Child Labor Day

Here at the Battered Ham residence, we decided to apply a literal interpretation to the Labor Day holiday and put the girls to work. Assigning housework to the girls is a little hit or miss: some days they really want to help and get into it, most days, not. Yesterday we happened to catch them on a good day, probably because Diane and I were already working. Diane took the inside while I conquered backyard weeds spurred on by a month's worth of monsoon rains. My back hurts.

The MVP of Child Labor Day had to be Kyra. She attacked the house with gusto and positive mental attitude. She washed dishes. She picked up her room. She also volunteered to clean the most god-forsaken room in the house: the bathroom. Kyra couldn't wait to get at it, following closely on Diane's heels and inquiring in a frenzied, high-pitched voice, "Can I clean the toilet too?"

Bless her heart.

Nobody wants to clean toilets. They're dirty and gross and smelly and disgusting, and ours has that stubborn hard water ring around it that you have to scrub and scrub and scrub and scrub some more but you never fully get rid of it. Diane and I usually have a contest to see who can withstand the disgustingness of the toilets the longest before the other caves in and cleans the darn things. I usually win. No more! Now (for the time being) we have a willing champion of toilets in our household...Kyra the Brave!

We realize that Kyra's fascination with toilet-cleaning is a flash in the pan at best, and that we need to capitalize on her willingness to clean as much as possible. What she needs is incentive. This is where my brilliant wife came up with a plan. At one point I checked in on Kyra, toilet brush in hand, to see how she was doing.

"Dad, guess what?"

"What, Sweetie."

"Mom says if I put on rubber gloves, I can touch the toilet water!"

I heard her, I just didn't quite believe her. "What?"

"Mom's getting me rubber gloves so I can touch the toilet water!" she repeated with a maniacal giggle.

"Ooo-kay."

Sure enough, as I emerged into the hallway, I passed Diane who was carrying a pair of yellow rubber cleaning gloves. We just looked at each other, grinned, and shrugged. I love my wife. If that's the price we have to pay for sparkly clean toilets, I say ring us up!

Buns of Steel

Last week Kailey punched a hole in the wall of our master bathroom shower...with her buttocks. She was messing around trying to get Kyra to laugh when she threw herself back against the wall, and punched through six, four-inch ceramic tiles, leaving a gaping hole in the wall. How a sixty pound little girl can punch a hole in the wall with her bare butt is beyond me, but it happened. The only thing I can think of is that there must have been a little bit of water damage in the wallboard. It didn't help that the builders of the house used conventional wallboard instead of blueboard in the shower, but that's water under the bridge (sorry).



I was at work, of course, when it all went down. I'm always at work when major home repair issues come up, like this time, or this time, oh this was a good one, or even this time. Not that it would make much of a difference if I were home. I would just do what I told Diane to do...call her Dad, the fix-it master of the universe. Of course Diane was bringing up terms like "complete bathroom remodel", but since we're about $10,000 short of a $10,000 remodel, I suggested we look at other options.

My father-in-law came out, looked at the problem, and had us up and running in about three days. The fix was relatively easy. He cut out the old wallboard, checking for any more water damage, patched the hole with new wallboard, then re-grouted our existing tiles back into place...exactly what I would have done. ;) Thanks, Papa! You da man!

So Diane and I have officially retired from our nightly sponge baths (darn!) and returned to boring ol' showers. Oh, and we're having Kailey's buttocks licensed as a lethal weapon.

Time for a LOTTA Reorganimization

WE OWN ENTIRELY TOO MUCH CRAP.

It's true. There, I said it. Think you're better than me? Well, you probably are. At least I'm man enough to admit I've got a problem. And I might even be man enough to fix it.

That's where I'm probably still in denial.

When we bought our house five years ago, it was the perfect size, or so we thought until we moved all of our stuff in. Shortly after we signed all the papers we discovered that we had already outgrown our home. Not really, but it sure felt that way. There simply weren't enough available nooks and crannies to put all our stuff. That's when "The Great Purge" began, and probably about twice a year I engage our home in a never-ending tango of "what stays" and "what goes".

