Sally (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shiredancer) wrote2007-05-04 12:57 am
shiredancer) wrote2007-05-04 12:57 am
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Middle of the night, windy and loud...
It's blowing hard out there and keeping me awake, and I see that my friend ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bodhifox has given me a LiveJournal Nudge... twice. *Hugs Cap'n Fox* LOL, guess I should be glad that LJ hasn't come up with virtual noogies yet! Nudges are okay.
I meant to post a few weeks ago, really. Wrote a good long one, in fact, and was just finishing it up when one of the cats jumped across the bed, jostled my mouse, and managed to make the laptop lose everything I'd composed. Beyond the abilities of recovering a draft, even. I got miffed at LJ, the cat, my stupid laptop most of all, and life in general, and it's taken me this long to build up to posting again... *sigh* That, and a case of insomnia. Writing is hard enough for me, and to have stupid technology wreak havoc with my hard-earned words makes me feel all *gah* and *pfffft* and such. Well, maybe I can recapture it now.
To misquote from a song sung by John McCutcheon, "Hallelujah! The Great Flood is over...!" Our downstairs is restored to its original (and improved) state, at long last. It became a comedy of errors, and resulted in three floods, before it was over. The first, big flood was just before Thanksgiving, remember, and after a week of huge fans drying us out and crews tearing up half the floors, we shoved all our belongings off to the one still-dry side of the living room. Then Kidlet was soaking something in her sink upstairs and left the tap dripping, and caused the Second Flood through the bathroom floor and dripping into the kitchen sink. It was small and easily contained though, so was only a momentary hiccup in the grand scheme of watery things.
I can't remember the sequence anymore, but at some point before or after the trip to New York we decided that while the flooring was all torn up it would be genius to get the termite guy in -- he'd been wanting to do the drilling to treat for subterranean termites but couldn't go through the laminate flooring, and this seemed like a great opportunity. So he comes in, drills all around into the cement pad that's now exposed -- and hits a water pipe in the dining room. Peter was there, and had the main water off in seconds flat -- we are ultra-paranoid about water now! So the Third Flood was not terribly bad as water goes, but did result in bringing in jack-hammers to drill through the cement pad to the dirt underneath to replace the pipe. I was freaking out fairly strongly by then -- we'd gone from floor to pad to dirt, and I wasn't sure what to expect next. Visions of the whole thing collapsing around us, like in "The Money Pit" -- yikes. And all of our downstairs belongings had now been blown over by large fans, coated with cement dust from termite drilling, and now caked with more cement and dirt from foundation-lifting. By this time we had hunkered upstairs and were living on our beds -- the downstairs was a cold, dank miasma of unpleasantness. We'd scurry into the kitchen, get some food, and take it up to eat in bed.
The new flooring was scheduled to go in in mid-January, so we had to move all the downstairs furnishings up to our bedrooms. This left us with little trails winding tightly through the forests of stacked... things, and our book loft and attic stuffed with more... things. And lo, the flooring was installed and made beautiful, and then began a long process of replacing baseboards and painting and wall-repairing (there was some outside-wall damage caused by, yes, flooding on the patio because our lovely bricks are too high up against the wall, and aggghhhh, I can't go there right now because that's still to be fixed...) Weeks later (because we could only work intensively on the house on the weekends, life being busy and all), that phase was done and at last, at last we could move back downstairs. Since every single book, knick knack, dish, and all had to be thoroughly cleaned (*after* intensive de-cluttering and eliminating many, many *things*), that was another weeks-long venture. I think we finally finished at the end of March or early April (lord, I have no memory any more) and made a final push when my mother-in-law came to visit. That part was fun -- fresh plants and accent rugs and new towels to give it all a new look. The best thing out of all this mess is that we bought new bookcases for the living room -- joy, joy!
Now, of course, the upstairs is left a shambles still after all the disarray, but that will have to be a new phase of weekend work -- as soon as I've recovered from the other. Next year sometime, let's say. *Tired grin*
In all of this, we realized that we might just have a problem with Nagas, or at least that's what my co-worker who paints Tibetan tankas told us. So after googling nagas and learning that they are sort of minor Tibetan/Buddhist/Hindu water deities/demons/snake-thingies, and that it is customary to propitiate them by making an offering and building it into the foundation of a house (!!!), I -- did nothing. Sort of forgot to drop some flower petals in when we had the foundation exposed. Guess when I fix up the garden and the patio (soon, soon) I'll put some kind of offering out there. Heh. Hear that, Nagas? It's coming -- please leave us alone!
