The doppelgänger of the water filter

For years we've had a Brita water system for our drinking water and have changed the filters religiously (that is, we put on a hat).

Michele said this morning that the electronic filter indicator had crapped out and would not flash either green, to show that the filter is working, or red, to show that we need to replace the filter. Without the light, how would we know when to replace the filter? What if we became overchlorinated? What if there was a sudden surge of residual copper or cadmium? The speculations gave me pause. A filter generally lasts two or three months, so Michele changed it today. Then she announced, "I've turned into Jack."

"On the roof, it's peaceful as can be / And there the world below can't bother me"

The title of this post is fraught with irony.

The sounds from the roof include

• metallic scraping,
• drilling,
• pneumatic hammering,
• raucous singing,
• pounding, and
• a radio favoring most of Western Area with hits from Mexico.

They're the sounds of progress.

The tongue and groove ceiling is also the decking for the roof in the living room and dining room. You could see daylight yesterday. Pumice sifting through and landing on everything sounds like a very gentle rain when it's falling, and when you walk on the grit, it sounds like you're crunching along in spilled sugar.

Here are the guys. Yesterday when it rained, they covered everything and, instead of calling it a day, hung out in the carport and ate Pringles and candy until it cleared up. Then they started working again and didn't quit until about 7:30 that evening.

I forgot to mention the sound of motorized equipment.

A new roof

Last summer's epic hailstorm injured Sophie the Honda and damaged the roof. My insurance company reminded me that I have a deadline by which to start repairs on the roof, so earlier this summer I got estimates.

My neighbor recommended a buddy of his who was not licensed but worked cheap. The guy gave me his estimate written in a barbed and illiterate hand on a piece of scribble paper: "Fix roof," with a total that would keep him in beer for months.

The neighbor's ex-wife recommended a guy who is indeed a licensed roofer and maintains office hours at the bar at the VFW.

A friend recommended the guy who fixed her roof. He showed up six hours later than his appointed time, got up on the roof and walked around for a minute in a vague, desultory, poetic manner, promised an estimate by the end of the week, and disappeared. That was mid May.

Finally, I called my neighbor, who is a licensed contractor, and said, "Stan, I need a roofer. I need a reliable roofer. Don't argue with me." So he gave me the name and number of the guy he uses.

Ian showed up at the appointed second, gave me a sample of the material he proposed to use, gave me a detailed description of the structure and a potential problems with Original Western Area roofs, gave me a list of references, drew a diagram of what he proposed to do, got up on the roof and measured and took a core sample (I have two roofs, one of which contains pumice, which absorbs water), and gave me an estimate a couple days later.

Today I came home for lunch to see workers swarming all over the yard and roof and the materials staged in the driveway. And now, after work, they have already removed part of the roof over the bedroom. It sounds as if they're coming right into the house because the sound carries so well down the chimney.

The odor of 20-year-old waterlogged pumice is very sour, like vomit.

Here is the roofing material staged on the lawn. You can see a corner of the roof in the upper right.

And I'm still not finished

Here are some images of the facelift of my home office. Fortunately, I don't have a "before" picture, because I would have sunk through the floor with embarrassment.

First I packed up everything in the office and staged it in the living room.

When the bookcases were empty, I cleaned them and staged them in the carport so that Fernando from Mountain School could come get them in his truck. Bookcases are a hot commodity in the public schools, and Fernando told me later that they disappeared immediately from his truck and then reappeared in the classrooms.

Here is the almost-empty room. The walls were off-white, and the ceiling was sort of beige.

I chose Valspar's "Ice Storm" for the ceiling and walls and "Capri Coast" for the accent walls. (I fixed the "holidays," so there's complete coverage.)

I think this is a more accurate representation of the colors.

I chose rustic Mexican iron for the closets and cupboards.

Here are two full bookcases. I put the inscribed books from various signings up on the top because I probably won't read them any time soon. Harry Potter is up there, too, because he takes up a lot of room, and I don't reread those frequently.

Years ago I picked up a cute iron bird in Madrid. It's made of pieces of farm implements. The rustic Mexican lamp has a "piña" design. The little cupboard is made from salvaged teak from the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

Here is my bespoke rustic desk.

