Author: Claire
Six months after my family moved into the first brand-new house my parents ever bought, Mom started directing my father to remove or move walls and change various other things. This was a perfectly ordinary three-bedroom tract house in a blue-collar neighborhood. It was laid out in a fairly obvious way. There was not much you could do with it. But for the next 20 years my mother conducted a ceaseless rebuilding campaign. She joked that she was born with the Mrs. Winchester gene. I believed it. And early on it was clear I’d inherited it. Other women move furniture,…
… that whenever I ask The Wandering Monk, handyman extraordinaire, how to handle a house problem, his answer involves matches. And sometimes accelerants. Nevertheless — progress. I can now state that the foundation of the house is as stable, level, and rot-free as it’s ever going to get. Additions to the understructure have been done with ground-contact treated materials. Dubious portions of the periphery that couldn’t be fully corrected with new wood have been bug sprayed and preservative treated to the max. Whew. There’s still more to do on the current phase of The Great Foundation and Screen Porch Project.…
The Great Foundation and Screen Porch Project, Phase II, commenced yesterday. Somehow I wasn’t expecting The Wandering Monk to need to tear off all the siding off the east wall on that part of the house. Good thing he did, though, as it was the classic good news/bad news case. The siding came off completely intact and both it and the upper walls were in fine shape. A pleasant surprise. The lower walls suffered rot, of course (no surprise at all). And we found termites. But we found them in a place it would have been surprising not to find…
Whatever your view of their politics, this is a clever bit of resistance. Four things to spend your money on if you want to buy happiness. “Not everybody gets a cookie”. But every social-justice pecksniff can turn a gesture of kindness into an occasion for a display of vicious narcissism. The left. It had a miserable week. Bastiat’s goofy story and real-life folly in the solar-panel industry as solar power begins to become cheap enough for the masses. No wonder Comey decided to let Hillary skate on all those sloppy security violations. Creative lifesaving. Will this be the well-deserved ruination…
Amazon Prime Day is officially tomorrow, But it actually begins at 6:00 PDT/ 9:00 EDT today. What’s Prime Day? It’s an enormous special-deal event like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, but in summer. Lots of specials for 30 hours, beginning this evening and running all through Tuesday, July 11. This is for Amazon Prime members only. But. If you’re not a member, read on. Amazon Prime is an excellent service, with everything from (most famously) free two-day shipping to free streaming movies (and Amazon TV series) to a low-cost grocery service (Prime Pantry) to music … to about a dozen…
The U.S. is not “one nation” — and it never was. Among the other “benefits” of artificial intelligence, it’ll make it easy to forge nearly everything. Yet another cowardly, too-quick-on-the-trigger cop shoots dogs in their owner’s fenced backward. On video. Both dogs survived the vicious attack, though one is still touch-and-go. A GoFundMe appeal for their vet care was fully funded in less than a day. But on the good side of cops … The sad story of the man who invented the equal sign and brought math to the masses. Oh darn. I missed Nicola Tesla’s birthday. Again. You…
The Wandering Monk is due in an hour to commence the first and worst of the remaining structural projects on Ye Olde Wreck. I thought he’d be here last week, but … life. There are eight projects for the rest of this year, three substantial and five mini. Compared with the work we did in May, what’s left is nothing. But it’s enough. Project One involves a final round of foundation work — beam, “lite” jacking, and rot repair — plus replacing a section of floor and closet wall inside. Then swapping out a tiny, crooked, frosted former bathroom window…