The girls are the biggest problem. If they'd just stop frickin' GROWING, or needing NEW TOYS for Christmas and birthdays, we'd be fine. When they come to me whining about clothes not fitting, I try to convince them that capri "floodwater" pants and belly shirts are "in", but to no avail. So we buy them a whole new wardrobe and stockpile their old clothes until we figure out what to do with them, usually bagging them up and carting them over to Goodwill. We could probably do pretty well with a garage sale, but we're not garage sale people. Too much work. And too many weirdos poking around in your garage. It's just easier to bag it all up and let somebody else deal with it.

Or it was until the good ol' Federal Government began their charitable contribution crackdown last year. It used to be federally acceptable to guesstimate the value of your contributions, but I guess too many people were valuing their broken Mr. Coffee coffeemakers at $1000 a pop. I'm telling you, it only takes a few bad apples to spoil it for everybody. So now they want "documentation". It's not enough to merely write it all down...you've got to have pictures of all the crap you're giving away too! Suddenly the garage sale isn't looking all that bad...

Anyway, I give you all of that backstory simply to say that "The Great Purge of Aught-Eight" has officially begun. Only this will be the Purge of all Purges. As I sat and thought about our home I realized we weren't effectively utilizing our storage space. Man, that sounds anal! But it's true and it's driving me nuts! We have closets where we just threw crap "temporarily" when we first moved in that hasn't been touched in five years. File cabinets overflowed as well as bins of pictures and letters and cards. And then there's the issue of the girls' schoolwork: what do we save and what do we toss? It's a sort of self-damning experience to be judge, jury, and executioner to a 7 year-old's artwork, but we since we only have room for the best tigers (or is that a severely beaten chinchilla?), some of it's gotta go.

On Sunday and Monday (yes, it took me TWO days), I tackled the main file cabinet, shredding six bags of sensitive documents and tossing an equal amount of non-sensitive papers. My poor shredder was smoking! Yesterday, Diane and I teamed up, with Diane taking on hall closets and the kitchen pantry while I prepped and "documented" ten garbage bags of clothes and other miscellaneous household items, all of which were piled up in the garage, for transport to Goodwill (the garage sale will have to wait another year). Phase two will be the girls' closets, which is a lot of fun with the girls whining about us giving away toys they have NEVER played with, the guest room closet (what a frickin' disaster that thing is), and a few various "junk" drawers. There is light at the end of the tunnel! I'm always open for reorganimization tips, so if something has worked well for you, please send it along because I need help.

In more ways than one.

Along Came A Spider

We were in the process of getting the girls ready for school yesterday morning when a blood-curdling scream erupted from Kyra's bedroom followed by the worst words in the English language, "THERE'S A SPIDER IN MY BED!!"

Spiders.

I HATE spiders. The way Indiana Jones hates snakes.

Arizona has tons of spiders. They're huge too. I've even had the pleasure of being visited by a tarantula...right in our guest bedroom. Oh sure, Mr. Tarantula, make yourself right at home whilst I introduce you to the bottom side of Mr. Flip Flop. It wasn't a big tarantula, only about four inches long (legs included), but still, a four inch spider in your house is no laughing matter. I didn't sleep for weeks after that one. Now that we've been in Arizona for about five years, I'm getting used to disposing of spiders around the house. I don't freak out near as much as I used to, but I still don't like it.

Diane and I rushed into Kyra's room (Diane first, thank God) and we began prodding through the pile of covers on the floor. Kyra was making her bed, and for her that process means pulling all the covers off the bed, then replacing them. That's when she found the spider on the top sheet. She reported that it was black, about an inch long, and fast. Gives me the wiggles just thinking about it. Diane and I took turns grabbing sheets and blankets and shaking them out, but to no avail. The little sucker was nowhere to be found.

"It's OK, Sweetie," Diane comforted. "Daddy will wash your sheets and vacuum your room. He'll find it."

I shot her a look that said, "Thanks alot." I didn't know when all this was going to happen since I was already slated to spend the day volunteering at Kailey's third grade luau, but since Diane promised, I now needed to make the time. Besides, the thought of a spider in my little girl's bed, potentially feasting on her was now pissing me off, and I wanted it dead.

After school the girls went down to a friends house to play, and I decided that it was time to go spider-hunting, roughly eight hours after it was originally discovered. I really didn't expect to find anything, but thought I'd give Kyra's room a good cleaning anyway (as though that would repel spiders). I stripped her bed and threw her sheets in the wash, then returned to start picking up a bit. Kyra has about a million stuffed animals that should go on her bed but spend most of their time on the floor, one of which is a massive stuffed horse, big enough for her to lay on. I picked it up to toss it on the bed when I saw a tiny black blur scurrying like hell from under it toward the bookcase/headboard of Kyra's bed.

