FULL SPEED AHEAD

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

The precious arrived this morning.

The very first thing we did was pull down the cabinets in the garage, revealing pristine pegboard behind them:

I was fully convinced that there was going to be a massive hole and perhaps a live possum behind those cabinets, so the fact that it ended up being more usable pegboard is a huge plus. We tossed the cabinets into the bin and then threw out a bunch of stuff from the garage and the back yard that has been sitting around for way too long, plus an ancient end table from inside the house that we’ll be replacing soon. Then we ordered a garage cabinet from Lowe’s that will be here tomorrow. Among the things we threw away: a roof rake that we inherited from my in-laws easily ten years ago if not longer that has never been out of the box it came in. My wife, who I love dearly, tried to keep it. We just had fourteen feet of snow and felt no need to rake the roof. We’re never using that Goddamn thing.

I have been told that she will very much enjoy the I Told You So moment if it comes next winter. Me, I’ll just buy a new fucking roof rake. (I won’t. This will never happen. I find the entire concept of roof rakes ridiculous.)

Then we tried to cut the post down again:

You may notice that it looks shorter than last time. The reason is I tried to cut it off at ground level using the same reciprocating saw and a new saw blade and it absolutely would not bite, so I tried again from higher up, taking off a foot and a half or so more, and it cut through clean just like it did last time. At this point what’s left is full of twigs and soil and, we’re pretty sure, at least one dead baby bird, and I’m pretty sure the bottom six inches or so is full of concrete, which is why my saw wouldn’t cut through it. I refuse to dig out whatever blob of concrete this thing got sunk into, so I threw a post up on Craigslist offering $100 for anyone who wants to come tear this thing out of my lawn and got six responses within ten minutes, so we have a guy coming over tomorrow to do that. If he flakes, we have five more in line, so somebody is going to do it. Just not me.

Then it was time for the bedroom. Which is much bigger than it looks in this picture, our bed is just huge. There’s also plenty of space behind me, which is where the bed used to be.

The order of operations:

  1. Strip the bed.
  2. Pull the made-of-fucking-neutronium mattress off the bed and lean it up against the wall somewhere. This was easily the hardest part of the job.
  3. Lift the metal frame off from around the mattress and base, Tetris it across the room into its new location. Get the chair that was sitting in the corner being in the way out of the way.
  4. Shove the adjustable base, also heavy as fuck, into its new location, lifting the frame up and out of the way to slide the base underneath it.
  5. Wash and clean the floor. Wonder how we have been living in the immense amount of filth that was under our bed. Discover things that should not have been under there.
  6. Tetris Thor’s Mattress back on top of the bed.
  7. PIVOT!!!!!
  8. Move the dresser from its old location (where the bookshelves are in this picture) to its new location to the right of where I’m standing while I’m taking the picture.
  9. Take all the books off both bookshelves, move the bookshelves. Resolve to throw one of them away as soon as possible since it’s falling apart.
  10. Look around for a bookshelf solution; Ikea is getting so much money from me in the near future, but nothing has been ordered just yet.
  11. Order two new nightstands that are more functional than the ones we have; they’ll be here Wednesday.
  12. Put most of the books back. Throw some away and put some in a box for Goodwill or whoever takes old books that nobody wants.
  13. Clean the floor again a few more times.
  14. Upon the wife’s declaration that we’re hiring someone to redo our closet (behind me) soon, tear the old doors off the closet and throw them into the dumpster.
  15. Holy fucking Christ how do we live like this???? Vacuum the shit out of the floor— again— and the old tracks for the closet doors. The closet doors were almost never closed anyway, so seeing our clothes inside the closet isn’t that big of a deal.

Meanwhile, while I was tearing down closet doors:

See that wooden trellis, back against the fence? Bek tore that down. We still need to fix the fence. That’s on the list for tomorrow, along with starting work in the basement, possibly putting the rest of the shelving back on the wall in the bedroom, and watching as someone takes five minutes to tear that post out and still gets a hundred dollars of money from me because I don’t want to do it. Also, I have a dentist appointment, scheduled before I knew about all this shit.

Best Spring Break evar.

Pause

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized3 Comments

My intestines exploded again this morning for no clear reason and I’ve been asleep all day. It’s 7:00. Did I miss anything?

In which I shove stuff around

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Not pictured: the chaos behind me, involving our bed, everything we had to move out of that corner, and a ton of stuff that we used to paint/patch/repaint/prime everything and haven’t moved back into the garage yet. You can see where the wall used to be on the right there; the seams range from, well, that, to nearly invisible depending on the direction and amount of light in the room. It’ll be fine. That missing baseboard in the back corner was already missing and has been since we bought the house. We threw furniture in front of it and didn’t worry about it; the fact that it was literally hidden behind. a wall helped. We assume there used to be some sort of ladies’ vanity there or something like that. Anyway, we cannibalized baseboard from the half-wall we removed to extend out to that point and are going to have to go to Lowes to see if we can get something similar to fit in what’s left of that corner.

