.

Therefore, it is with heavy heart that I put you on notice. And, pants, sit up and pay attention here, because you ARE on notice of probation.

I am wounded. I have a pulled muscle in my thigh. It hurts a heckuvalot. In order to protect and heal that injury, I have to keep an elastic bandage wrapped about my upper leg.

Your persistent, jealous stalking of the aforementioned elastic bandage is making it uncomfortable. In fact, it has gone to pieces -- totally unraveled -- three times today, to say nothing of yesterday! It's losing its grip! Due to the added social pressure of walking and clinging at the same time, it has taken to falling apart in extremely public places like airports and hotel lobbies.

This is simply unacceptable. I do NOT want to look like the girl who couldn't get the tile comet off her shoe before leaving the ladies' room. I further do not want to look like an escaped zombie who managed to steal some awesomely comfy pants off an improbably tall woman, but forgot to tuck in my bandages before shambling off to the airport.

So, please, dear blue jeans, for the love of all that is fashionable, will you leave the Ace bandage alone and let it do its job? I swear I will call you my Ace jeans for the rest of your existence and love you more than all other pants if you will only do me this one, teeny, tiny little favor.

Luvyameanit,
Thal

things i like...

1) A good stylist who gives me a good haircut, consistently. My stylist just moved from one salon to another, and I didn't spend 0.1 seconds trying to figure out whether to be loyal to the salon or the stylist. Curly hair ain't easy, y'all!

2) Ice. It soothes aching muscles, it brings coffee down to a comfy summer drinking temperature, it makes my dogs scrabble across my kitchen floor chasing its frictionless fleeting form. No end to the hilarity OR usefulness of ice.

3) Growing and nurturing things. Fish. Plants. Dogs. Marriages. Well, just the one marriage, but you get the idea. I can't bake, but I can make stuff grow!

4) Swimming. I like the way it feels when I'm suspended in the water. I like the way water slides over my skin. I don't know if I'll still be so in love with swimming this winter when the weather is cold, but for now, I lurve it.

5) Air Conditioning. The south didn't get civilized until this handy invention became commonplace. I wouldn't live in the cold, cold north unless I was paid to, and even then it would have to be sums of money in direct proportion to the volume of snow I have to move in the course of my daily life. But without air conditioning? I would not so much enjoy all the easy access I have to sunshine, beaches, quality mexican food, and year-round motorcycle weather.

count those blessings, y'all!

Pooped

I just started a new exercise routine. Actually, it's more like I just started a lifestyle revolution. I guess if a revolution fails to take hold, it goes down in history books as a revolt, huh? We'll see how this goes. I'm holding out hope for revolution, but that won't be clear for a while yet. I'm revolting against the steady increase in the size of my butt. I've gone up two pants sizes since I started this job three years ago. At this rate, long before I would be eligible to retire, I will not be able to do my job because I won't be able to travel by commercial airliner. I'm not about a number on the scale, and I'm not dieting myself dangerously thin, I'm just trying to get my body back to the proportions it has when I'm being active and mindful of my diet. Lately, I've been doing neither of those things.

Anyway, I'm taking a triathlon training class. And "class" makes it kinda sound like we sit around with clipboards and learn how to train for triathlons. But it's more like hiring a personal trainer with 9 strangers and all agreeing that you'll work out together for the next 2 months. Some of these strangers are FAST, y'all! I'm the pokey little puppy at the back of the class. One of my very dear friends is also in the class, and she and I together comprise "Group 2" in most of the workouts. All the skinny fast kids who've done this before are "Group 1."

So far, though, I haven't had a single asthma attack. My coach gave me a great piece of advice tonight, and I think it's going to make this my favorite sport of all time, ever: Any problem you encounter in a workout or a race can be solved by slowing down. So, if anything ever goes awry, like my lungs seize up and I start sounding like a hurdy-gurdy, I just slow down. Even stop for a minute. I won't ever be the fastest girl on the course that way, but frankly, that's never been my goal. I just want to finish one of these things. I want to be able to work out without having an asthma attack every fucking time. So far, at least, this "slow down to fix your problems" sport sounds like the sort of thing that will accommodate my goal.