DON'T LET IT GET BEHIND THERE, I screamed to myself, grabbing the first thing I could find, a roll of wrapping paper, to relieve the spider of its life. Why there was a roll of wrapping paper in Kyra's room is beyond me. Just another indicator that her room was in dire need of cleaning. But I was so glad it was there. The spider slipped into the four-inch gap between Kyra's headboard and dresser and was resting up against the wall. To miss meant that it would retreat behind either one. I measured my blow and struck. And watched as the little bastard slipped behind the headboard. FOUR LETTERED EXPLETIVE THAT RHYMES WITH TRUCK!!

Now Kyra's bed is not easy to move. The base of the bed is one big wooden storage unit with several compartments that happen to be loaded with, what else, books. That unit backs into the headboard which is a bookcase. Why, oh why do we encourage our girls to read? I dropped my wrapping paper weapon and tugged at the bed. It wouldn't budge. So I ran over to the storage compartments and heaved handfulls of books out onto the floor until I was able to move the bed. I pulled the bed out about two feet, then worked on the bookcase. This spider is long gone, I thought to myself, but after pulling the bookcase out about six inches and peering behind it, there he was. Thank God spiders are stupid. But at this moment I was seriously pondering which one of us was stupider. I picked up my trusty wrapping paper roll and once again measured my blow. If you miss, don't, DO NOT, let him go to his right and get behind the dresser. I struck. I missed. He ran behind the dresser. SON OF A FIVE LET...oh, you get the idea.

I pulled the dresser out, which was considerably easier than the bed/bookcase combo, and I now had plenty of room to operate. I also found tons of lost stuff: scrunchies, missing pieced to games, puzzles, toys, etc. Against the wall lay an unused tissue. I picked it up and there he was with nowhere to hide. This time I struck and the wrapping paper found its mark (notice I didn't use the tissue? wuss). I crushed the sucker, then used the tissue to clean up its carcass. Yes, I am bad ass. I then spent the next hour cleaning up my mess. Kyra's room has never been so clean.

And that spider? It was only about a half-inch long.

The Joy of Sax

Here are the girls channeling their inner David Sanborn, laying down what they believe to be some smooth jazz licks.



In reality, it's a bit more like the mating call of the Canada Goose.

Time for a Little Re-Organimization

Does anyone else's hall closet look like this?



Just wonderin'.

Squeezing the Charmin

Last week Kailey waddled into the family room with her pants down around her ankles, bent over and asked me, "Daddy, do I have any toilet paper on my bottom?", giving me yet another reason to hate Charmin toilet paper.

What's to hate about Charmin, you ask? Well, nothing...if you have a home full of adults, or at least older children who are able to economize when it comes to TP usage. You see Charmin likes to boast that their toilet paper is so much thicker and so much more absorbent than their competitors that it requires fewer squares to wipe your tender derrière. See for yourself:



And it's true. Charmin is so thick that, if necessary, a single square would be sufficient to wipe the butts of a family of four for a week. But trying to explain to your kids that they can and should use less is a whole 'nother ball o' wax. Their main concern is not getting the poop off their butts. That's secondary. Their main concern is not getting poop on their hands, and that requires a hell of lot more than three puny squares. To ensure hand cleanliness requires no fewer than twenty, 12-ply squares of Charmin...per wipe, which means:

1. The average spool life of a roll of Charmin in our home is approximately one day, or four bowel movements. Whichever comes first.
   
2. The rubber from my plunger is practically sucked off the wooden handle from overuse. I spend more time in the bathroom unclogging toilets than I spend on the throne catching up on my reading. That's a lot of frickin' time.
3. Our water bill is through the roof from multiple flushes, mainly because I'm too lazy to go get the plunger. I usually have to flush three times, bringing nasty water to the very brim of catastrophe before retrieving the plunger. You'd think I'd learn.

