Those tall ships really raised the nation's spirits after Watergate!

My sister, who is heavily pregnant, called me a few weeks ago and said she had experienced a hormone meltdown while on the phone with our mother.  She was stressing over how soon it was before the baby would come, and how she and her husband still hadn’t bought any of the essentials, like a crib.  Mom had told her to calm down and not worry about it.  Babies didn’t care where they slept, she said.  Why, look at your older sister!  She slept in a drawer for the first six months!  It’s not that big a–

Wait wait wait, I said.  Back up.  I did whatnow?

Slept in a drawer, my sister said.  For six months.

So I called our father to confirm.

Me: Hey Dad, Brie says I slept in a drawer for six months when I was a baby.

My Father:  What?  No.  It was four.

Me: DAD WHAT THE HELL.

My Father: Oh calm down.  It was a nice drawer.

Me: It was a drawer.  I was an infant.  A drawer is not a crib!

My Father: You’re right; it was also your bassinet and your stroller.  When it was hot, we moved the drawer under the picnic table in the shade with the dogs, and when it was nice, we moved it back on top of the table.

Me: I’m pretty sure that’s illegal!

My Father:  Nah, today it is, but you’re older than most of those child safety laws.  Besides, you like dogs now, don’t you?  And dovetailing?  It built character.

Me: I’m practically made of psychoses!

My Father: Eh, that might have happened anyway.

So I told you that story to tell you this one.

Excessive Sneezing, by Britney.

Apparently, my parents were drawer-poor when I was born, but they figured out how money works.  For the last, oh, two decades or so, they’ve been planning for their retirement as though it was a product launch where every detail has to be perfect or they’ll be stuck with eighty-seven warehouses full of unmovable Britney Spears cosmetics.

One of these details is where they will live while still working.   Dad telecommutes from our Frigid Homeland most days; he’s looking forward to spending a couple of months a year somewhere warm, but he doesn’t want to buy a second house and he says renting is hurling money straight into a stranger’s wallet.

So, it seems when your daughter moves to North Carolina and buys a house with a lot of land, the sensible thing is to build a small in-law suite in her backyard.

This is the home project I’ve been working on for the past two weeks.  More to follow.

As promised, here is the rant about Homax “Tub and Tile,” which seems to have been taken off of the market since the time I purchased it.  No surprise, really, considering that people actually want to use their bathrooms after they refinish them.

When the renovation was begun, the bathroom looked a little something like this:

Bathroom, minus sink, before cleaning and tile preparation.

Nasty, right?  It’s a tiny space, about 3 by 5 feet, but it hadn’t been maintained since the house was built.  We think there was a sink replacement at one time due to the date on the cabinetry, but the tile is definitely original to the house.  We would have gutted the tile and replaced every square inch of it had we the spare cash, but we didn’t.

As luck would have it, a few weeks before Brown ripped the sink out, we had been at a party where a woman told us she had recently painted her bathroom tiles with a really great Rustoleum product she got at the local hardware store.  She said it had patched the cracks in the grout and the tile, and was holding up great under regular use.  So when the sink was removed, I looked for this product but couldn’t find it, and grabbed the Homax substitute.

Rookie mistake, folks.  I didn’t read the reviews.

Required reading after proper tile preparation.

I busted out my steam cleaner and washed every square inch of tile three times, then prepared the surface for the paint.  The paint came with steel wool, a lengthy guide that read like stereo instructions, and a tidy packet of powdered acid.  I roughed up the surface of the tile with the steel wool, then steam-cleaned again to get the steel fibers off, then made a warm bucket full of freakin’ liquid acid to use for the final wipedown.

(The acid is only sort of a big deal.  It’s one of the stronger acids but it won’t eat through your gloves if you’re quick about it, and you’ve come across worse in some household cleaning products).

Shower stall with painted blue trim, pretending its heart out that it's actually a nice grouping of accent tiles.

The acid was required to remove all of the oils and other bio-organic crap that is shed from our bodies and forms deposits on various bathroom surfaces.  I was working to remove nearly sixty years of this accumulated bio-crap, so since I had bought two cartons of the product, I repeated the acid bath twice.  There was one final wipedown with an oil-free damp cloth, and the bathroom was allowed to air-dry for a day.

