Stumped

"That tree  has to come down, it's a mess," I said.
"No problem," my TS, Angela, answers, and off she went to cut it down.

I usually help with this sort of job as she has a penchant for falling off ladders.But, iIn this case, she managed without one. Besides, I was watching the grandkids, at least that was my excuse for getting out the worst of the work.

We have hardpan, so we seldom need worry about tap roots, and so, expecting no problems, the stump was roped and attached to the car. One quik "Varooom" later, and said stump and root ball was on its side. The difficulty was the darn thing was too large to manhandle, or in our case, womanhandle, to the dumpster. So, Angela pulled it over there with the car.

"How are we going to get this heavy thing in there?" I asked.
"I'm thinking about a pully system," she said.
"I'm a ramp would be easier," I suggest.
"Good idea," she replied and off she went to bang one together.

Five minutes later, she was back with a 6 foot board with a 2x4 nailed at one end. She promptly hooked the 2x4 over the lip of the dumpster and pulled the stump to within inches of the ramp's base. When the rope was taut, she gunned the car. The roots caught the ramp and the whole kit-&-caboodle went sailing over the dumpster. I think the "Thump" it made, as it landed, was easily heard a block away.

"Plan B," she said as she sawed off the offending root, repositioned everything, and stepped on the gas.
"STOP," I yelled and signaled as I watched the stump travel half way up the ramp, tilt it, and stick solid. The next thing I knew, the dumpster, ramp and stump were all heading down the roadway at 50+ mph.

"I think a slower approach might be better," I suggest when she pulled up next to me with the afore mentioned three ring circus still behind her. She agreed.

You know what they say, the third times the charm. All went well, and we were happy to shove that bundle into the dumpster, take a shower, and head out to Outback for a nice dinner.

Oh Brother

Let me tell you that I was SORE. I was sore ALL OVER in fact. Worse, I was in that state for several days. Why? We decided to put down a new floor.

In my earlier post I noted that Angela recently had rotor cuff surgery. This all happened a few weeks before that.

Angela's arm was beginning to give her some pain, but you already know that she can't be without a project for long, and I greatly appreciate that fact. So, since we'd been talking about replacing our aging linoleum floor for months, we decided to go ahead.

First, one must take up the old before putting down our new tile. I won't even go into the joy of trying to find that bit of ceramic bliss. Trust me when I say the choices for anything with any hint of gray in it was quite limited. Anyway, cutting through the layer of linoleum was easy, lifting it off the floor was less so, but still no strain for either of us. Then came the reason for my sore arms, body, and psyche: taking up the glue.
Lots of adhesive remained on the floor. Angela quickly discovered scraping away at it was too painful. Oh yes, we spent money on miracle removers, all guaranteed to turn the glue into liquid. Don't believe the hype. They all fall into the category of Buyer Beware. Save your money and just put down copious amounts of water, let it soak, and develope some muscle as you scrape away the gunk. Even so, Angela just couldn't do it. I quickly volunteered and made her go work on "something else." I had no idea four days of scraping that impossibly difficult to remove stuff from our cement foundation would leave me hardly able to lift my arms, much less anything else. Arnold the Swartz would have been sore; Hercules would have been sore; and I was beyond sore. Angela was most complimentary, or course, but I saw the twinkle in her eyes and the quiet chuckle that followed her "nice job, atta girl, and nice bicepts."

When I finished, she patiently set about cutting and laying the tile. It was my turn to say the same phrases along with the twinkle and chuckle. The tile wasn't so heavy that it hurt her arm, but she did have to get into a few awkward positions, so she had her share of Ouch moments.

Now we sit back and enjoy the new look of our pantry, laundry room, and third bathroom. A little shared pain never hurt any marriage.

Trouble right here in River City

Okay, okay, I've been gone a LONNNNNNG time. Here's the deal: I changed my email address and blogspot wouldn't let me in. Their sign-in had the new email address, but my account said it wasn't changed, so I couldn't get in with either email address. So, I'm sorry, but I am still trying to fix that. I finally got in using the old email address that I had changed because THEIR system didn't automatically put in the new address FINALLY after weeks of attempts!

Otherwise, the trouble is we seem to have a beastie or water under the kitchen floor. Whatever it is, we have a little hillock that rises between our kitchen and dining area from time to time. The tiles sound hollow, which means they're no longer attached. It's probably water, but I'd rather it be a gopher, rabbit, or mole (we have all three living on all sides of the house, so why not under?). Whatever it is, we're going to have to fix it. Dast-Oh-Dear, as the heroine might say.

Now, we just finished putting new tile down in the pantry, utility room, and small bathroom (that'll be another blog). THAT was a BIG job. Now, we can only hope we can salvage the tile from this area or we'll have to get new tile for the whole kitchen and dining area. Of course we won't be able to match this fifteen-year-old tile, we all ready know that. Dang. I like this tile. We don't want to do that because one, it'll be expensive, and two, we will soon be starting the cooler rainy season. Okay, Fresno isn't known for lots of rain, but we know that if we start a long project now, we'll end up with an unusually wet fall - so says Murphey's Law - right?

