With all of the stuff I’ve been up to lately, doing a bit of writing has fallen by the wayside. Work on the house is still incomplete, but has slowed down because what remains isn’t critical quite yet. Once all of the painting is complete, and I’ve managed to get all of the doors rehung, there will be pictures.

I’ve gone to see The Dark Knight, which was the first time since Abraham graced us with his presence that Debbie and I managed to get out alone. I went to the zoo, where the boy and I became an exhibit to all of the women around when Debbie went to the restroom. I went to Whiskey Island on Friday afternoon for a picnic, took a walk by myself to get some alone time with nature, watched swallow bug-catching, a swallow-heckling oriole, and played with a groundhog for a little while.

Last Monday my office was one of the three County offices raided by the FBI and IRS-CID as a part of their investigation into corruption by County officials. Apparently they came over the intercom and told folks to go to the canteen [which is what everywhere else is called a lunch room]. The design room keeps the overhead speaker turned off because we’d rather not listen to the best in soft rock from the 80s, 90s and now, so I didn’t hear the announcement. I happened to be both on my computer and on the phone, both no-nos, when the FBI knocked on the door. I’d already managed to tell Debbie everything she needed to know to get the scanner at home working though, so it was no big deal.

I went to the canteen, where everyone else was, and filled out a sheet that asked for basic information and job duties, and then got to take the rest of the day off.

When my mom rolled up here for the 4th of July, we planted a tree for Abraham. I had a tree planted for me when I was born as well. I even wrote about it for Young Authors, so you can read that here. Although that picture is from a month ago, Abraham is already much bigger, I’d say near 12 pounds. He’s started smiling and chuckling a little, and I can actually sort of play with him now. The only rough part is that when I’m at work he’s in his best mood, so when I come home I get to interact with him for the part of the day when he’s at his worst. It gets frustrating at times.

I got season tickets to the Notre Dame football games this year, blessed be my monogram. I don’t know that I’ll be able to get to more than one of them, however.

The weather has been wonderful, and today looks as if it will continue that pattern. Dinner is a daily choice between eating on the porch or watching some old school Muppet Show episodes. I recently discovered that I can get Mr. Wizard on DVD as well. Abraham’s going to talk to folks at school about these crazy shows that aren’t on TV anymore and no-one is going to know what he’s talking about except his teachers.

I haven’t been to a rock and roll show in forever. It hurts.

Although I’ve taken the last two weeks off of work to spend time with Abraham, I’ve also been doing [and having done] a lot of work on the house. I’ve been working on the room that you enter from the front door. For lack of a better term, I call it the parlor. Here are some photos:
Before:

After:

Before:

After:

I painted, put down quarter-round, replaced a pane in the doors to the bedroom, and painted those too. The plaster needed some serious patching but that was done awhile ago. I’m having quite a bit of contracted work done on the bathroom and getting a closet expanded. One of the small rooms is disappearing to make this happen, but it is certainly worth it. During this process we’ve found some painted-over hand-made fixture gems. Here are some hinges:
Stripped of their paint [and original black enamel, unfortunately]:

And restored [thanks to Rustoleum]:

The window sashes have similar paint-encrusted metalwork, and I’m still working on restoring the original doorbell [you can see the paint-encrusted version and the empty spot in the photos above]. The door itself is probably going to take a week or two of work itself. I’m not looking forward on the constant removing and rehanging of it.

There will be pictures of the bathroom and closet when they are finished.

I’ve lived in this house for almost a year and I’m still not moved in. The work on fixing the place up continues, and tomorrow the embiggening of the bathroom and closet [to the dearth of the tiniest bedroom] begins. Since we’re in the process of painting the entry room, this means that 4 of the rooms can’t have anything in them right now. It will be 5 if we don’t manage to complete the painting and quarter-rounding of the entry room by the time the big room by the kitchen is ready to have the flooring put down.

We’re pretty stressed and cramped, living in two rooms with the floors covered in crap from the other rooms, and the kitchen. We’ll have to go upstairs for most of the bathroom needs. Plus, an imminent eminent like a thief in the night baby on the way. Compared to the hectacular hecticness of our current lives, being settled in with a finished house and a finished baby seems positively cromulent.

There are some good interactive utilities out there for determining housing affordability based upon various metrics. The Center for Neighborhood Technology has a Housing + Transportation Affordability Index and the New York Times has a calculator that determines whether it is better to rent or buy based upon selectable criteria. There’s also WalkScore, which determines the walkability of your residence to basic needs. My place gets a 68/100.

