I found this little guy (or girl) in the garage the other night when I went out to find a part for the Scout, hiding under the engine block. Thinking it was some kind of gruesome Horned Widow Jumping Copperhead Recluse, I admit, I smushed it. Then I measured the span of its legs: FOUR FUCKING INCHES. I found out later it’s most likely a wolf spider, harmless and beneficial. Hopefully this one laid lots of eggs and left a family behind to patrol. I promise will leave future wolf spiders alone.
Last night I spent an hour with a can of paint, a cold beer, and a cut-up washing machine box to make eight high-visibility signs for the neighborhood, which will go up this evening on our way home from work. The path to our front door has slowly been consumed by items for the yard sale tomorrow, labeled and waiting for their day in the sun. Let’s hope the clouds clear out today and we get good weather for the weekend.
Ever since we moved into the Lockardugan Estates, we’ve been playing catch-up on 50 years of poor decisions. The most visible of these is the condition of our yard, which has only barely been held at bay by a combination of mowing, judicious tree pruning, and brush removal. It’s a lot of work to stay on top of, especially in the thick of summer, when time is short and commitments pile up. It may also be the reason our neighbors seem to cut a wide swath around us; I don’t think it’s paranoia talking when I say that we’re rooted at the fringes of our local society.
Saturday morning I loaded the Scout up with a pile of brush and bags of leaves from the driveway and hauled it down to the dump. Every winter the trees in our yard drop tons of dead wood, littering the lawn, and I spend time on free days picking it all up and hauling it to the driveway for collection. We have been contacting tree removal companies for the past three weeks in the hopes that someone will give us an affordable quote to make a handful of them disappear, but so far we’ve gotten no callbacks. We’re trying very hard not to take it personally, as we did with the lawn service who didn’t return three phone calls.
On my way back I did a quick recon of area yard sales and ran into a guy who has an Early Bronco a few blocks over, and had a nice chat with him. Then I returned home for a snack and hauled the wheelbarrow across the street to pitch in at the church playground, where they put me to work hauling mulch from a pile way in the back to the various trails and areas throughout the woods on their property. By the time noon rolled around my back was sore but we’d cleaned up a huge section of land.
Returning home, I raked leaves for a couple of hours, cleaning out the back porch, driveway, hedges, and flowerbeds, which changed the outward appearance from “abandoned” to somewhere around “squatting”. The kid we hired to mow the lawn did show up on Wednesday, and did mow, but inexplicably left the median strip out front alone. After I texted him he came right back out and hit it, so hopefully this year I’ll have a regular assist on the grunt work so that I can start making progress on larger projects–new front stairs and maybe even a new walkway. Maybe when the front of the house gets cleaned up, people will start calling us back.
Saturday morning we took Finn to soccer practice in a new facility close to our house; what used to be a 7-Up distributor’s warehouse is now filled with two indoor soccer fields for rental and two teams’ worth of sweaty high school lacrosse players. We signed her up for a kids’ intro class, and it turned out that we have several friends who had the same idea, so we got to stand around with other parents we know while the kids ran in circles. She took a class at her last school, so we were proud to see her kicking and actually dribbling the ball—until she got bored and decided to go off and do her own thing. Hopefully we can get it through her head that practice will make things more fun for her down the line.
After we were done with soccer we hit the IKEA to pick up one more bookshelf for the den, with the hope of consolidating all of the toys, art supplies, and other stuff that’s been clogging the living room, office, and den. With the big bookcase in the living room free of toys, we were able to uncover the entire collection of books we’ve collected from the library liquidation at her school. It’s really amazing how many good books Jen was able to save, and I hope that Finn takes to reading as much as I did as a kid.
Over the course of our Saturday errands in the CR-V, it became loudly apparent the passenger’s rear brake pads were grinding on the rotor, so I hit the parts store to buy a new set for the back half. It’s just enough of a project that I didn’t want to attempt it this afternoon with 6-12″ of snow on the immediate horizon, so I loaded the parts in the back and parked it behind the Accord until we can dig out this week. On my way to the store I guesstimated the amount of gas in the Scout and came up about 50′ short, stalling out on an incline within spitting distance of a pump. After borrowing a gas can, priming the carb, and standing on the brake, I got her started again. This being the second time it’s happened in two months (the first being directly across the street from our driveway in the middle of the road), I’m getting impatient to sort out the fuel gauge and tank problems in the spring. Hopefully, a long-awaited hydro boost brake conversion will give me more than 10′ of stopping power (both brakes and steering are powered, so when the engine cuts out so do my options for direction and stopping).
Over the last couple of weekday evenings, I got both speakers rewired, mounted, and tested. Sunday I cut out and glued in 1/2″ corner supports around all the seams, then sealed the front edges and nailed them into place. They sound good! I’m still unsure as to how I’m going to finish the outsides off; I could wrap them completely in Tolex or speaker carpet, but I’m not sure yet.