Then I broke out the paint.  I painted every exposed tile with the white epoxy, and tinted half of one 26oz container blue for accent decorations.  The accents would be on the sanitation wrap around the walls and the first row of tiles adjacent to these, as well as up the external border of the shower to create a door jam effect.

The outcome was a definite improvement over the original state of the tiles.

Before: cracks in sanitation wrap under door jam of shower.

After: Same cracks, but mostly filled in.

I was feeling pretty good about the project until I applied the second coat of white paint to the floors and the shower stall.  I had waited more than 72 hours for the paint to fully cure, but the second coat caused the lovey smooth, glossy original coat to wrinkle up like an alligator’s butt.

Okay, we thought.  So what if the paint isn’t absolutely perfect when you get right up close to it?  From normal standing height, it looks fine.  We’ll toss a couple of bath mats down there and all DIY-sins are hidden.

I was grumpy but not unmanageably so until I had to pick up a third container of paint to finish up the shower stall walls.  In the week’s time between when I had purchased the first two cartons and when I purchased the third, they had increased the cost of the product by $4 and reduced the amount of paint received by a fifth.

Top: Original label on first cans. Bottom: same size can, different label (21 fl oz), and a happy little note letting you know that it's your fault if you expected more paint than you received.

This really fluffed my pillows.  Not so much the overall cost increase but the blatant lie on the top of the can which saved them from having to shell out seven cents for different packaging.  This is Homax saying they just don’t think we’re smart enough to deserve a credible lie.

And then, two weeks after the shower and the floors were freshly painted and were all lovely and clean, we had the audacity to have house guests.

See, we have been using the hall shower since the little shower stall is very small.  Extremely small.  Brown-can’t-raise-his-arms-above-his-head-without-turning-on-an-angle small.  This is a shower that has killed many a sexy mood because participants need an advanced level of physics to manage the logistics.  But when we have house guests, we let them have the big shower and we retreat back to the tiny stall, and the moment the hot water hit that shower stall the paint started to peel off.

So now we have a shower that looks nice but falls apart like the Wicked Witch in a rain storm.  We’re using the large shower for the time being, but we’re going to start on that bathroom remodel soon and we’ll have to head back to the little shower in the meantime.  I’m absolutely furious that I wasted two weeks on prep work and paint, since the outcome is something that will be destroyed as soon as we use it.

My apologies for the silence, but I needed a few weeks off.  From blogging, not from home repair.  Every so often there’s a swelling of arghwtfblechtothemartinimobile! that comes from chronicling various stages of destruction, and it’s best to not touch a keyboard during such moods.

Case in point: we finished one larger project.  You might remember how my husband waited until I was out of town and then ripped the existing sink straight off of the wall in the little bathroom.  Well, we have finished the room.

YELLOW. Small bathroom, YELLOW as we found it when we moved in YELLOW and during the following year of occupancy. YELLOW.

After quite a bit of plumbing and new fixtures and scrubbing and painting and such, the room now looks like this:

Bathroom, today. De-yellowfication is complete!

Looks snazzy, right?  Oh no.  No, no, no, no, no.  This is quite possibly one of the worst jobs we’ve completed, thanks to a tile paint that has rendered the bathroom unusable except as a place to deposit poo.*

For the next week, I’ll post process shots on each stage of this project and show you how you, too, can make a bathroom conditionally worthless.  Fun times!

*(Which, as Brown would surely correct me, is the single most important use for a bathroom and should not be taken lightly.)

Repost of the pottery scraps and the hangy-bit-line-things on the underside (A) and the top (B).

Remember this post about the Vestigial Lawn and the bits of pottery shrapnel I kept digging up?  We still have no clue what this stuff is.

The all-knowing Internet has provided options but no answers, and comments and emails from blog readers have not given any clear resolution to what these odd bits of old things might be.  Beth R. observed the outer lip might allow these to be used as a a decorative baseboard, something similar to the sanitation wrap which joins the wall to the floor in commercial bathrooms.  Other readers said these could have been used in the garden as pottery or for drainage.

