Barn

The Mailbox, Derecho, Dumpster and Beetle

/ wvfurandroot / 3 Comments

I can read by this sucker!

July 7th (or maybe July 8th, it could be after midnight)

I’m sitting outside in the heat and neglect ravished garden writing this with pen and paper. It’s a night to make 72F past midnight feel like watermelon on ice.

The last time I blogged, I was trying to make my mailman happy. I may have succeeded. But here we are again, trying to make the mailman happy. HMOKeefe and the mailbox had a lover’s quarrel. He wielded a U-Haul and the mailbox stood silent, but not firm. After sprawling on the ground for several days in the debris of unwanted catalogs and carpet cleaning advertisements, the monster mailbox was tossed into the rental dumpster.

Exhausted, but victorious. The post, that is.

Boston Boy spent most of the day installing a new mailbox using some New England method that bears no resemblance to how anybody I know has ever installed a mailbox. It’s not going well. I say, “Um, you’re trying to pound that thing into bedrock,” and he says, “I did this in Massachusetts” and then I don’t say, “What part of any of this reminds you of Massachusetts?” But it’s been 3 weeks without a mailbox and another day or 300 doesn’t matter. I’m not the mail junkie.  The new post is sprawled in the driveway, exhausted but victorious against insertion into bedrock.

Oh, yes, rental dumpster. It’s been exciting times around the old barn and, really, if you’ve never rented a dumpster, do so. Before things got worse, I had a lot of fun running around like June Cleaver on crack de-junking the house.

I am too damn old for all the excitement of the past several months.

In no particular order, I offer up the following as a sort of “What I did on my summer vacation” essay.

1. The Derecho.

2. Three downed trees.

3. 6 nights and 5 days (and counting) of no power

First floor of the house. For upstairs, add 10 degrees.

4. Heat index between 105 and 115

5. The pied-à-terre abandoned (hence the Uhaul).

6. Mushrooms growing on my carpet.

7. New subfloor

8. Termites, carpenter ants, squirrels and a possum, all in the house, and all evicted.

9. Rotten bookcases.

Where are my bookcases?

10. 105 linear feet of homeless books PLUS HMO’Keefe’s.

11. Moldy drywall.

12. Packed the entire first floor of the barn.

13. New HVAC.

14. Chose new flooring, paint, and more paint.

15. Sanded drywall.

16. Acquired my first extension ladder.

17. New solid bottom (doesn’t that sound sort of risqué?) dishwasher to protect the as-of-yet-uninstalled new flooring.

Ah, there they are. Those aren’t bookcases, they’re trash.

18. Burl the Handyman Extraordinaire retired. Found Shorty, the Whirling Dervish Handyman.

19. Sheer, unceasing, unspeakable chaos at work.

20. Flunked the mammogram. Passed on the 3rd try.

21. More indignities of old age.

22. Even more.

23. Still yet more.

24. Filled the dumpster (and then some).

Building a new subfloor, fa la la.

25. This is only a partial list. I’m leaving out 26 through 147, but each and every one of them hold promise of a good story when I get to the point where I can laugh.I got a wee bit drunk last night. It was my only hope for sleep. I’ll never sleep tonight. It is, literally, 94F in the bedroom and the entire first floor is a construction zone. The only furniture available for human bodies are the wooden kitchen chairs. The idea of wine as a sleep aid is revolting and I’ve been mainlining water so I’ll pee every 30 seconds all night. Might as well just sit here.

AH DAMN. I JUST SWALLOWED A BEETLE.

After the Derecho slammer jammed West Virginia, 85% of the state lost power last Friday, including me. I woke Saturday morning to air conditioned comfort much to my astonishment. That astonishment grew as I learned about the Derecho, the state of emergency, the suffering that hurricane force winds during temps in excess of 100 can provoke. For those of you as ignorant of this weather phenomenon as I was, a Derecho is either Spanish or Sioux for Straight Arrow (different sources different origins). It’s a hurricane force wind that arrives with no warning and travels a great distance in a very short period of time wreaking havoc. This one started in the upper Midwest and didn’t stop until it knocked D.C off the grid. In 10 hours.

