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!

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!

great life

did you know that i can't dedicate more than 48 hours worth of effort to a project before it loses my attention? i can read a book for weeks on end and never get tired of it. i can read a series over and over and find new details in it every time. i've been playing the same character in a computer game for three years now and i'm still interested. a physical project, however? i've got about 48 hours to get it completely finished. anything more than that, and it is doomed to languish on the floor of my office until i become so frustrated with the clutter that i chuck it out, approximately three years on.

i'm the worst DIY candidate you can imagine, for this reason. accordingly, i've had someone in to scrape wallpaper and then apply paint to my bathroom walls. i assure you, if you've not been in my downstairs bathroom (and now it's too late) you would understand the need for this repair. remember "The Drew Carey Show?" remember the character from that show named Mimi? she wore the most awful muumuus in really awful bright colors, and garish makeup to match. if that character had walked into the bathroom of my house and suffered an unfortunate gastrointestinal malady and exploded, that would sorta explain the wallpaper in there. so it's gone now, and has been replaced by a hyperintelligent shade of the color blue. or at least, a nice soothing blue. also going is the extremely dated seashell-shaped sink.

i have no idea why seashells and nautical themes are the default bathroom decor, but i'd like to announce to the world and to interior designers everywhere that I'M OVER IT. thank you. there is no further need to emphasize the hydraulic relationship between a room with water faucets in it and the peaceful ocean. srsly.

the good news is, although i'm short on time, i am blessed to have the kind of good life and good partner who recognizes that our time together is worth more than our money. so we hired the job out, instead of starting it, dropping it at the end of the weekend or as soon as the first fun "let's get dinner!" invitation came along, and resuming it sometime in the vicinity of 2015. it's a good life.

bathroom curtains?

in my ongoing quest to keep my faithful readers informed about the state of women's rest rooms around the country, i present to you the latest weird thing i have observed in my travels: paper stall curtains!

so what is a paper stall curtain? well, you know how the standard stall divider is separated from the wall or the next panel over by a short gap? the size of the gap varies due to the mounting hardware used to attach the thing to the wall, but it averages about 3/4 inch. well, at the facility i'm teaching in this week, someone decided that gap was large enough to threaten her privacy, i guess. i wandered in, put down my paper ass gasket, and prepared to do what it is we do in a toilet stall when i noticed this long streamer of toilet paper dangling from the stall divider just in my peripheral vision. someone had hung a makeshift paper curtain to block the view through the gap between the stall divider and the wall. and this raises the question: did the previous occupant of my stall erect her paper-thin veil of modesty because she herself has viewed something objectionable through the gap between stall panel and wall? or did she catch someone peeping at her? my curiosity is piqued!

it is completely beyond my ken that someone might actually attempt to observe a stall occupant in her disadvantaged state, but i am assured by an ex-girlfriend of mine that this did occur to her, and not in the larry craig way. and this story, i think, is REALLY REALLY weird. let me know if you agree...

my ex fell ill at work one day and found herself in the women's room, doing what one does when one's gastric system is in distress. she heard some foot-shuffling and other traffic outside her stall, but she was in her own special world of misery and paid no particular attention to it. upon exiting the "necessary room" and returning to her desk, she heard strange titters from her coworkers (say it with me: cow orkers) and felt her spidey-senses tingling. she had the strange feeling that she (and maybe her unfortunate lack of intestinal fortitude) were the subject of office gossip. as she was telling me this, i interrupted her story to interject, "Surely," says i, "nobody came out of the restroom and discussed what she saw in there! To do that, she'd have had to bend over and peer under the divider and identify you by your shoes, and that's just ridiculous! No grown person does that!" surely, she assured me, this was exactly what had happened. on the one hand, i was stunned at the puerility and the crassness. on the other hand, this woman's propensity for stirring up drama was well known to me by this time, and it just fit.

still, i ask you, gentle readers... if you came out of the toilet and found yourself the subject of gossip for solo activity conducted in the privacy of your stall, would you be embarrassed for yourself? or for the harpies who were sitting in the cube farm discussing you? seriously. i thought this was a one-off thing, just one crazy pot-stirrer's crazy behavior in a crazy office. is this stall-spying problem more widespread than naive little me would like to think? do i need to start hanging paper stall curtains, too?

i got a haircut!

every few years, i like to grow my hair out. i grow it out until it's as long as i can stand it to get, and then i whack it off short and start all over again. i usually start growing it out about the time the phrase "yes, i know this is the women's room" starts to roll off my tongue even before the woman coming through the door can try to tell me i'm in the wrong place. unusually short hair, unusually long legs... sometimes the first impression is wrong. and eventually, that gets old.
it takes me about two years to grow my hair out to 12 inches, and i know that because the last time i got my hair cut was when my nieces were in the NICU. they're turning two this month, so that's how long my hair's been growing. i wanted to cut it before my monster road trip because my mop of hair is NOT something one wants to deal with on a two week motorcycle adventure. it's especially not something one wants to wear in the desert, and as i already mentioned, i was crossing ALL of them. (seriously: the chihuahua, the sonora, the mojave, the great basin. ALL the deserts)

it's the second time i've done this and donated the hair, but probably the 4th time i've done the drastic hair-chopping thing. this time, instead of just taking a borrowed pet trimmer to my own head, i got rose's sister to cut my hair for me. she did a great job! i like the process, i like the way it makes me feel lighter in body and spirit, but i really like knowing that all that time in maintenance and upkeep isn't just going into the trash. so, since 1 pic = 1k words, i'll just say that i donated the hair to Locks of Love and let you read the story below...

before the cut!

a foot of hair...

i'm ready. are you?

cleanup. with STYLE...

ta-daaa! high speed, low drag, easy-maintenance hair for the desert...

walky man, and tampa

so, i promised a photo of the canadian walky man forever ago, but my phone was roaming the whole time i was in canada, so i could never upload the image. i remembered to upload it last week two weeks ago while i was in missouri, but then i ran out of time at the airport and didn't actually post it here.

so, without further ado, the SUPER JAUNTY canadian walky man:

i think he looks a lot perkier than the standard issue american walky man. maybe it's just me. i mean, he has feet! and he's shouldering bravely into the wind!

and in yet another bathroom weirdness post, i leave you with the following message that was printed on paper and taped up in the bathroom stalls of the Tampa Municipal Building:

Ladies, in consideration of ours please cover before disregard products in** can.

Now, the obvious flaw here is that "can" is a euphemism for toilet, but those of you who've ever had to plunger a tampon out of a ladies' room in your day know what they're trying to say. The next problem, which you'd have had to be there to appreciate, is that where i typed the ** there was white-out on this sign. Let me say that again: THERE WAS WHITE-OUT ON THIS SIGN. I was so curious that i turned the paper over to see if I could make out what they'd decided was so inappropriate that they had to white it out. Turns out the word "in" originally read "into". This set me to giggling. In two lines of text so grossly grammatically incorrect, they'd decided that "into" was the wrong preposition, and "in" should be used instead. The remaining corrections are left as an exercise for the reader, if you can bear to think about it any longer.