Need the heat to break. I hate to whine about it, but it's starting to affect my overall attitude. I'm fatalistic by nature, and the constant, unrelenting heat and dry is adding a measure of apathy that is really dangerous. It's started to bleed into my overall attitude - home and work. Not good.

I discovered last weekend that the dry conditions have exacerbated all the problems in our foundation: the blocks on the North end of the house are literally being shifted apart from one another. There are gaps in some places wide enough to stick a pencil into. I'm not panicked about it: it's on a gable end, thus non-load bearing, and there is a second foundation (actually a first foundation, to be technical) just three feet inside it, so having the outer foundation crumbling won't cause the house to collapse, but it's just One More Thing.

The yard is dead - I don't think it's just dormant. I've never seen it as dry as it is; even the crabgrass couldn't survive. The only things living are the carpet weed and scraggly mulberry bushes trying to gain a foothold. We've kept the vegetable garden and the herbs watered, but other than that I am content to let the lawn languish. I've put a lot of work into the lawn over the last several years, but...as I said, apathy.


Seamlyne has more paid orders in its queue at this moment that it has ever had in its history, and most of them came in within a few days of each other, and a variety of regions are represented. The only scary part is that several of them have deadlines within a few days or weeks of each other, so keeping up with them will be a challenge. We can do it, though, I've no doubt of that.


The day job hasn't changed much. For one of our projects - adding a data push from our system to a third party - I am at the mercy of the third party, and they are notoriously slow and unhelpful. A fair chunk of money depends upon the completion of the project, and I've no confidence that it will happen in a timely fashion.


Several weeks ago I committed to some fence repair for a friend who is putting her present home on the market. I'm replacing about a hundred pickets. I made this commitment while the temperatures were still reasonable and like an idiot put off the work, little reckoning that the temps would rise and stay above a hundred degrees. I'm about half done, working last Saturday and Sunday morning. The fence is in shade and it wasn't actually that bad.

It has been a while since I put that kind of effort into that kind of activity, and my hands - even now, three days later - are sore and don't want to make a fist. I feel the strain deep into my wrists and forearms. It's a good ache, because it means that I did something.

It turned out to be quite the weekend. We got a lot of gardening done, in spite of a persistent migraine for Michelle. In the garden now we have cucumber; zucchini; bell peppers, poblano chilis; two tomato plants (couldn't tell you what kind, those are all Michelle's). Left to plant are garlic (which we won't harvest for a year and a half), bush beans, and potatoes.

It looks like the shed I hoped to finally build is going to have to wait yet another season. Our front porch, which has been cracking for many years but has remained basically whole has started to crumble: the bottom step lost a corner, the other steps are showing cracks, and it will only get worse from there. Time to pull out the sledgehammers.

The gas meter and line to the house is inches from the porch, so the plan is to demolish the porch - a reinforced concrete slab on a foundation of cinder blocks - a little at a time, starting at the meter and working back from it. I'll take the rubble a bucket at a time and find a place to dump it on some back country road between home and work. The slab will go first, then I'll take down the cinder blocks, taking care to preserve them for future use.

The new porch will be long and narrow, about 5' x 15', and extend from the South edge of the existing porch to under the double-window in the living room. It will have a railing of turned spindles.

To that end, this weekend I installed a new storm door on the door to the side porch, and we'll use that entrance from now on, until the new porch is safe to use.

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Random thought: it's been several years since I took out the wall between the living room and the dining room, creating the arch and opening up the space. Late at night, though, I still mentally go for the light switch where the wall used to be.

The day was productive, but not in the way I thought it would be. I had thought I'd get a dye job done and maybe assemble the tights once the fabric was dry, but I just decided to get the basement wiring project finished. That's the way things typically get done around here: I Just Decide to get something done and I work on it until, 1. the projects actually does get done; 2. I run out of money; or 3. I run out of time.

For years - decades, really - to have light in the basement where my shop is has meant pulling a cotton string attached to an ancient ceramic bulb socket, and there were four. Two of them had four-foot fluorescent lights plugged into them so there has always been plenty of light, but you had to walk through a dark basement to turn on the light farthest from the door. Kind of a pain. There was one set of lights actually controlled by a switch, but the switch was placed in a spot convenient for the way I once had the shop configured Way Back When, but not for several years since.

When we first made Seamlyne a business back in 2000 - officially, not the paying hobby it was for a decade before that - we bought two commercial sewing machines on credit. No way those could go upstairs, so I began the process of finishing the basement as well as I could. The job is about half done, having reached a point of stasis: done enough that it looks like an actual room instead of a concrete block dungeon, as long as you don't look between the shelves at the back. With carpet, pictures on the white-painted walls, a table lamp, and track lighting to supplement the harsh task lighting over the cutting table, it can be quite comfortable down here (where I happen to be writing from at this moment.) There's even a worn old loveseat, much the worse for wear, but still sittable.

If you count the spare refrigerator, a hotplate, and large plastic shop sink, there's even a rudimentary kitchen. It's got all the amenities except for a bathroom, which I simply don't have the money for - below grade, it would have to be a toilet that pumps waste up, and those are très expensive.