There is a slight consensus towards roofing tiles.  John said these seem to be like the Spanish roofing tiles where he lives, and Kasey K. sent her boyfriend up on the roof to take pictures of the tiles on their Belgium home:

Belgium roofing tiles, and look! Hangy-bit-line-things!

They have the grooves in the right places, but there are differences.  Kasey’s tiles have deeper, more rounded grooves and are generally thicker and more solid-looking than our scrappery.  The grooves might be regional preference, but I have looked around and have not been able to find any thin roofing tiles.

Digger noted that it might be the remnants of bricks used for housing insulation:

Looks like structural terra cotta to me. Structural terra cotta isn’t bricks, but more honey-combed (generally) forms used from linings to entire buildings. You may have had a small outbuilding or addition built from it, or perhaps it was used for a flue liner. Here’s linkage to an online piece that clearly shows the same stuff as what you have: http://historicbldgs.com/terra_cotta.htm

That link leads to a fascinating article on “hollow tile,” which appeared to provide some insulation in addition to cosmetic facings.  The thickness and general size of the pieces looks similar to those in the article.  This might be more likely than roofing tile!

Another option is that these are simply old floor tiles.  I’ve chipped off some of the marine enamel (read: industrial boat paint) on the floor of the hallway bathroom and it looks as though the previous owners painted over red terra cotta tiles.  The color and texture is not a match to the pottery scraps, but the scrappery was left outside for a few decades so weathering might have altered them.  I’ve never heard of floor tile with thick grooves on both the top and the bottom, though, and five wheelbarrows full of floor tiles is a lot of materials waste.

Weirdly, I was digging around in the ivy and found yet another scrap of pottery with the same hangy-bit-line-things, but this one was blue.  It was what put me in the mindset that these might have been used for decoration rather than construction. And take a look at this: there’s writing stamped into it.

Top text: Carlyle. Bottom text: MADE IN U.S.A.

The edges are saw-cut so someone fabricated something out of this.

I still have no idea what these things are.

Reviews you can trust from reviewers who have been badgered into submission.

To Whom it May Concern at Angie’s List:*

Stop calling me.  Stop calling me.  Stop calling me.

Listen, I appreciate how you’ve let me access your site for the past year, even though I only paid for six months.  That’s very classy and I will definitely renew my subscription when it comes due.  And I think it’s great how you try and keep companies from rigging your system, even though we all know that any media-savvy organization will hire people to boost their social network ratings.  Heck, Brown and I just got home from dinner in a pizza joint where we sat at the bar and watched a guy with an I-do-this-for-a-living attitude post long and glowing reviews for that very restaurant on everything from Facebook to Yelp.

But you have to stop calling me.

I know how your business model works.  You advertise yourself as a source of unbiased independent consumer reviews.  I am aware you require a continuous supply of fresh reviews, and not the type of reviews posted by professional-seeming gentlemen who get a free pizza along with their cashier’s check.  Reviews from people like me, who go to your site and read up on local companies, and then use that information to select a company to resolve various household concerns.

The thing is, though, you assume that people like me don’t do research before we select a company.

Let me give you an example.  A few months back, we thought we had a problem with our roof.  So I hopped onto Angie’s List and pulled the names of several highly-rated roofing companies, then went and searched other sites for different reviews on those same companies.

(I make my living doing research for other people so I’m sure as heck going to cross-check my sources when it’s for my husband and myself, especially if some of these sources can be bought for pizza.)

A couple of weeks later, I was flooded with calls from Angie’s List asking about the quality of service provided by Ajax Roofing Company.  Then, we were asked whether Gary’s Discount Shingles had met our needs.  Was the staff at Get Those Cats Off Our Roofing prompt and courteous?  Did Take a Leak Roofing finish the job in a timely manner?  Would you allow Squirrels in Your Attic to service your home again?

Dear Angie, how many roofs do you think we need?

