Well, so much for that Friday morning ride. Regular readers will recall the Shit Monsoon and the clusterfuckery that ensued immediately thereafter — it continues this week with the delivery of a second wrongly sized bathroom door. As in No. 2. Hey, it’s a cheap joke, but that’s all I can afford.
These things are custom-built, and take about six weeks to arrive, so when the second botched door shows up all a guy can do is laugh. Rage is absolutely useless. Trust me, I’ve tried both, and I like laughter a lot more.
So instead of going for a pleasant road ride with my boys Big Bill McBeef and Dennis the Menace, I’m sitting on the back deck with a laptop, watching Mia Sopaipilla tear around the yard and waiting to hear whether the second door can be made to fit. I expect Jim Morrison will rejoin The Doors for a Back From the Dead Tour before that happens.
Seven weeks after the shit monsoon, the basement is 99 percent finished. Drywall, carpet, vinyl and tile all have been installed and Herself’s office and bathroom resurrected. All we’re waiting on is a special-order door for the loo. Until it arrives, Herself will have to endure visitations from Turkish and Mia Sopaipilla while she is perched atop the throne, thumbing though Vogue.
Upstairs, the dishwasher, which blew up at about the same time as the basement, has been repaired. Everything removed from downstairs has been returned to its rightful place or disposed of, and now a guy can walk from room to room without twisting an ankle or barking a shin.
Seven weeks ago, this crapper was a shithouse.
While the basement was undergoing its restoration, every square inch of upstairs storage in this place was filled to overflowing, and I went through it like Sherman did Georgia.
The oldest Macs and various accessories went to the recycler — the Quadra 650, the Power Computing PowerBase 200MT, the PowerBook 2300c with MiniDock, a Tandy laptop, a UMAX SCSI scanner and an HP inkjet printer. The office G4 450MHz “Sawtooth” Power Mac, two MacBooks, two iBooks, a G3 500MHz “Pismo” PowerBook and an Asus Eee PC survived the purge, so we’re not exactly back to chisels and tablets here.
Meanwhile, the Sawtooth has been enhanced with a 250GB FireWire drive, so I can finally back up its internal drives, one of which has been making some dire noises of late (it’s only 10 years old, f’chrissakes). That will have to wait for tomorrow, however. Today I’m in the barrel at VeloNews.com, where the chamois-sniffers will soon be congregating, desperate for news about Lance Armstrong’s collarbone surgery.
I never got surgery for either of mine, probably because my health insurance sucked. And I could have used a little savvy knifework on the second break, which was nasty. Says my doc: “The good news is, as long as all the fragments show up on the same bit of X-ray film, the break will heal. Eventually.”
. . . the basement has turned green. Six weeks after the shit monsoon, we finally have our basement back. Well, kinda, sorta. We’re still missing the door to the loo — a special-order item, and Pan only knows when that will arrive — and none of Herself’s gear has been moved back downstairs yet. But at least two people can pee simultaneously around here without one of them being outdoors or employing a sink.
That final week was a hectic mother. Herself was mostly out of town, I had work to do for VeloNews.com and Bicycle Retailer, and all of a sudden the big push was on, with construction types trooping in and out at all hours with glues and solvents, pads and carpets, tile and vinyl. Plus I had a house guest due in, an old college roomie and fellow ink-stained wretch, and I didn’t want him to be sleeping on the coffee table and peeing out a living-room window, although we both have done this in the past. Never went over big with the neighbors.
The plumber finally paid a call the morning of the day my buddy was due to arrive. Seating the toilet was no problem, but the pedestal sink took a bit of doing; we had decided to go with tile in the crapper instead of the original vinyl, and the additional height of the floor means the sink now has a slight tilt toward the wall. I’ve spent many an enjoyable evening tilted toward one wall or another, and occasionally a floor or ceiling, so I don’t have a problem with an off-kilter sink.
Herself and I picked out vinyl, tile and carpet yesterday — now all we have to do is wait for the flooring dude to clear our choices with the property-restoration folks, who no doubt must consult the turd-herders. Then we’ll be in business, maybe, assuming that the contractor who handles the installation will not be buried in some other nightmare project.
Lots of other projects in greater cosmopolitan Bibleburg are playing red light-green light lately. A massive development project on North Nevada past Garden of the Gods has been dialed down to a Costco for the moment, while a similarly ambitious project on South Nevada has been placed on hold altogether.
One suburban-renewal project is continuing apace, however. Jimmy Dobson has stepped down as chairman of Focus on the Family. Dobson plans to spend his twilight years instructing his grandchildren in the dark arts of Republicanism, homophobia and hypocrisy while struggling to master a Biblical magic trick — stuffing a camel through the eye of a needle.
I remember when there used to be something called “the off-season.” No longer. Websites don’t like downtime, and so there’s always something needs doing over at VeloNews.com.
My days in the barrel as online editor at large are Monday and Wednesday. Come important events, like the Amgen Tour of California or any of the grand tours, it’s all hands on deck for the duration of the cruise.
It’s not physically demanding work; there’s no heavy lifting to strain the back, though calluses on the brain are a common occupational injury. But it can be wearisome, especially amid distraction and when combined with other tasks.
The resurrection of the basement has begun with a vengeance, and work crews have been scuttling in and out of there like roaches, dismantling the futon and carting it away to storage, replacing drywall and sealing concrete. This both disturbs and fascinates the cats, who as a consequence have been spending far too much time confined to my office. Turkish loathes and despises all characters of the two-legged persuasion, while Mia just wants to gallop downstairs and leap into the middle of it all.
So yesterday I had a basement full of drywallers and an office full of cats while I pushed pixels around the website in consultation with various colleagues, banged out two columns and a cartoon for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News and tried to diagnose a couple fresh computer issues that popped up like virtual Whack-a-Moles (O, the joys of working on 10-year-old equipment). No healthy, restorative exercise was to be had, but there were a couple bottles of wine in the kitchen and so recreation of a sort was available.
Today it’s more drywallers, and perhaps carpet and vinyl selection. But that’s not until the afternoon. And so with all deadlines met and no pixel-pushing until Monday, I think I’ll get outdoors for a couple hours and run a little fresh air through my headgear.
Late update: Damn, leave the office for an hour and look what happens: E.W. Scripps Co. throws the Rocky Mountain Newson the scrapheap. I know at least one journo’ there — Chas Chamberlin, a former VeloNews art director — and I sure hope he can land on his feet. It’s an evil job market out there for us ink-stained wretches. But it looks like The Denver Post is picking up a few lucky sorts.
Meanwhile, Google is sticking a toe in the local-news market with Patch, a new online venture that aims to provide local reportage in backwaters ignored by cash-strapped newspapers. Public service or another step on Google’s march to global domination? We report, you decide. Thanks and a tip of the green eyeshade to Indiedoc on Twitter.
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