We're overrun by pets!

The fat dogs are back - and will be here on and off for much of the summer. At least the 'rents have their house on the market. There is an end in sight.


Today we got our newest member of the household - the fish. He seems happy enough, despite the cats.



And so far we're all surviving the heat. Although I was a bit worried about Tasha puffing away in Monday night. I guess 85 degrees inside is a bit much for a fat dog.

I think I've been blogging for work too much; I just can't get into blogging here. That, and there really isn't that much going on these days. I dragged Nick to a Swing class on Thursday - I think he's nearly got the basic Lindy down. The rest was a good refresher. Now I just have to goad him into Contra on Saturday. I mentioned English Country dancing and he looked a bit sick. I guess I'll leave that one for now.

Other than that, I'm devouring The Ghost Map, which is fabulous. And tomorrow is my first book club meeting at work. So far I only have three people (myself included) who have actually read the book. We'll see if there are any surprises tomorrow. I guess three's better than nothing . . .

It's Finally Summer!

I can tell it's summer again, because it's 83 degrees inside my house. It never seems to be the perfect temperature - always too hot or too cold. I probably need to move to a more temperate locale.

Fat dog is here again, since she's been banished from the new carpet house due to he own poor behavior. She's been good so far, and the kitties have tolerated her. Except for one incident at 3 am on Monday.

I recently enjoyed "Is Google Making us Stupid?" in the Atlantic Monthly. Nicholas Carr apparently forgot that we've always been stupid. It's just more interactive now. Of course, that led me to the more interesting article American Murder Mystery, which makes the shocking point that inner city crime is not actually caused by density. It reminds me of all the epidemiologists who talk about crime as if it were an infectious disease . . .

And then there was this: "Fuel Prices Shift Math for Life in Far Suburbs" in the New York Times. It's full of comments about how suburban schools are always better than urban ones - another myth that I'm sure will be disproved soon. C'mon, it's all about the parents, anyway.

That said, I'm hoping that those exurbanites don't move into my neighborhood. Exurbanites live in the exurbs for a reason, and the last thing I want is for them to turn my urban neighborhood (which is the only place you can live an urban lifestyle) into a recreation of the suburbs. They could tear up the sidewalks to increase the size of front lawns, push out buses because the stops encourage loitering and take away on-street parking space, or zone out corner businesses because they interfere with the "residential feel" and lack parking lots.

Hopefully the houses are too small around here to be appealing. Plus, I'm walking down the street a lot, and perhaps I look hoodlum enough to scare them off. At any rate, for the moment I hear mostly birds chirping outside my open windows. I don't want it to become the noise of leafblowers and SUV engines filling my house.

It's so inconvenient when losers keep winning!

I haven't bothered to write much about the current election in a while, but the last few weeks have had me shaking my head. I'm just astonished by the treatment of Hillary Clinton's campaign by many in the party and the press. For so long there has been the constant drumbeat of calls for her to quit. The insults took nearly every form: she's a sore loser, she's wrecking the Democrats' chances, she doesn't have support, she's the candidate of the old (read: racist/losing) Democratic party.

Now I'm not a big Hillary fan. I actually think she's only marginally less bad than Obama. My favorite candidate dropped out long ago because nobody liked him but me. Oh well. But let's stop for a minute and think about what we've done in the process of vilifying Hillary.

The party made a gigantic, colossal, ridiculous, horrifying mistake by nullifying the Michigan and Florida primaries. I don't believe that they should have taken results from the primaries as they were done (that would certainly not be fair to Obama in Michigan), but they absolutely should have called "do over." The cost of new primaries and the precedent of special treatment is far less of a concern to me than the near disenfranchisement of so many primary voters. This isn't Zimbabwe or Kenya - we can redo a primary in a fair manner that would get to the actual preferences of Michigan and Florida voters. Their voices are not being properly heard, and in a primary where even Montana managed to be pivotal, it should have been done.

The attitude of the media and the party has done a great disservice to women. I remember the day I realized as a child that my grandmothers were born into an America where they couldn't vote. I now wonder what we will say to our collective granddaughters when they learn about the first really viable female presidential candidacy. How could a woman have won so many primaries and still be so consistently be called a loser (and she won them right up to the end)? The labels used in this campaign were not the language you hear in any other close race - no nail biting or neck-and-neck. The moment Obama won Iowa the new press meme ran rampant: She's lost! Now she must crawl into a hole and disappear! Wait! Why is she still here? She must be ruining everything!

