We’re quickly approaching time to paint. No one has really decided completely on colors in their own personal space, but the kitchen, living and dining are pretty decided.

The floors we chose throughout the house (except the tile remains in the bathrooms) are like slate with white wood grain. It’s kind of like old bleached barnwood only with alot more contrast. The kitchen and dining will be lavender and orange respectively. The kitchen cabinets will be a pale ash and the countertops are dark mottled blue/purple/green/slate. The living room will be a hard to describe shade of green that is called “Salted Ash.” The green in the living room and the orange in the dining room tie into the coloring of the paintings that hang in those rooms. Those two colors will meet at the fireplace over the french door.

With the totalling of my car, we’re down a vehicle and although the at fault driver’s insurance paid for a rental for me it was due back on Friday. Not that Allstate could be decent enough to give us any notice of that. The guys at Enterprise were nice enough to call Bucky Friday afternoon and ask us if we knew, but of course it was in Dallas with me and I didn’t get home with it until after they closed. We took it up Saturday morning and the guy at Enterprise said not to worry about it, which was very cool of him, but again left us a car short.

Having talked it over off and on last week we decided I would take over driving the Dodge behemoth and Bucky would get something else because I didn’t want to add another car payment to the family budget and another vehicle otherwise in our pricerange for me would be a piece of shit that would drive me nuts and likely waste money and Bucky’s time on repairs, while it wouldn’t be too hard to find something reliable enough for Bucky to use as a daily driver but cool enough for him to tinker on as a toy.

I should also mention that the day after my wreck Bucky was at work and had the edge of a ditch crumble under him, dropped about a foot and a half and landed with his knee locked and tore a ligament in it, so he’s on workman’s comp, at home and going crazy with boredom and scheduled for arthroscopic surgery on Monday.

Needless to say he was able to find the time to scour Craigslist. He was about to get a project truck when the tree fell but of course with that and everything else since, it never happened. Well he’s got one now, and she’s a doozy (in a good way lol). ‘63 Chevy longbed fleetside. He’s absolutely thrilled and I can’t argue. Not only is she in beautiful shape other than some oxidization on the paint and some minor wear and tear that is more than expected considering that she’s 45 years old. Currently no heater or AC, the driver’s window only rolls down 2 inches, there’s a couple pieces of trim missing and a few other things but nothing important.  Several in fact are just the kind of thing that will give Bucky something to tinker with that keeps him from losing his marbles this week without being overly strenuous on his knee right now. And the guy who had her just put in a brand new engine and transmission so she’s perfect for a daily driver. There’s all of 6000 miles on them. All that and the guy let that truck go for $2900 apparently because his wife was making him. Something I will never understand.

We’ll probably trade in the Dodge on something more fuel efficient for me soon, but I gotta figure out what I’m looking for.

I’m really not happy with the train right now. Monday I got back to my car after work to a warning that I was parked illegally, which I was. Hurst-Bell station doesn’t have enough parking. It never has. Every day there are 10-15 cars parked in not-parking-spaces because there’s no where else to park. The lot is full before 8AM every single day and was long before gas hit $4/gallon and a bunch of new people started riding the train. No one parks in a fire lane or blocks anyone else in, we just all park at the ends of rows next to the curb islands and anywhere else out of the way. The parking lot is landlocked between the tracks, Bell Helicopter, Bell’s parking lot (which has a big sign identifying it for employees and visitors of Bell only) and (what I assume is protected) marshland, so it’s not like they can even expand it to add more parking unless they build a garage.

I drove to work yesterday because I was running late, but I got an earlier start today got my coffee and drove to the train station. As expected there wasn’t a single parking space, so - not wanting to get my car towed or booted - I headed for Centerport which is the next station down the line. Have I mentioned it was pouring down rain this morning? I got about halfway to Centerport on Trinity and got rear-ended and thrown into a telephone pole. I’m fine. My car is not. Trinity is a very bad road to be on in the rain. There were no less than seven wrecks (counting mine)  on that quarter mile of road in the two hours I was out there. There is no such thing as a safe speed on it when it is wet. My wreck was the worst of them, everyone else pretty much checked bumpers, traded insurance and drove off, including (after about an hour or so) the guy who hit me.

I hate 2008.

They ripped the rest of the roof and ceiling out of the kitchen, dining and living rooms on Tuesday. That made all three rooms really surreal. They also managed to rip out all the tile and laminate that are being replaced, which revealed not one but two kinds of really old, really ugly and now water damaged linoleum under the laminate in the bedrooms. I didn’t have time to make it over to the house on Wednesday, but by last night they not only had the whole roof put back together and were there late putting shingles on but had also stripped all the paneling in the living and dining rooms.

The new trusses and everything else for the roof were delivered yesterday. And the construction guys were obviously busy for the first time. Mostly just mucking everything out, but some demo. Our kitchen went from this on Friday to this yesterday afternoon. They ripped out all the cabinetry and the ceiling. The view from the other end of the kitchen, this is Friday, this is yesterday. The living room, too: Friday, yesterday. And the dining room: Friday, yesterday. Yes, that  is an even more gaping hole in the dining room roof than was already there.  You can see it better from outside, but rather than the broken trusses and mess that was there before, now it’s just open space.

