C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 128
January 29, 2012
Locked out of the bathroom with glue on the floor…
We're sticking down the tiles. Put glue down—you have to wait for it to cure, it has to be seen to at that point—and an accident locked the bathroom door. We—own no key.
Help is at hand, however—I have mad burglar skillz. I found a cheap pair of scissors of a thinness that would serve and, pop! We're in.
Today Jane has started re-tiling the bath, has designed a sofit with lighted nooks for bric a brac, to hold the new lights, whiich she has also wired, fished a new power line from one socket through a stud to reach the area desired, and in short we now have a fan, a new rocker switch instead of the old toggle, a new fourplex constantly live circuit, a new duplex power socket up in the sofit, a new rocker cutoff for that, and a new socket with that for the hair dryer. Suffice it to say if we had just called an electrician—we would be out many hundreds of dollars. We are still tiling (after supper). And I am making real progress on the book.
That's today. Jane wires. I burgle.
January 27, 2012
Construction hell.
Our bathroom has no tile in the tub enclosure, just plastic sheeting. Dusty plastic sheeting on the floor. A patch of concrete 'leveler' where we had to replace the subfloor. We have no cabinets, just a hole in the wall. No tp holder. More holes.
Our tile is here. Except 8 pieces because the tile shop screwed up the order of the trim tile for the little mural which is the center of the whole tile job—they provided only 8 and it takes 16. Our workman is coming Tuesday. Thursday, yesterday, the tile we ordered to make up the deficit was finally in! We'd agreed to pay 17.00 postage to get these pieces here in time. Takes, ordinarily, 2 weeks to order tile. I pick the new 8 tiles up—and being a suspicious soul—I opened the packet while I was there.
Wrong tile. Jane and I had a flaming fit. They promised to try to get it straightened out…dealing with someone other than the clerk who screwed the order. We spent yesterday near closing time trying to find that tile elsewhere. Found a place that can order it—in two weeks. Found another color at Home Depot. (Won't work.) Found another right color, wrong pattern at Lowe's. We got those, but don't like them. We also picked up some spray paint with which we might be able to brighten the highlights on them a bit….
But we really want the ones that really work for the color scheme. This morning the store called, said they'd ordered them, they'd make it.
We're still determined not to pay ANY postage on that: it's their employee that caused this mess. Secretly we'll pay the 17 if we have to. But what they WANT to charge us 45 dollars to express tiles weighing less than half a pound together. These are pencil-thin pieces of decorative border. It's not like we're shipping bricks.
I swear to you, I am never doing anything involving tile again. Ever! I don't mind carpentry, but masonry involves dust, lotsa dust.
On a positive note, we got the table saw put together and correctly adjusted (to be sure the blade is true and the starting angle is zero, so when you angle the blade, etc, you're at the angle you think you are)—and we managed to cut that piece for the subfloor (a jigsaw handled the wavy curvature of the tub edge side)–in short order. Needed it a hair skinnier—piece of cake. Straight and true. Jane was dubious when I held my breath wanting a table saw, back in the Black Friday sales, and she was still dubious until we began to use it. A table saw is the principle piece of equipment my dad used, I used it, we worked together on projects, and I got a real respect for the versatility and ease of use of this item. So it is a big success. Jane now is a believer as well, and we can do a lot of things we need to do without the hassle of handhelds or worse, hacksaws and makeshifts. With a good table saw and a rolling board support, you can even cut curves—not that the saw ever does anything but a straight line, but you put a lot of straight lines on an arc (ie, multiple cuts, shifting the angle of the board at each pass) and you've very quickly got a nice accurate curve. A belt sander on the edge to take off the little peaks remaining, and you've got it. No end to the stuff you can do with this lovely thing. The vaunted safety equipment nearly killed us—the pawl that's supposed to prevent bucking grabbed a board and wouldn't let it move; the other shield got in our way when we were trying to see what we were doing, and I confess that gear is now off the machine—but really, if you just never ram a board through, but advance it with a butterfly touch and have a helper receiving the cut board. If you've got knotholes, you figure out bucking is a possibility, and be ready. I helped my dad use scrap lumber (which can have problems) and yep, a few boards were problems, but nothing we couldn't handle. Love this machine.
January 25, 2012
Another fun Chinese Astrology site
I'm apparently Red Snake born in the year of the Black Horse, and my element is fire, my ancestral element is water, and my lucky element is wood, green my lucky color, East is my lucky direction, and Rabbit or Tiger is my fortunate match.
Jane is Black Rabbit born in the year of the Black Dragon and her element is water, her ancestral element is water, and her lucky element is fire. South is her lucky direction, red her lucky color, and Horse and Snake are her fortunate match.
We seem to fit together in a weird way.
January 24, 2012
Happy Chinese New Year
I believe it's the year of the Dragon.
Jane is a Dragon.
I'm a Horse, myself.
In the first comment—a link to the chart. 
