Tag: wiring

On that project

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

That slight pinkish hue is how we know that the drywall compound hasn’t finished drying yet; this needs another sanding before it’s ready to paint, but considering how it looked a couple of weeks ago this represents significant improvement. We meant to get this done last weekend but neither of us were feeling well so it got put off to yesterday and today; I capped off that loose wire and stuck it into a box (It meets code now! It’s even straight and flush to the wall!) and we both pitched in on the sanding. Bek did the mudding. Hopefully next weekend we’ll get to throw some furniture around, and then there’s a dumpster coming for the first few days of Spring Break, during which I will have to be restrained from throwing away everything we own. Do we need a dining table? The oven? Come on, let’s just put ’em in the dumpster.

Seriously, we have like half a dozen projects planned for Spring Break (most of them involve destroying stuff, which is exciting!) plus a handful of contractors and other specialists coming out to either take care of other things we’re not smart enough for or give us estimates for them. If we get more than half of the shit we’re thinking about taken care of it’s going to be a very successful Spring Break.

My other project today was … filling a hole in front of the house, which may be a post all on its own. I never realized that it was possible to be bad at filling in a hole, or to fill in a hole incorrectly, but I appear to have done both of those things. One way or another the current phase of the Fill The God Damn Hole project is complete; the only question is whether we need to move to Fill The God Damn Hole, Phase 3: In Which I Learn to Pour Concrete, Because Fuck This.

In which I’ve accomplished something

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Okay, on some sort of Absolute Scale of Adulthood, successfully installing a ceiling fan at my dad’s house is probably not at or near the top of the scale. But as far as I know the damn thing is solidly installed, working properly, and isn’t going to come flying off of the walls or collapse or anything like that, and now there is both light and moving air in Dad’s kitchen again (we’re not going to talk about how long it took for this to get done, especially since it diminishes the actual achievement itself) and as far as I know the only thing that really still needs to be done is painting that patch of naked drywall up there that was underneath the original fan.

I mean, y’all, this involved wiring and everything. Wiring is scary! And I only had to go back to Lowe’s once, because I forgot to bring a wire stripper from my house and Dad didn’t have one, and Lowe’s was closer than going back to my house for mine. I thought for a few minutes that I was going to have to install a junction box but it turns out I didn’t have to, so all good there.

And then I got home and found out another former student had died, or at least that’s the rumor; the kid moved to Pennsylvania a few years ago so right now it’s all rumor mill shit and no one who I still talk to has any idea what happened. If I remember right this kid was a year ahead of Makyi’s class, and if I’m being honest I don’t remember him all that well, so it’s not hitting me nearly as hard, but … Christ, between this and everything going on in America this week the emotional whiplash has been a motherfucker and I would really like the world to calm the fuck down for a couple of weeks. It’s enough.