TERRIBLE DECISIONS: The Destructioning

On December 20, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I am in a hurry, as something that I thought was at 6:30 is at 6:00 and I need to buy a card and a gift between now and then, so have some pictures, which I don’t think need a whole lot of context anyway:

What was behind the weird patched part of the wall? An unused junction box!

Broken tile!

Broken all sorts of stuff!

They were not prepared for the amount of insulation we have in the attic. Apparently this was “chest-deep” a few minutes before I went to investigate all the coughing. Sorry about the lung cancer, guys.

You can get an idea of how deep the blown-in was from this picture. We’ll have to reinsulate once the new ceiling goes in, but that’s the biggest problem we’ve encountered so far.

You can see from the dots on the wall (paint, sprayed through the pegboard) where the old closet was. The new shower is going to be nice.

Probably no pictures tomorrow, as they’re just doing electrical and some plumbing, but we’ll see.

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: The Return

On December 19, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

…we never really finished the first bathroom renovation, so to hell with it, let’s start on the second one. Only we’ve hired professionals to do it this time! And demo starts tomorrow! Let’s take a look at what we’re wrecking:

Bek and I removed the giant mirror that was on the wall in front of the heinous green wallpaper, because that’s going to go into the basement, but I think you can manage to imagine a mirror. That patch of unwallpapered wall next to the medicine cabinet was there when we moved in (did they move the medicine cabinet over a couple feet? Replace it? We’ll never know); the torn patch of wallpaper next to it was me, trying to figure out what was behind it (and deciding it was way too much of a pain in the ass to remove). The holes in the wall were made tonight, just for the hell of it. All of this is gone tomorrow. All of it.

This closet is actually in our bedroom, and it’s not going to be a closet anymore as of tomorrow. We are eating this space to expand the shower …

…because this is the existing shower, and there’s been a leak in it somewhere since we moved in, so it literally hasn’t been used in years. This is going to get much bigger and have a bench, a rainfall shower head and a regular one, and a few other bits of coolness. But the kicker? The thing I’m looking forward to the most about this entire process? My wife let me order this tonight.

Yep. That’s right, motherfuckers: I just spent over a thousand dollars on a bidet. It has a remote control.

My asshole is going to be immaculate.

Start looking forward to the review right now. Because there is going to be a review.

I have to get up early tomorrow so that I’m ready for the construction guys, and I don’t even mind.

May as well tell everyone

On September 14, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

I came as close as I’ve come in my adult life to shitting myself in public today.

Yeah, buckle up, buttercup, it’s gonna be one of those kinds of posts.

Y’all have been here a while: what do you think is my least favorite thing about teaching? Is it paperwork? Lesson planning? Grading? Discipline? Dealing with students who don’t want to be there and don’t intend to allow anyone else to get an education but still manifestly refuse to stay the fuck home like they ought to?

Nah. It’s the fact that I can’t go take a shit when I need to.

Every so often someone will get pissy (no pun intended) with me about the idea that kids need permission from teachers to go to the bathroom. Without wading into that conversation too deeply, I write a lot of bathroom passes during the day, and basically my only rule about it is that it’s not happening if 1) I’m actively teaching, 2) You seem to be more interested in fucking around in the halls than taking a piss, or 3) I can’t actually think of a third reason but these things don’t work well in binaries. Even then, I’m likely to let you go anyway if you look like you really need to go.

But what about girls and their peeeeeeerioooooods, the nonsense-speakers shriek.

I can assure you that after eighteen years of teaching girls at or around the age of menarche I have encountered every period-related problem that it is possible for a male teacher to encounter and I’ve got the shit covered. Your kid still can’t get up and go to the bathroom whenever they want, because inevitably the exact same people who think their precious babies should be able to leave my room whenever the mood strikes them also would be excessively angry if they ever attempted to collect their child from school and the teacher’s response was “I have no idea where this kid is.”

Anyway.

