Tag Archives: humor

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Threshold

I went to kickball last night and had a good time connecting with my team. I didn’t go play flip cup, because I don’t want to drink very much while I’m processing the murder in the acute stage. I also have my feelings with regards to not being in my previous family anymore.

I’ve gotten so many of my friends and also my family members to donate to the fund for her orphaned children that she leaves behind. I think that I’m doing as well as I possibly can with processing this event and what it means in my life given that I am not involved with my ex-wife’s family anymore. I’m feeling better with regards to this tragedy.

I’m not Zen about my house. How do people live in a house while it’s being painted without going over the edge?

It’s really hard to live with tented furniture that was limited anyway. I’d only left my bed, my dining area table, and the desk and it’s wires. Yesterday, because the floors were taped, plastic-covered and papered, I felt like I was living in “ET” when the hazmat scientists start to study the creature.

So, I had a lapse in judgement. I didn’t pay too much. Well, a bit.

I bruise easily. However, these are pretty bad. If I knew where my oral arnica was, I’d take it, but things are piled in linen closet and other places so most things are blocked, and I only know where my topical arnica is. I applied it, but I imagine that I’ll look bad for a week or so.

I’m reading “Where Men Win Glory,” and it’s great. Last night after kickball, feeding my pets, and walking my dogs I wanted to read in a chair. Not in my dining area, but in a chair. I wanted to get a fabric chair upstairs from the basement. I have a staircase and a baby gate that is retractable at the top of my stairs.

Best laid plans…

I got the ottoman for the chair upstairs fairly swiftly and slunk around the ladder, the staging area, and traipsed through the paper and plastic that my dogs and cats have dug up and moved around, but the chair that goes with my ottoman is an entirely different story.

I got it out of the hoarder piles and around my upturned loveseat and existing table in my basement. Recall if you’ve read previous entries that movers emptied my upstairs so my basement isn’t usable. It’s like a Jenga Tower which has fallen.

I moved the chair around stacks of boxes and such and then got it to the base of my staircase. I thought that inverted and pulling it up each stair was good. I got it up all the stairs. Then it got caught on one of the plastic hooks on my gate.

I needed a Phillips Head Screwdriver, but those were in the laundry room closet. All of my large storing and my laundry machines are downstairs. Downstairs was blocked.

I was sweating so badly. Although the chair is fabric, it was really difficult to get it back downstairs because plastic tenting kept attacking me in my stairwell. It would stick to me too or would trip me. I imprisoned my shoe under the chair and almost fell until I shimmied the shoe off under the chair. It was now 8:30 and I’d done cardio with my son, ran errands, kicked, ran and scored two runs in kickball. I was a sweaty and angry mess.

I texted my neighbors who are like family to me. They said that I could borrow a screwdriver. I got the clip off without breaking it. The screws were really long. I made a mental note to use my electric screwdriver when I was no longer blocked out of my basement and could get tools. I pushed the chair all the way back down and removed the gate clip and it was really hard.

I went back downstairs and realized that I would have to slide the chair sideways with the legs toward the banister. That worked until I had to hoist under it from the top of my stairs. Heaving and hoeing finally got it upstairs and I got it into the corner by my living room window and successfully avoiding buckets of paint and a ladder.

I still couldn’t read though.

Now, I had to screw back the gate clips. Well, the screwdriver was set to left. I unscrewed my work and nearly fell backward. Then it was too big for the screwhead. I got the other one that we have and discovered that the nut is missing to attach non-drill pieces. That was something that my son was famous for during his whole life. He would take things out of my tools and they wound up in the _______ chasm of loss. My drill isn’t usable as a screwdriver anymore and the other electric screwdriver is too big for very small screw heads.

Finally, I just screwed them in by hand enough so that the top of the gate was somewhat secure and read for an hour in the damn chair! I have the bruises to prove it.

