Post 3878 - Sigh

Welcome to Monday night.

Some of the flooring we ordered on Friday night, is not available. So we ordered some other flooring, which they swear is available. Not sure when it will arrive. I am hoping in the next couple of days, after which they will install said flooring.

Very impressed with the paint job that the guys did last week. We now have a red accent wall. I did not know what an accent wall was until last week. I figured an accent wall was one which had a grave or acute written on it somewhere prominently. I was, sadly, mistaken.

Patricia took another sick day. She sounded terrible this morning so I urged her to stay home. She did not fight me on it. She is coughing up a lung now, too.

We both can't wait until the work is done here at the house. Would be very nice to have it all done, and our stuff all back, by the end of June. Fingers crossed. Of course, then, I would have to go through every single box and decide just what would be kept, and what would be tossed. That will be a hard decision, given my inability to part with much of anything.

Say, I need your help. We want to get a new washer and dryer. What do you recommend? Not crazy about stackable ones, but I see their benefits.

I am going to call it a night. I have yet another long day awaiting me. Need my beauty coma.

See you tomorrow.

Bevboy

Post 3877 - Sunday Night Stuff

Busy couple of days.

After work on Friday we drove to Dartmouth, the part of the HRM that holds up the other side of the bridge so people in Halifax can get there, to pick out some flooring for the recroom, laundry room and home office. That only took about 30 minutes.

We decided to have dinner at the Mic Mac Tavern not far from there. Except in Dartmouth, nothing is easy to get to. It meant jumping back on the thoroughfare from Woodlawn and going hell, west and crooked, overshooting where the place was. My blood pressure about to boil over, Patricia said she thought she had seen the place, so we got turned around in someone's driveway and retraced our steps, finding the place this time. Then we had to find a parking space, nothing easy to do on a Friday night at that joint.

I don't know what it is about Dartmouth that makes it so bloody difficult to find one's way around. The assumption that people just know where the streets are is part of it. Street names at major intersections would be helpful to those of us who don't know where the hell things are.

And don't get me started on Dartmouth Crossing, built as an antithesis to Bayer's Lake, except with Bayer's Lake you can actually make your way from place to place without ending up in the next county by mistake.

Sigh.

What did we do on Saturday? We stayed home. We got the barbecue out. We tried to mow the lawn but our ancient lawn mower seems to have died. I called my handy man friend in the Valley to have a look at it. He says he can sell me a lawn mower for fifty bucks if it is not feasible to fix it. I may take him up on his offer.

Today, Sunday, I went to Bayer's Lake to refill the propane tank for the barbecue. Twice, someone pulled out in front of me because they thought a stop sign was just a suggestion. Twice I laid on the horn. Twice they thought I was unreasonable. I don't get people. Why do they make left hand turns into traffic? Do they just assume people will just stop and let them out? Are they entitled or something? Sigh.

Anyway, I stood in line for a good 45 minutes to get the tank refilled. Turned out to be less than five dollars. Well worth the wait. Then I skipped over to the Kent store and picked up some stainless steel hot and cold water hoses for our washing machine. The hoses downstairs now are 18 years old and owe me nothing. If I have learned anything from the big flood of 2019 it is that a little bit of preventative work will more than pay for itself. That these hoses cost less than $25. Not a big investment.

 Tonight we finished watching "The Order" on Netflix. A fine, fine fantasy series about a young man whose mother was murdered by a man upon whom this man and his grandfather have sworn vengeance. He attends the university where this man works as the head of a mysterious cult-like group and the good times flow from that. There is enough humour in the show, and at the same time, plenty of thrills and blood and gore to make us look forward to season two.

We have such fun in our lives, don't we?

I am going to turn in a bit early this evening. Another work week beckons. These darn weekends go by too quickly.

See you tomorrow.

Bevboy

Post 3876 - Thursday Night

You gotta love these short work weeks!

One more day, and it is the weekend again. I will get to sleep in. Ah!

The painters have done a really good job so far. We decided to paint over the old paint scheme, replacing it with a red accent wall and "wheat sheaf" for the other walls, in the recroom. The laundry room is in "barely teal", which looks pretty good. The home office, which I have always called the green room, is still green, just a somewhat lighter shade called "leprechaun".

Another coat or so, some drying, and they will be done. Yay!

And as things stand right now, we will be picking out some flooring after work on Friday. Some kind of tile for the recroom, replacing the carpeting that we no longer want and which was ripped up anyway. Some green-based tile for the home office. And once again, a tile or linoleum for the laundry room. It should look really, really nice when it is all done. The next few weeks should be interesting!

This has been an interesting experience. Let's go with that word. But we cannot wait for this to be over. I want my home office back. I want my books back in place, although maybe not quite as many of them. I want my computers back in place. I want the recroom to be usable again. We want to downsize our stuff so that what we keep, we will really use.

It is a dream.

Speaking of dreams, I should go to bed and experience some.

See you tomorrow.

Bevboy

Post 3875 - A Day Later...

Tuesday night.