That's my initial reason for hating Charmin toilet paper. Then came the Kailey incident, which I know was incited by yet another Charmin commercial, a commercial that I can't find on You Tube. Perhaps you've seen it. In it star the same cute bears you see in the clip above, but in this one Baby Bear has used a competitors toilet paper, and as a result, has FLECKS OF TOILET PAPER ALL OVER HER ASS. She must have had quite a blow out. Momma Bear tries removing it...with a BRUSH...but those flecks aren't going anywhere. She finally has to get out the vacuum cleaner to rid Baby Bear's bum of that pesky TP. Are you kidding me?

Kailey has never asked me about sticky TP down under. Never. And the fact that she was cackling while she asked me (bear, er, bare bummed) clued me in to her little joke. So now I hate Charmin for putting crappy ideas into my kids' heads. Don't I have enough problems already?

The Heat IS On

It finally turned cool here in Southern AZ just before Thanksgiving, cool being in the upper 60's/lower 70's and sunny. It's the perfect weather, in my humble opinion, but it was short lived. The past two days have been cold, cloudy, and downright gloomy. They've been the kind of days where all you want to do is lay in bed and pull the covers over your head, which is pretty much all I did yesterday, minus the bed and the covers. I napped in the chair. This morning reminds me of an Illinois fall day: crisp, cloudy, and windy. The thermometer on the patio shows me that it's a brisk 49°. In Tucson. That just ain't right.

Given the change in weather, we finally turned the heat on last week, especially with overnight temps flirting with the freezing point. Since we moved here, Diane's blood has thinned and she has gone all Southern AZ on me. When temperatures dive below 75°, she dons sweaters, turtlenecks, ponchos, anything to keep her warm. Now that the temps are in the 50's and 40's, there's an ongoing debate about climate levels inside our humble abode. You'd think that because of the way I was raised, I'd have no problem with maintaining a tropical climate within the house during the winter. But I do, and I have absolutely no idea why.

Growing up, my brother and I would engage my Mom in a constant epic battle over the thermostat. The most heated battles took place during the summertime when my Mom insisted that the air conditioning be set at 88°. "What's the point! We're dying in here!" we'd plead. The point was that I had a single mom trying to raise two boys on a teacher's salary, and we could either eat and have enough money left over to do the things we wanted to do, or we could pay the electric bill. But not both. At 88°, much of the humidity, which is brutal in the Midwest during the summertime, was removed from the house and made things a little more bearable. Barely. My brother and I made frequent trips outside just to remind our bodies of the difference in heat and humidity, then go back inside to convince ourselves that even though it was 88°, it was still cooler than the muggy heat outside.

In the wintertime, the thermostat was set around 69°. I don't remember us complaining so much about that. All of us would just bundle up. We'd throw on extra sweatshirts and wear slippers around the house and shock the hell out of ourselves and each other every time we'd touch something or someone. And each of us had these plaid blanket-thingies with snaps that you could snap up into a sort of floor-length gown with arm holes and everything. They kept us warm, but I'm sure we looked like a misfit, plaid-frock clad order of monks. All we needed was a chant: Do-mi-ne, Lord we pray, keep us toa-sty.

Now I'm all growed up and the master of my climatic domain. While I've totally chucked the notion of sweating my ass off in the summer, for some reason I've embraced freezing it off during the winter. And I still have my snappy blanket tucked away somewhere in the closet, though I haven't used it for nearly 20 years. Perhaps it's nostalgia. Perhaps I'm a lunatic. Perhaps it's a combination of both, but I like keeping it cool inside during the winter. I have compromised a little though. Last night as I was getting the girls' pajamas out, a shivering Diane peeked in the doorway and asked, "Honey, is the heat on?"

"Yes, the heat IS on," I confirmed. "It's a balmy 72° in here."

And if you don't like it, there's a red and black plaid snappy blanket in the hall closet with your name on it.

Fini

Phase 1 of the patio project is finished! To say that I am pleased with the results is a major understatement. It was a lot of hard work, but still very much worth it.

After laying the flagstone and mortaring the cracks, my father-in-law rented a saw and trimmed off the edges of the patio and rounded off the corner (pic 2).


We then dug an 8" trench around the patio, boarded it off, and mixed several wheelbarrows of fresh cement on which we laid a brick border. My father-in-law completed the job by filling in the cracks with mortar. I told him that he was definitely the man for the job because he has the patience of a saint when it comes to detail-oriented projects like this. Mortaring brick is a long process requiring much more time cleaning the brick than applying the mortar. I hate that. I just want to slap on the mortar and be done with it. Not so with my father-in-law. When he does a job, he wants to do it right. I really appreciate that about him.

