around the house
Toilet
There are few things as satisfying as fixing something. The toilet in Papa’s guest bathroom had a leak around one of the bolts that holds the tank to the toilet itself. In the process of determining that, I also figured that the valve itself needed replacing. So a trip or two to Home Depot and everything was set.
There are few things more frustrating than thinking you’ve fixed something only to find that something else in the meantime — like a slightly too-small tank gasket — has caused an even bigger problem. A test flush resulted in virtually all the water in the tank out the sides, onto the wall to the floor.
That Log
My neighbor came over today to help me wrestle that log out of our creek. The problem is simple: it’s sitting in the water, so there’s no way to cut it into manageable pieces. The real problem: the thing probably weighs well in excess of 1,000 pounds.
We got some of it cut, but the vast majority still lies in the creek. We’ll try again Saturday with some kind of improvised wench system.
Sunny Sunday
After all the rain yesterday, it was really a relief to us all to see the sun this morning. It made the autumnal trees in the backyard shimmer and shine.
The Boy and I decided to wander down to the stream to see what it looked like after such a long, heavy rain. I thought the little island we’d built up earlier this year might well be gone with that volume of water rushing through.
What we saw instead was that the tree that had fallen into the creek had been washed downstream a significant distance — thirty or so feet.
And our island was completely gone — it couldn’t withstand the several-hundred-pound tree’s attack.
Saturday in the Yard
I spent an hour this morning preparing for next week’s lessons, and though I’d already readied an article for next week’s Article of the Week, I ditched those plans when checking the news, I realized what today was: the thirtieth anniversary of the breach of the Berlin Wall. The fall? Well, I guess so — once it was breached, the Wall was no more a wall.
I watched those reports on CBS Evening News realizing the momentousness of the event though perhaps not its personal significance.
I say “perhaps” and not “certainly” because it’s a question: would I have met K had the Berlin Wall not come down? Communist control in Poland at that point were already teetering. Solidarność’s revolution, with Wałęsa at the visible helm, had already gained traction — almost a decade earlier — and gone underground again only to reemerge to take all available seats in the sejm just a few months prior to this significant day 30 years ago. Perhaps Germany could have remained divided while Poland transformed, but all those regimes were like so many dominoes or a Jenga pile: once one went, they all went. So I might have gone to Poland; I might have met K; but there are no guarantees, certainly.
From that spins out a series of eventualities that are far from certainties.
Had all that happened, it’s hard to see that I would live in Greenville now, that I, after having planned and prepared for a week of lessons at a local middle school, would spend a late Saturday morning trimming hedges, pulling the remains of flowers, and mowing.
Where I would be, what my life would look like — it’s impossible to say. But it strikes me as odd that events halfway around the world helped set a trajectory that ended with me pulling purple hearts from the flowerbed as K took the Boy to rehearsal for the Polish community’s annual Christmas pageant.
I prepared the Article of the Week assignment and decided that instead of the usual multiple-choice questions about bias and central idea — all designed to prepare students for the standardized testing that will consume the final weeks of school — I would ask them a simple self-reflection question: “What will be the Fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall event of your adolescence? What world event do you think could happen that would change the course of history permanently for the better?” And unlike all those silly questions that I have check, I’ll be eager to read their responses.
Saturday Work
Free Monday
Today was a teacher workday, one of three that we are able to take off without worry. Exchange days, they’re called. If we’ve gone to meetings and such after school, we use those hours toward the time we would have ordinarily spent in school. I didn’t have those hours, so I took a personal day.
E and I spent the morning working on the large tree that had fallen in the drainage ditch — which we call a creek — that runs behind our house. I knew that if we didn’t, the first big rain storm would cause flooding.
I didn’t realize how much of the tree was under brush and vines that I’m assuming it took down with itself as it fell. We cleared all that away so we could get to the tree, and we cut and removed as much as we could with just two of us.
E is of an age that he actually is starting to be helpful. I can pull on a large tangle of vines and have him cut the critical vines that are keeping everything locked and immobile. He can bring tools to me, help pull things up out of creekbeds, offer helpful commentary on the whole process.
Once we got that done and ate some lunch, we spent the afternoon at Denver Downs — fun with hay, ropes, and corn…
Sunday
The Boy had been waiting to work on his project.
We’d been waiting for the tree to fall.
Soccer and Painting
Morning: the Boy’s team played its second game. Last week, they won 8-0. This week, there was a stronger team on the other end of the field. We won 2-0, and the Boy got one of the two goals: the goalie didn’t pick up the ball, and the Boy took advantage of the mistake.
In the afternoon, we worked to do a little painting around Papa’s new addition.
A good Saturday, overall.
Tackling the Leylands
Hatchet
It’s all the Boy has been talking about for the last few weeks.
“Daddy, can we get a hatchet?”
He was thinking about buying it with his own money; he was thinking about splitting the cost with us; he was thinking about it, talking about it, probably dreaming about it.
Today, we finally got it. He wanted to make sure that he wasn’t going to pay any of his money for it because he’s got his eye on another Lego set, but when, after buying nails, concrete screws, pegboard hooks, and other things on the list, we finally headed over to the gardening section, his excitement brought a smile to both K and me.
The highlight of the afternoon, then, was teaching him how to use it.
Independence Day 2019
Monday
The day started with a ride back up to the north of the county to pick up my car.