...except for light switches by the door. Now we have them. I divided the basement into two zones: laundry, close to the door; and shop, away from the door. The exposed ceiling is starting to look like a bowl of noodles, but I'm okay with that. It's messy but safe, and all to code, or will be after I go to Lowe's to pick up covers for the junction boxes. 

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Michelle woke without a headache for the first time in about two weeks, and so We went to the Nelson Atkins Museum, our first family outing in quite a long time. The kids loved it for about the first half hour. Jami particularly liked the Egyptian section, especially the mummy. Surprisingly, Katie liked the Asian section.

Before we left for the museum, Michelle started to feel the headache and so took a preventative dose of medicine. Before we left the museum, however, her headache spiked and we were constrained to get lunch to go and just come home. She took a percocet and retired to the family room. Since a dye job can't really be interrupted once started, and since I didn't know if we'd be making a trip to the ER for Even Heavier Meds, I came downstairs to install light switches.

I can already see what I want my next wiring project to be, though I'm in no rush - it's just a re-route and not critical. The circuit I tied into for the laundry-side lights also powers the furnace, and I want the furnace to have its own. I'll run another 15amp circuit if I must. I know how at least.

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As to the tights, I'll make them tomorrow. 

The ceiling is done. I started in earnest about 1:00 and started sweeping up the mess about 5:30.

I replaced a three foot wide strip across the width of the room - that's it in the picture there on the right (click for the large image). I played it smart, using my Dremel and a spiral bit to remove small, manageable pieces of the drywall - a drywall saw would have put a lot of shaking into the material and possibly pulled down more than I wanted. There was dust, yes, but not the amount I expected largely due to the facts that I held the nozzle of my shop vac close to the tool , and the insulation between the joists didn't just fall out like I thought it might. The insulation stayed put, and everything went very well...

...Until a large piece of the affected ceiling fell on my head and back. The piece was about two feet wide and five feet long and it felt like the entire house had collapsed on me. With it came dust and termite poop and mouse turds in a long cascade down my neck and back, in my hair and inside my shirt. Thankfully, I was wearing safety glasses and had my mouth closed at the time. (The kids were safe: Katie was grounded to her room and Jami was watching from a safe distance.) I went to the front porch and stripped to the waist, and Michelle toweled me off.

My back hurts in a line just above my bottom ribs, but I can't tell if it's from having a sheet of gypsum fall on me or from working overhead all day.

In any case, there were three joists exposed by the work.  The first joist I sistered with new wood (mostly to give myself a nailing surface), the third was already sistered on the non-work area-side and didn't need anything. The second joist, however, was more eaten away than I thought: I went to grab hold of it to move one of the roof supports and it crumbled in my hand. Termites had turned it into an empty shell of a board, crushable with no more effort than crushing an empty beer can. That one I replaced completely, and removing it was easy.

After that, new insulation went in, new drywall over that and I have a few more seams to mud than I originally planned on for this project.  I'm okay with that.


In other news, I got me a bicycle. I've been wanting one for several years and one of our neighbors sold me his for ten dollars out of his garage sale. It's an 18 speed mountain bike, lightweight and bouncy and electric blue. The rear calipers need adjusting, the whole thing needs to be oiled, but it's a smooth ride for all that. We didn't have any available cash, so Katie lent me the money.

Yeah, my daughter bought me a bike. Cool, huh?

The worst part is over: the new header over the South window, bridging the termite damaged wood, is in.

It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, though still dusty, dirty, and unpleasant. Decades-old chewed-through wood and a whole lot of termite poop is no fun when filtered through a circular saw running at several hundred RPM.

What I didn't know going into it was that the exterior sheathing was also weakened, so when I pulled on the cut sections of the studs being displaced, a hunk of sheathing broke off. The siding wasn't damaged so the envelope of the building is still (more or less) intact, though come Autumn and cooler weather I'll need to remove the siding in that area and install new sheathing. No problem, I've done that before.

The only things left to do in the room are to finish hanging the drywall, mud the seams, paint the walls, trim the windows and doors. In project order, they also happen to be in descending order of ickiness, so as I said,

The worst part is over.

I'll bring the full story later, but let me offer this as a quick update.

Friday evening, I started removing drywall from the front wall of the living room. Nothing new there, the usual frustrations. There are a few wiring why-the-hell-would-you-do-that's (which I will repair as part of the project), but no real surprises, except...

I already knew there was termite damage on the south end, but I didn't know the extent. There was quite a lot, so much so that I'm going to remove a portion of the framing and insert a header into the wall just to bridge the damage.

Oh, and a couple studs that don't attach to anything except the exterior sheathing. Like I've never seen that before.

I'm documenting the process and when the full story is told it will include pictures.

Today, I had just enough time to visit Lowes to pick up all of the relevant supplies before we made the long journey North to visit Kate and Rob for really good BBQ and an even better movie. (Wabash and Open Range.)

I've a project that has to be done for work for Monday morning, so the wall will have to wait. I've got a few more hours on that. I had hoped to have the wall up, mudded and primed by tomorrow night, but obviously that's not possible - not with sleeping and meals in there.