My wife just called me to tell me that something like a small tornado just went by our house. Tops of trees down the street have been twisted off, the siding of one of our neighbors' house has been torn off and a couple of trees are down in the street. Don't know if it was a tornado or a sever wind burst or what, but it did some damage. She's taking some pics and I'll post them later.
Related: Last Thursday we had 11 trees removed from the woods by our house. I'm thinking we were just in time.
This is what it looks like when you put in a new septic drain field. I really had nothing to do with it other than contributing to the, uh, effluence that led to the old field getting saturated. BTW, I highly recommend Frank Transou if you need to have septic repair, installation or replacement done.
A couple of weeks ago we had a new septic field put in our front yard. Why the front and not the back yard like 99% of the world? You'll have to ask the original homeowner why they situated our lot the way they did, but my guess is that they wanted to place the house farther back on the lot away from the road. Whatever, the result of having the work done is that a little more than half of the front yard is dirt which means for the first time in my life I'm trying to grow a lawn from scratch.
Of course we needed grass seed. The weekend before last Celeste picked up a couple of bags of Scott's Turf Builder Heat Tolerant Blue Mix at Lowe's and a seed spreader to go with them so that meant that Saturday morning I was up and rarin' to go in my role as Jon-ny Lawnseed. Spreading the seed took about 20 minutes, which was great, but upon reading the instructions I realized that once the seed was down I was going to have to water the dirt twice a day. What a pain in the butt!One of the problems with having a saturated septic field is that you really want to avoid putting any more water into it. That becomes problematic when you have three teenagers, so we've been taking measures to limit our water use. This week that's meant making a couple of trips to the laundromat to do mega-loads of laundry. Consequently I've come to a few conclusions and realizations:
According to this story at WXII the rain over the past weekend combined with the snow has gone a long way to catching us up on our yearly rainfall totals. Local reservoirs are approaching full which is a good thing.
So that brings us to this weekend. I'd dug a hole about two feet deep and three feet in circumference to get to the lid of our septic tank so that the county guy could access it if he needed it. I decided to leave the hole in case I needed to call the septic pump guy to empty our tank again. Well, when we got the monsoon over the weekend that hole started to fill with water and I worried that a couple of bad things might happen: one, the concrete lid might start leaking some of the stuff inside the tank into the water in the hole, or two, that the water would freeze overnight and crack the lid. So guess what? Sunday after church I was the idiot bailing water out of a hole in the middle of massive rain showers and then filling it with mud. I'd love to know what my neighbors were thinking when they drove past.
As I’ve documented extensively here our house is an absolute money pit. I must have written over 20 times about the travails of owning this heap, but it seems that it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
My most recent post was about our bathroom reclamation projects. Well, Celeste and I decided that we could handle putting the new linoleum in the kids bathroom as well as replacing the sink and cabinets. On Sunday we went to Lowes and picked up the necessary materials and on Monday we tore out the old cabinets, sink and toilet. We got busy with normal work/family stuff and put things on hold, and then Tuesday night I drove to Charleston, SC for business. I drove home last night through four hours of rain, surviving the maniacal drivers on I-77 near Charlotte, and walked into what can best be described as a crap-storm.
Celeste had been working to tear up the luan and was visibly upset. It had become apparent to her that there were problems with the sub-floor that were probably going to be beyond our means and she wasn’t happy. I helped her tear up the remainder of the luan and I quickly came to agree with her assessment. She had called Greg Hester, the miracle worker who’s saved our house on numerous occasions, and luckily he called her back just as things seemed darkest. He was already planning to send one of his guys out to do the finish work around the bathroom and when he heard Celeste’s voice he simply said his guy would do whatever needed to be done to get us set up.
This morning Jeff, who’s been here enough this year that we’re thinking of adopting him as an honorary Lowder, showed up and looked at the floor, particularly where the toilet had been. He went down to the basement to look at it from underneath and when he poked the floor from below with his screwdriver it went straight through the inch of wood. Just a little water damage!
I started thinking about the scene in Money Pit that Keith pointed to in the comments on my last post and now pasted below, and then imagined someone taking a squat on our toilet and finding themselves sprawled in the basement wondering what they’d eaten that day that would cause a toilet to explode through the floor. I’ve used that facility on a number of occasions and now consider myself very lucky not to have plummeted 10 feet to an unceremonious landing and porcelain embedded in my hind end. I’m very, very close to breaking into the uncontrolled, hysterical, laughter exhibited by Tom Hanks in the movie.
FYI, if you ever have a home improvement project that needs doing just contact Greg Hester. The work is excellent, he and his guys are reliable, and they come through in a pinch. If you want his number just give me a shout.
