Squirrels: gone!

I win.

It turns out that the best way to get rid of the squirrels is to take down the squirrel highway.

I wondered about the highway when I took out the dead tree - I had watched them jump from tree to tree across the yards, and was curious as to how they'd get around with the tree gone.  I needn't have worried; they quickly figured out alternate routes using the fence and the power line.

The line originally crossed the back yard at about 8'; it was easy to reach up and grab it - and the squirrels had no trouble jumping from the fence to the line and from there to the roof.  I wasn't so keen on the 8' above the ground part (I didn't know yet about the squirrel condo in the eaves; if I had, I wouldn't have been keen about the squirrel roadway part either), so when I had the foundation dug, we also buried conduit between the house and the garage.  When the outside of the garage addition was complete, I had my electrician come back and install a new meter box. (The line had to move SOMEWHERE, anyhow - the location of the original meter is now in the middle of my kitchen.)  The power company was most cooperative about coming out to move the line from the house to the new box.  I don't think they were keen about that 8' clearance, either.  From the new meter box, the line runs below ground to the new crawl-space; the main panel has now become a sub-panel off the feed.

While we were at it, we also had old cable and phone lines taken out, and the new fiber line also moved to the garage.  Which means there are now no suspended wires connecting my house to the pole.

Turns out the squirrels didn't like having their main highway taken down.  They CAN make the leap to my roof from the neighbor's house, which is only about 10' away, but it's an awkward jump.  It's uphill, and not a great angle.

So, within a week after the line got moved, they packed up their bags and moved on out.  Not sure exactly where they went - I think they just moved to the tree across the street; I see them climbing on it all the time now.

I'm happy.  The squirrels, presumably, are happy.  The cats, not so much.  One of their favorite pastimes was watching the squirrels through the screen, plotting how they could get out there to catch the little buggers.  With no rodents to watch, they've had to find other interests.  Oh, well.  Can't please everyone...

Teepeed!

No, not my house.

But last weekend I stepped outside to see the tree in front of the house a couple of doors down festooned in toilet paper.

It brought me back, way back...

Like many high school students, my friends and I thought it fun to teepee houses.  We'd round up our weapons by scrounging from our parent's houses and assorted public restrooms.  (a belated apology to those gas station and restaurant owners...)  We'd pile in my van (a discreet vehicle it was - a red and white full size Chevy van) and go to the targeted friend's house.  We'd park around the corner and gather up the missles.  We'd creep not-so-silently in the night and set to work.  I still remember how good it felt to launch a roll just right, to see it soar high into the night over the targeted tree branch; a ribbon of white arcing in the darkness, decorating the tree in ghostly strips.

One night, we decided to target David Looby's house.  There were five or six of us in the group.  We marshaled our resources and managed to come up with over twenty rolls of TP.  The Looby's had three or four mature trees in their yard; we covered them in white.  A masterful artwork if I do say so myself.

We congratulated ourselves on a job well done, and went home to sleep with satisfied hearts.  The next day, I oh-so-casually called Dave to see how things were.

"Do anything fun last night?", I asked innocently.

"Yeah", he said.  "We got teepeed and boy is my mom mad!  She's grounded me for the next two weeks.  She says she thought my friends were better than to pull such a sad stunt!  I'd better get back outside to finish cleaning up before she gets any madder..."

I felt awful.  We were out to have fun, not to get anyone into trouble.  So, I called the others in the crew, and gathered them up.  Properly shame-faced, we headed back to the Looby's to help with cleanup and to apologize for the trouble we'd caused.

Much to our surprise, when I pulled up to the house, there wasn't a shred of toilet paper to be seen.  Hoping to salvage some of our relationship with his mother (she made the BEST tubs of popcorn...), we rang the doorbell.  When she answered, we poured out our apologies.  We were so sorry, hadn't meant to cause anyone any harm, we had come back to clean it up, would she please forgive us?

She cocked her head and looked at us, puzzled.  She said she hadn't been mad at all.  In fact, she thought we'd done a capital job.

As we stood there in stunned silence with our mouths hanging open, Dave came around the corner laughing.  After a moment or two his mom figured out what had happened and joined in.  A long moment later we finally figured out the joke was on us, and our laughter melded with theirs.

But I don't recall teepeeing any more houses after that.

