Nom de Plume

Still have to seal the floors. Now who knows when we’ll get around to the tub portion? BTW, that’s the royal we, meaning Steve.

And just for reference, this is what the bathroom looked like when we moved in. As you can see, we busted out the stuff covering the window (which Steve reinstalled) and got rid of the jog in the wall to frame the tub.

The front half is almost done. We still need to rip out the old tub, lay new tile, install the new (to us) clawfoot, and put in new drywall.

It’ll be a while. But hey, I can live with that.

So the plan is to tile up to the bath tub, put up trim, reinstall the toilet and the sink, and then go on vacation. After vacation, we’re dealing with the tub side of the equation.

Steve put down subflooring and measured out the tile. I cut out the black tiles and laid out the pattern.

This is what it loooks like with all the white tiles removed.

While we were gone, Nicki took care of Harry. She just sent me this picture, which is pretty darn cute. The dog in front is Sasha, the latest addition to her household. Sasha is a very smart little dog — and even more of an accomplished escape artist than Willie.

Today, Steve was going to take out the toilet and start laying the tile. It is not going according to plan. Every half hour or so, he bellows expletives while I rush over and say, “What?! What?!” and the dog scoots under the dining room table as fast as his short little legs will carry him.

First, he discovered that someone had cut out an entire section of the beam below the toilet. There was no support at all. Apparently, the give would make the tile crack; it needed to be replaced.

So off to McClendon’s he went to get a joist and down into the basement he hauled it. There are pipes right underneath where it was supposed to go, which meant it didn’t fit. He managed to plane down two inches at the edge of each side, and hammer it into place. Abd of course, a regular hammer wasn’t big enough, so he used his antique railroad hammer.

Actually, it worked really well. Five hefty swings on each side and the board was in.

He had just started to take out the toilet when I went to the library ($31.10 in overdue fines, thank you very much). When I came back, the dog was back under the dining room table. Turns out the wood under the toilet is rotten and needs to be replaced.

To be continued …

Well, here we are. We spent the weekend at Steve’s uncle’s ranch in Indiana for the big family shindig. It was fun, but the drive was pretty long for the amount of time we spent there. Now we’re back in Rockford, and Steve is off doing handyman stuff at his Grandma’s house. I, on the other hand, am comfortably settled in a squishy couch in a coffeeshop, basking in the rays of their free wireless. It’s an addiction, I tell you.

No e-mail for a WEEK. Will I survive?

I threw down three chick lit novels in disgust before picking this up with a heartfelt sigh, thinking it would be another waste of trees. But the character Elle was so weird that I was instantly hooked. Elle lives in Santa Barbara, ekes out a living as a phone psychic, and actively resists her architect boyfriend’s attempts at making her improve herself. Nothing seems to faze her, like having her dressing room striptease taped and posted on the Internet. Very fun.

Steve, whom I love dearly, has developed this irritating habit of seizing all the novels that I’ve waited through 267 holds for at the public library, taking a long time to read them, and then giving me no time to read them before they’re due back at the library. Fortunately, he really liked it and zipped right through. “I was expecting it to be really literary,” he said, “but it was more like a mystery.”

Indeed it was. Barnes retells the (true) story of George Edalji, the son of an Indian vicar and Scottish mother who is unjustly convicted of animal mutilation, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who plays a major hand in getting Edalji pardoned. It was riveting. But it’s not just about this mystery. Barnes does a fabulous job of steeping us in Victorian England, and we come to know these two men, not just as characters of history, but as real men who are both very much products of their age. His characters manage to balance pensive introspection with the vigor of an increasingly mechanized world. Highly recommend.

I don’t think a book has ever started with such a great hook:

Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blond Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade …

Obviously, Valentina, the aforementioned pink grenade, is a golddigger, come to England in search of a better life. Obviously, Pappa’s two daughters are not happy about this. And obviously, Things Will Come to a Head. The two sisters, Nadezhda (the narrator), and Vera have not gotten along for years, but they manage to unite against Valentina. The story whips by in a brisk froth of humor and misspoken English (Pappa’s erectile disfunction, for instance, is referred to by Valentina as “squishy squashy flippy floppy”). There are hints at a darker past, as well. Lewycka draws a picture of a singular family very well, but I confess to a tinge of disappointment. It seems to me that she attempts the humor-as-a-way-to-underscore-suffering idea, but it fell just a little too far to the side of humor. And so, while I liked this just fine, it isn’t a wholehearted Recommend.

The horse, my good friends, is dead. And not only is the horse dead, but he has been ground into a bloody pulp. So, alas, has my love of all things Austen-esque

I’m sure this novel, told from the viewpoint of the inestimable Mr. Darcy, is a fine one. I’m just tired of the whole darn thing. I flipped through the pages to see where I gave up. It was the first page. I don’t even know why I bought it, though my suspicions are aimed at one of those nefarious little Borders schemes to “buy two get one free.” Perhaps this will get another go in a couple years, but for now, it’s going back to the bookshelf.

Should I be embarrassed at the sheer number of kid books on the blog lately? Probably — but I think children’s literature is more consistently good than literary fiction. Sure, there’s some good stuff out there, but I am getting more and more disgusted with a lot of the pretentious garbage that masquerades as literary highbrow. With kid’s books (and romance novels!), you know where you stand: they don’t purport to be anything more than what they are. I think kids have higher standards than adults in a lot of ways — and they’re a lot harder to fool into thinking something’s good when it’s not.