The point is, as restrictive or liberal as any teacher might be about their personal bathroom policies, a simple fact remains: while at least in theory we can let a kid out to go use the bathroom whenever we want, unless we happen to have another adult in the room with us, which is much rarer than it should be, we can never go use the bathroom, because we can’t leave our students alone. And I’mma be blunt here: I don’t drink coffee in the morning any longer because coffee has certain specific effects on me that I don’t have time for in the morning, and if I don’t have an adult in the room with me during 5th and 6th hour, which are the two class periods after lunch, there is going to be a problem, because I can’t make it an hour and a Goddamn half after lunch without a bathroom break.

I normally have a paraprofessional in the room with me, but the science teacher was out today and he was covering her class. Her practice is generally to bring her whole class out for the last couple minutes of the period for– you guessed it– a bathroom break, and I was so close to a disaster that I walked out into the hallway and told him he was just going to have to find a way to watch that room (it’s next door) and mine for the next couple of minutes and bolted for the bathroom.

The boys’ bathroom is directly across the hall from my room. And I have proven today that I will not use the kids’ bathroom under any circumstances, because if I didn’t use it today, I’m never using it.

There are two adult bathrooms that I am legally able to use on my floor. Both have one toilet. If the one I’d gone to had been occupied, I’d have been fucked.

I will spare you the details. Let’s just say that the tolerances were milliseconds and centimeters, respectively, and that I didn’t have to clean anything up afterwards that I don’t normally have to clean up.

And that is my least favorite thing about teaching.

Nattering on

On June 9, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I’m in a mood again today, and I think it’s social media related; I need to spend less time on … well, everything, really. I’ve done a reasonable amount of adulting today; I rescheduled a doctor’s appointment, made my first dentist’s appointment since before the pandemic (letting people stick their fingers in my mouth before I was vaccinated was not happening) and got some more planning done for next year. I also finished my first bookbinding project, which I was going to share with you but I think I’ll wait until I finish the second one instead. All I can see when I look at this one are the mistakes, so I’m going to give it to my son and make a better one for my wife, which hopefully will be something I’m actually willing to share with people.

You’d think this would have me in a decent headspace, but I just can’t deal with the level of stupid the world is throwing at me today:

ORBITS: Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) asks whether the Forest Service or the BLM can alter the orbit of the moon or the Earth in order to fight climate change during a House Natural Resources hearing pic.twitter.com/yYiOyi2cMZ
— Forbes (@Forbes) June 8, 2021

I also sat down with the estimate I just got from the fixtures place for our bathroom renovation, and compared it to our initial estimate, which was supposedly based on average prices at that specific location, and I’m going to have to have a stern word with someone about it, because right now we are astronomically over budget, before a single square inch of drywall gets pulled off the wall or a single tile gets laid. To a certain degree I’m willing to blame myself for not paying attention to certain things– like the fact that a shower door wasn’t included in the original estimate, when in fact what I was told was a very basic shower door at this place is thirteen hundred dollars, and a shower door is not exactly an unexpected purchase when redoing a bathroom. But when you tell us that your estimate for the vanity will cover a “custom” vanity for the space, and we in fact pick out a pre-built, non custom vanity, and the vanity still runs three times the estimate? That’s on you. When we are specific across the board that we are looking for mid-range stuff, and we ask you to quote us out for mid-range stuff, and then they show us what they are saying is mid-range stuff, and the estimate is off two hundred percent? I am not taking all the blame for that shit.

So first I have to go over all this with my wife to figure out just how deep in the shit we are, and how much we can afford to crawl out of said shit, and then I need to call my guy who put this estimate together and we’re gonna have us a come to Jesus moment.

So, yeah. I’m in a mood.

Lights!

On June 4, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

This is as exciting as my day got– picking out the lighting for the bathroom remodel. That’s what they look like; bask in its room-lighty glory. Or not; we didn’t exactly go super-complicated on this particular decision. I suppose we also picked out a bathroom exhaust fan, but seeing as how the entire decision-making process for that was to authorize whatever our contractor had already suggested, and I couldn’t pick the one we chose out of a lineup if my life depended on it, it didn’t count for much.