Saving Things for Good

Erma Bombeck once listed some of her regrets.  Among them was the line:

I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage.

The line has stuck with me, and it comes back to me when I find something ruined because I was saving it for good.

The latest was a cute little bottle of Burt's Bees lotion my daughter got for me a couple of years ago.  Why didn't I use it right away?  I don't know.  I thought I had to use up my regular lotion first.  I thought I needed to save it for something special.

Turns out all I saved it for was a trash can.  By the time I got to the bottle to open it, the mixture had congealed and I didn't get to use it at all.

I hate it when I do this.  When, exactly, do I think I will enjoy the special things that surround me if I don't enjoy them now?  Is there some just-around-the-corner tomorrow where the stars will align and I will feel I have worked hard enough to use the special instead of contenting myself with the everyday?

It's OK to eat the last of the raspberries - I don't have to save them for tomorrow; they'll be bad by then anyhow.  Likewise the chocolate.  (OK.  It'll last longer than the raspberries, but still.  How many times have I gone to the cupboard to find a delicious piece of chocolate gone gray and stale because I was saving it...)

It's OK to dip into my savings because my project is over budget.  Hoarded wealth benefits no one (that was a quote earlier this week - I looked for it, but couldn't find it again...)

It's OK to use the little bottle of lotion.  If it's gone, it's gone.  At least I would have enjoyed it.  And if I really like it, it's OK to buy more.

It's OK to treat me as if I'm special.  As if I deserve to be treated now and again.  Or even every day.

I'm going to try harder to enjoy the beauty around me.  All of the days, not just the predetermined special ones.  I know that more days could be special if I'd let them.

I will try.

Not Exactly the Ritz!

I'm deep in the slog part of my project.

It seems like I've been living in the midst of dust and debris for about a decade (I only exaggerate a little), but it's still not worth cleaning the house because we'll just make another mess within a day or two.

We've hauled load after load to the dump, but there's still more to be hauled.  (OK - I actually went with Joe to the dump with exactly one load; he's taken the rest himself.  But I have helped load them all onto the truck, if that counts for anything!)

The tear out is almost complete; the last part to go will be the bathroom walls, which will be gone sometime this week.

There's a lot left to do, and nothing, but nothing is complete.  Nor is it ready to be completed.

Living here right now is a bit of an adventure.

I still have a sink in the kitchen, and the microwave and fridge in the dining room work just dandy.

I may not have a bathroom upstairs, but we've cobbled together the necessary facilities in the basement.  Admittedly, there's not a ton of privacy down there, but we're careful to check what the basement occupant is up to before heading down the stairs.

I can't turn the air conditioner on - there are too many holes in the walls and it would be unable to keep up with the airflow.  Fortunately for me, the weather's been unseasonably rainy and cool.

This weekend's priority will be to insulate the walls; according to the forecast, I'm about to the end of my cool-weather grace period.  I've scheduled the furnace company to come out next Thursday to run the new ducts and move the air conditioner to its permanent home.

As hard as it is to see right now, we are making progress.  The framing carpenter is done, and the house is weatherproof.  I finally quit dithering and ordered all the tile, which got delivered today.  My brother will be back next week to work on the plumbing.

I'm still hoping I'll have a semblance of order here by the end of the summer.  It'll take a bit longer than I'd planned, since I'll need to finish building my kitchen cabinets without Ron's help, but I'll get there.

One step at a time.

Remodeling Break

Last weekend, I interrupted my regularly scheduled work on the house with a trip to Hastings, Nebraska.

My older brother, who has always loved Porsches, has decided to indulge his midlife crisis by racing a perfectly good, quite expensive car around in circles with other people afflicted by the same excess of money and a need for speed.

He invited us to come watch him race in Hastings this past weekend.  When you start racing, they put an X on the back of your car; sort of a 'Student Driver' sign for race drivers.  You get to take the X off after you've successfully completed four races without incident.  He'd completed two races last year, this set was to be the one where he graduated.

Curious to get a taste of a Porsche club driver's life, the kids (Kate and the baby are here) and I piled into the car and made the six hour drive after work last Friday night.

We got to the track in time on Saturday morning to watch his first practice run.  I was catching up on the latest family news with his wife and kinda-sorta watching him drive when the cars on the track all came to a halt.  You could see smoke off at the far end of the track - right about where Michael had been driving.

