So far I’ve spent my sec­ond day of fur­lough catch­ing up on var­i­ous items around the house. I need to get back into the habit of writ­ing here a bit more fre­quently. I keep think­ing of things that are worth post­ing, but never actu­ally sit­ting down to do so.

A bunch of exte­rior work is being done on my home right now.

• Chim­ney caps, tuck-pointing and new flashing;
• Rot­ten sid­ing replacement;
• Glass block win­dows added to the basement;
• Gut­ter repair; and
• Some patches to the foundation.

Our reg­u­lar guy doesn’t do exte­rior work, so I had to track some­one else down. Since you can find any­thing on Craigslist, I put up an ad. I got a bunch of responses, with the usual range of gram­mat­i­cal errors and pro­fes­sion­al­ism. I responded to a few of the like­li­est and only heard back from one.

The guy came out to take a look at things, with two of his bud­dies. They were all wear­ing ragged and torn clothes, and one of the guys was more inter­ested in eat­ing as many peaches as he could from my tree. Main dude said he’d get back to me with an esti­mate within three days. He kept try­ing to get me to tell him how much I’d be will­ing to pay, which is a huge red flag. Ten days later, after one unan­nounced return trip and fur­ther phone calls where he kept try­ing to find out how much I wanted to spend and kept try­ing to give me prices piece-meal, he finally emailed me his esti­mate. This esti­mate only cov­ered the cost of mate­ri­als for one of the items on the above list. Need­less to say he didn’t get the job.

Mean­while, I received a response from a gal around my age who just moved from Port­land, OR. She came out, took a look at things, some mea­sure­ments and pho­tos, and got me an esti­mate within a cou­ple of days. She’s done his­tor­i­cal restora­tion work and has the nec­es­sary tools to get the job done. My chim­neys are repaired and the foun­da­tion patched, the glass block has been ordered and from what I’ve seen so far, she works both effi­ciently and effectively.

Inside I’ve been paint­ing the new doors we got a cou­ple of months ago and touching-up var­i­ous Bram-smears.

My ten­ant upstairs is mov­ing out this month. This means I’ll be out the sup­ple­men­tary $450/month that was quite a help. Thank­fully Debbie’s now a full-time teacher, so her addi­tional income will help off­set that. Her brother might move in upstairs and just pay for util­i­ties, and I plan on work­ing with him to tear off the wall­pa­per and do a lit­tle bit more ren­o­va­tion up there as well. Once it is painted, the elec­tri­cal is upgraded and there’s new car­pet, I’ll prob­a­bly be able to get at least another $50/month on the rental price. It’s a 2 bed­room, so $500 is a pretty good price, I think. I could prob­a­bly do bet­ter than that if the bath­room wasn’t the size of a mouse turd.

Speak­ing of which, I’ve killed 4 in the last 24 hours.

While I was watch­ing the Celtics/Bulls game, some­one set fire to the aban­doned build­ing just cater­corner from me on Holm­den Court (the alley behind my house). Either the fire started back up around 3am or the arson­ist came back to fin­ish the job because the street was clogged with fire trucks. This is the sec­ond arson less than a block from me in two months, and the fifth (that I know of) within half a square mile from me in the last 2 years.

These last two were both “aban­doned” houses with squat­ters in them. Rumor has it that the bank who owned the house behind me (which was slated for demo­li­tion) had the house set aflame so they could recoup as much from the prop­erty as pos­si­ble. Rumor also holds that some kids set the fire, or, less likely, some­one set fire to keep warm.

The house had been aban­doned since I moved into the neigh­bor­hood and over the course of two years it was peeled like an onion and pit­ted like an avo­cado. By the time whomever set fire to the place set fire to the place, all that was left inside the struc­ture was some crazy-looking linoleum.

Now, there are quite a few seri­ous prob­lems that are touched on directly or tan­gen­tially in this post:

• Habit­ual Arson
• Fore­closed Homes
• Squat­ters
• Folks steal­ing sid­ing, wiring and any­thing of value from aban­doned properties
• Crazy Linoleum

and one very good thing. Thank you Cleve­land Fire Depart­ment, you guys are great.

