shannon_a | Entries tagged with house

Ugh.

I wake up at 8.50 or something this morning, and when I wander into my office I notice a truck sitting on the street, blocking our garage. And I wonder if it's our handyman, B., who was going to be installing side and backsplashes today to resolve one of our house crises, the finishing of the installation of the new vanity, which was way more trouble than it should have been (and quite likely more than it was worth). But I'd expected him to call first.

So I wander back into the bedroom and put on some clothes. (No shower for me this morning, on the second day running; sorry folks!) And when I came downstairs, B. comes to the door. Yep. No shower.

He installs the side and backsplashes, and he'd managed to match the piebald nature of our vanity basin, but in a darker color. Maybe it looks intentional? I dunno. It's not close enough to look like an accident. I don't like the color variation, but maybe I'd get used to it. But I won't because we're leaving in 11 days. So good enough? The whole area looks tons better than before the splash installation, because you can no longer see the uneven nature of the walls, and how the vanity is actually partially sitting in the wall. So, way better, and good enough.

And they were done before 10.00.

But the heater is also doing funny things.

Here's the whole sequence of what I hope to be our last house crisis.

1. Over the weekend, I notice the heater goes off every once in a while and the temperature drops four or five degrees or so below what it should before it goes back on.

2. Wednesday, I call a new heater repair company, and they send out R., who tells us it's the valve, which is getting too hot and shutting off, but he needs to replace several things to bring it into compliance. Fair enough. He goes to work under the house, breaks a rusty connector, doesn't have any replacements, and tells us that he'll be back with a replacement in the morning. I totally control myself. Accidents happen. But I'm really unthrilled we don't have heat overnight on the edge of winter.

3. Wednesday night, Katherine brings us a nice little space heater to tide us over. We manage to heat up the bedroom pretty well. Still, Lucy spends the last few hours of the night climbing on top of me, presumably huddling for warmth, leaving me constantly turning over as my muscles clench up due to a leaden cat lying atop them.

4. Thursday morning, I put on my clothes first thing and the doorbell rings, and I go downstairs to see a new heater repair guy, J., who I have a lot of trouble communicating with, but he and a helper disappear under the house and a while later report that it's all done, except someone will be out later with a sensor that they don't have, but it should work fine until then.

5. Thursday noonish, J. and his helper return and do something mysterious under the house, presumably replacing the sensor, and then they come up and we assure ourselves that everything is working right. It all seems fine at the time

6. Thursday night, sometime in the hour before bed, the heater starts making weird sounds, and I'm not sure it's turning off right. I watch it for a while and determine it's maintaining the heat even if there's something wacky. (I'd worried it might super-heat the house, but it doesn't.) Maybe it'll be better in the morning.

Now it's Friday morning, and the weird sounds are still happening. I shut the heater off entirely (though it still sounds like it's on) and eventually things cool down enough that I can pop the radiator cap without burning myself. It looks like the pilot light is running very high. So we constantly hear it, and it's generating some heat even when the furnace is theoretically off, because it's big enough to heat the metal in the radiator a bit. I call the heater repair place and request someone come out for a fourth time. They tell me someone will be out there after 5pm.

My work day starts and it's increasingly becoming a blur. I'm finishing up some finances for Skotos and trying to resolve some issues for RPGnet and talking with Chris about a few RPGnet topics.

I take a break to scan and email my applications for power & water service in Kauai. The power service request goes easy. We exchange some email, I later get them some more info, and then they send me info on how to get them a deposit. We should have power on the first. (As long as I pay them!) The water service is more of a pain in my tuckus. They will only accept a deposit in person or by post and oh hey, they're closed on the first. Yeah, maybe moving on the first was not the best idea. But so it goes. So I'm going to have to mail them everything.

Oh, and I get email from my shipping company with a weight and an invoice. (8000 pounds exactly, which suggests to me that they round up if their stepped scale would result in a higher cost at 7,800 or something. But that's 211 pounds less than their estimate) This all means I need to pay them so that they will actually ship my stuff. Oh hey, it's already noon and they're closed down for the day, probably having a holiday party where they're having fun. And they're really picky about how they'll receive payment so I need to add my investment banker to my TODO list to get a certified cashier's check.

