I’m going to document the January thaw that is predicted to occur over the course of the next week. I’ll be taking a photo from the same locations at 3:45 every afternoon. Today is January 4th, day one.
I’m putting the rest of the pictures in the coppermine.
** I started this post on July 31st **
Yesterday, when I woke up, I said to Eileen, “Amets Txurruka,” and she replied, “posturography.” Honest to God. Those were the first words we said to each other.
Let me explain.
Every summer, Eileen and I watch the Tour de France with the fervor of a Nascar fan, and we often play this little game where in I mention a name of a cyclist and Eileen replies with the name of a different cyclist. Many of them have foreign names that are a lot of fun to say, like Haimar Zubeldia and Yaroslav Popovych. Even the English-speaking guys have fun names, like Levi and Cadel. Cadel? Have you ever heard that name before? I love it.
We go back and forth until one of us can no longer name anyone else. Then the game is over and a winner is declared.
Well, this summer, my pattern has been to wake up and start watching the Tour; Eileen goes off to work; I write or read news on the internet or go hiking with my friends; and then when Eileen gets home, she watches the rebroadcast of the Tour, and I often watch with her. So, bottom line: my Tour-watching this year was off the charts. So I had a lot of cyclists’ names running through my head.
Meanwhile, Eileen was immersed in her Audiological jargon for eight hours a day. So last night, she was dreaming of how one might solve the dilemma of having a patient undergoing Rotational Chair Testing while wearing wired goggles or electrodes. I’m sure you can all see how such a sitution might be a predicament. What happens to the wires when the chair starts spinning?
Posturography is also a diagnostic test for balance disorders, so when she woke up, Eileen had such things on her mind.
On my mind was still the Tour de France, which recently ended. Amets Txurruka, whose name kinda sounds like a balance disorder, won the Most Combatative Rider award.
So there you have it. The summer experiences of Tim and Eileen summed up in one small, three-word dialogue.
The kitchen remodeling is in its fourth week or so now. It got delayed a bit as we were waiting on an electrician. Our original estimate for the electrical work was $1600, which was about $1200 more than we had budgeted, so with some help, we got a deal from a friend of a friend and saved a lot of money.
In the meantime, “The Carpenter” (which is what I’m calling my brother Ted) discovered that our staircase to the basement was in rough shape, so he tore them out and rebuilt them.
Of course, everyone knows that house ownership works like that. You tear down a wall and you discover bad wiring, or water damage you didn’t know about. Which reminds me: last week, we had a significant leak in our basement, coming from the first floor bathroom. Plumber dude had told me a while ago that I needed to recaulk the tub, but since I’m partial to fun things, I put it off.
As The Carpenter has been installing the cabinets, he has discovered minor setbacks and surprises — a mismeasured cabinet, mysterious extra shelves, those sorts of things.
But nothing compares to the little surprise we discovered Wednesday afternoon. Our wasteline got backed up, thereby sending a few gallons of water out the lowest drain point in the house, which happened to be the basement toilet. I guess it wasn’t as disgusting as it could have been, but shit.
Eileen and I were looking at craigslist yesterday, and we stumbled upon the “free” listings. For those who don’t know, craigslist is an online classified ad site that’s free to use. I was on it yesterday since I’m going to try selling our older computers before doing the ebay thing, which usually involves shipping.
The craigslist free section has some pretty funny stuff on it — toilets, dwarf bunnies, big screen tvs, hostas. The list goes on.
We were pretty amazed reading through all the offerings. But by far the best one was the “kick-ass cement block entertainment center and computer desk.” The sales pitch was this: “Free to whoever the hell wants to come get them, decentish computer desk, and a cement block entertainment center (OK, it’s 7 blocks, with a 2’x4′ sheet of plywood on top, with 2 smaller blocks and a 2’x2′ plywood square on it for the TV). The plywood is Birch, and still looks kinda nice.”
Good sale.
This guy named Tunnel Bob used to live next door to us. He was nicknamed such because he used to break into the tunnels underneath the university and under the hospitals — pretty much any tunnel in town, he could get into it. The rumor was that he was so capable at finding his way around the tunnels that the police could never catch him; so eventually they hired him to help them map the tunnels.
I never asked Bob if the police hired him, but he did often bring up his tunneling in conversations. He told me that he’d go to different cities to explore their tunnels. He’d been in Ann Arbor tunnels, Minneapolis tunnels, Milwaukee tunnels. Some of them were really nice, he told me. One even had drinking fountains in the tunnels.
He was a nice guy. Genuinely good-natured. But as you might have surmised by now, he was a little nuts. Eventually, he got evicted from his house.
By his mom.
She owned the place, but lived in a condo or some assisted living place since she was getting up there in age. She warned Bob that if he didn’t keep the place clean, she’d kick him out. And I guess she followed through on that.
This all happened a couple years ago. Bob stopped over to tell us he was getting evicted. Soon afterwards, this guy showed up at the house in a van and started fixing up the place. He was a nice guy, about 60 years old, handy, hard worker. We just assumed that Bob’s mom was getting the place prepped to sell.
We didn’t say much to the guy, since you don’t typically get to know tradespeople who work on your neighbors’ houses, you know? But he was there a lot; he even had a couple helpers — younger guys he’d hired to help him out.
Weeks turned into months, and eventually, he introduced himself to us. One of his employees was living in the house “to help defer the mortgage,” and he introduced that guy to us too. We’d never seen the house for sale, so we assumed Bob’s mom still owned it. And at one point, the man mentioned that he lived 45 minutes out of town.
This was all about three years ago. The guy’s still working on the house; we talk to him more often, though neither one of us knows his name. He told us when we first met him a couple years ago, but I didn’t figure he’d be around so long, so I didn’t bother paying much attention.
The other night, I went out in the front yard with Tember and noticed the guy’s van had its lights on. He’s got two vans — one big one with ladders on top, and one minivan that gets driven more often.
The house was dark, like it usually is at night, but there was a blue light in one of the rooms. We’ve always figured that the low lighting every night is just a timer of some sort to make people think someone lives there. But when I saw the van’s lights on, I tried knocking on the door of the house. Nobody answered, but when I started walking toward the sidewalk, I heard a tapping on a window.
I looked back and saw that the blinds on the front window had been opened a bit. I couldn’t see much inside, but I saw a red digital alarm clock reading 10:30. I waited.
After about 30 seconds, the guy came out of the house and thanked me for pointing out the van lights.
When I came back inside our house, I said to Eileen, “so that guy is our neighbor.” Only took three years to figure that one out.