We watched anxiously for his car to pull off with the others, but didn't see it.  We COULD see the white roof of the car that was burning; the same color as his car.  Since the waiting ambulance didn't take off, we weren't panicked, but at the same time...

Sure enough, when his car came off the track, it was on the back of a tow truck.  Once off the track, they pulled it over to the side and doused it with water good to make sure the fire was out.  It turns out he'd taken a turn wrong, run onto the grass, got a load of alfalfa stuck under the car and the heat of the engine set fire to the hay.

I was quite sad.  We'd driven a long ways to see him reach for a dream, only to see it go up in smoke.  Little did I know.  They brought the car back to his spot, and within a few minutes he had all four tires off.  He and Joe climbed under the car to pull out all the packed grass; his wife wiped the extinguisher residue off the exterior.  By the time his first race started 90 minutes later, the car was ready to go.  I was impressed.

A couple of hours later, he had his two races tucked safely under his belt.  Relaxing in the condo after the event, he was tired, but obviously high on his well-earned achievement.  Yea, Michael!

(I'm SO glad we took the time to make the trip...)

Squirrels: 2

So, Joe and I sat down last night and constructed a squirrel exclusion door.  An exclusion door is a steel wire gizmo with a spring-loaded door, designed to allow the squirrels to exit from their penthouse suites, but not to re-enter.  Kind of a low-tech bouncer.  

I measured, Joe cut.  I climbed the ladder and did the fine-tuning on the bending.  I screwed our creation into place, and went to bed secure that I was one up on the little buggers.

This afternoon, I climbed out of my car and startled a squirrel who was hanging out on a portion of the roof where I don't normally see the nefarious pests.  He jumped, ran up the roof, and disappeared.  I stepped back a bit to see where he'd gone, and sure enough, they've made a matching hole on the north end of the house.  He was peering over the edge at me, as if to try to figure out if I'd seen where he'd gone to hide.

Back to the hardware store I go...

However, I'm not spending all of my time chasing squirrels.  Last weekend, I had a great time tearing down the walls in the kitchen.  

I found some more bad karma cooties lurking in the ceiling.  I'd suspected the bath faucets almost had to be leaking, but hadn't been worrying a whole lot about it since there wasn't any water coming through in the kitchen below.  When I got into the ceiling, I found the water hadn't been leaking because they'd green-rocked the area under the leak.  (Green-rock is a mold and water resistant type of sheetrock.)  In two layers.  The leak wasn't bad enough to come through both layers, but there was enough water to foster a healthy layer of black mold up there.  The kitchen smells much better with the cooties banished to the trash pile in the back yard.

I also got the main electrical line moved this week, from the back of the house to a new mast on the garage.  (It's buried between the garage and the house.)  The framing is moving along, and while there's still a ways to go, it's getting to where you can see the bones of the shape of the new space.  The amount of work to be done between where we are and the finished rooms is a bit overwhelming to think about, so I'm trying to focus on one step at a time.  It will get there eventually if I keep chipping away at it.

Kind of like the squirrels, chipping away at my eaves.

grrrr.

Squirrels: 1

squirrel taunting cats

The other day, I woke to the unwelcome sound of squirrels in the eaves.  again.

I cussed a bit, then went outside to see what I could see.  Sure enough, the little varmints had managed to get back into the eave I'd blocked off earlier this year.  This time, there are four of them.  Young ones, which is probably why they were initially able to worm into the hole.

I wasn't sure why the coyote urine had stopped working, but figured it out later in the day when I saw some green plastic when I was cleaning the gutter.  They'd managed to get the packet out of the pocket, and tossed it over the side, where it landed in the gutter.

I can hear it now.

"Look guys, what a great fixer-upper!"
"Yeah, but what's that smell?  It's awful!"
"It's coming from this pile over here.  Let me just get rid of it, and we'll have ourselves a great place to live."
heave.  ho.
"See?  The stench is clearing out already.  It'll be just perfect for us in no time!"

Back to Google.  No, you can't poison them - they REALLY smell bad if they die in the walls.  I can't shoot them, we're within city limits, and besides, I'd probably just take out a window or two.  Searching further, I found some designs for one-way squirrel doors.  I picked up the materials this last weekend, and plan to build me one this week, and try it this weekend.

Wish me luck...