I routinely lose power. If a cloud somewhere sneezes, my power goes out. How did I get lucky? I don’t know. But I lost power in the second storm on Tuesday and here I sit, swallowing water and beetles.

Third degree mosquito bites fer shur, dude.

Boston Boy is resolved to sleep out here tonight. If he succeeds, we’ll be at the E.R. tomorrow tending to potential Lyme Disease and 3rd degree mosquito bites.

The IPhone is keeping me sane. I switch between Facebook, the APCO website and email. One thing led to another and I found Charlene on Facebook today. By the time she accepted my friend request, the battery was dead. So the phone is on the car charger and I’m losing the battle against the bugs. The nifty new lantern which was the last non-electric source of light available for purchase in the state of West Virginia is attracting June bugs who subsequently explode like tiny, wet fireworks when they get too close to the flame. (Yes, it’s gruesome, but there are that many fewer for me to swallow.

It’s a dandy lantern – 1500 lumens with an electronic ignition. If it just had wi-fi, I’d be all set.

I need a strait-jacket.

Besides every hotel being full to bursting with tree trimmers, power workers and the heat-tortured citizenry, we’re not in a hotel tonight for fiscally prudent reasons. Nor were we last night, but we were Thursday night because otherwise I was going to end up in either prison or the psych ward. But the, “Gee! Let’s put in new flooring” torture and massacre of every penny and more in the budget has the checkbook keening loudly, although not loud enough to drown out the neighbors’ three, yes three, generators. I hate the sound. Hate it. It sounds like a stampeding herd of semi-trucks. I just know the neighbors are over there wearing sweaters and surfing the Internet while sipping something frothy with lots of ice.

[Connie looks forlornly at the 2” of dirty water in the bottom of the cooler.]

So, it seems I’ve blogged again.

Find contentment in creating chaos.

It’s now Sunday evening, about 10 p.m. I’ve had power since shortly before 2 p.m. Of course, another storm arrived shortly thereafter which is wreaking havoc. Thus far, the power is on having only flickered once or twice. I have the AC cranked. I’m going to get this house freezing so if we lose power, and I expect to, we’ll have some spare cool air. However, the heat has broken. It’s a good 30 degrees cooler outside than it was this time last night. I expect to sleep well tonight. Last night I prowled Walmart after writing the above. Heat-induced insomnia is a terrible thing. I did manage a few hours of restless half-awake-half-asleep-all-miserable time in the bed. I did persuade HMO’Keefe to sleep indoors last night so no hospital adventures for us today.

Sleep well, y’all. And try to find contentment in chaos.

My mailman better smile tomorrow.

/ wvfurandroot / 5 Comments

My mailman complained.

HMO’Keefe gets more mail than any other private citizen in these the United States. I’m convinced of it. 99% are magazines and catalogs. Then there are the book clubs. Never mind that he can no longer read at the speed that he used to. He orders more and more. More and more arrive.

And then there are the medical bills followed up by confirmation from the insurance company. Then the banking and retirement account stuff.

You have to see it to believe it. We need a burro or at least a little red wagon to haul it into the house.

My long-suffering mailman complained. [Not the mailman that ended up in the tree – he retired. The new guy. A nicer guy you’ve never met.]

Under normal circumstances, I get very little mail. It’s been part of my modus operandi to leave the mail in the mailbox until I’m ready to sit down and deal with it. This can be a couple of days or nearly a week. When the mail comes out of the box, everything is immediately dealt with. The bills are paid. Junk mail goes in the trash. Magazines are read or put in designated magazine spot. Insurance statements filed. Yada yada.

Not as big as it looks. The barn roof makes it look like it holds more than it does.

Leaving it in the mailbox means I know where it is. You might think it a silly way of doing things. It works for me. My bills get paid on time. I don’t have to ransack the house

HMO’Keefe’s deluge of mail (bear in mind there’s another address a few miles away where he also gets mail) is making all of us a bit cranky.