We never used any of those companies, Angie.  All I did was click on their listing to do a little fact-finding.  I was rather short with your staff, I’m afraid, and I have since taken my name off of your “please call” list so I am hoping I won’t be contacted again, but my point stands: you cannot simultaneously advertise your site as a source for consumer research while assuming your customers will use the first company that catches their eye.

I hope this has not come off as a criticism of your service.  Rather, this is a criticism of the consumer tracking models you use in your service.  I think you need to adjust these models and assume that your subscribers are there to do research, not pay a monthly** fee to stumble mindlessly towards a witty name or a high rating.

Or to put it another way, if I’m going to hand over large sums of money to a bunch of strange dudes and tell them to rip apart our home, I’m going to be freaking positive they know how to put it back together again.  Any model that you apply to track customer behaviors should assume that this is the norm.

We’re informed consumers, Angie.  We look at lots of things before we commit.  Please don’t nag us to death when we do.

* This rant also applies to ServiceMagic and a couple of other online sites, but I feel justified in criticizing Angie’s List as I actually have a subscription with them.  They all use the same lousy tracking models supplemented by follow-up phone calls, and this has a chilling effect on my willingness to use them.

** Annual?  Again, thank you, very nice of you.

Thanksgiving has come and gone, leaving a wake of chores.  We hold it here and the week before is constant cleaning, followed by a week of family, followed by another two days of cleaning.  Brown and I spent yesterday on the couch, too tired to move except to scrounge the occasional scrap of pie.

One of the perils of owning a fixer-upper is having to justify your purchase on a fairly regular basis.  Every time the family comes over, we take them around the property and show them the projects we’ve completed since the last time they were here, or the projects that are ongoing and will be done by next Thanksgiving.  Also, we ramble.  Brown and I tend to look towards the piles and piles of ivy and yammer on about “outdoor fireplaces” or “granite tiles” or whatever nonsense happens to be front-and-center in our brains as we gaze wistfully towards a future when everything is done. 

We are renovation prophets: we predict long weekends, moods varying between exhaustion and pure fury, and, eventually, a substantial hike in resale value.

All of this has gotten us to review the Never-Ending List of Things to Do.  These are broken into Ongoing Projects and Stuff we Need to Do.  Links to previous posts have been added where appropriate.

Ongoing Projects:

• The landing:  Remove the slate and replace it with a permanent brick foundation, and take out another foot of dirt to allow room for a dry stacked stone retaining wall.
• The French drains: Rip out the crap we have and put in actual French drains.
• The garden under the Japanese maple:  Finish the landscaping in this area like we had planned before we realized we didn’t have real French drains.
• Finish the master bathroom: Paint is done, and there is nothing left to do but finish the trim and hang a mirror.  Then write up a nasty, vicious blog post about why Homax paint is the worst home improvement product I have ever used, ever.  Ever.
• Run a retaining wall at the line between the slope and the lawn:  The lawn has gone dormant for the year and I’ve been dumping earth to build up the difference in the gradient between the slope and the lawn.  We’re thinking a 4″ cinder block retaining wall (with drainage, of course!), and a cosmetic shell of dry stacked stone on the other side.
• Finish pressure-washing the driveway: In addition to the cosmetic appeal of clean concrete, we’re noticing some cracks that should be repaired before they get away from us.
•  Finish the fence: I have just gone through the last six months of archives and have realized that there isn’t a single blog entry on the fence. Dagnabbit, those pillars we stuck into the ground are impressive, too.  I’ll have to remedy this.
• Clean the rest of the bricks of all mortar:  There’s a pallet of cleaned bricks ready to be made into a sidewalk, and a picnic table and several pallets groaning under the weight of bricks still in need of cleaning.  I’ll rent one of the heavy-duty masonry saws for this project.  Later, these bricks will be turned into a sidewalk.
• Move Stumpwall to the street: Okay, yes, I hate Stumpwall.  It’s tacky and silly and will only collapse into wood waste over time.  We’ve been hauling in into the street every other weekend or so, and a post on Craigslist for free firewood allows it to fly off of the property in a matter of hours.

New projects are those floating around the back of our minds, nagging us to get started on them before our backs go out.  We keep telling them we will get to them just as soon as we’ve made progress on the ongoing projects.  Then, they laugh at us.