So now we'll take a little break before beginning on Phase 2 of Operation Flagstone Patio: clearing the rest of the river rock from between the back patio and grass and extending the patio to the grass. That's going to be fun.

Flagstone & Fatigue

The other major project I've been working on, or rather "helping out" on, this week is constructing a flagstone patio on the side of the house. My father-in-law is the brains of the operation; I stick around to learn and help with the grunt work. We laid the concrete foundation a couple of months ago, before the summer heat came, and on Monday went back to work. On that morning I had a special delivery: a pallet carrying over 2 tons of flagstone.

A dude pulled up in a flatbed truck with a gargantuan forklift in tow and asked me where I where I wanted it. I pointed to the back gate. He did a quick survey of the land and then asked if I thought the neighbors would mind if he drove through their yard. I thought, "Probably", then said, "I'll check", and rang their doorbell, twice. Nobody was home (or nobody was answering the door), so I told Dude that it was easier to get forgiveness than permission. That was good enough for him. He hauled the pallet to my back gate, I covered up the track marks in my neighbor's "yard" (it's all rock, not lawn), and we bid one another good-day.

Then my father-in-law came over and the real fun began: unloading the pallet. There were 23 large cuts of flagstone, each weighing around 200 pounds. Armed with only a hand truck and our cunning to guide us, we set to the task of unloading the pallet one heavy chunk o' flagstone at a time. We rolled each piece into the back yard and cautiously leaned them up against the wall. Needless to say, I was sore for a couple of days.

The rest of the week we spent chiseling, laying out, and cementing down the flagstone. It's coming along quite nicely. Our next steps are to fill in all of the cracks with mortar and then build a brick border along the outside of the patio.

Then begins the next leg of the patio project with the remaining 14 slabs of flagstone: extending our back patio which runs the length of the house. That should be fun.

When Stuff Slips Through the Cracks

Continuing with the cleaning theme of a couple days ago, I need to preface this entry by saying that we are not complete slobs. I will also preface this entry with an explanation for what I am about to show you, and it is simply this: life tends to be busy and fast paced. We do have a regular cleaning schedule (sort of), but it is usually limited to what is SEEN. Great periods of time can pass by before we get around to cleaning the UNSEEN: e.g. the top of the fridge, behind the TV stands, under the beds, and, um, under the couch cushions. Forget about dust-bunnies; we're breeding full fledged dust-warthogs in some of these areas.

You may recall that we recently bribed the girls into collecting an allowance. The other day, Kyra was performing her duties vacuuming in the living room while I took a shower. I was toweling off when she burst into the bathroom. I really need to start locking the door. "Daddy, I have a surprise to show you!" she sang.

"I'll be there in a minute!" I sang back.

She turned to leave, pulling the door closed behind her when she wheeled around and thrust her face into the crack of the door. "By the way," she informed me through a toothless grin, "I saw your privates." And with that she disappeared. The girls have a disturbing infatuation with seeing my privates. I need to find a way to remedy that. They need to know that male genitalia is a bad, bad, bad, bad thing, and should be avoided until they're 30 or so. Maybe 40. Actually until after I'm dead.

So I dry off, throw on some shorts, and head out to the family room fully expecting Kyra to show me an amazingly clean room. Instead I walk in to find her and Diane standing in the middle of a floor littered with cushions from the couch and love seat. One half of the couch had a blanket draped over it. Kyra's face lit up when I walked into the room. She grabbed a corner of the blanket and, in her best David Copperfield impersonation, yanked the blanket away to reveal what hid underneath. "TA-DAAA!!!"

Please don't judge me for what I'm about to show you.













Go ahead, click on the picture and investigate what's been hiding out on the lam underneath our couch cushions. There are candy wrappers, pencils, a back scratcher, a pair of scissors (I wondered what happened to them), loose change, hair scrunchies, and various other crap. Initially I was shocked at the sight underneath the blanket. How could we let it get this bad? Then I did what any rational, responsible adult would do in this situation: I ran to get the camera. Diane was horrified. "You're not going to post this on your blog, are you? It's so embarrassing!" She knows me too well.

So before you cast judgment on us, take a look under YOUR couch cushions. If there's less crap (and you have at least two children under the age of 8), then JUDGE AWAY!