The two of us also shop online a lot. Most of Christmas arrived by UPS, Fed-Ex or the USPS. All three have been delivering packages to my folks and my folks are a wee bit tired of being our mail drop.

There’s also the issue that HMO’Keefe lives for the mail. Or at least acts that way as he watches for the mailman and then bounds out the door to collect the mail which he then brings in and leaves scattered all over the place – not one piece of it thrown away. Not one advertising circular, not one car insurance come-on, not one Cigar Aficionado catalog thrown away despite his not having smoked a thing in nearly 40 years. He opens the envelope, looks at the contents, sets it aside. Wanders to another part of the house, where he opens something else. Rinse and repeat.

Did I mention I was cranky? Did I mention the mailman complained? Did I mention that I didn’t charge a single Christmas gift in part because my new-expiration-date-credit card got stuffed somewhere and nobody knew where.

For the first time in years, I had mail stacked everywhere. MY MAIL. And then there were the towers of his mail threatening to topple and kills us all.

Santa Claus took pity.

New crate?

Under the tree was a mailbox large enough to hold a body. The photos don’t do it justice. As Santa maneuvered through Anderson’s General Store in Columbus, folks moved to the side of the aisles to gape in astonishment at the mutant mailbox. One person asked if it was real.

It is. And it’s big enough to hold a week’s worth of mail and a package or two.

I went to Lowe’s to see if there was a pre-made platform available for my mailbox. Nope.

I went back to Lowe’s to see if they could sell me a piece a wood and cut it for me. I never found out because the Lowe’s guy suggested a bracket set-up that looked like it would do the trick a whole lot easier.

I thought about painting the mailbox a garish color, but decided to keep the elegant, understated black. At least until warmer weather.

I took off the old barn mailbox that I’ve hated almost since it was first put up 23 years ago. That actually went pretty easy.

The old mailbox is nestled in a pile of leaves outside the front door. I’m considering doing something with it INSIDE the house. I doubt HMO’Keefe will cotton to removing mail from one mailbox and putting it in another, but I may cogitate some more. If I could have all the mail (sans junk mail, magazines, advertising) in one place, I’d be less of a bitch.

Photo perspective is weird. This thing is HUGE.

I also removed the Herald Dispatch tube. They refused to deliver a paper to me well over 10 years ago. For reasons I don’t understand, there’s been an empty jar in the newspaper tube for years. Every time I thought to remove it, I would stop reaching just in time to avoid the giant wasp nest just inside the opening. January is a good time to destroy a wasp nest.

After removing the old mailbox, it was blatantly obvious the existing mailbox platform was inadequate even with the bracket gizmos.. The new mailbox would bow and bend and, probably, collapse if attached to the Barbie House sized mailbox platform.

Mail-related Trash

I persuaded my 72-year-old mother to play table saw with me.

After returning with a piece of wood cut to the right size and a power drill, I set to assembly. Other than the fact that I didn’t have the right kind of wood screws, it went well. I put in 4 screws. It’s kind of wobbly, but I have to stop at Lowe’s tomorrow anyway, so I’ll get 4 more screws to fill the empty screw holes and call it done.

Why do I have to stop at Lowe’s? Well everybody knows any project requires no less than 3 trips to Lowe’s. On my second trip, I bought a nifty house number thing that hangs from brackets either from the mailbox or the mailbox post. After opening it and looking at the parts, this thing had 89% chance of utter destruction within a couple of weeks. So back it goes. Along with the bracket gizmos.

Clean desk!

Since I had to tear off the old mailbox, I had to empty it of mail first. After playing with power tools, I came inside and rock’n’rolled through stacks of mail. I found my credit card. I found all sorts of stuff. I threw tons of stuff away. I have a large, heavy-duty black garbage bag nearly full with mail that has accumulated since Thanksgiving. The mail to be dealt with is down to a short-stack.

I’m feeling very virtuous.

My mailman better smile tomorrow. I told him a new mailbox was coming.

Don’t wash your self with it put it on top of the toliet.