Before the housing disasterbacle here in Cleveland, affordability based upon the NYT calculator would have been giving me returns on home-ownership after 3 years. Who knows how that’s changed. The Housing and Transportation visual for Cleveland basically fit what I expected. The poorer areas with lower property taxes fit the criteria for affordability, while the nicer areas [outer rings, non-Cleveland-incorporated] are over the suggested benchmark. Of course, the map just provides basic data, there isn’t much interpretation going on in terms of statistical comparisons of other data associated with our area. The advanced menu is a bit more informative.

I don’t know why this wasn’t published a couple of days ago. The new version of Wordpress has some weird bugs in it.

Life at home this week has been a flurry of task-dragon slaying. Every Thursday I clean a bit of the shed out back, piling up towers of junk on the curb for scrappers and the fantastic Cleveland Waste Management fellows to take care of. I’ve been cleaning and preparing the upstairs unit for a tenant, which results in multiple bike trips to Home Depot each night. I’ve been tagging some of my personal junk for a yard sale I’m going to have On May 24th. I had an idea to make it a Punk Rock Flea Market in honor of Punk Rock Softball, which I’m going to have to miss this weekend. It’d be sweet to have a bunch of Cleveland rockers show up and browse each other’s indie crap they don’t want anymore. Grills and beers and informality.

Sorting through all of the stuff upstairs has been an adventure, and it will be nice when the second half of the downstairs is complete, so that Debbie and I can arrange our stuff in some semblance of finality. It’d be nice to have space for the kid when he shows up too. There’s a ton of work that needs to happen there in preparation as well. I’m waiting until after the baby shower to ramp that up.

There’s so much going on, and I feel pulled in so many directions, that I’m almost shackled by indecision. Back to work.

Yesterday was a bit of a wash in terms of accomplishment. I had some appliances delivered ass-early in the morning, which turned out to be excellent, because by 9am I was at the hospital with Debbie. She’d been having erratic contractions all night and since she’s 32 weeks along Colleen our midwife had us come in for a checkup. Turns out Debbie’s cervix was 75% effaced, in preparation for labor. I was an early bird and it looks like the kid will be too. But not quite yet. They gave Debbie a drug that was originally used for asthmatics to stop the contractions, 2L of saline and a steroid shot for the kid to help develop his lungs in case he does come early. Apparently male lungs develop slower than females. Debbie had to go back to the hospital for another steroid shot today and she’s on 3 weeks of bed rest. Gotta keep him in there as long as possible

We were at the hospital for 6 hours, so I didn’t get to accomplish all the things I wanted in the morning, including having my friend Chris come and install a faucet, Punk Rock Softball, and hanging out with Rafeeq. Instead, it was time to clean and organize. I was emotionally and physically exhausted so I crashed at 9:30 and didn’t wake up until 8:15.

Today I just went ahead and installed the faucet myself. It took a couple of hours, but I did it well, and now the upstairs is ready for renters.

Forked over for some plant life this weekend. For the most part my yard takes care of itself, daffodils and tulips blooming everywhere and the roses starting their warm-up set. I had to repot some sort of succulent that I purchased in the depths of winter for my office, it is doing much better split between two pots 4 times the size of the original.

My 4 peach trees are in full bloom [pictured], but I don’t know how to take care of them. The fig bush died from neglect, since I didn’t wrap it up during the winter. I need to dig up a peach tree too. The previous owner removed their apical meristems, so they only grow out, not up. Like I’ve been doing lately. The whole back yard needs tilled and leveled, but I won’t have time this year. Maybe this fall…been removing all of the decorative brick which was slowly submerging. Free bricks, come and get ‘em.

Dug up a yew bush older than I am. Neighbor across the street said they’d been there as long as she’d lived there, over 30 years. Planted a lilac bush in its place. Got some sort of yellow flowering perennial, some Gerber daisies, some omnispermum and gifted crocus and hyacinth bulbs from Sandy.

All the grass in my front yard is dead.

Took a first look at my springtime yard today, since it was so nice out. Last fall I deliberately didn’t rake any leaves, and the resulting piles acted as natural mulch on the lilies and other flora that are starting their primavera growth. The thorny rose stalks are even beginning to bud. I picked up a few bags of top soil and some grass seed to fill in a depression along my treeless tree-lawn and covered that with some leaf mould to hopefully keep birds from eating it all. I did a lot of raking and sweeping and bagging; some picking up of litter from my ex-neighboors who were fond of throwing bags of trash from their balcony directly to the tree-lawn. Burst bags and blowing rubbish resultant. The folks across the street came out and started doing the same.

Then I helped clean out Debbie’s car and more rubbish-tossing.  I’m ready for a big yard sale in May. Probably too late to get the whole street in on it. All those ants that have been hibernating in my pants woke up. I’m over-ready to be working on my digs.