While the arsons are trou­bling, there is much that is great on my street and in my neigh­bor­hood. I have new neigh­bors who are ren­o­vat­ing the home next door to me, and the chil­dren who appear to own the house cater­corner from me on Holm­den Avenue are fix­ing the place up quite nicely.

The new Buhrer Ele­men­tary school one block away is near­ing com­ple­tion, and I just found out, will be remain­ing a Dual Lan­guage School. Now if only Deb­bie could get a job as an art teacher there, all would be set. How­ever, find­ing an open posi­tion in the CMSD isn’t the easiest.

The last cou­ple of days have been great. Good weather after a seem­ingly end­less win­ter does that, I guess. Fri­day I got to work from home for the major­ity of the day since we were shoot­ing a video for the Solid Waste Dis­trict about the proper ways to dis­pose of latex paint. The night before, my new neigh­bor needed to bor­row some elec­tric­ity and ended up giv­ing me a whole bunch of ancient paint to use for the PSA. The labels on the cans are pretty cool:

The shoot went well and I ended up hav­ing to bust ass back to work in order to give a pre­sen­ta­tion to a bunch of folks about using our Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem. Slept with the heat off and the win­dow open for the first time in seven months.

This morn­ing Abra­ham woke us up at 6:30 and after he’d had a bit to drink we watched the sun­rise and learned about out­side. He loves touch­ing trees and look­ing at how huge they are. He doesn’t like grass; it is too prickly.

I spent most of the day shirt­less in the back­yard. I tore up a cou­ple of peach trees using my bare hands:

I also cleaned out the shed, turned the soil over my tiny gar­den, and got every­thing planted. The all-tomatoes-all-the-time patch last sum­mer has been reduced to two plants. The rest of the space is occu­pied by a bell pep­per, basil, chives, oregano and cilantro.

I had beans & rice for din­ner on the porch, and after the lit­tle guy goes down for the night, I’m going to eat some chocolate-peanut-butter ice cream on the porch.

My porch still needs a rail-mounted beer-bottle opener. Speak­ing of that, here’s a list of other things that I need to do around the house (in no par­tic­u­lar order):

• Remodel Kitchen
• Till & resow backyard
• Dig up one more peach tree and replace it with some­thing that will pro­vide shade
• Replace rot­ten siding
• New gut­ters
• Paint the exte­rior of the house
• Fin­ish bathroom
• Get cov­ers on roof & chim­ney & get the flash­ing checked out.
• Fix base­ment plumbing
• Get a cover for the AC & get it hooked back up to the furnace.
• Get new screen doors
• Refin­ish front door
• Bring wiring up to code
• New win­dows
• Doors rehung

A month or so ago I stopped into the down­town Fifth Third to inquire about the pos­si­bil­ity of refi­nanc­ing my mort­gage. Now that rates have dropped I fig­ured it was a good time to test the waters. I was told that I’d have to pay into the mort­gage a bit more before I was eli­gi­ble, but that I’d get a call when it was time. A few weeks later I get a call from a Fifth Third branch office about com­ing in to refi­nance my mort­gage. The per­son who called me proved impos­si­ble to meet with. We played phone tag for a bit, and when I finally sched­uled an appoint­ment, I showed up to dis­cover that she’d just sat down with some­one else, and could I please come back in an hour or so.

I ended up sched­ul­ing an appoint­ment with a fel­low down­town and met with him the other day to finally talk about refi­nanc­ing. Turns out it is a $350 appli­ca­tion fee crap shoot. With the way hous­ing prices have tum­bled in Cleve­land, it could cost me sev­eral thou­sand dol­lars, up front, to refi­nance. My house could be worth 20% less than what I paid for it. Zil­low esti­mates that my house is worth $7k less than what I paid for it, which would mean I would need to pay 5 or 6 grand to refi­nance to a lower rate.

The upside to this is that it will take me a bit to save up that kind of cash, and in that time, rates might fall even fur­ther. The new mort­gage will likely have mort­gage insur­ance though, so fig­ur­ing out how much money I’m really going to save in the long run is going to be quite complicated.

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!