/ wvfurandroot / 3 Comments

It’s Christmas afternoon and there’s a lull in the action. We had a Christmas breakfast here in the fancy eating-room. My child toddled off to a nap and HMO’Keefe did the dishes and I think he’s now snoozing. I’m reminiscing and finishing off the mimosas. Besides the fact that it does involve champagne, the lovely libation is in a hollow flute and I love watching the column of bubbles.  There’s no way I could just abandon it.

The weeks leading up to this holiday have been busy, yea, verily, frantic! And there’s been some drama. And I’ve been so very worn out and emotionally at the end of my tether. After leaving the office on Wednesday afternoon for a badly needed vacation, I’ve been a whirlwind. Nothing had even begun to be readied for the holiday and overwhelmed was the word of the week. The month. The year.

This is a stay at home vacation. I love having time off this time of year to hang around the house. I clean a little. I organize a little. I sleep. I write. I re-charge and gird my loins for the mayhem of January and February and March.

But before I could wallow in time off, Christmas had to readied. Against all odds, and with a fare amount of shouting, it came together. The house is not at its festive best by a long shot, but it’s so much better than it has been.

There was a whirlwind of shopping – most of it online. I generally refuse to order from any online establishment that will not provide free shipping, but when one waits until Christmas week to even begin, well, one, must make peace with shipping charges. Everything arrived.

A friend of mine has a long-standing tradition with her sister. For the holidays, they go on a shopping expedition together each spending on herself what she had intended to spend on the other. At the end of the outing, there’s a ritual exchange of “Here! Look what you got me!”  When I was younger I would have hated this.  But I’m an old woman, now.  I have what I want, seldom really want anything, and for Christmas I’d really just like to spend a little more time with my mother.

My mother and I thought this sounded like a fine, fine tradition. We decided such an outing required the exotic locale of Columbus, Ohio. So, off we went. My mother “gave to me” some wonderful sweaters. And I gave to her some equally wonderful duds. It was a wonderful time and the First Mother-Daughter Christmas Shopping Expedition is now an annual event.

I spent the next day wrapping and finishing the trees. And cleaning. In the course of such, I found an old Christmas card from my son. This card had accompanied my gift of bath salts lovingly nestled in a baby-food jar and adorned with a fabric topper. The card is a dandy.

Merry Christmas

Mom I Love you

The soap Please Don’t

wash you self with

it put it on top of the

toliet.

Well. You can’t argue with that. For years, it was on the toilet, but now it is on the beloved dressing table.

He was such a cute kid. He still is. He got into town about 9 p.m. Christmas Eve. We unwrapped gifts with the folks and came back here where he, I and HMO’Keefe killed two bottles of wine and talked food until 2 a.m.

Considering we were up until the wee hours, we woke fairly early and the three of us opened gifts. It was nice. HMO’Keefe prefers Christmas morning to Christmas Eve and joining lives is all about meshing traditions. After the spectacle of rampant materialism, I prepared French toast with didn’t turn out well, but if you serve anything with champagne, it becomes memorable.

We’re all pretty tired. I should be napping, but the sun is pouring through the atrium doors and there’s still champagne. I don’t spend much time in this room and I don’t know why. The light, particularly at this time of year and this time of day, is a balm to the spirit.

I’ve caught up with myself.

I was gifted with some very special presents which will merit another post another day, but I also received, because I asked for it, an all-in-one art box. For years, I’ve said I didn’t get the artistic gene that runs rampant through the rest of the family. I’ve also never been particularly interested in painting. I’ve quipped that if I had grandchildren (inserting an evil glare at Chef Boy ‘R Mine at the time), I could be the next Grandma Moses. I have no illusions that I’ll be any good. I don’t even care that it will be dreck. I’m looking forward to tossing paint around.