I might never be good at this, but if it can keep me from having to upsize my pants again, and I'm having fun, I don't even care. Viva la revolucion!

send in the clowns

And by clowns, I do NOT mean another round of plumbers or bathroom renovators. In this case, I actually mean clownfish. Like these little guys pictured here. I bought a tank recently off a friend of mine who was getting out of the hobby. I bought it, put his freshwater fish into my livebearer tank, and converted his lovely acrylic 55 gallon tank to saltwater. I've had it up and running with nothing but rocks and sand in it for a month now, to allow all the right kinds of bacteria to dig in to the rocks and start converting nasty fish pee into harmless fertilizer. Did you know that fish tanks are basically composting toilets? I betcha didn't know that. Next time you meet an aquarium hobbyist, or even a conservative with a goldfish bowl, you can mock them for being freaky environmentalist tree-lickers with composting toilets. Because I know that's the sort of thing you all like to do.

Tonight, I put my first fish into my new saltwater tank: the two clownfish pictured here. They're supposed to be pretty hardy, so they ought to survive my learning curve. As a trained environmental engineer I know a thing or two about water chemistry, and so I always sound like I know what I'm talking about. I needed to bring up the pH of my tank water a little bit, and I seriously considered using baking soda, but then I remembered that I have no idea how much would be required and I didn't know if it would leaven my fish so I went and bought a pH buffer from the fish store. I still laugh about the bottles of "pH reducer" that pool stores sell for $25 each, when you can get a jug four times the size for $5 at the grocery store if you're willing to carry around something labeled Muriatic Acid. The contents of the two bottles are the same, but there's something scarier about toting a jug-handled plastic container with a skull and bones symbol and the word ACID in large letters on the front. Anyway, for all I like to adjust the pH myself with real acids and bases, I wound up with a very expensive little bottle of powder that looks precisely like baking soda tonight. My inner geek is probably going to compute the molarity and molality of baking soda solutions tonight while I sleep so that I can be freed from the tyranny of pet shop chemistry supplies.

I also got a little shrimp to keep the rocks and sand clean. If I can keep him safe from my shrimp-gobbling family, he should fit in nicely. His picture is a little blurry, but you get the idea. I'm something of a giant Amazon, being the size of the average dude, basically. So when I say that without the shrimp in my diet as a kid on the Texas coast, I'd have stopped growing at five feet tall, that's saying something. This particular shrimp has giant freaky claws that make him look a little more like a crawfish than a shrimp, so maybe he could defend himself if my dad came over to visit and got peckish. I dunno.

Last but not least, since I spent the last two posts blah-ing on and on about my bathroom renovation project, I figured I'd post a picture of the finished product. Here is my shiny new bathroom! Rose just noticed that I didn't pick on her at all in this post (since I read it to her on her way out of the office). In fact, I owe her credit for all the photography here. She picked that blue in the bathroom, and I have to say I like it a lot, even though I always want to refer to it as a "hyper intelligent shade of the color blue" just to see who remembers their Douglas Adams.

Eight years' bad luck...

... or the continuing drama of the mirror that committed suicide and the earthworks and plumbing boggles that ensued.

Right, so ... wallpaper scraped, paint applied, carpet removed, wood floor laid, sink installed, poof! Right? Wrong. The plumbing in the original sink was large and messy and didn't fit behind the slim, attractive sink cabinet we'd chosen. No problem! There was a replacement plumbing kit with the cabinet, in anticipation of just this situation. Except you have to turn off the water to the house in order to make such a repair. I know this is possible, because a plumber did it a year ago when fixing the non-overflow drain to the same bathtub that precipitated this mess. He mentioned to me when he was leaving that I might want to dig out the plumbing box in front of the house because the valve was broken and hard to reach. About a week later, I dutifully opened the box, trowel in hand, and saw a perfectly good valve handle, high and dry above the mud. "Huh," says I, because I'm profound like that, "he must've fixed it." I closed the box and thought of it no more until Paul the Carpenter was trying to turn off the water so he could swap out the plumbing and install my new sink.
The high-and-dry valve handle previously witnessed by yours truly was, in fact, a red herring. It basically allows me to bleed all the water out of the pipes in my house, after I've shut the water off with the valve that is (at this point) totally buried in the mud. Now, I know that's really useful in vacation homes, particularly in frosty climates that are likely to freeze and burst pipes during unoccupied seasons. But when, I ask you, am I going to need to drain my water pipes for fear of a hard freeze? The answer, in case you didn't know is, "Not during the life a 70s townhouse," regardless of what trends global warming brings. Paul and I both did a little digging, barehanded, until I hollered "OUCH!!!" and then again "OUCH, DAMMIT!!!" and pulled my hand out of the muddy box dripping blood from two of my fingers. Mud and blood without beer is really, really, really not all it's cracked up to be. It turned out there was a large hunk of broken glass down in the box, which was probably the universe's way of reminding me that this whole project revolved around a shattered mirror. Anyway, Paul finally found the cutoff valve, but as you can see from the accompanying photo here, there's no HANDLE on it. No KNOB. No LEVER. There is NO WAY TO TURN THE VALVE. Paul is a resourceful dude, so he grabbed some Vise-Grip pliers and improvised a handle. You may have also noticed that the hole is rather deep. The pile of mud in my front yard was alarming.