Not only did my crazy yelling neighbor get evicted, but the dude that lives upstairs, a relaxed and friendly guy, just got taken away by the cops on suspicion of gun possession. Based on what his distraught girlfriend was yelling from the balcony, someone gave a false report about it and she blamed the folks who live across the street. Debbie and I have been holding a theory that drug dealing has been going on in front of our house for awhile, lots of quick traffic stops and visits. The distraught girlfriend supported this in her yelling about how “people just don’t want people dealing drugs in front of they house.” I’m not sure if she was actually saying that her or her baby daddy were selling drugs, or just that folks were selling drugs in front of their house, much like folks are selling drugs in front of my house. Since we live next door to each other, I’m inclined to agree with the second theory, especially since it would be the height of foolishness for her to admit to selling drugs when there are three cars full of cops in front of the house.

One of the cops was being unnecessarily rude to her, telling her she had a potty mouth in a mocking tone and saying he was going to throw a snowball at her if she didn’t calm down. I’m not condoning Distraught Girlfriend’s behavior, but I’d expect a bit more maturity from Cleveland’s Finest.

I wasn’t out rubbernecking initially, I went out to shovel the sidewalk and Debbie’s car, I was about 30% done before I even noticed the cops. So much for my observational skills. Everywhere I’ve lived in the GCA, I’ve had drug dealing occurring outside my residence. I’m rather inured to it now.

I decided to go ahead and put my new design out there in its 40% done state. Having to see it whenever I look at my site should encourage me to finish it up. I’m using one of Eric Meyer’s reset styles as the base, and building from it. Eventually I hope to go through each post and fix it up as consistently and accessibly as possible, since I know a lot more about such things than I did even two years ago. I’m also letting the design show my newfound interest in typography. I’ll be tweaking that as I go along as well. As always, if you notice any errors or such, please let me know.

After nearly going crazy yesterday in my snowedinitude it was nice to get out and about today. I shoveled the first foot of snow yesterday, so that busting out this morning wouldn’t take quite as long. Shoveling my portion of the walk was pretty easy, but I also had the chance to shovel out an ambulance which had become stuck on Holmden. I think they forgot to plow our street, since all of the other side streets around us have seen it at least once. The fire truck showed up too to help the ambulance. I grabbed a couple of rugs to put under the tires and the ambulance managed to free itself. Those rugs came in handy twice more today, a few minutes later I used them to help my neighbors who were also stuck in the drifts and then, coming back from Debbie’s parents’ house we used them to get out of their driveway.

We picked up some homemade sawhorses so I could use my new circular saw and cut some drawer bottoms out of the leftover luaun from the floor installation. It was a good use of the scraps, and I figure the cedar will help preserve whatever I decide to put in the filing cabinet. We also picked up the almost last of our framing orders and hung up a Miro, Giotto di Bondone [framed] and a piece I picked up at Pitchfork last year [framed]. Our previous order included the Jon Hicks designed screen print [pictured] of the Parts & Labor show I was at last summer.

A few weeks ago when I installed a dimmer in the master bedroom, I was heartened to see that the wall box had a ground wire in it, waiting to be hooked up. I hoped that this was a good sign for the rest of the house, which has ungrounded sockets. Unfortunately, tonight when I tried to change a socket, there was no ground wire present. That means I’m going to have to have an electrician come in and install them throughout the house, in all the sockets that don’t have them. Only the kitchen, and the room immediately off of it have grounded plugs, and I’m not even sure if they are truly grounded, or just have three holes and no actual ground wire inside of them. This is entirely possible, because even the ancient plugs that are currently scattered about were installed incorrectly to my untrained eye. You can screw the outlets directly into the wall boxes from the outlet itself, but also through some extra screws in the wall box. The old outlet was all bent out of shape because this wasn’t done.

It is interesting and crazy at times to wonder what people were thinking when they did certain half-assed things. I mean, I haven’t done all that I can in the painting of the two rooms I’ve done thusfar, but I haven’t don’t a shitty job on anything.

Also, nearly three weeks after getting my wisdom teeth removed, I pulled a shard of bone from one of the upper sockets. I’d felt a little hard nubbin up there for awhile, but wasn’t able to get it out until today during the Use Case class I’m taking in Independence, right down the street from my old job.

This weekend I dropped a few grand on hardwood flooring. Yikes. I looked into buying the sustainable bamboo stuff, but it was twice as expensive as engineered hardwood. I have been painting with Sherwin-Williams’ Harmony paint though. It has no VOC and is anti-microbial in addition. I’m halfway done painting another room as well. I need to get all this wrapped up before having the flooring installed. The wood apparently needs a few weeks to settle in to the house anyway.