We finally got the check from the insurance for the construction on the house, and got it into an escrow account with the mortgage company and got the first draw off of it. Bucky should be giving it to the contractor tomorrow.

The dumpster showed up yesterday, so they can start in on tearing stuff out, and the contractor says we should have  the first batch of materials beginning of next week. After that the first time there’s 4 days in a row without rain in the forecast they should be tearing the roof off and putting it back on. Good thing since the tarps we put on back in April to cover the holes in the roof are leaking. Actually the one over the dining room ripped in the last storm and that whole area is soggy again and more sheetrock has come down from the kitchen ceiling. I don’t know that it’s even worth putting a new tarp on since everything that’s getting wet is all being torn out and replaced anyway, but it makes the inside of the house a horrible sauna. Dumpster also means we’ll be over there this weekend sometime putting some of the tree pieces into the dumpster (not all of them, the weight of all that wood means we have to spread it across several dumpster loads).

The girl’s been at her dad’s all week. She’ll be home on Sunday and then is heading out to visit her grandmother in California at the end of next week.  Bucky’s and my 10 year class reunion is also next weekend. It ought to be entertaining. Work has finally slowed down to something approaching sanity. I can catch the train on a regular basis without worrying about working late and being stuck waiting an hour for the next train.

Speaking of the train, I’ve started crocheting again to have something to do during the ride to and from work since all my books are in storage and I don’t want to buy more right now since the shelves are too, lol. I made 4 scarves and then realized that there are only so many people I can give them to so now I’m working on an afghan. it’s going to be 6 rows of 6 squares (or 7 of 7 if I end up having to buy more yarn anyway) and each square is a different stitch pattern. I’ve got 3 mottled colors (dark purple, dark blue, and lavender) and 2 variegated (a light base and dark base both with the same purple and blue mixed in) so I’m making solid squares of each color of yarn and some that are a combination of 2 colors and some that are a combination of three.  If I make it 7×7 then there’ll be one of each in each row and column or if i leave it at 6×6 a different one will be missing from each row and column. I’m on the 5th square of the 3rd row, so the project should last me a few more weeks at least. Then I’ll have to find something else to do.

I also  finally started recreating the database on my portfolio tonight (which has been missing since I changed hosts). The structure is all there, so at least it’s not throwing errors any more.  Most of the content is still missing, but that’s the easy (if monotonous)  part.

For the first time since April, things are almost starting to feel normal, except for the whole really missing the house part.

I have decided that 2008 is cursed. Almost everyone I know has had weird crap happen this year. Car wrecks, illnesses, pet illnesses, and all kinds of other unexpected bullshit, some worse than others, here’s ours. Perhaps you’ll see why site updates have not been particularly forthcoming.

We finally got everything together and bought a house last August. Nothing crazy, not a McMansion (they have NO yard), just a cozy 3 bedroom in a decent older neighborhood. That made Halloween, 2 birthdays and the rest of the end of year holidays insanely busy with settling in, organizing, decorating (both generically and for the holidays) plus all the normal chaos that sets in that time of year.

February we got a dog (one of many things on our “wait until we have a house with a yard” list). Moose is an adorable rescued American Bulldog mix (best we can tell). He was thrown out of a car in a 7-eleven parking lot at 4 months old with cigarette burns on his paws. Our assumption is that someone was trying to make a fighter out of him, realized it wasn’t in his temperament and threw him away. Some people deserve to be shot.

Things started to finally get settled down into a routine, even though work was still crazy busy and I was pulling lots of overtime that I don’t get paid for because I’m salary. Then, the night of April 9th/10th I was at work pulling an all-nighter on some crazy project that was due and at 3:30AM I got a phone call from Bucky that the 35 foot cottonwood in our backyard was now in our dining room. And our kitchen. And it took out the chimney on the way by, the top several feet of which (and a large chunk of roof) were in the middle of our living room. All people and pets were accounted for and uninjured. Remarkably, since I’d been home to change clothes and see if my VPN connection was working about two hours before and Fido was asleep in the middle of the coffee table that afterward was buried under the chimney top. Bucky found her cowering behind the litterbox at the intact end of the kitchen with her eyes looking like saucers. When he called, it was still raining torrentially and tornado sirens were going off so by the time I waited for the storms to finish rolling through and left my office it was dawn when I got home.