January 21, 2012
Threw my back out…
…yesterday, shoveling snow. By noon, I was walking like the witch in Sleeping Beauty—could not straighten up. Didn't hurt too much if I just didn't straighten up. On the bright side, it was the opposite side from the sciatica in my right hip/leg from that nasty fall I took, oh, back when we were living in Spokane Valley—I caught a blade during a fast-traveling (for me) crossover and flew outward, sort of on the straight line tangent of the circle I was making, and went smack! flat out sideways. That is not a nice way to fall. The lower back didn't like it, and subsequent years have reminded me of that moment—it was the day after Bloomsday Run and I was skating with tired legs and deeply blistered and sore feet. Well, what would I expect, eh?
So that's the right side. Yesterday all pain left the right side and I was bent double on the left hip, so something shifted in that piece of dubious genetic engineering called the sacro-iliac joint, where the spine and the hips have a sort of vague connection mostly governed by tendons and muscle. It's the weakest part of anybody's makeup, so far as what they're born with. When it's out, ain't nothin' happy. And it gets 'out' from falls, or just because as you get older, you have all those accumulated insults: to paraphrase my father when I turned my trike over—"You're going to remember that one when you're sixty."
He was right.
Well, I decided a day of no-functiong-brain would be an improvement over marginally-functioning-brain and unable-to-stand-up. So I took a prescription muscle relaxant, and went to bed (a Sleep Number bed, adjusted to 100, or 'brick', as opposed to 35, where I usually like it.)
This morning I lacked the energy to get out of bed, or do much more than take aim with the waterpistol when Shu decided to do an unfed-cat dance atop the air purifier. But I got up. Jane's buzzing around full of energy. I am not. But I am able to stand upright again, and I'm just going to take it very easy to day and do minimal lifting. I may clean up the fish tank. Or do some other chore that requires no brain. Scraping pink coralline algae off the glass is relatively mindless, requiring only the ability to see the color pink, and the grace not to knock the corals loose from their perches. I think I can do that.
It stopped snowing last night, has warmed, and is melting a bit off shoveled sidewalks. This is good, because more is coming.
January 19, 2012
Snow. Lots of snow.
Our Toro electric is our friend. We now have about 5″ of standing snow, as opposed to what melted while it got started. It's powder, where we live. And rain can just wait, thank you! I established our back walk and the half of our double driveway we use this morning.
We're going to do some cleanup today. Put away Christmas. Clear the decks.
January 17, 2012
We assembled the new table saw we got ourselves for Christmas…
Which should have taken 30 minutes. 4 hours later, into lunch, we now have it mostly put together.
This thing is amazing. Board restraints, anti-buck pawls, —My dad's consisted of a flat surface, a saw blade with no guards at all, an on switch, an angle adjustment, and a height adjustment. I learned on that one, and still have all my fingers, and never got hit in the head by a board, either. I'm not sure I trust this modern stuff. This is "Buck Rogers does a table saw…" Only thing it lacks is a laser.
We are doing this to be able to cut a patch for the bathroom plywood. Sheesh! OTOH, it should go fast once we have this thing running.
Jane's finger is getting soaked often.
I had my computer lock itself again today, so that I had to do a hard shutdown. I went through two sessions with 'Peggy' on Dell, until I finally got one to admit he was lost, and I got gentlemanly Olivio, bless him, who worked until he admitted he was lost, too (but he was nice) and we eliminated hardware failure and think it is more a software issue. So I am taking some measures he suggested about hibernation-shutdown and I have his number and a tracking number so if it does it again we can remote the computer and let him try to spot the problem. OTOH, the fix may work.
I also found a piece of malware on my disc, and got rid of that. So today is a day for fixing things.
Jane fixed my dishwasher! Yay!
January 16, 2012
And just to put a cap on the evening…
Jane dropped her laptop, which is now wheezing, and has discovered a red line running up her slashed finger. Sigh. I will be going to the pharmacy tomorrow earliest to get antibiotics…she is now soaking the finger in Epsom salts. Did I mention a snowfall is likely tonight. NOW it snows….
We do have a Carbonite backup, but when she consulted it after the computer accident, it refused to admit how much she has in storage. We hope Carbonite was only confused, because this laptop is not happy at all. And Jane's computer has all the graphics and conversion work for Closed Circle.
I swear—nothing's ever dull around here. It wouldn't have slipped if she'd had all her fingers working.
All is in readiness for the tilework…
We (and the Rotozip, an excellent tool) got the section prepared for the new floor insert: we found plywood in the basement; and Jane brilliantly used tinfoil to make a pattern which we will cut out and drop into the hole atop the floor decking, before restoring the floor tiles: this repairs the punky wood from the old corner-of-the-tub leak. OSGuy was so kind as to come by and let us put a 2″ pipe in place of a 1″ pipe supporting our tub spout, which lets the shower-cutoff make its full rotation, which it could not. The walls are bare of tile and wallboard: Jane is improving the insulation from an R-4 to R-15, to keep the tub water snug and heated. We are waiting for word that our new tile is in. And we are immaculate, edges trimmed, studs de-nailed and smooth as if it were a new construction.
Jane's hand (actually it was her finger she sliced) is healing and doing well. A twinge of ouchiness now and again. But good.
We are so ready to get this done!