Yea! Our problem was solved! Paul installed the plumbing and it was all peachy keen after that. Or not, because I still haven't explained the manhole cover in my yard and the mud running down the gutter, have I? No, I have not.

It turned out that Paul's improvised handle only had the power to CLOSE the valve. It did not have the power to OPEN the valve, thus restoring water to my 70s townhome. What good is a brand new shiny bathroom, all freshly renovated, if you cannot use it? None whatsoever, I'm here to say. You can photograph it. For getting-on-with-my-life purposes, however, it's worthless. And since the cost of that shiny new bathroom included seven years bad luck, blood, mud, (no beer!), two room renovations, and disabling all hydraulically-enabled rooms in my home, I was none too pleased over it, no matter how shiny.

I'll spare you the blow-by-blow, but suffice it to say there was some trickery (on our part) of the city water department, whose shutoff valve to my house was also not functional. They averred that it would take 10 days to put in a work order to fix their valve, but they could come out and turn off the water to our house in short order and then turn it back on later in the day. So we asked them kindly to do so, knowing that they could not shut off the water without also fixing the valve. Ten days, hah! So, when the fellow turned up and claimed he'd cut the water off, we asked him to prove it, which he gamely attempted to do by turning on a faucet and showing us how it didn't run. Except that it did. And kept on running long after it should've dribbled off. The look on his face at that point was your classic dictionary example of the word "glum". The only way for him to fix the valve in dry fashion was to cut water for our entire block, which he didn't have time or authorization to do. The only way for him to comply with the city's Prime Directive of "cut off the customer's water on demand so they can fix broken stuff" was to fix the valve. That meant wet work, and that meant a muddy mess. He was liberal with the mud and the mess, too. There were cat-sized chunks of Texas Blackland Prairie Clay strewn everywhere.

I didn't want to tweak him any more than I already had, so I held off photographing the thing until he was done and gone. Besides, he had shovels, rakes, and implements of destruction at his fingertips. But that's the shiny, new city cutoff valve down in the valve box, still awash with the muddy water that the city guy worked in to replace it, that matches the shiny new bathroom.

In addition, we had a plumber come out to fix the broken house cutoff valve, and that was a minor drama in itself. Not quite enough to write an opera over, but at least as much as selecting the sink cabinet. There were multiple trips, delays, lots more digging, cursing, and backwards gaskets, of course. But then, we had WATER! In our HOUSE!! Modern indoor plumbing is something you cannot appreciate fully until you've gone a couple of nights without a shower and only flushed the commode when you could borrow a pitcher of water from a neighbor to refill the tank.

It made our sink look like this, however. Now, those who know my wife well may argue that this is pretty much how any sink looks after she's been at it. However, she hasn't been doing any motorcycle work lately, and I'm fairly certain there was more mud on my knuckles this week than on hers. Either way, it was unacceptable for our house pipes to be producing mud, which they produced in large volumes after the four rounds of plumbing work, in spite of me standing over them sternly stating how very unacceptable this whole mess was.

Blessings upon blessings, the plumbers knew just how to fix the problem. There is some magic tool supplied with some of these modern faucets so that you can remove the aerator. I'd never heard of it, but when the plumber described approximately what it might look like, I found it in the pile of sink parts and paperwork left behind by the well-organized Paul the Carpenter, I was pleasantly surprised, given my experience with my wife's installation jobs. Given the vast service to hygiene and sanity performed by my plumber, I'd have given him the mint. He charged a modest sum and apologized for it having been so high. We parted company a happy band. And now, I have a shiny new bathroom, freshly renovated, that I can actually use! Which all started with a broken mirror... You can thank Jill over at Twipply Skwood for requesting photo documentation of the whole episode. Unlike my usual stuff, these are actually photos I took, not Rose's work. Perhaps now you see why I leave the photography to her?