Stuff We Need to Do:

• Renovate the hall bathroom:  This bathroom is dreadful.  It hasn’t been touched since the late 70s.  It’s yellow paint over pink paint over what looks to be wallpaper.  The red clay tile was covered with white boat enamel, which is bubbling.  There’s a leak somewhere in the tub and water might have penetrated the subflooring.  There’s a closet in there which is so poorly positioned that it eats up space.  There is no fan and everything drips like a rain forest when the shower is used.  I foresee pretty much a complete gut job down to the bare studs in this room.
• Landscape the front yard: Part of the drainage problem is that the house is built on a slope and water runs directly into the basement on its way down the hill.  We need to add some terraces to break up the flow, and stick some drains in the terraces for good measure.
• Do something with the front walk:  This thing is a hazard.  Fixing the walk so it isn’t a threat to ankles will probably be blended into the front yard landscaping project.

And we’re increasingly enamored with the idea of renovating the kitchen, but this is so far out of the budget it barely counts as a pipe dream.  Every time we host several dozen people for a couple of large meals, we realize yet again how poorly designed the kitchen is.  It’s hard to describe since all of the pieces are there and it should work, but it’s like someone put a puzzle together where the bits that sort of went together were forced into place with a hammer (Brown and I also have a dollar bet that one of the main ceiling supports the previous owners installed is just a jack post covered in a fancy wood housing, so a kitchen renovation might be structural in addition to cosmetic.).

There’s more — much, much more — but I’ve just re-read this post to proof it and I think I need to spend some time in the Weeping Closet with the ice cream.  Happy Thanksgiving!

For obvious and not-so-obvious reasons, Brown and I watch a lot of DIY Network.  Obvious, as we’ve bought a home that is the quintessential “Before” shot, and not-so-obvious, as we have widely different tastes in programming and this is the only compromise that allows us to watch television at the same time.

(The man has a serious aversion to sharktopi.  Go figure.)

Brown does do a lot of yelling at the homeowners on these shows.  You might not know this, but the majority of renovation programs  are not comped in full by the network.  The homeowners pay for the lion’s share of the materials and most specialized labor (e.g.: electricians, plumbers, etc.).  So when the show’s host is standing in the bathroom and the homeowners say they are okay with a $85,000 renovation as long as they can save ten grand, they already had on hand seventy-five thousand dollars.  There are many, many times when a homeowner will say something like, “Well, we weren’t sure if we wanted this polished sconce for the insert of the new in-wall bathroom coffeemaker, but it was only four hundred bucks and it would really make the espresso pop, so we figured we’d go for it.”  Hence, the yelling.

pssst! Little girl! Want a minibar?

The exception are the Crasher shows.  These are the programs when the show’s host, who is also a professional designer, will go to a big-box home improvement store and stalk the customers.  The beginning of every episode has the host and his camera crew chasing rather frightened people who ask, quite sensibly, “You want to follow me back to my house and remodel my kitchen for free?”  (I have yet to see the episode where the customer asks the follow-up question, “And will the new cabinetry have ample storage space for my corpse?” but I’m sure it’s out there.).

IT IS A VALID CONCERN

The caveat is you leave the design for the kitchen/bath/yard/whatnot entirely in the hands of the designer.  If you don’t give them some extremely clear preferences, the outcomes can be… well, imagine you’re a designer with a rather large budget and the opportunity to put together a room using whatever doodad or doohickey that has come across your desk from manufacturers eager to showcase their products on your show.   The end result is typically very clever design but can also be very gimmicky.  So when Brown said: “Wouldn’t it be great to get on one of those shows?”  I said, “Maybe not.”

BROWN: It’s a free renovation.

ME: They made a bathroom based on a Thai spa and stapled eighteen different textures to the wall.  They’re going to have to remodel it again in another couple of years just to stay sane.

BROWN: It’s a free renovation.

ME:  Those guys would slap teal and orange together, then add piranhas for accent pieces.

BROWN: Teal and orange are the Miami Dolphin colors, so they’re working with an aquatic theme.  Also, it’s a free renovation.

