Row, row, row your boat...

...gently down the street!

It's been a bit wet around here. A few big rains and a lot of melted snow pushed the water level up — way up — to the highest level anyone has seen around here, a good three inches higher then the flood of '81, and much more spectacular than what we had last January.

High enough, in fact, to go paddling around the neighborhood in a canoe.

Alas, I didn't know any gondolier's songs. That didn't stop me from singing, though...

A romantic ride through Venice...

I could commute to work like this. I really could.

I just like this shot.

My neighbor, Chris, taking a lap around the block.

Of course, it wasn't all fun and games and photo ops; there were several tense days of pumping water as fast as we could as it rose ever and ever higher. I even went out and got new, larger hoses for my pump (which I've nicknamed "the candle" — as in, "Better to light one small candle than curse the darkness") and watching the green on the radar map stretch from here to California, knowing it was all coming our way.

We didn't suffer any damage other than water getting into the floor of the shed. The carpet's no great loss, but it'll take work to pull it out.

The rest of the neighborhood didn't all fare as well as us. Several houses on our street have basements, believe it or not, and many of those got flooded.

You can normally drive a speedboat under this bridge. Here, I don't think you could even manage a canoe.

This sculpture by the canal took on some new interpretations that I'm sure the artist never intended.

At the height of the flood, the street and the lake became one. You could paddle from one to the other without bottoming out on the curb.

Despite the destructiveness, it was still beautiful and, — dare I say it? — kinda fun. I'm sure we'd feel a bit differently if we'd sustained more losses, but we still would have enjoyed the "wow" factor either way.

Oh, that's better... MUCH better!

Editor's Note: We're a few weeks behind these days. Current events and older events are getting posted at about the same time. So if you're trying to reconstruct an accurate chronology of my life... um... sorry...?

If you've been following this blog for a while, you know I've been trying to get an old air compressor running in my shed. (More on that here and here.) The latest wrinkle in what was supposed to be a straightforward project was that the shed wiring and breaker box really couldn't handle the pull of the new motor. To be perfectly honest, the shed wiring wasn't really good for much of anything...

The wire running from the house to the shed. Eek.

The seriously outdated and under-rated fuse box in the shed. Double eek.

A closeup of the wiring. Eek, eek, eek.

So, while they were visiting, my father-in law helped me fix all those things and more. (Some of them even needed fixing!) The whole thing took about a day and a half and a few hundred bucks (good wire isn't cheap...) but finally, we had...

Grounded 10-gauge wire, protected by weather-resistant piping...

...that looked a lot better than the previous wire, to boot...

...a proper breaker box with properly-rated breakers...

...and after all this time, a quiet, powerful, all-weather air compressor! Yeah!

So all in all, I lost a fire hazard and gained a good tool. Not a bad deal!

...and After

Dramatic, no?

This transformation was enabled in part by the wonderful folks of Freecycle, who lined up to claim the loft, the dresser, and a steering wheel off of a Mazda RX-7 (How did that get in here...?) Also credit the heroic efforts of Paul, who tackled the mess in a different way than what I'd been doing, with spectacular results.

Now, do realize what the truly amazing part of this transformation is?

No?

Well, here it is: I didn't clean Deborah's desk. Nor did I add to the mess thereon, which is equally amazing. Temptation comes in all forms, but it can be resisted!

Before...

One Candlepower

Better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.

The rains are back. And with the ground frozen, there's nowhere for the water to go — nowhere good, anyway. So, rather than wait for my neighbor's pump to put in an appearance (it's been three days; surely his crawlspace is quite full...?) I broke down and bought a pump of my own. It's nothing amazing — I didn't have the money for amazing — but it's now been running for a good 12 hours, which has brought the water level down two very welcome inches.

I'm planning to pick up a larger-diameter hose for it this evening, which should allow it to clear things out even faster. It just feels good to be doing something, rather than watching and worrying. It feels better to cheer on the efforts of a heroic little pump than to curse the flooding.

The patio is down to an inch here. You can see the crust of ice on the legs of the sawhorses, and see how far the water has dropped.

Black Hole 3: Adventures in Architecture

Now that I have attic stairs, it's much easier to deal with the attic itself. This is, more or less, what I had to work with when I started:

Notice that almost nothing is straight, nor level. The vertical seem to have been hammered in any old way, and the horizontal supports at the top aren't much better. The insulation is a mess, too.

After a fair amount of work, things are starting to assume a much more pleasing form. I've got four sheets of plywood down for flooring (three in this picture) and I've been gradually repositioning the support beams. Looks a lot better, doesn't it?

I'm not done yet, but I haven't been able to resist the urge to start storing things. An antique high chair and an Exersaucer have already been bagged and brought up. I'm definitely going to have to establish rules about what can go up there; I don't want it to become a junkyard. The allure of free floor space is very tempting, though.

Black Hole (Part 2)

Note the food on the kids' table behind my father-in-law. We had to eat in the living room to avoid the falling plaster in the kitchen.

Ta-dah! Pull-down attic stairs!

All that remains now, of course, is to replaster and paint the ceiling, and put down a floor in the attic. Should take me months. But this is the hard part that allows the rest to happen. The old access hole to the attic involved a 16 x 24" wide opening that you had to get through by climbing up the pantry shelves. Deborah could scarcely believe that I fit at all going up the old way. This is MUCH easier. And now, soon, we'll have a nice place to stash some of our stuff!

Black Hole (Part 1)

A black hole has been opening up in the kitchen ceiling at Patience corners, and threatens (promises?) to devour all...

Hey, that looks better!

For some time now, I've been looking at the weathered, peeling paint on my house and shed, and dreading the day I'd have to do something about it. Well, that day came, but I had help. Professional help, no less, in the form of Joel and Paul, who both work for Matthew's Painting Company. Joel rented a pressure washer for the weekend, and came over to do our house first. (Joel is trying to sell his own house, and, now that he's graduated from seminary, move somewhere and go be a pastor. If you want a new pastor...)

The first order of the day was to bleach the whole house. This is necessary to kill off any mold or mildew that's living on the house and would ruin the paint, I'm told. So I went ahead of Joel, using a "spray ranger" that mixes the bleach and water to get an even mix. Then Joel came behind me with the power washer, to rinse off the bleach and remove anything loose. (Loose items can include outdoor thermometers, peony bushes, fingers... gotta be careful with this thing!)

Paul takes a turn with the pressure washer on the shed. You couldn't see this with the naked eye — it just looked like a fog coming out the tip — but the camera caught the rotating nozzle here. Apparently, the idea with this tip is to have an extremely high pressure stream, but rotate it so fast that it won't do (much) damage.

Joel's wearing shorts. Can you tell? Apparently a lot of the stuff that comes off the wall comes straight back at the person holding the wand.

Joel let me try it out on the shed, where the paint was the worst. I laughed out loud as the old, peeling paint practically leaped off the wood. It was enormously satisfying, especially since I knew how long it would have taken by hand with a scraper.

(I've since gotten my water bill. It was 5,000 gallons higher than normal. Small price to pay...)

Later, once the flood waters had abated, and the wood was dry again, Paul came over and showed me how to finish preparing the wood. There was still some work to be done with a scraper and wire brush, but it wasn't anywhere near as bad as I had imagined.

We finished up the trim on the house on Saturday, and we'll be tackling the shed soon.