I also installed a new dimmer today. Got lucky with the circuit breaker and the first guess was the correct one. The house sure is wired strangely. There are a couple of places where one light switch has to be on for another one to work, definitely old school, and definitely in need of repair. I was heartened to see a ground wire present in the dimmer socket though, so perhaps replacing the electrical sockets throughout the house to have grounds won’t be too bad. It will be nice to have part of a home to just relax around in for a change. I’ve gotten used to living in a construction zone.

Last night at 4am I was awakened by the worst altercation I’ve heard yet from my moon-struck neighbors. The crazy lady yells at her man on a nearly daily basis; “fuck this, fuck that, fuckety fuck fuck, like Samuel L. in Pulp Fiction. She is so loud that she can wake me up when there are no open windows and she’s in the building next to us. There are often children crying. I called the cops once when there was both yelling and crying children with the addition of threats about custody and safety issues regarding the kids. I don’t think anything resulted from that.

Last night they woke me up twice. The first time, crazy lady was screaming at the top of her lungs for people to shut up because the kids were sleeping. Then, later on, she was yelling “get the fuck out of my house!” and then “get the fuck out of my yard” to some dude named Raekwon who ended up breaking her car window before tearing off like a bat out of hell. Crazy lady keeps yelling and ends up yarfing from the stress, the folks upstairs quickly bring down their infant and skedaddle for a bit, and crazy lady and company go back inside. No use calling the cops, they’ve got more important things to do at 4am than stop by a place where the altercation has already finished [unless Raekwon comes back with a 9].

A few minutes later I heard, a few blocks away, a terrible car accident. The horn went off for about 10 minutes before sirens showed up. I went outside a few times to make sure things were safe, and was going to try to find the accident, but I couldn’t tell which direction the horn was coming from.

My mom’s visiting this weekend, so now she’s convinced I live in the ghetto [apparently an inaccurate portrayal], even though, as far as I can tell, the place next to mine is the only problem residence on my street. There was a fire at that place right before I moved into my house and they’ve been working on it for a few months, the landlord is absentee and obviously doesn’t care too much about that particular property, as the fire was the result of code violations.

In other gym-related news, there is this dude who I’ve seen at the gym since I started going there that never lifts weights. He dicks around the entire time, almost always looking at himself in the mirror and going through the motions of lifting weights, setting up the bar, adjusting seat heights, switching out handles and weights, cleaning the bench, sitting down and getting “in the zone”, but never actually doing a set or even a rep. He spends something like an hour in the locker room, grooming and combing his hair and shit too. I once showed up and he was in the locker room combing his hair, did my approximately one-hour workout, and when I went to the locker room he was still combing his hair. Weird thing is, the guy is frigging ripped, so he must actually lift sometime.

Saloio bread is gross. I picked up a loaf from Dave’s because it seemed to be the closest bakery approximation to whole wheat, since they were out of the latter. It is salty as hell, crumbly, dense, and chewy. It tastes worse than the homemade hosts that Fr. Stan makes back at St. Gabriel’s in Connersville. Never again.

I get so much weird junk mail about mortgages now that I’m a homeowner. A lot of it is obvious scam stuff about PMI and refinancing, but some of it is not so obvious scam stuff that looks like official documentation from Fifth Third. Today however, I received a scratch off ticket. It says on the ticket that all tickets are winners for stuff like an xBox or iPod Video, the only obligation is to sit through a demonstration of some home care products. Fat chance.

I also both like and have a crush on someone.

My first mortgage payment was made the other day. Out of the hundreds of dollars I paid, less than $68 actual went to the principal balance, the rest disappeared into the vast realm of interest. It is going to be tough checking my bank account online and watching the balance dink lower. Work on the house is going slowly, and even slowlier in this humidity. I’m washing the walls in the master bedroom to loosen the wallpaper glue and then scrubbing them and then sanding them when they are dry. It takes about 24 hours for the stuff to dry, though and a shower half hour to wash off all of the accumulated dust that sweat sticks to my arms and chest. Chest hair works like a lint trap for small bits of floor, dust and yard. I’ve been taking my mom’s advice and slowly unpacking bits of things to make the house a bit homelier for the duration of renovation, but I’m at the point where I can’t do much more until I get some bookshelves and a wardrobe or better use of the closet.

Tonight is a drink or two at the VTR and some swing dancing.