And Magyk was good. At birth, Silas Heap is spirited away from his magical family and a little girl is found and brought home. Fast forward ten years and magicians are persecuted, the missing princess is found in the Heap family, and Silas, who is the seventh son of a seventh son (and therefore very magical) is somehow helping an evil wizard take over the world. Except, of course, that he’s really not … Lovely, filled with weird and wonderful characters.

It’s really pathetic, but I was haunting the bookstore the day before this was slated for release. When I saw it on the shelf, I pounced, ran three red lights in the way home, and burst into the door screeching, “It’s out! It’s out!” Then I managed to finish it in a day and a half, despite the fact that Steve kept on hiding it (out of sheer spite). Thank heavens he was reading Arthur and George, and left me in peace.

So, Maerad’s adventure continues, but as she’s starting to come into her own powers, she’s also more aware of the darkness within her. With Cadvan as her guide, she is on a quest for the elusive Treesong — a journey that takes her further and further North. I can’t recommend these two novels highly enough. The best thing is that there won’t be throngs of people waiting for the next installment as there will be for the next Harry Potter. You know what? There should be.

It’s looking good. No, I mean the deck.

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The world is a different place during work hours. Stores and supermarkets are virtually empty. People aren’t in such a hurry; they seem to meander more. Those of us who don’t go into an office for work get used to the the leisurely crawl of the work week day that never seems to compress, no matter how busy we are. We are surrounded by silence, and in that space, little daytime dramas loom large and loud.

I am used to this. I don’t even really think about it anymore, but it’s interesting watching Steve settle into this new world. And whereas he once laughed at the minutiae I fed him in the evenings, now he participates eagerly.

Our little neighborhood is a hotbed of drama. For instance, the neighbor across the street two houses up just moved out. Turns out that when she and her husband got divorced, he agreed to make the house payments for a year. It’s been almost two years, and she simply would not move. So he stopped making the payments, got a friend to repossess, and then had his new girlfriend buy the house. Now, the girlfriend has evicted her.

So she and her two children have been spending the past few days moving. She is a nice enough woman, I guess, but boy does she yell at her kids. That’s what we’ve been listening to. Bump. Thud. “I told you not to …” “Are you listening … ?” It goes on and on. “God,” Steve said. “No wonder he left. Can you imagine living with that?”

Or there’s the Korean family across the street in the huge 50s monstrosity. They are doing major work on the house. Actually, it’s kind of depressing, because they’ve done in two weeks what it’s going to take us 5 years to do.

“Now they’re repainting,” I tell Steve.

“What color?” he asks.

“Come see.”

Right next to them, is the lady whose father was the original developer of this neighborhood. She is 101. Every now and then, she emerges from her house. It’s not that exciting, but during the day, it seems worthy of a mention.

“I saw the lady across the street,” one of us will say.

“What was she doing?” the other asks.

“Taking out the garbage.”

And of course, there are the dogs. We are surrounded by yappers. A yapper gets going, and then the next thing you know, dogs are howling, baying, yodeling, and practically mooing. “Jesus,” says Steve. “I can’t hear myself think.” I agree and then get back to work.

I had thought that having Steve home during the day would drive me crazy, but it’s not. Not at all. In fact, I feel closer to him now that he is participating in the observation of such little things with me.

*** So much for being all sensitive. Steve looked at me like I was crazy when he read this post, and told me it was all my imagination.

Nathan and his mother live in a small village in the English countryside. Nathan is, to all extents and purposes, a normal teenager — but he starts going to other worlds in his dreams, and it soon becomes clear that he is a lynchpin in this modern quest for the grail. Hemingway pulls in traditional English folklore, the science fiction of other worlds, and a slew of captivating characters. It’s a great story; the writing is fabulous. And in tone, it is excellent, reminding one of a slightly more modern, slightly more detailed The Dark is Rising

They’ve found the cup; now they must find the sword. Nathan’s story continues; he is older, and (somewhat) wiser. He falls in love with a princess in another world. His mother is struggling with the knowledge that she needs to tell him who his father really was. Again, highly recommend, though this wasn’t quite as riveting as the first, which was truly magical. Nonetheless, I am eagerly awaiting the publication of the third, and final, book.

I’ve been coming to All City Coffee in Georgetown in the mornings. Free wireless, not too crowded, a squishy couch — it’s a great getaway as Steve is hammering, nailing, sawing, and generally causing a racket. Dogs run wild around the place too, and so this morning, I trundled Harry in the car. He’s having a fine time patrolling the perimeter, in search of affection. And he’s getting it too.

Steve was going to replace the wood on top with trex (sp?), but discovered that the wood underneath was rotten. So he’s replacing that too.

It’s infected again. We’re back to a drop every two hours, and calling the vet in the morning.

Otherwise known as a lesson in how to attain white trashhood.

Steve chopped the sleeves off an old t-shirt. (Personally, I’m not sure why, but whatever. He says it’s a work shirt.)

Then he made Harry a wifebeater tee out of the remains.