It's quite disingenuous for people to keep going on and on about Obama's campaign as being a shocking, surprise victory as well. I remember the 2004 convention. Anyone who saw that production was well aware of the collective gush that followed his speech. And the gush kept happening long after that. It would have been surprising if he hadn't managed a very successful run for the candidacy.

And now there has been so much focus on the question of racism, it's nearly tarred every Hillary supporter out there. The claim that Hillary represents the "old" Democratic party, which started long before the talk of door-to-door campaigners hearing racial slurs, is particularly damaging to the party. Treating Hispanics, women, and blue collar workers as if they are all part of Strom Thurmond's Democratic party only pushes people away. And it sorely misrepresents the true base of the party. Are we now to think that women aren't the backbone of the party? That Hispanics aren't a growing electoral force? That working class people, who have been hit incredibly hard by the economic changes of the last decade, shouldn't be a major focus? Get real.

And just how are we going to explain this one to the next generation? "Well, you see honey, she may have won a lot of votes, and she may have kept winning primaries, but not all of her votes could really count, and some might have been from racists. And by continuing to win, she just got in the way of the real winner. So, what you should learn from this is that if you are very close to winning, but it's not 100% sure you will win, you should just give up so that people will still like you."

So here we are; Obama now gets to preside over a party that has spent several months devouring itself. It wasn't the long campaign that did the damage, or even the candidates, really. Candidates are always going to try to spin things in ridiculous ways. You just have to ignore that and move on.

I blame the press and the party regulars. They turned this from a constructive fight about minor policy differences into a destructive battle over who really counts as a Democrat.

Adventures with Fat Dogs

It doesn't take long before there's some sort of adventure afoot with the fat dogs. Today we were on our evening stroll and just a block from home I looked down at Tasha. Although her face was complacent enough, there was blood everywhere!

She had worn down a nail on her front paw to the quick, and with each step blood was spattering across her stomach and down her hind legs. We got her home and I had to try to wash off the blood while Nick ran to Walgreens to pick up some first aid supplies. In the time he was gone, the bleeding mostly took care of itself, but we still had to bandage off her paw in case it started again. We wrapped it up nicely, and she seemed to tolerate it just fine. You can see our handiwork here:Only a few minutes after this picture I left Tasha alone to file some papers. I should have known that the dog who loves to eat kleenex wouldn't be able to resist gauzy bandages. She had the bulk of her bandage halfway down her throat before I could pull it out.

So, we wrapped it up again, and then sacrificed one of my socks to be the bandage cover. So far she hasn't taken to eating socks, but I'll keep my eye on her!

Fat Dogs are Visiting

To make sure that the new carpet isn't ruined at the 'rents, I've got the fat dogs for a few days. We'll see how this goes - the cats are already pretty ticked, and it's only been half an hour so far! At least it's warm enough that they might not want to all sleep in the bedroom with us. Six beings in a 10X12 room is a bit too cozy for my tastes!

What do you mean, no flange?

So, on Saturday morning the toilet came up. We were sure we'd find something pretty questionable down there, based on our general experiences in this house and the puddle of water that formed on the basement floor. We weren't (were?) disappointed; the last person to install the toilet did so without using a toilet flange. They just stuck a wax ring onto the top of the drain pipe and dropped the toilet on top. Then they screwed the toilet to the subfloor.

Needless to say, non-standard toilet installation is not a good idea. In the decade that toilet was sitting there, bit by bit the floor rotted due to water not quite getting into the drain. So Nick & Dad spent the better part of Saturday morning digging out what was rotten and getting a flange put in place.

By the time I got home it was time to actually install the toilet. That wasn't as easy as we'd hoped, and we had to make a second trip to the hardware store to get an extension for the socket wrench. Somehow I got the job of reaching around the toilet to try to attach the tank to the bowl. I'm obviously just a weekend warrior - I had to rethink which direction an upside down "righty-tighty" was several times. Still, it's finally in. Here's the new (and incredibly tall) toilet in the bathroom, and the old (shall we make it a rabbit-proof planter?) toilet in the yard.
Now I just have to paint the sections of wall that were unreachable when we had the old toilet. That is, of course, if I'm not spending all my time working elsewhere. I have another Saturday shift at work, and every moment I have free seems to be spent working at mom's. Saturday afternoon was painting the exterior of her house (while Nick helped dad with the deck), and Sunday was painting the interior. Thank goodness I took Monday to work for myself, or I'd still be microwaving in the dining room, wearing dirty clothes, and crawling over piles of tools everywhere!

