I have been sort of staring dully off into space for the last half hour or so, and the cops just murdered another child in Chicago, and I’m just kinda … done, today. I’ll try and be interesting tomorrow.
Category: life
Adultifying!
We met our contractor– the same people that did the roof– at a flooring supply place today and picked out the look for the new bathroom. On the left, vinyl flooring that will extend into the laundry room and looks like tile. On the right, the walls in the shower (12×24, nice big tiles) and, divided into little squares, also the floor for the shower. In the middle, accent tile for the shower. It’s going to run vertically from the showerhead to the handles, form the back of a niche for shampoo and such, and possibly also be a little vertical accent stripe on the bench that’s going to be in there.
We’ll go to a different place for fixtures and a custom vanity in a week and a half or so. Will there be body jets in the shower and a bidet on the toilet? Yep. There sure as hell will.
Whee!
After
Just as a reminder, this is what the roof looked like yesterday, this time heavily cropped:
This is what the internet said our new roof was going to look like:
And this is what our new roof looks like, although it’s gotten a bit overcast outside, unfortunately:
To my eyes, the roof-in-actuality looks a touch lighter than the sample does, but not in a way that’s displeasing; I’m pretty happy with it, and it’s done already, and I was figuring it would be at least a two-day job. We got some light rain for a little while, which didn’t appear to bother anyone, and while I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about the job at least looks well done from ground-level. We’ve talked about springing for a third-party inspection to see what someone who knows roofing says about it, but the guys who did the work were conscientious as hell about nearly every aspect of the job that I might be able to fairly evaluate (my sole complaint: a couple of plants in the back yard have either been stepped on or were covered with tarp for a while, but they look like they’ll recover) right down to having several guys going over the lawn with what turned out to basically be giant magnets on wheels to get every last nail that might have fallen off the roof. I’ve been around the house twice and I can’t find a single scrap of roofing material anywhere. I figure if they’re that fanatical about cleaning up after themselves there’s at least a decent chance that the work itself is good. I can hope, at least.
This is what it looked like when they were unloading the actual shingles, by the way:
I don’t know what the hell I thought they were bringing the shingles over on, but I wasn’t expecting a giant-ass crane to lift the pallets up to the roof to be unloaded up there. It was pretty cool to watch, honestly.
Also, this:
Similarly, the new water softener is in “this appears to work and not be leaking, so I’m good” territory, although I can more carefully inspect new piping that I can actually see than roof work that I can’t, and it all looks very clean and nicely done, so I’m happy. We will see what life with soft water is like now.
If anybody’s local and wants to know who we used (well, okay, you can see the name of the water folks right there in the picture) let me know.
Before
Pictured: the mess of pipes that had not one but two different water softener people swearing at the level of redundancy and poor decision-making required to have installed it in the first place. To the right is the ancient previous water softener, which has not been active since we moved into the house. My understanding is that several of these pipes are going to go away tomorrow to be prefaced with something more streamlined and sensible.
Also tomorrow: the roof gets ripped off of the house. Here’s what the roof currently looks like:
I mean, okay, that’s more a picture of a storm on its way than the roof, but who takes pictures of their roof? Nobody. I figure they’ll at least get to the part where that’s torn off tomorrow; I don’t have a firm idea of how long this entire process is supposed to take, but I assume sometime in the next few days I’m going to have a new roof and new eaves and all that fun stuff.
The roofers are supposed to be here by 7:30 in the morning and the softener guys are here before 10, so I gotta get up early to get all water-using tasks out of the way before they arrive, and also to keep the roofers from taking up the entire driveway, since I’d like the water guys to not have to cart pipes from halfway across the world before taking them into the basement. It’s going to be a long, expensive day tomorrow, but hopefully I’ll have some neat pictures to share with you by tomorrow night.
On jewelry
On the right there— and holy hell, does hi-res make it clear that I need to polish my rings– is my wedding ring. I got married in 2008. On the left is my class ring, which I probably acquired in 1996 or 1997. I almost never take either of them off, so it’s not unfair to say that that class ring has been physically on my finger for nearly 100% of, at least, the last 24 years.
I think it’s probably time to admit that my class ring is too small now. And that was the original impetus for this post, that I’m hitting the point where this ring is getting harder to move than it really ought to be and that I wasn’t super excited about the idea of not wearing it any longer, and yes, I’m aware that I can lose weight and I absolutely should lose weight but that’s not going to happen instantly. And then I got on this kick where I started looking around for men’s rings on the Internet (because not wearing a ring on my right hand is not an option; I just want one that allows blood to travel through my fingers) and I found a ring size chart and printed it out.
