I will probably post pictures once everything is completely cleaned up, and especially once we have the basement functional again, but tomorrow is absolutely going to be a book review unless I decide to write two posts. I only got two projects done today, really, other than organizing and cleaning, but man, they were doozies. Both of these have been waiting for literal years to get done, and they took between ten to twenty minutes each. One of them required me to spend some more money, though.
Anyway, look at this thing:
That is a TRX X-mount, used for TRX suspension training. My wife used some wellness funds she had access to to purchase it years ago, and it has been sitting in the basement ever since, because it needs to be carefully anchored into a stud to work properly, and the enormous bolts it came with put me off at first, and then … in the way of such things, it just never got done, and then we had a basement goblin for two years, and, well, now the fucker’s on the wall and it was done in less than ten minutes. I am not actually strong enough to do pull-ups but I put as much of my weight on it as I could and my hands gave out before the mount budged. I have spent a lot of time today uttering the Dad Mantra, “That ain’t goin’ nowhere,” and this was the first thing that Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.
Speaking of:
Those mirrors were originally in our bathrooms, so at least one of them has been sitting in the basement since the original Terrible Decisions remodel a thousand million years ago. They are mounted to the wall now. They, also, are Not Goin’ Anywhere, although I might put a cleat on the one on the right just to ensure maximum safetiness. Actually, thinking about it, I could put trim around them. That would protect the edges— you’ll note that the top corner of the taller one is already slightly broken, and I’d like these to be as safe as possible.
They are also heavy as fuck, and I had to go to Lowe’s and buy two of these to move them, at which point a nearly-impossible task became something I could do by myself. Worth it.
Our new nightstands also arrived today, and I probably ought to put at least one of them together before bed. For now, though, it’s absolutely video game time.
They took the precious away today, so I can no longer arbitrarily choose to throw away any object I own. It’s very sad for all of us. There has been a distinct slowdown in the pace of work around the house today, very likely due to both of us finally and thoroughly running out of steam. I did manage a couple of projects, though: I cleared all of the books from my Chicago classroom library out of the basement, some to the dumpster and some to donation and a small number that will be brought to my classroom on Monday. And we put this together:
Bek got some touch-up painting done in the bedroom, too. We still have baseboard to deal with, plus making the garage usable again (mostly an organization/putting everything away project; that cabinet is currently empty) and installing a couple of things in the basement, plus restoring the basement to its former glory as a mostly-unused workout room. The bedroom’s not quite 100% yet either. It’s 5:30 right now; we had an appointment at 3:00 that took an hour and a half or so; I’m hoping that one of those projects gets done by the end of the day. Just one more today will be enough.
Maybe one more update tomorrow. I have a couple of reviews I’ve been sitting on that need to get written, and sooner or later I’m going to have to admit that I’m going back to work in a few days. For right now, the PS5 is calling for the first time in a little while, and I’m going to answer it.
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:
Strip the bed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Order two new nightstands that are more functional than the ones we have; they’ll be here Wednesday.
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.
Clean the floor again a few more times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nine teachers out tomorrow already, before 9:00 PM. Five of them are out for the entire week. I went ahead and signed up for coverage every day next week, figuring that it’s going to be one of those weeks where I don’t end up having a choice. I slept all afternoon and into the evening and am bound and determined to be back in bed by nine, which is in ten minutes. I have not had dinner. Last night featured truly spectacular digestive distress. Whatever this is, I’m planning on sleeping it off, because hell if I can afford to miss any school this week.
I have just now managed to put on socks and comfy sweat pants despite having spent the entire day uncomfortably cold …
And site traffic has been garbage for the last few days for some reason so no one is going to see this anyway …
I am going to declare the day a wash, decide that I am decompressing from work, and go to bed early without any real thought of accomplishing things today.
I’m trying to decide which overused sentence I should start this post with, and I can’t make a decision.
Because unfortunately, while I haven’t read this book before, I feel like I’ve written this post before. Dava Sobel’s excellent Galileo’s Daughter is a biography of a genius, and, well, I think you probably already know if you want to read a really good biography of Galileo. The title makes it sound like a thousand different literary fiction novels– there are so many The So-and-So’s Daughter novels out there that I’m surprised that there isn’t a parody of them with that exact title– but no, this book is at least a third or so about Suor Maria Celeste, Galileo’s oldest daughter, through the prism of the surprisingly large corpus of letters we have from her to him. Suor Maria was a cloistered nun, and her letters, or at least the translation of the letters in this book, show her to be a woman of lively intellect and wit, and starting each chapter with an excerpt of one of her letters was an inspired choice.
But ultimately this is a book about Galileo– a book called Suor Maria Celeste’s Father would not have sold many copies– and, well, Galileo was Goddamned fascinating, so if the author is of even middling talent writing a good book about him should not be especially difficult, and as it turns out Dava Sobel possesses far more than the typical allotted share of talent. So maybe this isn’t as comprehensive a review as I might have thought I was going to write when I sat down, but I assume the You Should Read This is still coming through at sufficient volume for you to hear it. Because you should.
Most of us have some sort of memories of Spring Break, although I suspect for most people they involve parties, or beaches, or some form of public drunkenness. For me, on the other hand, my strongest memory of Spring Break, one I reminisce about every time my own break rolls around, involves going to see a movie on the first night of a Spring Break in grad school with a good friend of mine who is a professor at Oxford now. We had to stand outside to wait for tickets in a driving, wet, utterly bullshit snowstorm in downtown Chicago, and Bill stepped out of line for a moment, threw his arms over his head, yelled “SPRING BREAK!” at the top of his lungs, and rejoined the line without another word.
I may not have partied enough as a young man, is what I’m saying here. And I openly laughed at anyone who asked me what I was “doing” for my break. I’m going to be sitting in a damn chair reading a book, that’s what I’m going to be doing. And it will be glorious.
