“Dark night of the soul” is too serious a term for this week’s mini-crisis. That’s an expression to reserve for the big bad moments (or years) in life. But this week fell at least into a momentary twilight of the creative soul. Then … light! —– Tuesday the Wandering Monk and I found all that awfulness as we began the Great House Foundation Project. Not unexpected. Dismal nevertheless. The Monk immediately began kludging together a plan for jacking up the house even with very little of the house left to jack. His plan was creative. And intelligent. And it removed…
Author: Claire
The brain isn’t working today. I blame the house foundation. The Monk, however, has his system figured out, with only mild consultation from me (which mostly involved me asking, “Why aren’t you doing XYZ?” and him explaining quite logically why something that made perfect sense in my mind actually wouldn’t work as well as what he’d already figured out). At least I was able to come up with the average psf weight of a house for leveraging purposes. My major contribution for the day. Once the lumberyard delivers beam-and-joist materials this afternoon, my major contribution will be banging nails and/or…
I wasn’t sure how much the Big, Scary Foundation Project would affect my blogging. Unfortunately — for the next week or so, at least — it’s going to affect it a lot. After the many serious problems we uncovered today I’m going to be totally preoccupied with the safety and success of every step we take. I trust the Wandering Monk and his smarts, but we’re both in territory where we’ve never gone before. I won’t be thinking about much else besides how to get past that dreadful mess. And I won’t be surfing the ‘Net or participating in many…
So. This morning we went outside to tear away siding and general rubble at the base of the house to get an idea how bad the beams and joists of the bedroom floor were. The Wandering Monk was hammering and prying away and the bottom of the west wall. I was hammering and prying away at the bottom of the north wall. This wasn’t a particularly tough job because … well, there wasn’t much solid wood to pry at. That’s the north-wall foundation beam, such as it is, bending, cracking, and diving deep into the earth. Those are floor joists…
… it begins with tearing out the ceilings. Because once this monster project is done, I want only building, creating type work to remain in the bedroom. No more giant trash heaps. So the Monk has been tearing out the old, water-damaged fiber ceiling. First, down came the 12×12″ tiles. He pried. I scurried at the bottom of the ladder, bagging up the remains. Then he went back for a second pass, prying off the larger sheets of fiber that were behind the tiles. These sheets were covered with paper that had become brittle and fragile over the decades. Messy…
Killing time while waiting for The Wandering Monk to arrive and begin the foundation project, I found something absolutely fascinating. Johatsu. A Japanese word meaning “evaporated people.” Not dead. Not suspiciously missing. But people who’ve chosen to disappear out of their existing identities into new, perhaps off-grid ones. A French couple have been tracking this phenomenon for years and now have published a book: The Vanished: The “evaporated people” of Japan in Stories and Photographs. PRI has done a story on the johatsu and the French pair who became obsessed with them, as has Business Insider. Oddly, it turns out…
… Including places where you normally find only criminals. Once a month, a cardboard box from Colorado appears at the office of a conservative Christian lawmaker in central Georgia, filled with derivatives of marijuana, to be distributed around the state in the shadows of the law. Operating in ways he hopes will avoid felony charges of drug trafficking, state Rep. Allen Peake, R-Macon, is taking matters into his own hands. He’s shepherding cannabis oil to hundreds of sick people who are now allowed by the state to possess marijuana, but have no legal way of obtaining it. Nearly all the…
Monday. That’s the day the long-awaited (and long-dreaded) foundation project commences. The Wandering Monk and I had hoped to start in April, but it’s been far too cold and wet. It’s still cold, but we’re headed into a drier period, so here we go. This weekend I’m schlepping the last movable stuff out of the back end of the house. We’re going to be tearing up sections of the floor, then replacing beams and jacking the house up from within, so it all has to go. (There is simply not enough ground clearance for anyone but a masochist or a…
Ooooh. Remind me never to try to draw a jowly dog again! Not unless I have a much better reference photo. I was in over my head and struggled with this one, start to finish. It’s my neighbor’s birthday tomorrow and my neighbor is a Rottweiler fan. Fortunately she’s also refreshingly frank. So when I give it to her with the request, “Tell me if it’s complete crap and you don’t want it,” she’ll do me the favor of being honest rather than painfully polite. If she says she likes it and wants it, she’ll mean it. (I like that…