No Good Words

my new kitchen island

When he heard I was working on my kitchen, my friend Ron offered to build my kitchen cabinets for me.  We've been friends for some 20-odd years.  He's helped me on projects before, and is the one who taught me how to sweat copper plumbing.

I was more than happy to accept his offer; I've seen his work before.  He got started on the cabinets last fall, before he and his wife went to Arizona for the winter.  He called me in late March, letting me know they were headed for Missouri.

I sent him a message a week or so later, letting him know my construction project is finally progressing, and to see how he was.  I didn't get a reply, which was unusual for him  I waited a week or so, then sent another message.  This time I got a reply that started:  Janice, this is Marilyn...

I knew it couldn't be good news and it wasn't.

Ron is dying of cancer.  I went down to his place to see him.  In just over a month, he's gone from healthy to a constant morphine drip.  He won't be alive much longer.

I am so glad I went.  He's not able to say much, and the drugs muddle his thinking, but we were able to talk some.  I told him this really sucks.  I let him know again that he will always be my hero.  I let him know I was grateful for his help and friendship over the years.  We gave each other a big hug, and cried on each other's shoulders.

But my words felt so inadequate.  What words should I have used to say goodbye when I knew it was likely to be the last time I will see him?  I still don't know.  I can only hope he understood the language of my tears.

Another Goodbye

I didn't know I still cared.  It's not like I left the church where she was choir director mad at her, it was another issue entirely.  Yet, when I left, there was some unfinished business.  It never sat quite right with me, but I also never tried to set things right.  Neither did she.

So when I heard last week that she was in the hospital with an infection, then that she had died on Good Friday, the depth of my tears surprised me.

She was a good teacher; she taught me how to cantor.  I remember when I first met her, at a workshop she led some twenty years ago.  Along with the technical aspects of singing and welcoming the congregation to sing with you, she asked, "Why do we gather as church?"  After gathering our answers, she offered her own view:  We come to share our stories.  The stories of Jesus and Moses, woven into the stories of our own lives.

I've come to believe she was right.

And so I gathered with a whole bunch of people yesterday at church.  My tears flowed freely as her nineteen year-old daughter spoke of what her mother meant to her.  I was sitting at an angle to her family - every time I looked across the church at young Christina, trying so hard to be brave and strong and to (unsuccessfully) stop her tears, I cried again.  For her and for myself in much the same place so many years ago.  Her story mingled with the readings, meshed with my own story, and I cried for her in the years to come, when her mother won't be there to guide her through the rough spots.

But her mother was a good woman.  She laid a strong foundation for Christina and her brother to build the rest of their lives upon, and they still have their dad.  He will be there for them and together, they will heal.

Beatrice Santner, rest in Peace.

Two Hour Project

see my floating wall???

I am wildly unrealistic when it comes to guesstimating how long it'll take to complete the projects I do around the house.

My brother, I'm sure, remembers well the time I asked him to swap out the back door for me.  "How hard can it be?", I think.  "Door out, door in.", I think.  "Two, three hours tops!", I think.

I was so wrong.  He pulled out the old, rotting door - and a good portion of the back wall around it was rotted out, too.  It took him the better part of a week to put the corner of the house back together.  (He did a good job - it was sound when he finished...)

So, I should have known, when I started to replace the siding on the back of the garage today, that the project would take more than the afternoon I had allotted for it.  Sure enough, we were pulling off the rotten siding, and when Joe pulled off one panel, the entire section of wall moved with it.  There's nothing securing the bottom of the wall.  nothing.

I suspected something was wrong.  The inside of the garage was freshly sheetrocked when I bought the house.  I saw the sag on the ceiling line on the back of the garage.  Old, repaired damage, I thought.  I was half right.  It was old damage.

We THINK that at some point, many years ago, someone hit the back wall of the building with enough force to knock the wall off the sill plate.  (It's been known to happen...)  If you line up on the wall, you can see where it leans out at the bottom.  In the intervening years, everyone just ignored or covered up the damage.  Even old oak rots out when it's been in contact with the dirt long enough.

We caught the problem in time, i.e. before the roof caved in.  My two-hour project now involves tearing out the finished walls on the inside of the garage, jacking up the roofline, installing a new sill plate, sistering the existing joints to get around the rotted bottoms, and tying the whole thing back together.

THEN, I can go back outside and put the new siding up.

"Two hour project.", thought I.   **sigh**