The strange saga of living in our house continues. Honestly, I have enough stories about this money pit that I should put together a book. Here’s the latest: we are replacing two of the bathtubs in the house, and one in particular is an urgent job because the bottom of the tub feels like it’s going to fall out when you stand on it. When the tub was pulled out we discovered a hole in the sub-floor near where the front of the tub had been. That’s why it felt like the whole thing was going to cave in when you got in to take a shower.
But what was found next might explain the state of things in what we now fondly call La Casa de Dinero Hornacho. Under the tub was a perfectly preserved empty Budweiser can of a vintage not seen in twenty years (pictured to the left). It’s made of real aluminum, thus it’s thicker than today’s cans, and it had a pull tab. One of these days I fully expect to find Jimmy Hoffa’s mummy behind one of our walls.
Yesterday my wife had wakened in the pre-dawn hours, packed up the youngest and headed to Virginia for our niece’s baptism. I stayed home with the oldest two kids because they had various things scheduled for the weekend, including my daughter’s soccer game. Well we had torrential rains so the game ended up being cancelled which left me with something I’m not accustomed to: a Saturday afternoon with nothing scheduled. I decided to take the opportunity to get some things off of my to-do list.
First up was assembling the dresser we’d purchased for the youngest’s room. We bought it from God-forsaken Wal-Mart almost a month ago, but I hadn’t had the chance to put it together and it was weighing on me. I opened up the box and was pleasantly surprised to find instructions that informed me that I’d need exactly one tool for the job, a hammer. “Whoa,” I thought, “this is a job even I can handle!”
I continued unpacking the box and neatly aligning all the pieces, found my hammer, and set to work. I had the first three pieces together in no time and was trying to get the fourth piece on when I messed up. I misaligned the male metal bracket of one piece with the female metal bracket of the other and they got stuck. So I pulled and tugged and finally got them to separate with a real hard yank. Unfortunately my index finger got in the way and one of the brackets opened it up right nicely with an inch long gash that was deep enough that you could see things you ought not to be able to see.
I went into the kitchen to rinse it out and realized that I might need to get it looked at, especially when I couldn’t get my hand to stop shaking. Honestly it didn’t hurt, but it looked nasty and I figured the shaking was my body’s way of telling me I’d royally screwed up. So I recruited the oldest to help me bandage everything in place and then headed to see the folks at Davie Hospital.
We use Davie regularly because even though it’s twice the distance than either Forsyth or Baptist it is never crowded and you can usually be in and out in under an hour. Since it was a Saturday they were busier than usual, but I was out of there in about 90 minutes. They had a med student look at me and she wasn’t sure if I needed stitches or if we could get away with glueing it so she recruited a full-fledged doctor to look at it. His judgment was I just needed cleaning, steri-strips and a tetanus shot. So a student nurse gave me the shot and cleaned out the gash, and then the doctor returned to show the student how to steri-strip it, all the while engaging me in a cynical discussion of the impending economic doom being foreshadowed in Washington. It was a lot of fun.
The doctor also put a splint on the finger to prevent bending, and thus reopening the wound. They sent me on my way with instructions to keep my finger clean and dry which seemed contradictory to me. I’m still trying to figure it out, but I figure if I get “stinky finger” I’ll know I need to do something about it.
Once I got home I recruited the oldest to help me finish the dresser. It took about an hour, which wasn’t bad considering I was greatly hampered by the mangled finger. Pictures of the dresser and finger below.
WXII is reporting that only about 4,300 households have lost power in North Carolina due to the storm that cannot be named. Unfortunately we, along with two of our neighbors, were among those 4,300. Our power went out at 9:30 last night when the transformer on the poll next to our house blew. That knocked out service to us and the two houses to our right, but the rest of the neighborhood was lit up like a Christmas tree. In a way that’s more frustrating than having the entire neighborhood go down because you can literally see everyone else enjoying their evening in standard American energy hogging style.
Thankfully the power company was outside within an hour and we had power restored by 11:30, just in time for a midnight snack in front of the boob tube.
If you want to kill a plant the surest way to do it is to send it to us for safekeeping. In what must be a textbook example of God’s sense of humor anything that is classified as a plant worth keeping will suffer a slow agonizing death on our property. On the other hand if it’s classified as a nuisance plant, a.k.a. a weed,
it will prosper here. To the left I give you evidence of our decidedly brown thumbs. Since the weatherman is calling for rain the next few days Celeste figured she might as well see if the plants could be saved by putting them on the deck for a good soaking. Personally I think it’s a vain attempt, but it can’t be any worse than leaving them in the house which is what got them to that state of decay in the first place.
Befuddled 