Once we had time to take stock, losses include my antique coffee table, the dining set Melissa refinished by hand, the big TV and the PS2 in the living room, Bucky’s cell phone, and a bunch of random stuff like every consumable in the kitchen that had been opened (flying insulation) or required refrigeration (no power) and towels. A note for anyone else finding themselves in a similar situation: using a closet full of towels to soak up a monsoon in your living room does nothing except ruin the towels. As for the house itself: new roof and trusses for at least that whole end of the house (kitchen, dining, living, Melissa’s office, and garage), that same area all interior walls stripped down to studs and replaced, floors replaced in everything except the bathrooms, complete gutting and rebuild/remodel of the kitchen, replacing the whole chimney/fireplace in the living room, replacing the sliding glass door (with french doors), replacing at least part of the fence outside (which the tree also landed on), and some other miscellaneous stuff. $65,000 worth of stuff and that doesn’t count belongings. That’s just to repair the house.

Yes, we have insurance. Yes, everything is covered, including “loss of use” which means that while I still have to pay the mortgage, insurance pays for the apartment we’re in until it’s fixed, the storage building the rest of our shit is in, and any other expense that wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t happened, like a hotel room until we found an apartment. Another note to anyone interested: 3 adults, an 11 year-old, 2 cats, and a 6-month-old 50lb puppy in a hotel room is not recommended for any length of time, and especially not for a week. A friend of a friend of Bucky’s happened to be the manager of some apartments and we moved there temporarily.

It was right around then that Bucky’s grandfather who had been previously diagnosed with Lou Gherig’s and kidney cancer took a drastic turn for the worse and passed away…on Bucky’s birthday.

Had the apartments we were in not been exceptionally ghetto-tastic, we would probably still be there. However, while I don’t give a fuck what anyone else decides to put in their body, I do have a problem with meth-head downstairs neighbors who put furniture together in the middle of the night, have knock-down drag-out screaming fights at 2AM on a weeknight screaming that they’re going to call the cops on each other and allow their teenage dropout son to sit outside on OUR stairs and toke up all day, every day. Go the fuck inside and conduct your illegal activities there like a functioning member of society. Our 11 year-old doesn’t need your worthless example. It took about a month for the locator to find an apartment that would accept more than 2 pets, allow pets over 50 lbs, and do short term leases, but they finally found one and we moved again.

Looking for a contractor was also fun. A couple notes for contractors here:

1. When you show up to give an estimate and are talking to someone who is there packing - even if they are not the person who asked you for the estimate - “Do you even live here?” is never an acceptable question.
2. When someone lets you in to give an estimate and tells you that if you need into a certain room to let them know so they can move their dog who is locked up in that room, “I’ll kick that dog’s ass” is not an acceptable response.
3. If you’ve wasted 20 minutes of a woman’s time pretending to make idle conversation while quite obviously waiting for the only other man present to get off the phone, when he walks up and you ask him if he’s the owner and the woman says “No, I’m the owner,” that is a warning shot. It is your one and only chance to backtrack and address her as your equal and as a capable human being. Glancing at her, blinking, and then turning away to discuss the job with the guy who you’ve just learned is NOT the owner is not an acceptable response.
4. When someone points out to you that laminate flooring has obviously warped due to water damage, don’t dismiss them by saying it’s just separated glue. Even if it they are mistaken and it is separated glue (not true in our case) the proper response is “We’ll talk to the insurance company and see if they will cover replacement,” because regardless of the necessity, if insurance will cover it, that’s more money in your pocket, and if they won’t cover it, that makes them the bad guy, not you.

Any of the above, separately or in combination will prevent you from being hired by the people you are talking to or, most likely, being hired by anyone they know in the future. We finally found a decent contractor a couple months ago, and they finally got all the permits for construction approved after waiting weeks for the city to get their shit together. We also received a code violation notice from the city the week before that saying we needed to remove the “debris” from our yard and mow. Debris = a 35 ft cottonwood chopped into manageable sections and detached chunks of our roof, eaves, etc. Had they gotten us our permits in a reasonable amount of time to begin with we would have the construction dumpsters and the debris wouldn’t be there, but try explaining that to a bureaucrat.  And we still don’t have the dumpsters. Any day now…

All in all we’ve come out pretty well, the majority of our belongings are fine (if packed away), and the majority of the construction on the house is actually a more drastic version of the remodeling that we had planned for the house when we bought it. If everything moves according to schedule (yeah, right) we should be back in the house just in time for Halloween again.

The blog has been down for months now. I’ve managed to change hosts and lose backups at the same time (of course). The most recent backup for the blog DB that I’ve managed to locate is from 2004 and doesn’t seem to match any of the site backups I have laying around. I also can’t seem to identify the wordpress version (and combination of extensions) that it was using to run, so i can’t freshly install an old version to make it work. And for some reason phpMyAdmin is being a whore and won’t import the CSV files of data I rearranged from the backup to match the fresh upgraded install of Wordpress.

I think it’s time to say fuck it. I’m missing like three years of data anyway, what’s the difference if I kill another hundred posts.

Oh, and since it’s a fresh install of a version of wordpress that’s never been run on this site before, there are a few bugs with the design on some of the skins…I’m having to create a theme that runs my skins the same way as the rest of the site does. It’s interesting, but I’ve done it before…just takes a little wrangling.

And there’s a major overhaul coming soonish on most of the rest of the site anyway.