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.