I’d mapped the route on Strava, and it really didn’t seem so bad: 28km with nothing too intimidating in terms of ascents. But I’m not the cyclist I was 15 years ago. My legs aren’t what they used to be; my heart and lungs labor under what would have been the slightest effort at my fittest. And so when I hit the segment some Strava user named “Cleveland St. Climb – West,” it completely kills me.
It’s really pathetic. Look at this thing:
A mere half-kilometer that rises a mere 35-meters, with an average gradient of 8%. I finish in 3:08, with an average speed of 8.7 km/h. Of all the Stava users who have tackled that climb, I am the 386th fastest.
Details from my fitness tracker show just what a trial it was for me:
Ridiculously high pulse for a ridiculously slow speed. But I’m 46; I haven’t done serious exercise in years. I shouldn’t be surprised, and I’m not. But of course, I am.
When I got home, I did to the yellow bell bushes along our driveway what the ride did to me:
Three from Saturday
Friday
In the morning, I took the repairman’s advice from yesterday and started repairing (again) our dishwasher. How many honest repair guys will tell you, “You could fix this yourself and get the part cheaper on Ebay,” after giving you a quote of $354 for the repair? Not many. To be sure, he got his $80 trip/diagnostic fee, but honested himself out of another hundred bucks or so. Or perhaps he honested himself into more, for I’ll certainly never call anyone else .
The discharge pump was faulty, he said, and it came out this morning just as easily as he said it would. “There might be one or two screws down there — I can’t remember,” he said, “but then just rotate it and pull it out.” No screws — just a simple rotation and out it came.
In the afternoon, the neighborhood boys came over, and the Boy’s new Lego set came in, so there was only one thing to do.
Sunday
Polish lessons with the Boy in the morning.
Finishing up a project in the afternoon.
Thursday
Yesterday, we bought a new piece of furniture for Papa. He doesn’t have a closet, so we bought him something like a wardrobe. And the door opened violently as we were taking it out of the house (owners moving — everything must go!) and the door broke right at one of the joints. So first thing this morning: round up some clamps from a neighbor and get to gluing.
I added “fix cabinet door” to my summer to-do list just so I could check it off.
Next, the kitchen counters need resealing and repolishing. The Boy was eager to help. He chattered away the whole time about how important it was to take care of our granite (“Daddy, what’s granite?”) and how we were such good homeowners to be so conscientious about everything and how it’s important to spray all the sealers and polishes evenly (shortly after I told him that — he likes to do that as it makes him feel adult) and a thousand and one other things.
Late afternoon: K comes back and sets about making another cobbler from the blueberries that are now ripening like mad every day.
And the Boy had to get in on that as well.
Wednesday
Pulled it apart, checked for clogs, cleaned out a bit of gunk, put it back together, and reinstalled it.
Still not working.
Dishwasher Fun
The dishwasher stopped draining. This was what our kitchen looked like at about ten this morning as a result. My hope was that it was the discharge hose — I envisioned hopefully a hose blocked with some something that comes out of the hose when I blast water through it from the backyard garden hose. To get that hose removed required, obviously, removing the dishwasher. And then nothing came out of the hose. Which meant that the blockage was somewhere in the pump itself.
“It’s still under warranty,” I thought. “I’m not going to mess with it further and potentially void the warranty. I’ll just call and have Lowe’s make good on the three-year extended warranty we bought in 2016.” Only, it wasn’t an extended warranty: that would indicate an extension of the manufacturer’s one-year warranty. It gets extended. Lengthened. Stretched. Increased.
Lowe’s verbiage, which I didn’t understand until today, is “Protection Plan.” The protection plan kicks in from the date of purchase, which means for the first year, you’re doubly covered. Which means it’s not an extension but a layering. And the protection plan expired — you’ll probably guess — on May 31. We had 1,095 days of coverage, and 17 days later, we need it.
The upshot of this — if there is one — is that I can now feel free to tinker all I want without fear of voiding the warranty. Because there is none anymore.
The Boy, though, loved the whole process. “You need me to get behind the dishwasher?” was a common refrain.
A Mess
I’ve been working to clean out our basement this week. Because of some shoddy renovation work — well, shoddy cleanup — we had a fair amount of concrete dust coating many things as well as the usual chaos that comes with leaving your basement to grow its on labyrinth of apathetic misplacement of tools and storage bins for four years.
Monday and Tuesday I worked on the metal and wood storage shelves that hold our plastic storage bins filled with camping items, old photographs, clothes the Boy has not yet grown into, and mysterious “why do we still have that?” items. Wednesday was the work bench as well as a few more shelves. (Everything takes so long because each item — every single one — needs to be wiped down, and the shelves took a long time because I moved them to one location temporarily to clean them and then had to move them back.)
Today, I began working on the other half of the room and final touches to the work bench. The after picture, as a result of not having time to put everything back in its place, looks worse than the before picture above.
In order to clean a mess, we often have to make one first. It’s truism for most things in life, I think, but I often forget it. I want things to move ahead without ever moving back; I want lesson plans to come out perfect the first time; I want first drafts to be good enough to be final drafts; I want our kids to perfect things instantly. It’s in the mess that we figure things out, though, and making a masterpiece always involves a mess beforehand.
I forget that when I come into the kitchen as K is cooking, though. I tend to clean things as I go along; K, not so much. The kitchen is a complete wreck when she’s done cooking. Yet out of that mess comes little slices and ladles-full of perfection.