As for my son, the gift I gave to him that makes me smile the most is the pair of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sleep pants. In size Men’s Extra-Large. He’s wearing them. They’re, um, colorful. The little boy that gave me bath salts was a Ninja Turtle groupie. It was all Turtles, all-the-time, for a number of years. I chortled at the Wal-Mart when I saw them. He grinned when he opened them. Sometimes the best presents are the least expected ones which brings me to the gift from my father – a year’s worth of journal entries about his life. I haven’t looked close at it.  Not yet. I want uninterrupted time to sink into it, but I’m tearing up at the thought of him giving me that window to his heart.

Christmas dinner, which my Dad is preparing, is in a few hours. I should be straightening the house and dressing, but the sun is still streaming into this room and there’s still champagne. Dad’s not going to throw me out if I show up in dirty jeans and a sweatshirt. Such is the acceptance of a loving family.

Mmmmmm Co’Cola

/ wvfurandroot / 7 Comments

There is nothing I like better than an icy Classic Coke when my throat’s as dry as unbuttered toast. So here it is after 10 p.m. and I’m sucking it down as fast as the straw will deliver.

Why am I so parched? Well. There’s a story.

It begins with bread baking.

Well, now. No. That wouldn’t be true.

It begins with the Boorish Ass (who has since gone out of business) that flimflammed me on flooring installation. It’s taken me several years to get around to undoing the travesty inflicted upon my floors.

Boorish Ass convinced me that I could indeed have sheet linoleum in places that several contractors have said no way. Foolish Me wanted to believe and plunked down the cash. Boorish Ass took the cash and then discovered he could not lay linoleum in the Barn due to the composition and construction of the subfloors. Now I had mentioned, indeed explained at length, what professionals had said about the state of the Barn’s subflooring to Boorish Ass.

Boorish Ass insisted it was doable. I insisted Boorish Ass come look at my floors. He did. He pontificated upon the improvements of flooring technology. Blah blah blah. I have witnesses.

Boorish Ass abandoned the installation with the attitude of “Listen, Lady, I told you this couldn’t be done.” [Truly, I don’t know how he got out of here alive.]

What Boorish Ass left in my house was badly installed underlayment which I have been trodding upon for way too long. Each time I look at it, I want to jump in my car, do bodily harm to him, and hang some of his body parts from my rear-view mirror. I imagine you can guess which body parts.

So, it’s pert near 2012 and this nonsense and I have co-existed way way past what any sane person would regard as too long.

Which brings us to bread. (Kind of.)

I’ve been a wee bit stressed lately. Upon the advice of myself and those in the “helping professions,” I decided to take up a hobby. There was a clear and present need for fun in my life.

Learning to make scrumptious, earthy (ahem) “artisan” bread sounded like a peachy idea. I like bread. HMO’Keefe likes bread. Everybody likes bread. It’s inexpensive (hah!) and I could do it in the comfort of my own home (whichever of the two I happened to be in).

I’m no bread-making virgin. I’ve been a competent baker for a good 30 years. However, I’ve come across one-too-many website and way-too-many cookbooks that detail recipes that take days and sometimes weeks to produce a finished loaf. In short, I took up the kind of bread baking that makes what I used to do akin to the difference between tomato plants bought at a discount store and tomato plants grown from heirloom seeds in a painstakingly built home greenhouse with strict climate control features.

[There was an interlude with “Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day” which will someday be a blog post of its own.]

The bread-making thing GOT TO BE OUTRAGEOUS quickly and after out-growing every pair of pants I own, I reconsidered this hobby. It was a peachy for stress relief, but I’m mightily stressed and three or four loaves of bread every other day or so for months, well, you can see the problem.

This led me to join the gym. Everybody says exercise is a wonderful stress reliever.

Well. It is. Sort of. But I can make bread (1) at home, (2) at any hour of the day, (3) even if I’m tired and (4) I don’t have to make polite chit-chat to dough.

Flippin’ everybody I know goes to the gym. It’s hard to smile and say, “Well! Hi! And how are you?” when you’re trying to inflict all the indignities of the day on an innocent treadmill. Or worse, while hiding unshaven legs behind a meager towel while waiting for a swimming lane.

So, while still going to the gym but less frequently, I returned to bread which led me to a new super-discount store (Ollie’s) in search of affordable bread pans. (Contrary to the above, bread-making is not cheap if you’re a personality type that tends to over-do.)

