Tales from the Shitworks, Part II: We’re on our third vinyl-floor-removal dude. He took a shot at the title with what looked like a spade, then gave up and left to fetch what he called “a ripper stripper,” some class of power chisel that scared the piss out of the cats but did the job on the laundry-room floor.
Now we have to get the futon out of there somehow so the crew can take up the rest of the carpet. I never liked the giant sonofabitch anyway, and I like it less now that I have to find a way of getting it up our narrow stairwell and out the back door. It was assembled downstairs when we bought it, and thus disassembly is indicated. With an ax.
Late update: The Intertubes are all atwitter with word that Lance Armstrong will not be attending Don Catlin’s Anti-Doping Science Institute. Frankly, I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I understand Lance has a note from his mom.
Old neighborhoods are cool until they aren’t. Like, when sewer work in the alley leads to sewage in your basement.
I had deadlines out the wazoo yesterday — a column and cartoon for Bicycle Retailer & Industry News, online editing for VeloNews.com, and a cartoon for VeloNews the magazine — so I was pretty much nose to grindstone all morning while the sewer guys labored outside my office window. When finally I leaned back to look around, it struck me that I hadn’t seen Miss Mia Sopaipilla lately; she wasn’t in her donut atop the ‘fridge, so I wandered downstairs to see what she was up to.
R2D2's granddaddy supervises lesser units as they work to absorb the shit-mist in what used to be Herself's basement office. Her walk-in closet and the laundry room are down here, too.
What she was up to was viewing with alarm from the window shelf in Herself’s bathroom, which was covered wall to wall in sewage that had fountained up out of the toilet, soaked the adjoining carpet and spilled into the laundry room. Ay, Chihuahua.
So I pull the dividers out of a couple wine boxes and lay down a cardboard boardwalk into the crapper so I can rescue the cat. Bad idea. Think of trying to rescue the radiator fan from a running auto engine. My Bicycle Colorado T-shirt looks like something out of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Let’s try this again later, I thought, with some oven mitts, a cat carrier and maybe a pistol. First let’s chat with one of these Ed Nortons outside.
Oopsadaisy, says Norton, who calls his supervisor, who calls his supervisor, who calls a “mitigation crew” that arrives in what looks like a SWAT van and starts swamping out the basement with pumps and pressure washers and a laundry list of various tasty chemicals. Now it looks like we’ve had the Irish in — carpet pulled up in vast swaths, ditto vinyl flooring, drywall sawed away, furniture piled up in a dry corner. Three massive dehumidifiers have been running since about 9 last night, sounding like a Nazi U-boat on the run from Limey destroyers and periodically tripping a breaker that crashes my entire office. Nothin’ but a party.
The toilet has to come up, a couple walls have to come down, and then will follow the rebuilding, recarpeting and repainting, all while the two of us try to get our own paying work done (yes, that basement was Herself’s office before it turned into a sewage lagoon). Half our house rendered uninhabitable in one fell swoop.
But the cats sure like it. Ordinarily confined to the basement come bedtime, they got to spend the entire night upstairs, either leaping in and out of bed like furry jacks-in-the-box or draping themselves across my legs for a refreshing snooze. Sure glad someone could sleep.
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