Back to the Future

  Well, dear readers, home ownership has already come full circle. I have returned to whence I came. I am sitting in the living room, which at this moment is a sweltering 52 degrees. It makes me nostalgic for those dear, long departed days when we first moved in and the gas hadn't been turned on yet. T-Rex and I would huddle together around a space heater, shivering, and cursing the seasons. That was way back in December of 2012. People were still using cellphones and Ke$ha's "Die Young" was top of the pops. Truly, it was a golden age.
   We have come so far from those happy memories here in the cold, stark future of January 2013, where "Die Young" has fallen to #16 on the charts. Some things don't change, though. Good, wholesome, enjoyable things, like the lack of central heat in the middle of winter in a drafty old house without insulation. Why? Because the furnace stopped working. We tried sticking fire everywhere that look like a place where the fire should be, in the hope that it would create more fire, but it didn't work. We flipped switches, unscrewed screws and levered levers. Nothing. Nada. Niet.  So I called in a furnace guy, and he spent about 6 minutes on the stupid thing, it fired right up, and he charged me $100. Shit. He then checked everything and told me that my furnace is a mechanical miracle, because nothing in it should actually be working right now. Any minute the damn thing is going to get a little water on it and shrivel up like the Wicked Witch of the West. The good news is that in the time it took me to write the last paragraph the temperature in the living room has risen into the 60s. Before long I'll be able to wear different clothing inside than I wear outside. Maybe the future isn't so bad after all.
  Despite the profound incompetence that generally determines the outcomes of my projects, I have good news!

TA DA! I present you with the new and improved bathroom. The shower curtain is back, the shower no longer resembles those little vegetable misters they have at the supermarket, and I recaulked the bathtub. General mold content is down 1,000,000%. Great victory. General ugly content remains high, but I am waiting to start solving ugly based problems until the health damaging problems get resolved.

Before

After

Also...

                                    
TA DA! I bought a fridge. A gigantic metal fridge.

 I've had it for about 5 days, and it hasn't broken yet, but I am keeping a watchful eye on it. The one lesson I've leaned so far is that everything in this house that has the ability to break is watching and waiting for the time to malfunction that will be the most inconvenient. That big shiny bastard is lurking, I can feel it. There is a strong whiff of malicious lurk in that kitchen, and it isn't coming from the unwashed dishes. I WILL DEFEAT YOU REFRIGERATOR.

Moldy, Moldy, Windows

Well, I am only on to my third post, and already it may be rightly said that I am neglecting my blog. So be it. It turns out that there is only 24 hours in a day, and up until the last two months of my life, that has never been a problem. Not once. Now I find that I must rush from task to task, and there is never enough time to finish all of them. Oftentimes, by the end of the day, I get so frazzled I resemble one of those crazy people you see on street corners wearing sandwich boards that say things like "Repent! The Apocalypse is nigh!"

I also had a really great post whipped up about my blog worlds colliding (it was FULL of Seinfeld references, for those of you who remember that happening to George), because I was in Alaska, at the site of the Temporary Hermitage, writing about something else. But then I forgot my camera with all the pictures in Anchorage. And then I forgot it in Anchorage AGAIN when I flew to Portland. Woe is me, waily wail, I lose. 

So much to catch up on. I got my first tenant! And I quickly celebrated by making the moldy moldy bathroom unusable. It all started because taking a shower in this house is like getting peed on from a great height in a windstorm by somebody who has been stranded in the desert and is dying of dehydration. What I'm trying to say is that the water pressure is less than ideal. My solution was to strip the paint off the moldy moldy window. If the logic of that move escapes you, then don't be surprised, it escapes me also. But you know what they say, hindsight is 20/20. It really made sense at the time. In my defense, that window was fucking disgusting. Observe.

So I stripped that baby down. After like 8 hours and 10 layers of paint I was down to wood. On about 1 percent of the window. 

So I gave up and painted it. Does it look good? No, it does not. Is it a moldy moldy window? No, it is not. Overall, I declare victory. 

So now the shower still sucks and there is no shower curtain because I broke the rod while fiddling with the window. My mission to make the shower work is, all in all, a gigantic, resounding success. Hopefully the new roomie doesn't realize what he's gotten himself into until I get that rent check. 