Tomorrow we have to figure out how to Tetris our king-sized bed frame, absurdly heavy mattress and adjustable base up against that wall, then start moving everything else to where it’s supposed to be, cleaning years of dust off the floor as we go. My wife has a plan. I am just doing what I’m told. I have, like, two other very minor projects in mind for tomorrow; we can get those done when we get annoyed at moving stuff around in the bedroom.

Also, mental note: find a rug. God, I hate that floor.

In which I destroy stuff

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

We have a dumpster coming next week, and I have never been more excited about anything in my entire life. We are going to be tearing apart or taking down all sorts of shit that has been slightly annoying but not annoying enough to actually deal with during the fifteen years we have lived in this house. This metal post in the back yard has never had a birdhouse on it. You can see the rotten remains of it on the top part of the post on the ground back there, but we never bothered to do the work to tear the thing out because it’s cemented in place. It’s just been sitting there being an eyesore. Well, I cut a couple of chunks off of it today in preparation for either cutting it flush to the ground or digging the cement chunk out next week— I wanted to make sure the blade for my reciprocating saw would actually cut through the thing, and it looks like the answer’s yes.

Meanwhile, the size of modern cars means that my Kia and my wife’s car only somewhat fit in the garage, and these cabinets have been in my way for years. I tore the doors off today and we’ll take the cabinets down tomorrow. To the garbage with you! We’re going to order a standalone cabinet or two from Lowe’s that will use the space better and actually allow me to get out of my car without turning sideways.

There’s a workbench we’ve never used in the basement that’s going to go too, and we’ll finally repaint the bedroom tomorrow and start rearranging in there. We’ve got electricians coming in for new lighting in the basement, too, and we might tear down some paneling down there too just for the hell of it.

Soooooo psyched.

Victory

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I have made it to Spring Break. Certainly not the hardest year to do so, but I started my last three classes of the day with the words “your job is to make sure I don’t go to jail today” anyway. My official observation last week turned out literally perfect, and the guy who was in my room for the disaster lesson on Tuesday was back yesterday and everything went beautifully.

I even made it through April Fool’s Day without any particular nonsense, although one of my students did attempt to convince me she’d passed out, sticking to it until I stepped over her prone body and pointed out to the whole room that generally when human beings pass out they fall backwards.

“I guess she could be dead,” I said. “If that’s the case, someone needs to drag her into the hallway. There’s no dying in here. Y’all know the rules.”

One of the boys actually got up and that’s when she abandoned the joke.

And yes, I really do have a rule that no one is allowed to die in Math class, and I really am like this, and I guarantee if you ask my kids to name one rule in my class, about a third of them will mention that they need to stay in their seats and the rest of them will say they aren’t allowed to die.

Anyway, I’ve been playing video games all evening, and now I’m going to go read until I decide it’s time to go to bed. Hooray!

Monthly Reads: March 2026

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, ReadingLeave a comment

Book of the Month is the most excellent The Black Hunger, by Nicholas Pullen. This was kind of a bleh month overall, but Slewfoot and Trad Wife were pretty good too.

Unread Shelf: March 31, 2026

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, ReadingLeave a comment

How long, do you think, will I hold out until I cave and call this post “Unread Shelves”?

In which that could have gone better

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

I had my second observation today, the one that technically didn’t count: the head of math instruction for the district, who mostly just wanted to sit in on my Algebra class and see how things went.

Ha.

I can say without the slightest fear of contradiction that I have never had an observation, official or otherwise, go more poorly than that did. Holy shit, y’all. The kids were fine— this was one hundred percent not their fault in any way. But we just loaded math error on top of math error, and for some fucking reason every single problem I put in the assignment (graphing quadratics) put a negative sign in front of x squared, and basic arithmetic betrayed me, and by the end of it I’d managed to fuck it up so many times and in so many different ways that I stopped everyone, told them to all turn their assignment in for full credit, and that tomorrow we were going to try over again. The lesson was a complete disaster after the first ten minutes, which went fairly well, but for some reason -x2 completely shortcut the usual rules of order of operations in everyone’s brains— if it had been -3x2 I would have remembered (and so would they) to square the number first and then multiply it by negative 3, but the absence of an actual number meant that for some reason we were all trying to square negative x, which, of course, is always positive, and …

… fuck.

The thing is, this happens, and my observer knew that (and he fell down the same damn rabbit hole we did) and wasn’t pissy or upset with me at all, and in fact I think the way I dissected what had gone wrong in front of him actually impressed him a little bit. I told him he had to come back on Wednesday for the quadratic theorem, though, and I’m bound and determined that that one, we’re going to do right, Goddammit.