My criteria for the lights: 1) brushed nickel, to match everything else in the room; 2) smoked glass so that I’m not staring at bare lightbulbs, and 3) facing downwards to make the bulbs easier to change. My wife argued with none of these determinations and I more or less went “Okay, whatever you want” beyond that. I think we’ve been surprising the people at these places with how quickly and easily we’ve been able to make decisions throughout this process, although I did horrify the saleslady at the fixtures place a couple of weeks ago by abruptly snarling at my wife about something or another; Bek knew exactly what I was doing and laughed about it, but the saleslady clearly thought I had decided to die on the hill of refusing to have oval-shaped pulls on the vanity or whatever it was that I’d complained about, and you could see her bracing herself to be an unwitting bystander in Marital Drama.

I suspect these people probably have a touch of PTSD, and I don’t blame them for it; we probably ought to just get along in public and not make jokes. I will do better in the future.

There’s not much more to report here, really; I planned for the first couple of days of summer break to be low-activity and I’ve successfully achieved that. Tomorrow we are heading to Illinois to finally meet my new nephew, so expect a hotel window picture tomorrow evening and maybe some baby pictures if my brother and sister-in-law will allow it. Maybe I’ll just put my hand over his face and post that; we’ll see. We’ll stay overnight– the boy is psyched about staying in a hotel for the first time in forever– and be back Sunday, and then Monday morning I start actually Preparing for Things. We’ll see how well I do.

Adultifying!

On April 10, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

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!

TERRIBLE DECISIONS: PHASE 2 COMPLETE

On August 2, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy6 Comments

We hadn’t stopped working; I just decided a few days ago that I wasn’t doing any more updates until shit looked good.

Shit looks good.

Another look at the shower tile (finished over winter break) and the new toilet. The new toilet is wonderful. If you shit God, God will be flushed. As a fat man, I appreciate this. The new toilet is not leaking. Did I ever show you the new floor tile? That’s not leaking either, but tile generally doesn’t do that.

The new vanity and countertop. This… is a bit more of a problem. Everything you can see is not leaking, is hooked up, and works beautifully. Note that I also put new floor trim in, although you can’t see it too well. It’s just trim; trim’s not actually terribly impressive. But it’s there!

Closeup of the countertop and the new faucet. I love this countertop a LOT. I’m also glad that the vanity is taller than the old one, because it means that the boy’s going to have to grow a bit before he’s tall enough to splash water out of the sink, and hopefully by then he’ll be less likely to wantonly splash stuff around. Yes, the distance from the faucet to the electrical outlet is within code; yes, I’m also putting safety stops into the outlets when they’re not being used.

This shit right here is not my fault. And it’s leaking. (And it’s better than it looks, because that one PVC join that is obviously crooked is not crooked any longer.) The supply lines to the faucet are working beautifully and appear to be watertight; the rest of it, not so much.

Basically it’s leaking at the one spot that is obviously bad, which does not surprise me, as joining those two pipes in that fashion was basically a kludge involving crossed fingers. The PVC-galvanized join is strong and so is the join where the trap joins with the pipe coming out of the wall. I need to talk to some folks who know better than me and come up with something better than the kludge. I also need to fix a new leak that popped up by the drain that wasn’t there originally, because in all the screwing around with the pipes I accidentally loosened the top (blue) pipe too much and now it’s leaking too.

I will wait a few days, do some research and some thinking, and then take another shot at this, and if I can’t get it right the second time I’ll just suck it up and call a plumber. I’m not actually upset about this; it’s leaking at a spot that I knew was dodgy and it’s not leaking enough that it renders the sink unusable. If I need to wash my hands or my face in that sink, it’ll be fine; the pot underneath will catch the small amount of water that comes out. I just want it perfect.

Later this week, we’ll get into what Phase 3 entails. Phase 3 is the final phase.