[BTW, Ollie’s started the whole bread-making thing in the first place when they sold me The Culinary Institute of America’s At Home Series bread making cookbook – which is riddled with errors and not much good for anything other than some nice photos.]

I’m wandering around too-narrow aisles just browsing after discovering a dearth of bread pans when I happen upon peel’n’stick floor tile that would look great in the Cow Bathroom. I pondered. I looked at the price, looked again, and hollered, “What the hell!” after ciphering it would cost $20 to cover the hideous underlayment left by Boorish Ass.

I blew another $20 at Lowe’s for various accoutrements. After a couple of hours of very easy work, I had a splendid floor in the half-bath. It’s cheap tile. It won’t last but a few years, but it makes me happy. That $40 floor did more for stress reduction than bread and squats did. I am woman, hear me roar.

After the pie-making, bread-making extravaganza that was Thanksgiving, I found myself in the flooring aisle of Lowe’s. There was this nifty peel-and-stick tile in 6” x 48” planks that offer a textured wood finish to mimic hardwood floors. I pondered and ciphered. To do the kitchen, hallway and laundry room to cover the underlayment Boorish Ass left behind was a Big Number. While it was a much better grade of flooring than the $20 Ollie’s marvel, I can’t afford it right now and I wouldn’t afford it even I could without a test run.

The floor in the master bath is an utter travesty that harkens back to the Ex’s and my days of do-it-yourselfing. This old-time era did not include professional advice, the reading of instructions, or proper tools.

I hauled out of the Lowe’s enough faux-wood plastic planks for the master bath floor. According to the instructions, I could clean that old floor, peel’n’stick and enjoy the view from my bathtub in a matter of hours. Since that jibed with the Ollie’s/Cow experience, I drank the Kool-Aid.

[I’ve been doing stuff to this Barn for 25 years. You’d think I would have learned by now. Ancient Burial Ground.]

The first thing that went wrong was the cleaning of the floor. Between paint spatters, scuffs, this and that, a heavy-duty cleaning was required to ensure maximum adhesion.

One heavy-duty cleaning was more than that old floor could take. It gave up the ghost, shriveled, unstuck itself from the subfloor (in parts) and crumbled (in other parts).  After a stream of profanity and the lobbing of a coffee cup, I resigned myself to pulling up the old flooring. Of course, only parts of it would pull up. The remainder was stuck to the floor like bread calories on my hips.  Fused.  Welded.  Married.  Not-to-be-divorced.

Out came the scraper. No good. More profanity. Out came the steam cleaner. Nope. Out came the sander. Some progress. If I peeled the thin plastic layer off the top and then scraped and sanded, the subfloor would appear.

This was very slow. And I couldn’t really get into the Zen of peel, scrape, sand, repeat, because what I really wanted was a long bubble bath with a glass of wine and the glorious vista of faux-wood planks.

I went to the Lowe’s and returned with super-duper, silly-expensive sandpaper. (And a cute, tiny shop vac.)

[I’ve left out the part about removing molding, the sides of the whirlpool, the toilet and the sink pedestal. My boudoir is one tremendous mess as well as a study in contrasts.]

At 9:55 p.m., the floor was finally removed and the sub-floor ready for the primer I bought to ensure those peel’n’sticks stick. (I do, sometimes, do the prudent thing.)

I started at noon yesterday and worked until 8 p.m. I started again at noon today and worked until 9:55 p.m. The last 7 hours of today’s adventure included me, a mouse sander, sandpaper so expensive we must import it from Kuwait, and heaps, myriads, plethoras, mountains, stacks and whirlwinds of dust.

There is dust in my hair, my ears, my eyes, my wrinkles, and wedged into the dimples of my cellulite (dimples greatly increased by bread to the point of craters.) There is also dust between my teeth, coating my tongue and wall-papering my throat.

Mmmmmm. Co’Cola.

(Provided I can stand upright, I plan on peel’n’sticking tomorrow evening.)