Our soccer player was on the couch sick today, after waking to an upset stomach and then throwing up several times over the course of the day. She got to spend the day in front of the TV, which was good for her, but hasn’t eaten a thing all day, which is unlike her. At about 7:30 she turned on her side and fell asleep on the couch next to Jen, something that is VERY unlike her. She’s running a fever, so we’ll keep a close eye on her tomorrow.
Tonight we’ll hunker down, tuck the girl into bed, watch some good TV (Downton Abbey and True Detective), maybe sip a beer, and wait to see what the weather brings us tomorrow morning. Just when the lawn was almost clear again too.
So the house next door has been on the market for a couple of months, and as far as we know they didn’t do anything to it other than clean it out before it was listed. A week or two ago, a SOLD card appeared on top of the realtor’s sign out front. The son of the owner stopped by yesterday and I stopped out to speak with him; apparently a realtor from Ellicott City bought the place and the sale will go through in January. Which, to me, sounds like the place is going to get flipped immediately after they put some work into it. However, knowing the asking price and how much work it needs, I don’t see how they’ll be able to make improvements and keep the place affordable for the area.
We’re holed up in the house for the second snow day of the season; the forecast is 4-6″ over the course of the day, but Mama tells me it’s been downgraded somewhat since the morning. Yesterday we had about 2″ of snow which turned to ice in the afternoon, and while the roads were clear by noon I thought it was best to avoid the nutjobs on the road.
This morning we woke to about 2″ down over the snow and another closed school day, so Mama made pumpkin pancakes and I cranked up my work laptop to get things done. At some point I’ll have to get outside and shovel the walk but for now it’s warm and dry in here.
What better way to start the day than to be woken by breakfast in bed? Finn and Mama surprised me with a tray of warm food to kick off a day outside amongst the leaves and sun and wind. Even though we raked the front yard last weekend, the incessant wind has covered it back over, and the backyard was beginning to collect great mountains of maple, oak, and sycamore leaves. I got to work building Finn a great twig-free pile and she jumped in it while I kept moving.
We made a brief trip to the store to collect more bags, and stopped at the dump to drop off some old electronics. While we were there I spied a Polk subwoofer sitting in the recycle bin. Now, I work for a good company and I get paid a great salary, but when I see something I can repair (and that I’ve been mulling the purchase of for years), I’m grabbing it. So in the back of the Scout it went. Then we stopped for a photo op on the way home.
Then I treated her to lunch down the street, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. She talked me into a double-chocolate cupcake for dessert, because I’m a sucker.
Then we got back to work. By this time the sun was behind a low layer of gray clouds, so I brought out the firepit and loaded it with some dry elm. With a pile of recently collected twigs, I had a blazing fire going in minutes.
After filling about 20 bags, it was getting colder and Finn was bored, so Mama and I enjoyed the fire for a few minutes before loading up some forks with hot dogs so that Finn and I could roast them for dinner. Then we hit the den for movie night: Monsters University was funny and scary and just what we all needed.
And, guess what: The subwoofer works!
I had dreams, big dreams. I had a list of projects two pages long that I wanted to tackle in my free week. Most of them involved hefty tool rental fees, multi-day logistics, or the employ of multiple day laborers to complete. Some of them were simple. Most of them didn’t get accomplished.
I was supposed to haul an engine out of my friend Brian’s yard about two weeks ago, and for whatever reason we weren’t able to synchronize our schedules. We finally got together on Monday and got it moved into the garage without collapsing the floor, but it ate up most of the day. I did recover enough that evening to transfer my batch of Belgian Dubbel into the secondary, and then brew a Kalamazoo IPA, which started with a 25 minute grain steep and is mostly Centennial hops. It smells great and hopefully it’ll be done quickly because I’m running low on Texas Bock.
Monday was supposed to be the day I borrowed my neigbor’s pickup and hauled concrete chunks out of the driveway, but that didn’t happen. I did dispose of two old bucket seats, an inoperable snowblower, half a load of brush, and a spare tire, which made me happy.
Tuesday after I drove Finn into school, I came back and attacked the attic. We’ve been hurling stuff up there into piles for the last six years, so the whole room has gotten way out of hand. All of the baby gear is now organized into one section and the rest of it is separated into categories. After I got that finished I worked my way down the stairs into the atrium–what is now the master bathroom–and continued cleaning. More stuff had been piled in there by necessity, so that got sorted and moved to the right locations. Then I cleaned up the construction debris and made it all ready for whenever we’re able to get back to work.
I’ve been meaning to get a brewing stand built for months now, because the amount of brewing gear I’ve got has outgrown the table I was storing it on. I picked up a wire restaurant rack from Lowe’s and set it up to hold three fermenters, with a set of tubs below and storage for other gear up top. It’s much easier to work with everything organized and out of the way. It’s not as strong as the ones I bought from Sam’s Club years ago, but it does the trick.