First day back to work after four days off was tough. Hit the ground running. Ran into some complicated tasks, one of which I was still working on at the end of the day. I could have spent the entire night working on it, becoming increasingly frustrated and bitter, but I went home at 4:30 and have had an agreeable evening.

I have spent a couple of hours researching and note taking for my next Frank article. A totally different change of pace from my day job. I needed to do that tonight. If not, I would likely have just spent the evening watching tv. Not a bad way to spend an evening from time to time, but when there is work to be done, and money to be made, I have to do what I have to do.

Tomorrow is Wednesday already. Where is the week going?

Turning in. Very long day tomorrow. Hoping fresh eyes will help me figure out the thing I couldn't figure out at work today.

See you tomorrow, handsome!

Bevboy

Post 3874 - Monday Night Musings

10:30. Going to bed shortly.

The painter was here today to add another coat of primer on the wall panels that were put back up in recent days. We have selected colours so the painters can go buy the corresponding paint from Benjamin Moore. They want to start painting maybe as soon as Wednesday.

We are going for different colours in the laundry room, home office and recroom. The latter will have a red accent wall with the remaining walls being a beige. The laundry room will be a light teal. The ceilings in all three rooms will be white.

After the painting is over, they will be putting the flooring in place. Which we haven't selected yet.

After the flooring is in place, I suppose they will do some final tests before they return all the stuff that has been in storage for the last several weeks.  That will be a big pile of fun: putting all that stuff away. I have promised Patricia that I will think hard before returning stuff to its old location. Plenty of stuff will go to a thrift store or out in the garbage. I had an entire four drawer plastic "cabinet" full of old computer cables and the like. I don't need the cables. I don't need the cabinet thingy. So they will be gone. There will be many, many more examples of this reconciliation, which will take weeks and weeks to do.

It is the end of another long weekend. Back to work in the morning. I'd better get my beauty sleep.

See you tomorrow.

Bevboy

Post 3873 - A Week Later...

Well, how was your week?

Lots of sleep around these here parts. Patricia was sick most of the last week. She still coughs like crazy.

The carpenters have been dropping by the last few days whilst we were at work. They are rebuilding the floor and adding back the drywall and the pieces of wall that were ripped out in an effort to chase the water from the flood. In the coming days we will go to a local floorist or two and pick out some decent flooring for the bottom floor. Tiles. Linoleum. But no more carpeting for the recroom.

We are in the second half of the annual Victoria Day weekend for 2019. We haven't been downtown since Thursday, when the Memorial Cup folks rolled in to town. I'm told the place is a zoo, thousands of people in a too-small area. I am surprised that there haven't been more reports of shenanigans. The rules for people down there are harsh. Once you get down to the Argyle-street level with a ticket, you cannot get back out again, unless I suppose it is to go home for the evening. You have to buy what is sold in the area, so you can't go in there with your own bottles of water or food from your fridge or anything like that. I don't see the fun factor in much of anything in those rules. Of course, the fact that I don't get a rodent's rump about the Memorial Cup only makes things worse. I keep having to look up the fact that it is about a second, maybe even third, tier hockey tournament.

In the morning, the carpenters should be here by 9. That means I should get some sleep. We will be off on Monday but don't really want to go anywhere. So we get to hear power tools all day. Can hardly wait.

I will try to write something on Monday. Let's see if that actually happens.

See you then-ish.

Bevboy

Post 3872 - Happy Mother's Day To My Late Mother

My mother died in January of 2015. I was not there when she died. But I had spoken to her on the phone 15 minutes or so before she was gone. I have told you about that before. Still hurts, when I think of it, as it continues to pain me when I think about how certain people decided it would be more appropriate to go on a vacation rather than to bury our mother. No need to dredge that up more than I already have. I am right on this subject and anybody who disagrees with me is wrong. It is as simple as that in my mind.

But I want to write about my mother for a bit. I hope you will indulge me.

We didn't have a pile of money when we were growing up. As typical then as it likely still is now for families, we were not told a great deal about the financial situation, but it did not go unnoticed that others lived in bigger houses than we did, and their parents drove nicer cars, and they went on vacations every summer, something we simply did not do. It was what it was.

Dad worked at a job that didn't pay as much as other families made. He was a good person, more or less, but he was a poor business  man always listening to sob stories from people. He did an awful lot of pro bono work for people over the years. That was time he didn't spend with us, or doing paying work.

Mom would get a cheque every week to pay for groceries. Dad, and then we as we got our drivers licenses because Mom never drove, took her into town, usually Kentville, to buy that week's provisions. She would make every dollar stretch until it screamed bloody blue murder. 

She was a complicated person, my mother. Mercurial. Head strong. Stubborn. Took no feces from anybody. Spoke her mind, no matter what. There were times she exasperated me, but as we both grew older we grew closer. I would speak to her on the phone nearly every single day.

As my parents grew older, and they had medical appointments in the city, I would take vacation days and family illness days to make sure they got to them. If I hadn't done it, they would simply not have got to those appointments.

I think about my parents a lot. Both of them. They did not have easy lives. They would be both aghast at how my sisters and I don't get along, as they wanted us all to co-exist peacefully.