And I discovered that near as I can tell, my wedding ring and my class ring are exactly the same size. Which means that somehow my right ring finger is considerably fatter than my left ring finger, or maybe that “comfort fit” thing I vaguely recall the wedding ring people talking about makes way more of a difference than I thought. Because it is a lot easier to remove my wedding ring than my class ring. Or maybe it’s the shape? The class ring does have more surface area touching the finger.
So, two questions, I suppose: has anyone out there got experience with resizing rings? I feel like it’s a bad idea, because this size was good enough for nearly 25 years and permanently altering the ring rather than taking steps to make my fingers less chunky seems like a poor decision. Also, am I a sucker if I order a new ring from Etsy? Because there’s a lot of cool stuff on there, but they all look too cheap to be real.
Anecdata
If I’m being honest, I was oddly hoping to spend the day sick. Covid vaccine side effects, on an asynchronous Friday where I’ve already given the kids the day off and cancelled my most important meeting of the day? Staying in bed occasionally moaning, taking naps, and sick from something that everybody knows is supposed to make you kinda sick so I don’t have that weird self-gaslighting thing that I do when I’m sick about whether this is Good Enough to justify whatever I’ve chosen to not do? Hell, sign me up.
Turns out I’m fine. I followed some advice that my wife passed on, which was to go into the shot loaded to the gills on Vitamin C and as hydrated as possible. And, like, who the hell knows if that actually ended up mattering at all? But I have Vitamin C dummies on hand and ate a couple of those plus an orange and had a couple of large glasses of water before going in and getting the shot, and I’ve had no side effects at all beyond arm soreness, which is an inconvenience at best. So I figure I’ll pass the advice on: eat an orange and drink a bunch of water before your second shot. It might help, and if it doesn’t, well, you’re hydrated and oranges are tasty.
My brain keeps tossing me a few years into the future where the nanobots in all of the vaccines turn us into zombies in service of whatever company provided the shot, and I will fight for House Pfizer in the irradiated wasteland of 2025. If you end up getting your shot from someone else, I promise that whatever shreds of my mind remain will regret having to destroy you.
I ran into my old boss at the furniture store today, and we talked for a few minutes, and it really hit me during the conversation just how much I’ve re-embraced my identity as a teacher in this past year. I never really thought of the furniture store as a permanent job– this is not something that would come as a surprise to any of my co-workers, I think– but it was far from clear what I’d be doing next, and even throughout last year I was kind of thinking of myself as on probation. This year has solidified things; I’m not going anywhere, and I’m starting to step up for leadership roles in the building again, similar to the types of things I’ve done in previous buildings.
I am putting this in print now mostly so that I can come back and laugh at it in a couple of weeks, when after three days of in-person instruction I am back to wondering what the hell I was ever thinking and checking want ads as a form of recreation again. 🙂
Boom
And I am inoculated. Finally.
It is rare that I feel like things are going completely smoothly so I like to issue praise when they do— the clinic was supposed to start at 9:00, and as I was arriving, roughly fifteen minutes early, there were people leaving already. It is just now 9:00 and I have had my shot and am in one of the Don’t Die Please chairs. This place is so well-oiled it is glistening.
Now if I can just avoid major side effects today…
Dear Luther
What the hell, let’s advice column this shit and see what happens: I am feeling much more human today. My brother and his wife are expecting their first child in April, and it has long been the plan to give them the crib we used for our son. He texted me earlier this week and offered me $100 and lunch if I bring him the crib rather than the original plan of them coming to get it at some point; they live north of Chicago, so maybe 2-2 1/2 hours away. I am taking a day trip to bring him the crib.
(Also: I work from home, they both work from home, my dad is coming along for company and he’s retired; everyone involved except maybe my sister-in-law has had at least one shot. None of us really go anywhere, and we’re all religious about masks when we do. Covid risk is therefore minimal.)
(Also also: It’s possible, but not super likely, that my brother will see this; he gets a vote just like everybody else if he does.)
Giving me $100 will not break his bank account and receiving $100 will not change my life. He’s definitely buying me lunch, but do I take the money? Defend your answer in comments.
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