Seven Years' Bad Luck, or Seven Thousand Dollars.

A mirror fell off a wall in my house and shattered into a hundred thousand pieces. I came home from a nice weekend out riding motorcycles with friends and found a wreckage of shattered glass all up and down the stairs. I was so grateful my dogs weren't home! It wasn't a lone mirror, however. That mirror was but one panel on a wall that was covered floor to (very high) ceiling in mirrors. They were all about the size of a full-height mirror that you would find in a dressing room, or hanging on your closet door. They had been custom cut to fit and hung very neatly, probably about the time I was born. Maybe about the time my baby sister was born, but certainly before parachute pants and jelly shoes. So this particular mirror had probably seen all of the fashion changes it could stand, and before someone dragged the indignity of Ugg boots before it, the poor thing just jumped off the wall, smashed its flat face against the banister, and dissolved into slivers. Next thing I knew, there were plumbers in my yard and a whole new earthscape of mud in two different places out front. There is, I assure you, a logical progression here. Things are not as surreal as they seem. So follow the white rabbit, down the drainpipe and into my very expensive mirror repair...

The only safe and sane response here was to climb a ladder and poke and tug on the neighboring mirrors, to see if they could be encouraged to follow suit. It turns out that they were frighteningly willing to do so, and mostly were dangling, like a kid's loose tooth that hangs on by just one root before finally letting go in the middle of Thanksgiving Dinner. Loose teeth often come out with a gushing of blood and a weird popping sound, and since we wanted to avoid that in the mirrored wall department, we had Paul the Carpenter come take all the mirrors off our wall. Whereupon, Paul notified me that we had (*DUN DUN DUNNNNNN*) water damage on the wall. (See, I told you it wasn't as surreal as banana guacamole.)

We had good reason to suspect that the water damage was coming from the bathtub in our master bath on the second floor. So we called out a plumber who had to cut a hole in the ceiling of the first floor bathroom to get a look at the underside of the tub and diagnose the suspected leak. He found the leak coming from the overflow drain, but couldn't get to it through the hole he had already cut. So he had to cut a hole in the wall behind the bathtub to fix the backwards gasket that was causing the leak. Who knew gaskets could be installed backwards? I thought they were about as complicated as rubber washers! Anyway, I've been walking around muttering "backwards gasket!" to nobody in particular lately, because it sounds like the sort of thing a very perturbed and very crazy person would say. I want it to just roll off my tongue should I ever need to express myself in the most insane way possible.

Now, if you're keeping track, there are now TWO holes cut in my walls. One is through a ceiling covered with that popcorn texture that was so popular just before parachute pants and jelly shoes. The other is through a wall that was papered contemporaneously with lace gloves and the moonwalk. (RIP, MJ.) And if you've ever done this sort of thing, you know that you can't simply patch big rectangular holes in your drywall when there is wallpaper involved. It's one of the classic blunders, right after "Never go in against a Sicilian when DEATH is on the line! Hahahahahahahahahaha *plop*"

I previously mentioned that I was having the wallpaper scraped and paint applied in my bathrooms, and this whole mirror-cascade was what started the project. The main impetus for the wall recovering was that the paper in both bathrooms was hideous to the point of being nauseating. But since the sink in that bathroom looked basically like this and we all know how I feel about nautical bathroom themes, we decided to follow up with a general renovation of the whole tootin' thing.

There was a minor saga involved in the selection of the replacement sink and cabinet, involving no fewer than four trips to Ikea and three to Home Depot. There were purchases, returns, backorders, and backwards gaskets, but we finally secured a sink/cabinet combination that we like and it only cost about four times what we'd budgeted. This brings us to the plumbing installation, but since the downstairs bathroom was carpeted (another indignity that I'm sure contributed to the mirror's tragic end) in a badly stained seafoam green, we decided to have wood floor laid to replace it. Paul the Carpenter to the rescue! This was the only cheap part of the project, really, since we already had all the flooring materials left over from our living/dining room renovation a few years back.

This is already too long, so I'm going to continue it in another installment tomorrow. Stay tuned, gentle readers!