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.