I Hate Pinks

I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but I've become the de facto laundry-doer in our household. That's not to say that Diane doesn't contribute in this department; it's just that she deals with clothing at her "day job" and on a "subconscious level" avoids dealing with clothing at home, if at all possible. So the chore of laundering our garments falls into my hands, which is fine. Laundry is simply one of those necessary evils in life: the job that's NEVER done.

I have my laundry routine down to a science. Perhaps that's another reason why I've become Laundry-King of our household. I sort our clothes into six piles, yes, six. First I have the traditional dark and light piles. Then I have separate dark and light sock and underwear piles which I wash in hot water. It's underwear, people. Lord only knows what's growing in there, and I want them DEAD (the things growing in the underwear, not the underwear themselves...they're already dead). I also have a black pile since black is the only color Diane will wear. No, she's not a Goth and she doesn't have a fixation with death; she just likes black. And trying to get Diane to wear color is like asking Sunni's and Shiite's to get along: it's just not going to happen no matter how hard you try.

Because I have two young daughters, the last pile I sort is pinks. Sure there is an occasional purple or even an orange that sneaks into this pile, but for the most part, this is a big, heaping pile of pink. I hate doing pinks. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. Not because they're pink, but because of what's CAKED ON the pinks. As precious as my girls are to me, they are...how do I put this gently...messy.

The pinks are the most laborious of my laundry loads. I have to inspect each article of clothing, searching for food stains (usually chocolate or ketchup), grass stains, dirt stains, or "what the hell is that?" stains. Then I pull out my faithful bottle of Shout and go to work. But it's not enough to merely SPRAY the stain; you have to work the Shout into the stain, vigorously rubbing the fabric together so that the cleaning agents can penetrate to the very heart of the stain. I do this with EVERY ARTICLE OF CLOTHING belonging to my beloved daughters and it takes frickin' FOREVER. And no matter how meticulous I am in inspecting their clothes for stains, I always seem to miss one smudge of chocolate or a dollop of spaghetti sauce hiding in an inconspicuous location. Always. It's maddening. I mean, how in the world do you get food stains in your armpit?

I can't wait for the day both girls to outgrow their affection for pink. Not that the color pink is necessarily the problem. I just now associate that color with food stains and the smell of Shout. I'm like Pavlov's dog: every time I see the color pink, I get the urge to clean. One possible solution is to reintroduce the girls to a handy little gadget called a bib. Yeah, like that'd go over well. The REAL solution is for me to shut up and and grab the Shout.

I Hope This Lasts

Well, we finally did it.

Actually, Diane finally did it. I'm gleefully tagging along for the ride. She finally got sick enough of constantly cleaning the house only to have it completely destroyed mere minutes later that she put together an allowance list. That's right, we've stooped to the realm of bribery and cheap child labor, appealing to the greed of our children in order to keep a clean home. Or, for those who prefer a positive spin on the situation, we're teaching our girls the values of hard work and personal responsibility, as well as the lost art of earning and saving money. Yeah, yeah, yeah...those things will hopefully sink in to their rapidly developing brains, but right now we're more concerned about not breaking our necks after stepping on a strategically placed Happy Meal toy.

Kailey and Kyra each have their own lists for the week. And each list is not limited to the usual daily/weekly chores. They also contain duties concerning personal hygeine, personal development, and the attitudes in which the duties are completed. We're going to experiment and see how far we can stretch this sucker. For instance, will the promise of monetary compensation be enough of a motivator for the girls to "be nice to one another"? Probably not. But we're going to try it anyway, though we haven't worked out the finer details of how much we'll dock the girls for being turds to each other. Now that I mention it, we haven't really decided how much we'll reward them either. No matter. That'll come.

So far our dastardly plan is coming along swimmingly. The house has been clutter-free, the girls' rooms no longer resemble obstacle courses, and the fresh scent of Pine-Sol permeates the air. One of Kailey's weekly assignments has been to mop the tile floor in the kitchen. She's so desperate for cash (not really...she's loaded) that she opted to mop DAILY. I started to tell her that she only had to do it once per week before Diane shushed me. "Don't discourage her," she chided. "If she wants to mop every day, let her." Okie-dokie!

The real question will be how long we can keep up this ruse. How long will the weekly promise of cold, hard, petty cash motivate them to become domestic goddesses? That remains to be seen, but so far, so good.