I also have kinetic sculpture in the room.

Body-checked by a Sister of Charity

I'm giving my home office a face lift. I wanted new matched bookcases, to paint and install new window treatments, and to find a work surface that fits me.

After I took Sophie to the body shop in ABQ two weeks ago, I stopped at Tema Contemporary Furniture and bought five 87-inch high bookcases with two corner pieces to give them a finished look. (Today I called Mountain School, which rules all, to ask whether they wanted the old bookcases, and as luck would have it, they were going to order bookcases and accepted mine. Woo-HOO!)

I have a rustic-looking Southwestern desk that Custom Clarence in Santa Fe made, and although it's a great desk, it's just too tall for me, even with my chair all the way up. And I've been using a drafting table that I've had since Maxwell days for my computer table. It's no wonder my wrist seized up.

So I have been looking for adjustable work surfaces, preferably like the one I had at LANL, which cost a taxpayer's arm and leg five or six years ago. I poked around online and found some that would work, but they weren't like the nifty one I had at LANL. Suddenly, I had an epiphany! Why not go to the LANL salvage lot on the third Thursday of the month at noon, and try to find an adjustable work surface? I can hear you sputtering, "But, P-doobie, you're getting swell new bookcases! Why not get a brand new work surface instead of going to salvage?"

For the adventure, okay?

Michele picked me up at the store yesterday, and off we went to salvage. At the customer-service window we registered with a young man--who could make a cantaloupe look intelligent, compassionate, even agitated--picked up our auction number, and went out to stand on the blazing hot asphalt with the other hopefuls. The prime spots at the chain-link gate were already taken by the regulars, whose collective hunger for junk made the Potato Famine seem like a mere bagatelle.

About the time I was reviewing the signs and symptoms of heat prostration, the head guy finally came out and explained The Rules: walking only, no running, no pushing, use a Sharpie to mark what you want with your initials, no fighting, no biting, no throwing elbows, no hip checks. Then he opened the gate.

Holy moly. If that was "walking" I'm Hillary Clinton. It was like roller derby in there. I was especially vulnerable because I was wearing Birks, and the regulars wore steel-toed safety shoes and knew how to use 'em.

One of the regulars immediately snagged the work surface that I had had my eye on at the fence. Oh, well. It's a big yard. There'd be other desks. We poked around in the yard and got more and more discouraged. The stuff that was really good had already been claimed, and the stuff that was adjustable was missing important parts, most notably the cranks that adjusted them. Other pieces required six men and a boy to move or had been around since the first partition of Poland.

I was ready to give it up as a bad job when Michele saw it. Underneath another desk was the holy grail. The mother lode. The last, for which the first was made. Except for a rust stain, it was in perfect shape. We quickly despoiled the top of it with a Sharpie and called the helper guy over to verify our claim with a sales slip.

He gave us a piece of paper to present to Cantaloupe Boy at the counter, and we stood in line for a long time. When we got to the window, C-Boy studied the sales slip with all the intensity of someone just stumbling on Yeats, carefully input all the information ["desk"] into his computer, took my money and gave it to a young man on his right, who handed my change to C-Boy, who gave it to me, and got a receipt from a young man on his left. I love teamwork.

So now I have a new adjustable work surface, and it cost me only an hour and a half and a buck-oh-seven.

Michele and P-doobie (bottom) at LANL salvage.

Sophie's injuries

This morning I had my appointment to take Sophie to our insurance adjusters, who are set up in the high school parking lot to assess her injuries after the hailstorm. They wrote me a check to fix the

• hood,
• front fenders,
• doors,
• trim,
• trunk lid,
• roof,
• headlights,
• windshield,
• rear window,
• bumpers, and
• driver's side mirror.

In other words, Sophie is getting a whole new body. Michele took her VW wagon in yesterday, and she has to wait a few days to find out whether State Farm is going to total it.

Friday morning the insurance guy is coming to check the house. I'm betting we need a new roof.

A Kevlar® hail umbrella for the house and cars would have saved us a lot of trouble.