We have compromised.  If we are ever approached by a Crasher, we have established our preferences ahead of time so as to avoid piranhaings.  I lean towards contemporary Mission-style furniture and the open floor plans of prairie style homes.  Brown’s tastes are similar but he likes a slightly more industrial look; he longs for the day he can demolish a wall and set it off with hints of exposed metal.

But there is an additional problem, one stuck deep in my brain where home improvement shows cannot help.  I’m partially face-blind and can’t recognize someone on sight until I’ve spoken to them multiple times and in different contexts.  If someone ever did approach me at a home improvement store and offered to come home with me and destroy my house, I’d most likely hurl a drink at them and run.  To prevent this, Brown has created a wallet-sized card with the faces of personalities on all of the Crashers shows.

I have been told I must consult this chart first, then hurl my beverage if necessary.

He made it for you, too.  Click on this handy link* to get your own high-res PDF, complete with QR codes for each show.  Be informed, folks!  Be aware!  Avoid the perils of fish stapled to your walls.

*Currently hosted from AGAHF, so the link might change if I can get WordPress to accept a PDF.  WordPress is being belligerent, though. 

Thanksgiving looms.  Thanksgiving looms large.  We had two major projects to finish before family arrives.  The first was the small bathroom, and the second was the landing between the primary fence posts.  The weather was lovely last week, so we flipped these and went after the landing first.

I didn't take any Before pictures, so I went back in the archives to March of last year. This was taken right after Brown pulled out the old fence.

Let me put up a picture with the area in question mapped out for clarity:

The purple section is the topic of this blog post. Other changes since March of last year are... RED; Tree has been removed, and YELLOW: Added 50 pounds, goofyness persists.

That purple area is a slope which somebody decided to cover in bags and bags and BAGS of driveway gravel for traction.  It wasn’t an unmanageable slope, but the slope and the gravel didn’t do anyone any favors by being there, so they had to go.   Brown and I got started last weekend by carving out the space for the landing and roughing up the dig site, and from Monday through Friday I cut out the rest and hauled dirt

I personally dug out and moved 25 wheelbarrows full of rocks and clay last week. I also lost four pounds and my back feels like a tiger is living in it and has decided it wants out.

By Saturday, we had achieved had a nice, flat landing about 15 feet long and 5 feet wide.  The cut was 9 inches down at its deepest point, but since the slope didn’t start out being level it was only about 5 inches down at its shallowest point.

(I should mention this is also part of the drainage project, as the overall angle of the slope pointed down towards our house, specifically at our basement.  Leveling this area has changed the path of the water, but probably not in a way that will solve the worst of the flooding.)

I called it quits when I began to hit lateral roots.  We’re not messing around with a tree’s support system when it’s ten feet from the front door.

Brown placed a spare 4×6 to form an erosion barrier against this wall.  We stabilized it with some leftover 18″ landscaping spikes we had used to make the garden stairs a few months ago.

Then I threw a heck of a lot of dirt back on the area we had just cleaned and leveled, and raked it flat.

Bed prepared for slate.

Why more dirt?  Because most slate pieces aren’t entirely flat and each piece needs to be cradled down into the dirt, or it will rock when you walk on it.  A thick earth bed will allow slate to sink and will stabilize them.

Like Tetris, only messier and can be used as weapons.

After the slate was positioned, I dumped another wheelbarrow full of dirt on them and raked it into the cracks.

And STAY there.

Then I ran the soaker hose until the dirt turned to mud.  It will take a few rainstorms and several additional layers of dirt to stabilize these pieces, but they are fairly solid now.

Done! Wait... why does it look slightly half-assed?

And here’s the part where I tell you guys that in the spring, we’ll rip all of this out and redo it.

Decorative cement paver kit! We'll stick it between the fence posts and give the landing some instant Woo!

See, we needed to start working on the drainage problem and the landscaping, but our budget is such that we can’t do much.  After the holidays we can start dropping cash into the house again, but between then and now it is Not About Us.  Next year, we’ll take up the slate, re-level the ground, and remove the beam we put in to control erosion around the roots.  Then we’ll put in a couple of permanent stairs, a small retaining wall around the curved sections, and finish it off with a cement paver kit similar to the one on your left.