But today, I think of my mother, and how despite the hard times she had, she also had some good times. I hope that I was able to contribute in some way to those good times, or at least, not to make them any worse.

Happy Mother's Day, Mommy!

See you tomorrow.

Bevboy

Post 3871 - Hello. Still Alive.

The title pretty much says it all. I am still alive and kicking.

The flood in my house has really been a burden for both of us. I took Monday and Tuesday off work to deal with the workers coming here on Monday to pack up the home office contents. Tuesday, a big moving van showed up and took the stuff away. Then, almost immediately thereafter the workers tore up the floor in the home office and quickly realized that the floor was dry as a bone. Good news!

The last few days have been just trying to survive with a Spring cold. I felt quite poorly on Thursday, so much so that I had to step out at lunch time, when it wasn't warm, in my shirt sleeves, just to cool off. I stood by the fence and looked out on Young Street and thought I was going to collapse. Later on that afternoon, I dozed off during an ad hoc meeting, much to my embarrassment and my colleagues' amusement.

Friday morning I felt even worse, but I was determined to remain awake at work. Besides, the carpenters were supposed to drop by the house and commence rebuilding the floor and putting in the drywall and replacing the sections of wall that had been removed in an effort to chase the water. I bought two extra large double doubles at the Kempt Road McDonald's and sipped them during the day. I didn't fall asleep. I had to visit the men's room 14 times, but I didn't fall asleep.

During the week I managed to find the time to produce my latest cold case article for Frank Magazine. It is a fairly long piece, so you will not be able to read it while you are lining up to pay for your groceries at Superstore or Sobeys.

Friday night, Patricia picked me up at work and drove us home. I pretty much went to bed right away. I felt somewhat better today, Saturday, to the point where I could wash some clothes for the first time in a couple of weeks. That's when I discovered that Mr. Smarty Pants plumber had switched the hot and cold water hoses when he was here several days ago. I managed to switch them back, but I got a lovely water blister on my left forefinger for my trouble. It will likely hurt like the devil in the morning.

I sent an email to the project manager overseeing all the work. I hope I wasn't too mean about it, but it seems to me that learning how to hook up the correct hoses is something a plumber would learn in the first day or so of plumber school. I don't understand how a guy who told me he had over 30 years of experience as a plumber could have made such a fundamental mistake.

I have to get up early on Sunday morning to go to work for a few hours. My mother died a few years ago so it's not like I am missing out on much. How sad does that sound?

I am going to try really hard to produce a blog post on Sunday. How is that for a half-promise?

See you then.

Bevboy

Post 3870 - This is Driving Me Crazy!

Five days later. Losing my mind.

We got home from work on Wednesday night to the sound of freight trains or something downstairs. They were instead industrial strength dehumidifiers and fans drying out the entire downstairs. They had also emptied out the first part of the home office and as I reported here before they had discovered a lot of moisture in the strappings, so that means that they will be here this coming Monday by 8:30 or so to pack up every book and every other possession in this room and on Tuesday the movers will take the stuff away.

Sob!

This means my media server will be off line for a few months while this work is done. I actually took it off line today. The cable box thingy that holds the PVR was downstairs here and required a dedicated wired cat5/cat6 connection. Part of what they would do on Monday would be to disconnect 100% of that, so to preserve the PVR, this afternoon I carried it over to where the router is at the bottom of the stairs, where they swear they will not mess around with it so I get to have wifi at the very least, and hooked up the PVR cable box to the network cable coming off the router. Presently, the network cable is run along the walls into the home office and split several times. I will lose that connectivity for a few months.

Oddly enough, this doesn't affect one of my desktop computers. This ten year old thing has built in WIFI. Only "G", but even so, it gives me connectivity down here, and a 68% signal, which isn't too bad.

After work on Friday, we went to a house in Clayton Park. A couple were selling a very small computer desk. Since my two computer desks will soon be going into storage, and I have need for such an item, and a frightening lack of space is looming for both of us, a very small computer desk in the living room is just what the doctor ordered. I had another one several years ago but got rid of it, and I have always regretted doing so. I may try to find a way to keep it once all this work is done. It will likely earn its keep.

When I get up in the mornin', I will disconnect this computer, and the other one, and put all the various and sundry cables aside in a box or two. The computers, the monitors, the keyboards and so on, will all remain here at Casa Bevboy, having a good long rest while this work is being done.

It has been inconvenient thus far. Not having use of the recroom has hurt. I missed my recliner. I miss my couch. I miss the big screen tv. But I will feel nearly emasculated not having my home office with the 1000's of books and the computers and the printer and the scanners and everything else. The desk my father built me 30 years ago is in this room. For the first time since he made it for me, it will be out of my possession. My many local history books will be in storage. The several radios I keep here, gone for the session. How will I cope?

Sigh.

I will find a way. Things could be worse. I will get through this. It just will take a while.

You take care of yourselves. I will try to write at ya tomorrow, but we have to step out early as we are seeing John Cleese tomorrow night. In all this excitement, we nearly forgot!

See you soon.

Bevboy