I’ve had lengths of 2×4″ PVC cut for the kegerator for about six months. The plan was to replace the wood surround it came with, which had gotten stained and dented and had several holes drilled that I wasn’t using. Initially I was afraid to pull everything apart for fear that I’d never get it back together again, but with a full afternoon to work with I figured what the hell. My neighbor (the original builder) had warned me he used several tubes of silicone caulk to hold it together, and he wasn’t lying. Once I’d pulled all the screws out it took just a few taps with a rubber mallet and the whole thing came right apart. I made a few cuts to the edge of the plastic surround to fit and it all slipped right into place. A few carefully placed screws and some clean new caulk, and it looks brand new. The cover went right back on with no problem, and I mounted the temperature controller where it had been originally. I’ve held off drilling to replace the tap handle, gas lead, and temperature sensor because I’m not sure which side the gas tank is going to go on or where I’m going to mount a gas manifold that I don’t have yet.
Wednesday was taken up with a doctor’s appointment in the morning and a bit of rest in the afternoon, but I put a sheet of plywood down on the brewing shelf and cleaned up the rest of the kegerator before disassembling my old speakers. I was planning on buying some new MDF to cut down into new sections, but I held off in favor of some other more important projects.
Thursday, on my way in to drop Finn off, I passed a set of dumpsters by an apartment building and spied something that looked familiar: Two A/V receivers sitting on the ground waiting to be picked up. I backed up and when I spied the word DENON on the face, they quickly made their way into the car. Later, when I had some time to look them over, I realized they were units in the same family, separated by one model number. It took some time to sort out the controls and how they worked, but both of them fired up, recognized an iPod, and worked perfectly. They date to 2008, so they predate HDMI, but for utility use in the garage or basement they’re perfect.
I also sold a set of Scout doors I’ve had kicking around the garage for the past four years; they were painted blue with a white stripe by the PO and gave up their window regulators and some other hardware years ago, so they’ve been getting in the way ever since. Erik M. stopped by to pick them up before work, and he grabbed a spare set of wing windows as well. Now I can pull the windows from my good doors and stack them vertically where the other ones had been, which will make more room for the engine in the back corner.
In the afternoon, I had Jen help me lower the traveltop onto the Scout, and I pulled it out into the sunshine to bolt it in. Brian gave me a 3-gallon jug of muratic acid (he gets it free from work) to dip rusty parts into, so I dunked a pile of body bolts and other hardware and soaked it earlier in the week. After two days the bolts look brand new, and they go in just as easy as butter.
Friday we have plans to do a family trip out into the mountains and see leaves and pet cows, which sounds just right for all of us.
Tuesday after Labor Day has been a 2-cup-of-coffee workday. It was relaxing and we had lots of fun, but I need a vacation day to recover from my vacation.
We were lucky for the opportunity to visit with lots of old friends; Saturday night Finn and I went to a barbecue with the Flynns while Mama stayed home to catch up on work. Finn was shy at first but within about 30 seconds was engrossed in playing dress-up with the girls, while Tim and Betty and I drank and caught up on the deck outside. She was on her best behavior, even after a bowl of chocolate ice cream, and when it was time to leave we drove home under the stars with the top down.
Sunday we drove to Lexington Park to meet Grand at the Naval Air Museum where he showed us around the planes and told Finn about the ones he’d flown and worked on. It wound up being sunnier and hotter out there than we bargained for, so we had to skip the last couple in order to escape to air conditioning and an early dinner. After rehydrating, we made it home in time to move the mattress out of our bedroom, lay new carpet down, assemble an IKEA bedframe, and replace the bed. We’re getting to the point at which all the improvements we made in the house 8-10 years ago are needing touchups. This past week, the entire room got patched, sanded, and a new coat of paint throughout, and it looks dramatically better.
Monday we drove up to Pennsylvania to visit with the Beatties and have another barbecue. Finn was again on her best behavior, and we adults let the kids play while we (mostly) relaxed. Chris and Alison have a beautiful house stocked with mouthwatering mid-century furniture and two excitable Boston Terriers, and it was great to catch up with them. It’s amazing to consider, looking back at who we were 20 years ago, how far we’ve come, and how much the same we are in a lot of ways. As we stood in his driveway chatting and watching the kids ride bikes, leaves fell gently into the yard. Fall is coming soon…
On our return, we “did a teamwork” in Finn’s words and started assembling a new dresser for our room. We’re both tired of waiting around to get things done (we’ve had new carpet and furniture sitting out on the porch in boxes for months) and we couldn’t help ourselves. With some careful maneuvering and strategic use of a hammer in the quiet corners of the house, we got everything put together by 10PM and fell exhausted into bed.