I’m working on refinishing the floor in what will be my master bedroom once the floor is refinished. And other sundry stuff taken care of as well. Anyway, the refinishing was going fine until I hit this strange spot where the stripper refuses to work. It won’t soften the paint or anything. I put up a question on Ask MetaFilter and while people are giving me other advice, no one really has a clue why this could be happening. The photos above illustrate what I’m talking about. The unstrippable area seems to be smack dab in the center of the room. Confounding. Looks like I’m going to have to use elbow grease to get rid of that paint. That’s certainly a mess waiting to happen.

[Update] It appears that the section that would not strip is paint over untreated wood. Thus, the stripper was soaking through the paint and lifting up the varnish on the easy to strip portions. Since the paint was on top of this it came right up. On the unvarnished portion the stripper must have just soaked right into the wood. My guess is that there was a rug on the floor in the center of the room originally and they just chose to varnish the exposed wood. Halfasses.

Renovating a house is a bit like taking the clothes off of a woman; there always seems to be one more layer. Today I was walking to the kitchen for some breakfast when noticed a corner curl of wallpaper sticking away from the wall. “Pull me”, it said. I pulled. The whole sheet of wallpaper came off like a bra on Mardi Gras. Before I knew it, two hours had gone by and I’d torn the wallpaper from two complete rooms. Why do I feel spent and lightheaded and a bit giddy? Oh yeah. I never made it to the kitchen for breakfast.

Unfortunately, the plaster in the bedroom is so old that chunks of it came off with the wallpaper. I’m pretty sure Home Depot sells a repair kit. The bedroom still has its underwear on. I need to sand the paint off the floor and strip it from the woodwork. That reminds me. On my way to the grocery today I think I’ll stop by the Cleveland Green Building Coalition to get a refresher on the services they offer for residential homes. Hopefully they do a little pro bono consulting, since I don’t know much more about greening a home than to use non-VOC paint and look for the EnergyStar on appliances.

In a wonderful world there would even be a little cash available through grants or some such to folks who are intent on pimping out their home green-style. I could probably get a Restoration Society loan fairly easily, but I’d have to leave the original windows, which perfectly defeats the purpose of creating an energy efficient home if I have to keep 107 year old single-pane rattle-wood windows. I like the old style windows, but they’re draftier my wallet these days.

I still haven’t had breakfast.

I’m spending my 4th of July soaking the dining room floor with water and scraping up the linoleum that was under the carpet and over the hard wood floors. I’ve been pulling staples and nails out of the floors for a couple of days, one room at a time and was getting quite dusty and hacking a bit because of it. I bought myself a nice respirator today because there will be a few metric tons more of dust before I’m finished and the paper jobbers weren’t going to cut it. I think this linoleum is the same linoleum that was on the floor at the Last Supper. It appears to be that old. Right now I’m taking care of the labor-intensive but inexpensive bits of fixin’up until my finances have a chance to resolve back into something approximating equilibrium. So I bought a wallpaper stripper doohickey and once the floor stuff is fairly well taken care of I’ll start in on the nicotine-stained yellow woodgrained wallpaper.

I’ve created a collection on Flickr for house related happenings.

The day after I got the keys to my house the previous owner showed up unexpectedly and invited himself inside. He’s an old Lebanese dude, and very attached to the house. I probably could have gotten $5k less on the price if they hadn’t felt so sentimental about the place. Anyway, this guy told me he’d show me what the keys were for. I told him that I had it under control but he was rather insistent. So we went inside. I thought he was going to tell me to get the hell out of his house, or punch me when he saw that all the carpet was gone. He was seriously offended.

“Why did you tear up the carpet!?”

“I want wood floors.”

“It was less than three years old!”

*indifferent silence*

He then proceeded to grab all the keys and show me what went where. Amy got my friend Sandy on the phone and she pretended to be my landlord so we could get rid of the dude. Amy was great at ushering him out. I’m just not assertive enough at stuff like that. I feel rude. Hopefully he won’t be coming back all the time. I’m certainly going to change all of my locks though. He probably saved a set, since there were about 30 keys on the kitchen counter when I got the place. The last thing I want is to come home from work to find him lounging in my living room.

On Thursday I became a homeowner! What a friggin process it was though. I’ll go into more detail with that in a further post. Right now I’m enjoying my current disaster area. I pulled out all the carpet, padding and tackboard stuff that evening, so the floors are a bit rough right now. The wallpaper is old and nicotine-stained, and the bathroom door won’t stay open, but the place is mine, finally. I had lots of help from a friend who is now a neighbor and a few others too. I’ve been enjoying beer on my front porch.

I’ve also dropped a shit-ton of money getting emergency needs this weekend. Tomorrow I hope to get my kitchen put away and the dryer vent hooked up. Then, pulling more staples. I know I’ve become my mother when stuff like that sounds fun. Except more beer is involved with me. Whee!