Tubes are the Pits

Ah the joys of homeownership. I'm sitting here waiting for the first of the termite inspectors to arrive because I recently discovered five termite tubes on the northeast corner of the house. That's just frickin' fantastic. I'm about ready to dub this place "The Money Pit" because lately it seems to be siphoning my wallet dry on a monthly basis. We should probably just do a preemptive strike and replace the water heater, air conditioner, furnace, interior plumbing, and re-tile the roof just to be safe. Oh hell, let's just tear the place down and start over! But I digress.

I hopped on the phone the other day to get an estimate of what it's going to cost to cast those little suckers into oblivion. The first couple of places I called set the tone for the morning. "We can't really give you an estimate over the phone. We need to get someone on-site to assess the situation and then give you a free estimate."

"Can't you just give me a ballpark figure?" I pleaded.

Only one place took the bait. "Termite service in Tucson runs anywhere between $400 and $800."

Great. I guess they figure that sending their inspector to your house will make you cave right then and there and pay whatever they tell you. Well, I'm not playing that game. I scheduled six inspections between now and Monday, three nationally known exterminators and three local ones. I'm going to let them duke it out for my business.

Ding dong.

Speak of the devil. Let's get ready to rumble.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

beep

I have no idea what time it was or when I even became cognizant of the piercing intermittent tone. All I know is that it was way too early.

beep

The sound wasn't loud enough to wake me outright. It eased me out of my sleep and made me question whether I was dreaming it or actually hearing something.

beep

I definitely was not dreaming it.

beep

Smoke detector. Are you kidding me? I was too tired to even look at the clock and tried in vain to drift back to sleep.

beep

Diane mercifully got up at some point and closed the door. I went back to sleep.

beep

Ha ha...not loud enough to keep me from sleeping. Sometime later our bedroom door opened and the bathroom door slammed shut. Kyra. She hasn't learned the fine art of gently opening and closing doors. The toilet flushed and she emerged from the bathroom. "Daddy?" Oh please, Dear Lord, let it be at least 8:00. "The tooth fairy came last night!" she whispered loudly as she flashed a toothless smile and held up a $5 bill. Five dollars! Holy crap! I think I got a quarter per tooth when I was a kid. I gave her a hug and she walked out of the room...without closing the door.

BEEP

Alright, alright. I summoned the energy to look at the clock. 8:00 am on the nose. Now to find the culprit. There are six smoke detectors in our home: one in each bedroom, one in the hall, and one in the living room. I stumbled out of bed and trudged out to the hallway where I stood under the smoke detector there and waited, the living room to my left, bedrooms to my right.

beep

Of course the beep came from my left, from the only smoke detector I couldn't stand on a chair to fix. The living room has a cathedral ceiling that peaks at roughly fourteen feet off the ground. Guess where the smoke detector is located? I couldn't even get at it with the normal ladder. I needed the big daddy of all ladders: my million-foot collapsible, extendable Gorilla ladder. It also weighs about a million pounds.

beep

BITE ME!! I headed down the hall to see if Kailey was up. I peeked in and found her sitting up in her bed looking frizzy-haired and groggy-eyed. Kyra had apparently woken her up with her $5 bill as well. "What's that sound?" she croaked. I filled her in on what was happening and she told me she wanted to help. So she followed me to the garage.

beep

I haven't rearranged the garage since the plumbers were in there fixing our water main fiasco a couple of months ago. In order for them to get to the main water line, I had to move the contents along one wall of the garage to another wall of the garage. Guess which wall the million-pound Gorilla ladder was on? So instead of sleeping in on this glorious Saturday morning, I cleaned my garage, engaged in a major upper body workout extracting and setting up my Gorilla ladder, as well as a good cardio workout as I scaled the ladder into the upper stratosphere of my living room, all just to pop out a little compartment on the smoke detector and replace a 9 volt battery. How was your morning?

beep

What was that?

