
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and call it fall.
(Rimshot.)
Got back from Bibleburg last night after a week of what you call your basic flurry of activity:
• Meetings with our lawn guy, a painter, and a real-estate agent about Chez Dog.
• Relocating from the old home place to a north-side hotel and back again.
• Cleaning the joint three times (once after an Airbnb guest, and twice after me).
• Reglazing one broken lower panel in a self-storing aluminum storm window.
• Washing the other 15 windows and replacing those lower panels removed by asshats who failed to grasp the concept of the self-storing aluminum storm window.
• Replacing the screen doors with the storm doors.
• Chatting up a half-dozen or so friends and neighbors (and catching an escaped dog for one who suffers from reduced mobility).
• Two rides and two runs.
• The watching of a series of astoundingly shitty movies, which reminds me of why we jerked the cable out of the wall all those years ago.
• And finally, exactly zero cycling journalism.
This last caught up with me today, when I had to crank out a column and cartoon at high speed for Bicycle Retailer. But I think the downtime doing other chores helped free the mind after a disturbingly long stretch of creative constipation.
The sight of me with a tool in hand, for anyone who knows my mad home-repair skillz, conjures up the image of the hominid from “2001: A Space Odyssey” flailing around him with a thighbone. Nevertheless I managed to dismantle, clean and restore all those goddamn storm windows with nothing more than a putty knife, a hammer (my favorite tool), a quart of Windex and a great deal of profanity, especially when I was up to my hips in a shrubbery using hammer and knife to liberate an upper window panel from its prison of paint.
But sparkling windows and a fresh coat of weather-be-gone on the decks should help Chez Dog show a little leg when the suckers come strolling by. It’s been a great little house to us, but as an Airbnb rental it’s proven a little tough to manage from six hours away, and it’s time it was a great little house to somebody else.