The good news is that T Rex actually knows what she's doing. When she works on the yard, it actually looks better. It's the strangest damn thing. Here is the remains of a Mayan temple she found:

She also attacked an ivy stump and dug a big pit around in in hopes of being able to rip it out, but she completely destroyed one of her T Rex arms in the process. Woe is her, waily wail, the stump wins.

Also, did you guys realize how many pictures of cats there are on the internet? I'm just discovering this.  Happy 2013!

The Shitfields

Hello, dear readers. If you haven't noticed, it's the middle of winter. A funny thing about wintertime is that right when it gets down to being really wintery, some nanny goat thought it would be a good idea to institute daylight savings time. In fact, here is a picture of said nanny goat.

 His name is George Vernon Hudson, and he is the godfather of daylight savings time. He is totally rubbing it in with that sneaky smart-ass smirk on his ugly mug. It's not that daylight savings is a really bad idea in principle. George just screwed it up. He got it backwards. He made it so it gets dark earlier in the winter. Why would he do that? Who gets up at 6 instead of 7 to enjoy that extra bit of sun in the middle of December? Crazy people. Who would like a little light when they get off work, so going home doesn't feel like exploring the inky blackness of an uncharted cave? Everybody. I rest my case.

Why do you care about this? You probably don't. I do, though, because it means that it's fully dark by the time I get home from work, so I can't work outside on the yard during the week. The weekends are my only time to strike. T Rex (my lovely lady) and I had to move out of our apartment, clean it, and hopefully squeeze a little yard work out of our two days free from professional responsibilities. I sprang from bed at the crack of 10 o'clock, ready to whip the yard into shape. T Rex was a complete champ and dominated what stubborn bits of belongings and dirt clung to our old place before turning her attentions to the new place.

Guess what I found! A bucket. Here is a photo of the bucket.

Time for a multiple choice test. In your opinion, what is this bucket full of?
A.) Sunshine
B.) Hot Chocolate
C.) Old dog shit that has been sitting in the rain for a month and turned into chunky fecal soup

I'm pretty sure you can guess which one is correct. This was one of two such buckets I found. There were four tenants who used to live here, and each one had there own little furry poop machine spraying digested food over every inch of the back yard. The buckets represented a very small percentage of what was spread around.

Mud or poop? Nobody knows.

Once the sunshine buckets were carefully stashed in the corner I spent several hours working. I gathered branches, I raked, I shoveled moldy bales of hay, I organized, I generally spent an entire Sunday kicking ass and taking names. I was feeling VERY olympic (to borrow a phrase from my mother). I embodied, in that moment, all that a homeowner could be. And I felt that way all week. Then I saw the before and after pictures I took for my blog.

Before:

After:

Notice a difference? Yeah, neither did I. Fuck. Me.

Houses here! Git yer houses here!

Hello and welcome! I have decided to start another blog, dedicated to what I'm sure will become an epic and sordid battle between me and a grumpy old house bent on my destruction. I just bought it from an owner who clearly spent lots of time, effort, and money ignoring it as much as they possibly could. Here is the house in question:

It's a stately old craftsman in northeast Portland, Oregon. It was built in 1911, and to get you all in the historical mood, I slavishly researched the year 1911 by typing it into Google. Here are the highlights: The Mona Lisa was stolen, the first airmail happened, Pancho Villa was marauding through northern Mexico, and (my personal favorite) the Indianopolis 500 was run for the first time at an average speed of 74 miles an hour. I think if Pancho Villa wasn't busy having his way with the Mexican army, he would have beaten 74 mph on a burro.

The speed of Pancho's burro is neither here nor there, however. What is definitely here is a big old house that needs one megashitton of work. The work will come later, though. First, a tour! The house is a giant cube, equally divided with four rooms on each floor. First, the downstairs! Here is the kitchen.

The dining room! I apologize for the blurry photo, but the previous owner didn't believe in functioning light bulbs (or light fixtures).

The living room!

The stairs and toilet paper

Upstairs

Blue room

Orange room

Trash room

Our bedroom!

The really nasty bathroom

That's the house. We are now in the throes of moving in, so I should probably go scrub something and do some organizing. Now that you are introduced to the house, we will get down to the good stuff. The next episode: an accounting of the things to be done, and I do battle in the shit fields.