The good news is, I have a reliable tile person in Angela, the bad news is she tour her rotator cuff and is facing surgery. What now? We'll delay this must-do for awhile. My T does know how to take a day off now and then, so I'll just have to stretch that into a month of recovery time. I'll keep you posted on how that goes IF I can can in.

A Crappy Weekend

Okay, I confess that it wasn't all crappy, but . . .

You see, it all started durring a lovely RV outing. We had a wonderful time with everyone in our delightful RVing Women's group. The food, conversations, and doggies and kitties were great, but Saturday was very wet. I love my dogs, but neither wet fur and muddy feet, nor removing stickers are high on my Fun Monitor. After a riotious Trailer Trash dinner with the group, we returned to our coach to prepare for a quiet, dry, peaceful night. Angela went out to dump the tanks while I took the puppies for a walk. When I returned, Angela was still outside. I opened a window and asked, "Need help?"

"Nope," came the reply. Ten minutes later, however, she said, "Okay, I need you outside."

That did not bode well. First of all, it was raining madly, and it was 11:30, well passed Angela's bedtime.

"It seems the RV park's sewer hook up for our rig is backed-up or blocked," Angela said. "The rain could be the cause, but if that was so, the whole park would be in trouble. So, that means we're stuck with the problem. Of course, the office is closed too."

She didn't have to tell me that meant we really had a problem. What were we going to do with a sewage hose full of well, sewage? The good news was that the park link in the spot next to us was working. But, it was 40 feet away. Fortunately, we carry extra sewage hose for this sort of problem. Unfortuately, we usually know about the issue before we are hooked up for two days and can make the alterations before any thing fills the hose.

I could see by Angela's bussling around, getting out hoses, and thoughtful expression that it was going to be me holding our 'difficulty" for this switcheroo. I had visions of spending all day Sunday cleaning up a huge, smelly, yucky mess, even though it was not technically our fault.

With a great deal of care, Angela removed the sewage line from our rig and with much trepidation coaxed a bit more sewage into the park's input, unhooked it, and dripped more yuck into the near overflowing gap. Then, with a towel wrapped around it, just for me, she handed me that end too. Now, a 20' long 3" diameter hose filled with gunk is heavy, and rain was rapidly dropping into the upturned ends - splash, splash, splash - as I stood there with my hands full and my nose turned away.

She gingerly put extensions on each connection, hooked up to the rig, and then we inched our way over toward the new hole. She connected it slowly, but nothing happened! Dang. Okay, worse than Dang. You see, the new receptical was ever so slightly uphill. We have an 8 foot declining contraption to help with that, BUT, we now had 60 feet of hose slanting the wrong direction. It was not going to drain.

After the cloud of blue words dissipated, we got down to pulling lumber out of the rig's storage areas, looking for rocks, sticks and anything else we could use to overcome the problem.

It took half an hour more, but in the end, sewage was flowing, we'd had a nice warm shower and a few laughs. We crawled into bed and I said, "I'm so glad you thought of that towel."

Yes, it's a great thing to be married to a T.

It's just a little switch

I was dusting today. Simple, huh? Welllllll, let me say that doing so resulted in a mornings worth of work. You see, while doing my house cleaning, I dusted over a light switch and turned it to the OFF position without noticing that I had done so. Horrors! Dast, oh dear! Damn!

This particular switch controls the electricity to all the lights and plugs in the living room, dining area, kitchen, utility room and smallest bathroom. When none of these rooms would light up for me to continue my cleaning, I called for Angela, our Miss Fix-it around here. The rest of the morning was dedicated to testing switches, throwing fuses, running down electric cords and all other sorts of electrician-type stuff that I don't understand. All to no avail, I might add.

When every test had failed, and while we contemplated the need to call a professional out on a Saturday, we both took a break. Angela happened to pass by the switch. She stopped dead and called me, "Oh, Jonni . . . Could you come here a moment?" When I saw her standing there, I immediately realized what must of happened. Too bad neither of us thought to check there first.

She switched it to on, and "Voila! Let there be light!" she said. She is a miracle worker, isn't she? I helped put everything away and quietly slunk off to my computer.

Pumphouse Blues

"It appears your pump is dead, and your grass is not doing well," said the gardener over the phone. "We're expecting hundred degree temps this week too."

This is not a good thing to hear when home is in California, and we are in New York. Needless to say, we headed home. It's not quite a 3,000 mile trip, so it was not exactly an overnighter, given that we were traveling by RV. We had one planned stop we had to make. That added two additional days to our all ready 6-day trip.

"It's the motor, not the pump," said the repairman the day after we finally arrived home to browning grass. "We can fix it in one day, but you'll have to trim some of these trees so we can get the truck with the winch into your back yard."

Now, if you've been reading this blog, you know what I think about having Angela up in trees. However, given the circumstances, and with me standing by with 911 on the speed dial, we began two days of tree trimming. We also had to take the roof off the pumphouse.

We filled the dumpster to overflowing with branches, and then had another huge pile to fill it again the next week left over. The motor was done the next day.

Our poor grass, trees and few remaining flowering plants sucked down water three times a day for four days before we saw the first signs of green shoots again. The RV finally got emptied and cleaned out. Whew!

We finally stop singing the Pumphouse Blues.