I even took enough time to play with Moxie and her tent. After sitting on the floor for three years with almost no activity, this tent is now Moxie's favorite toy. It's already been through one repair, and needs a second stint with my sewing box very soon.





So, what's next? I've still got to go through everything we took out of the basement and get that space set up. I've put in my order for a new laundry shelf, which I'm hoping Nick will get done over the weekend while I'm at work. I've also got to get our last boxes out of the storage locker and all the junk sorted and moved out of the spare bedroom. We have to move all the furniture at mom & dad's over the weekend and there's supposed to unload a bed that'll be going into that spare bedroom! Right now I can barely get through that room to water the plants . . . I guess I know what I'll be doing when I'm not watching LOST this week. That, and figuring out how to stuff an old toilet in a Chevy Malibu.

Three Down, How Many More To Go?

First the drain tile in the basement (no water yet . . . it works!). Then the plumbing extravaganza (pipes, chimney lining, shut-off valves, and water heater). Finally, the new kitchen counter and sink. I thought that all would go smoothly with the tile at least. How difficult can it be?

We have learned it can, in fact, be quite difficult. First came the electrician to install some under cabinet lights. We (fools that we are) thought that would be a simple job lasting a couple hours. No such luck. The curse of the handyman special came back with a vengeance. Our kitchen electrical was so confused and not up to code that it took the electrician a day and a half to get it all sorted out. So, as you can imagine, that one ended up costing about four times what we'd hoped. Instead of actually counting up the real job, you can just estimate our electrician costs by the number of outlets we end up with in the end; it's about $300-$400 per outlet. Of course, our first call to an electrician was far less than that (only about $50 per outlet), but that electrician came to fix up our bad wiring job. Apparently we are only slightly bad electricians, whereas the previous handyman electrician was a real loser.

Of course, the budget busting electrical work came before the actual counter tops. The tile went in pretty well, with no major hangups until the finish work. Then came my beautiful, Kohler cast-iron, special order sink. It didn't fit in the hole. It wasn't that the hole was cut too small or too big. It was the actual cabinet that was too small. The deranged gnome who built my lower cabinets 2 inches too shallow also built the sink cabinet about two inches too narrow on each side. You can't fit a fabulous cast-iron sink into a space with cabinet walls infringing on it. The bowls don't fit inside. You also can't fit a snazzy stainless steel sink, since there's no way to clamp it in place. Goodbye beautiful sink (and $35 in restocking fees). Hello cheesy acrylic.
And since no home improvement stores provide handy specs for their goods, there's no way to figure out which awful sink will actually fit unless you either look at every possibility on the sink manufacturers websites, or open up the sink, flip it over, and measure it yourself. We did a combination of both. At least the acrylic sink fits.

Then we had to install the faucet and drain pipes. Nick failed to look at the big red letters on the side of the plumbers putty - the ones that say DO NOT USE ON PLASTIC - so we installed the drains and faucet using the wrong stuff. Finally Nick was sent out to get some silicone caulk and we had to go through the process of uninstalling and reinstalling . . . at 10:30 on a Sunday night!

And then, finally, we had our new counters, sink, and lights. It's really lovely, and now all I have to do is try to keep it from being ruined!But wait . . . There's more! As soon as we were done with the kitchen, I went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. Before I could even switch on the light, my foot landed in a puddle. I have never wished I had stepped in cat pee so much in my life. Unfortunately the cats have all been relatively well-behaved. The puddle was actually water that seeped from the base of the toilet. It looks as though our wax ring has failed. And to top it off, the mechanics in the tank seem to be off: there's a constant sound of refilling unless you manually lift the float at the end of a flush.

Now, pulling up the toilet to replace the wax ring wouldn't be so tough, but remember, Satan's handyman worked on this house. The shutoff valve won't budge, and instead of being bolted in place, the toilet was just screwed to the subfloor. And those screws are completely rusted. Nick is going to attempt to replace the valve, and he's already memorized what Menard's carries in their plumbing section. Once that toilet is up, we don't know what horrors we'll find. And that damn thing is the ONLY TOILET WE'VE GOT!