Hail, yes

This afternoon we had the Mother of All Hailstorms on the Hill. I was walking back from lunch and managed to duck into CB Fox before I got clocked. The hail and rain defeated the storm drains, and Central Avenue was a river of hail, water, branches, and leaves.

The hail was the size of golfballs in Western Area and the size of large marbles downtown. Here is the street in front of CB Fox. I took this one with my cellphone.

Here is the hail by Re/Max looking southeast toward Metzger's.

The hail broke the windshield in Michele's truck.

It also broke the windshield of her station wagon and left dents in the roof and hood.

It stripped leaves and branches from trees.

Sophie had some smaller dents, because she was downtown. The driver's-side mirror was broken.

Michele sustained the worst damage. She was trying to save the tomatoes and was struck on the head, knees, and back by the hailstones. Here is the bruise on her back.

Paper wasps

Today our handyguy, Mark, removed our crappy garage door and took it to the dump. We hadn't lowered it in years, and when I looked at the ceiling of the carport, I saw that paper wasps had made nests in the protected space between the ceiling and the garage door. They don't bother me, because they mind their own business and nosh on flies. They won't survive the winter, and the nests aren't reused. If you're not creeped out, click on the images to enlarge them.

This nest looks like an inverted umbrella.

This is the biggest nest.

This is a starter home.

Almost done

The guys will probably be finished with the siding today. Here's what BobBie and I saw on the walkaround yesterday.


The back porch is almost done. They'll need to put end caps on the wall.


Here is the back of the house. They need to caulk around the windows. The doormat covers up the culvert that goes under the house. Julio, the forerman, said that as they were working, they kept hearing a soft thumping sound. The sound was caused by bees, apparently confused by the pink insulation and later by the siding. Some were going in and out as we did the walkaround, and BobBie immediately identified them as honeybees. There's a big colony under the house.

They put siding on Dad's concrete work in the back. Most of the major tweaking they did was on Dad's projects.


Here is the demarcation between Mom's side of the duplex and the neighbor's. The spruce tree disguises it from the street.


Freddy is hard at work with measurements.

The crew has only a little more siding to install.

Talkin' soffits, talkin' crops

Yesterday ChelBert took pictures of the progress on Mom's house. The crew was working on the soffits.

Soffit on the east side.


At the northeast corner.


The crew moved the signs, street numbers, and Monitor tube to a temporary location.

I planted two tomatoes, a cherry tomato and a regular slicing tomato. Here is the first fruit of my labor. It is a large, regular slicing tomato.


Next year any tomatoes will be in containers in the greenhouse.


The zucchini are doing great! Here's a huge blossom from Sunday. The vine is spitting on its hands and is ready to make inroads into the kitchen.


Casey likes to sack out on the back stoop in her cardboard box. There's no better place to soak up the rays.

The siding is up!

The siding crew worked far into the night to finish the job. Here's what Mom's house looks like now.





































(The guys aren't working today, but I still wanted to give you a progress report. AH-hahahahahahaha!)

Little masonry bit, we hardly knew ye.

I went over to Mom's this morning at 9:30, and the crew was hard at work. Julio, the foreman of the crew, gave me the grand tour and introduced me to all the guys. He said the foundation is marvelous and he has never seen concrete quite like it. "We already burned out one drill bit on it," he said, and showed me the blunt end. "That's good concrete. The house isn't going to move ever."


Here's the siding on the east side of the house.


They did a neat job framing in the openings to the crawl space. Julio said that there's an infestation of rodents under the house. Apparently the mice come charging out in fright as the crew works. I told him that Mom has been battling the mice for years, then told him about Dad vs. the Skunk.


Here is the interface between the insulation and the siding.


Ooooo! Ahhhhh! Woodgrain!


This is the remains of a bird's nest on the east side of the front porch. Julio said they removed the bodies of 12 to 15 desiccated birds that had fallen in there over the years.


They had to remove the plywood that Dad installed because it wasn't properly applied and wouldn't be able to hold the insultation and siding. How long has it been since we've seen the porch railing? Is that green paint from the Zia Company?


This is the staging area for the equipment, product, and machinery.


Lots of progress on the front! I took this picture this afternoon.