Not a bad temporary job, though.  It looks better and the family can walk into the back without falling down a tiny rock-encrusted hill.  Now if we can just get the bathroom done in time…

The American Fauxberman (say it out loud); alternately, the German Short-haired Notweiller

Zu has been with us for a year. He’s decidedly not a Rottweiler and is not quite a Doberman, and there’s something sort of Shepard-y about his face.  He’s certainly a snugglet, though.  His happiest place is on the couch, either cuddling with us or draped over the back, like a smelly, drooling headrest.

After his behavioral speedbump in the summer, he is well on his way to being a good dog.  His anxiety has decreased to a point where he enjoys walks and casual socialization with strange dogs and people, and if a correction with the prong collar is needed, it’s almost always minimal.  We’ve been doing cruises of the big local park with Mary and her dog, Clover, every weekend or so; somehow, a few weeks back, we ended up in the middle of an offroad bike race and he did splendidly while Schwinns poured down around us like rain.  In his classes, we’ve moved on to fetch and other forms of operant conditioning.  I’m thinking of taking him through competition-level training, because (a) he’s smart enough and (b) it might be helpful for people who have dogs with serious behavior problems to see that it might be possible to work through it.

(Aside: It’s strange… it’s pouring rain and windy, but my office is gradually becoming more and more bright; the wind is stripping the leaves off of the trees and the difference in light after each gust could probably be outright quantified by scientific doohickies.)

Zu is what is called a “busy” dog.  He is constantly alert and investigating.  It’s possible that this personality quick is one of the causes of his anxiety, since everything has to be sniffed or poked or tasted or barked at to see if it moves.  Even if he knows what it is, there’s a chance it has changed since the last time it was investigated.  I think if he were employed as a guard dog, he would be a spectacular guard dog for about a week and would after that be a spectacular skeleton due to an irresolvable imbalance in calories consumed to energy expended.  He gets a minimum of three miles’ walk each day, five days a week.  The other two days are when I chuck him into doggy daycare, which our vet said were a must to maintain Old Dog’s health with completely puppy-free days (and I now think are a must because that’s when I get almost all of my uninterrupted writing done instead of banging out a paragraph and then dealing with *crash*thud*rip*rip*smash*spit out my underwear, dammit!).

Besides this, and my need to lie to Brown about why he has no more matched pairs of socks*, Zu’s done quite well for himself.  Another year of training to pare down the rest of the anxiety, and he’ll be a fluffy little champ.  I am hoping his inquisitive nature slacks off a little, though; I’m tired of having to hunt for my shoes.

*I think he knows.

Look at this lovely illustration of a French drain. We assumed this is what they meant when they told us we had them. Feel free to make your "U and Me" comments at this time.

First, we have discovered that when the previous owners said they had installed “French drains,” they did not actually mean “French drains.” They meant “plastic pipes covered in rocks ‘n crap and dumped on top of the ground.”  We could not for the life of us understand why we still had drainage issues when we had French drains!  If they had said they had stuck some plastic tubes on the gutters and allowed them to become lost in the sea of ivy and generally wrecked by the elements, we wouldn’t have spent a year looking for two of every spider in the basement before the flood water crested the sump pump.  The cause of the drainage problems has become much, much more clear.*

As for the second thing, Brown is currently under the sink in the hall bathroom, replacing the trap.  He was told they did not make this particular type of trap anymore, and had to track it down in a couple of different stores.  The leak is fixed; the need to gut the old iron plumbing, not so much.

As for Thing the Third: it’s that time of year again!  Don’t forget to enter the DIY Ultimate Kitchen and Bath Giveaway contest every day until November 18th.**

* I thought the French drains were clogged, so I kept blasting water into what I thought was the access pipe to the drains and wondering why it smelled like sewage down there.  Funny story: outlets for French drains and sewers can look identical. 

** If you win, we can no longer be friends.  So I hope you like your big Vulcan stove and jacuzzi tub, enemy-mine.