A Little Too Excited Over Home Cleaning

Rex went home yesterday, but he left millions of reminders of himself all over our house, just so we wouldn't miss him. We could actually collect all of the hair he distributed over our house to construct a smaller version of Rex...call him Mini-Rex. Earlier in the week, Diane swung by her folks house to pick up their super-duper, industrial strength, dog-hair-picker-upping vacuum cleaner. I thought it was overkill until I tried our regular run-of-the-mill vacuum that took nearly a half-hour to clean a 10' x 12' area rug. I decided to give their Hoover a try, and I wasn't disappointed. In fact, once I started, I was actually EAGER to vacuum the whole house, including rooms he hadn't been in. What's up with that? The model was a little bulky and heavy for my taste, but it did a much better job on our carpets. Diane's folks arrived to pick Rex up while I was vacuuming, and I actually asked them if I could keep the vacuum just to finish the house! Yes, it's official, I'm quite the dork. So now I'm adding a new item to my coveting list: guitar, drum machine, HD TV, surround sound system, HD video camera, and, yes, a new vacuum cleaner.

My Cup Runneth Over

Last night we moved into our new home, or at least it felt like a new home since we haven't stayed there for the past two weeks, and the latest of our string of nightmares has come to an end. I'm thankful that we had a place to stay so that we were able to avoid running up an even huger water bill, but I'm even more thankful to be able to sleep in my own bed, shower in my own shower, and shi-nola in my own, er, shi-nola-er.
We were supposed to be back in our house on Wednesday night, but the plumbers extended the job into a two-day affair. To be fair, they had five guys call in sick due to a stomach virus that was running rampant through their offices, or so they said. If that's truly the case, then, by all means, please stay home. Keep your infectious diseases to yourselves, thank you very much.

Two guys showed up Wednesday morning to dig sixty feet of trenching in which they would lay the new pipe. One of the guys sounded like he had the plague. He'd move a couple of shovels full of dirt and then spend the next five minutes hacking and coughing and complaining that he couldn't stop hacking and coughing. The other guy had played in his first pickup basketball game in four years on Tuesday night and could barely move, and he did just that, barely moved. I sat there thinking that we were never going to get back into our house. I felt bad for these guys, but I really needed them to dig a frickin' ditch. At this point, head colds and achy muscles fell squarely into the category of "Not My Problem".

They persevered, and dug throughout the day. Not that speed mattered, because they still had to wait for the "Master Plummer" to show up to tie off the old connections and reconnect the new. He made an appearance at about 12:30 to assess the situation. He had another job to complete and told me that he'd be back in an hour to finish the job at our place. He returned two hours later. By that time, the trench was dug, and the health-challenged trench diggers had been sitting around for at least a half-hour with nothing to do. Shortly after the MP arrived, two more plumbing trucks pulled up in a desperate attempt to complete the job by the end of the day. We now had eight plumbers wandering around investigating the carnage that stretched across the west side of the house. I laughed as I announced to them that there was never a plumber around when you needed one. I was the only one laughing. Apparently, they'd heard that one before. Or they didn't speak English.

The MP reassessed the situation, then declared that this would probably be a good stopping point for the day. He needed about three hours to complete the job and he didn't want to leave us without water overnight. While I was a little disappointed at the realization that I would not be sleeping in my bed that night, I was OK with the decision. The girls were making their theatrical debut later in the evening, and I didn't want to miss it. So all the plumbers scrambled to their respective trucks and called it a day. They would return first thing in the morning to complete the job.

Their idea of "first thing" is different than mine. I arrived back at the house at 7:30 on Thursday morning, but the plumbers didn't arrive until 9:00. Must be nice. The MP then realized that he didn't have all the materials he needed to complete the job, so he left two guys to putz around at our place while he went on a quest for plumbing supplies. He obviously shops for all his plumbing needs in Mexico because he was gone for three hours. I needed to get to work (I had already taken Wednesday off), so I didn't witness the new line being installed. I wasn't very happy when I left because I had also been told that they should be done by noon. Shoulda-coulda-woulda. Fortunately, once the MP returned with all of the necessary materials, he was able to knock out the rest of the job in a brief period of time.

Diane called me at work at 2:00, and I answered my cell phone to the sound of running water. It was probably just in my head, but I swear I heard "The Hallelujah Chorus" blaring in accompaniment as well. Diane then got on the phone and told me in her sweet, sweet voice that I could come home. I felt all the anxiety and frustration lift from my shoulders. I could go home to my bed. Go home to my stuff. It's great to be home.

Priceless

Locating a water main leak under your driveway: $275.

Hiring a series of plumbers to replace water main: $1787.

Settling the corresponding water bill: $1000.

Sleeping in your own bed: priceless.