And now I'd better see if I can lull myself to sleep with a few rounds of computer solitaire, because tomorrow is another busy day (it's Graduate Student Appreciation Week and damn if I didn't forget to buy a bunch of goodies that I promised for tomorrow!). Nighty-night.
bodhifox has given me a LiveJournal Nudge... twice. *Hugs Cap'n Fox* LOL, guess I should be glad that LJ hasn't come up with virtual noogies yet! Nudges are okay.I meant to post a few weeks ago, really. Wrote a good long one, in fact, and was just finishing it up when one of the cats jumped across the bed, jostled my mouse, and managed to make the laptop lose everything I'd composed. Beyond the abilities of recovering a draft, even. I got miffed at LJ, the cat, my stupid laptop most of all, and life in general, and it's taken me this long to build up to posting again... *sigh* That, and a case of insomnia. Writing is hard enough for me, and to have stupid technology wreak havoc with my hard-earned words makes me feel all *gah* and *pfffft* and such. Well, maybe I can recapture it now.
To misquote from a song sung by John McCutcheon, "Hallelujah! The Great Flood is over...!" Our downstairs is restored to its original (and improved) state, at long last. It became a comedy of errors, and resulted in three floods, before it was over. The first, big flood was just before Thanksgiving, remember, and after a week of huge fans drying us out and crews tearing up half the floors, we shoved all our belongings off to the one still-dry side of the living room. Then Kidlet was soaking something in her sink upstairs and left the tap dripping, and caused the Second Flood through the bathroom floor and dripping into the kitchen sink. It was small and easily contained though, so was only a momentary hiccup in the grand scheme of watery things.
I can't remember the sequence anymore, but at some point before or after the trip to New York we decided that while the flooring was all torn up it would be genius to get the termite guy in -- he'd been wanting to do the drilling to treat for subterranean termites but couldn't go through the laminate flooring, and this seemed like a great opportunity. So he comes in, drills all around into the cement pad that's now exposed -- and hits a water pipe in the dining room. Peter was there, and had the main water off in seconds flat -- we are ultra-paranoid about water now! So the Third Flood was not terribly bad as water goes, but did result in bringing in jack-hammers to drill through the cement pad to the dirt underneath to replace the pipe. I was freaking out fairly strongly by then -- we'd gone from floor to pad to dirt, and I wasn't sure what to expect next. Visions of the whole thing collapsing around us, like in "The Money Pit" -- yikes. And all of our downstairs belongings had now been blown over by large fans, coated with cement dust from termite drilling, and now caked with more cement and dirt from foundation-lifting. By this time we had hunkered upstairs and were living on our beds -- the downstairs was a cold, dank miasma of unpleasantness. We'd scurry into the kitchen, get some food, and take it up to eat in bed.
The new flooring was scheduled to go in in mid-January, so we had to move all the downstairs furnishings up to our bedrooms. This left us with little trails winding tightly through the forests of stacked... things, and our book loft and attic stuffed with more... things. And lo, the flooring was installed and made beautiful, and then began a long process of replacing baseboards and painting and wall-repairing (there was some outside-wall damage caused by, yes, flooding on the patio because our lovely bricks are too high up against the wall, and aggghhhh, I can't go there right now because that's still to be fixed...) Weeks later (because we could only work intensively on the house on the weekends, life being busy and all), that phase was done and at last, at last we could move back downstairs. Since every single book, knick knack, dish, and all had to be thoroughly cleaned (*after* intensive de-cluttering and eliminating many, many *things*), that was another weeks-long venture. I think we finally finished at the end of March or early April (lord, I have no memory any more) and made a final push when my mother-in-law came to visit. That part was fun -- fresh plants and accent rugs and new towels to give it all a new look. The best thing out of all this mess is that we bought new bookcases for the living room -- joy, joy!
Now, of course, the upstairs is left a shambles still after all the disarray, but that will have to be a new phase of weekend work -- as soon as I've recovered from the other. Next year sometime, let's say. *Tired grin*
In all of this, we realized that we might just have a problem with Nagas, or at least that's what my co-worker who paints Tibetan tankas told us. So after googling nagas and learning that they are sort of minor Tibetan/Buddhist/Hindu water deities/demons/snake-thingies, and that it is customary to propitiate them by making an offering and building it into the foundation of a house (!!!), I -- did nothing. Sort of forgot to drop some flower petals in when we had the foundation exposed. Guess when I fix up the garden and the patio (soon, soon) I'll put some kind of offering out there. Heh. Hear that, Nagas? It's coming -- please leave us alone!
And now I'd better see if I can lull myself to sleep with a few rounds of computer solitaire, because tomorrow is another busy day (it's Graduate Student Appreciation Week and damn if I didn't forget to buy a bunch of goodies that I promised for tomorrow!). Nighty-night.