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Repairs

I think that I’m renewing my energy. I have a new house loan. I am doing electrical work. I have a new cooler. I’ll have wall insulation in my kitchen and two back bedrooms. We have a neighbor family texting system that I used to find an electrician and begin learning some electric stuff with the help of my neighbor.

Electrical Work

The electrician rewired the basement so that now in my son’s old room the switches just work and are powered. You no longer have to turn on the switch on the west side of the Rec Room. He’s going to make a junction box exchange to the solar box so that the old and defunct Federal Pacific brand breaker box doesn’t function. It’s not that breakers flip all the time or anything, but rather that it’s archaic and not completely grounded. I want a safe house with no risk of fire. Federal Pacific only makes commercial products these days. The electrician also switched out 10 outlets in my house today. He had to replace two switches entirely–one of which had been grounded by the old contractor who remodeled my kitchen in 2004. The electrician explained that 85% of my house is grounded, so it’s really more of a matter of getting a majority of my switches changed to Ground-Fault Circuit Interrupter (GFCI) ones. Two in my bedroom had no boxes and were hanging basically, so he had to use new boxes altogether to get those outlets to be GFCI. He’ll be back next Saturday to make the new panel and hook it via a junction box to the breaker that has the solar panels working.

Cooler

I have a new contractor who is great. He had done work on sheetrock, a broken door, and rehung a mirror with tasteful metal clips. He installed a new evaporative cooler on Saturday. All of it, which will include summer setup was under $2500. I’d been quoted 10k for that in 2022 and suffered last summer with no cooler at all. The Realtor told me that she knew of a company who could do it for 7k. I’m so grateful that I’ve found this contractor and his company so I could shave $4500 or more off of that price!

Insulation

Years ago some mice got inside my garage and went inside some walls. It was gross. I have blown in extra insulation 2-3 times, but my house is still really cold. You can feel cold air rushing out of the bottoms of my kitchen cabinets and plates and mugs feel like ice when you take them out. I have given to warming them in the oven before I serve dinner. I’ve found an insulation company that will take out all the old fiberglass, clean and sanitize the attic, seal all the rafters, joists, seams, and baffles in my roof, install a reflective eshield, blow in new insulation to the max level, and then fill the walls in the bedrooms and around the cabinets with fiberglass from the attic down. It’s going to be so much warmer in the morning and no more cold dishes or mugs!

Learning some electric

We’d had a metal ceiling plate with two lightbulb fixtures in it with wires and a pretty dragonfly light fixture in the linen closet for many years. Electricity scares me. My neighbor across the street is the son of an electrician. Today, he came over and showed me how to remove a ceiling plate and expose wires and taught me what a plastic nut for electrical wires is. He wired in the new ceiling plate, shortened the middle nut, tightened it in and then got the new light fixture installed. He did it in 10-minutes. The nice thing is that although it will take me an hour to repeat it, I can help my colleague who almost died get a new plate in fixture in her daughter’s room now. I may surprise her at the end of the month with that as I’m no longer going to travel for a vacation.

Gratitude

I’m so happy to have my own house loan. I’m so glad that my bedroom won’t be cold in the winter and hot in the summer after Friday. I am over-the-moon with the prospect of room temperature plates and mugs. I’m so glad to have a fair contractor that I trust. I’m so happy about my new electrician. I’m going to make dinner for my neighbor (son of the electrician) and his wife right now. I’m going to buy some kosher alcohol for my neighbors who recommended this electrician. I found three pairs of jeans in great shape at two different thrift stores yesterday and they fit me perfectly! I had a good round of weights today. I’m bowling with the gay league again starting on the 11th. I’m going to write a thank you note to the angel that helped me when I was almost t-boned. I forgot to mention that the body shop has finally said that they’ll make my broken mirror right after I wrote on Google about it having noticed that they also didn’t replace my spoiler over my oil pan at all and it’s now off-kilter and has a noticeable hole. Again, my energy is renewing!