I get royalties done and decide I need to take a run around Berkeley.

At Skotos' bank, I get our address updated to Chris' address. SUCCESS!

At my banker, I'm told they don't do cashier's checks, but maybe I can have them wire the money. But my shipper is already closed for the day, so I can't get wiring info. FAILURE.

At the post office, I see an hour-long line for the counter that there's no way I'm going to stand in. But no problem, I'll just use their magic machine to overnight my envelope to the Kauai water company. It's kind of an awful interface, and I need to run through everything twice ... before I get to the payment screen that utterly fails. FAILURE.

So I walk to CVS to get some stamps. But not drugs for K., because there's an awful line there too. And then I walk back to the post office to drop off my letter so it goes out today (and hope that first class is good enough). Then I walk to the UPS Store where we fight a bit about closing Skotos' box, and they agree to forward the mail for 1 month, but not the 6 months that's apparently required by law, but it's probably good enough. Then I walk back to CVS and can at least drop off my prescription, but they're too busy to process it at the time.

And I walk home.

And this is made all the more annoying by the fact that I don't have a bike. It's already been shipped. Oh, Kimberly's bike is still here, but it's got a really slow leak on one tire, and she hasn't used it in long enough that it's flat. I actually planned to use it for things like this set of errands ... until I realized that the bike pump had shipped too. Dammit.

So I finish out the work day mostly talking to Christopher about how to deal with RPGnet things as I start to move over to other stuff next year. And by the end of the day, I've still got several required things on my list TODO. I'm going to have to figure out how to manage them in the next few days or week without stressing myself out.

Because there's too much stress.

I come downstairs. The heater is still making funny noises. I wait around for the heater guy for a while.

Finally I decide I need to pick up Kimberly's drugs. I give her the full explanation of the pilot light debacle.

I get the drugs. I get some dinner. I come home. We eat. We finish up the Survivor finale. It's 8.00. There's no heater guy.

I think the amazing thing is that the heater company picks up at 8.00. The woman I talk to keeps telling me that they can send someone in the morning, and I keep asking where our 5.00 tech is. I'm really nice about it, but firm. She finally tells me she'll find out, and someone else calls back a few minutes later.

She tells me that the guy got stuck at his last job. And he'll come by tomorrow between 11.00-1.00. To fix the problem from their work two days previous.

I'm good. I don't yell at her. But when I hang up I do childishly throw the phone. Which is going in the trash in 11 days anyway.

The heater is still making funny noises.

I'm done with the day.

This was not a good weekend, because I had to frantically get everything ready for our shippers (with help from Kimberly as she was conscious and able).

I mean, we've been getting ready for the move all year, culling and giving away stuff for months and months. (Turns out that it's a lot harder to move if [1] you insist on getting rid of all your unused crap; and [2] you do your best to be ecologically responsible about it.) But, we hadn't gotten to some of Kimberly's stuff, due to her health problems of the recent years, and we hadn't dealt with places like the bathrooms, the kitchen, most of our clothes, and our Harry Potter closet.

And then we also had to separate out the things that were shipping on a boat from the things that we wanted to keep until the end and take on a plane with us (or abandon at the last minute, for some percentage of our cold-weather gear).

And yeah, we should have been doing this in the weeks previous to our shippers showing up, not the weekend before, but of course Kimberly was in the hospital up until Wednesday (and then I had friends over on Thursday, and then it was the weekend).

So I started slowly Friday night, working but also taking some time to myself in the evening, and then did the same on Saturday. But by the time Sunday rolled around I felt like I was on the eve of finals and hadn't studied at all.

(Which is ironic because our movers were scheduled to show up on Monday, which was the same day that finals began at Cal. But for once in the last decade+ I didn't care that the city was about to get a lot nicer ... because we had plenty to consume our attention at our house.)

The first goal was creating a home base in my office by getting everything out of there that needed to ship and then starting to use it to save stuff we didn't want shipped. And that took through the end of Saturday.

Meanwhile, as Kimberly was conscious we slowly went through those unsurveyed rooms. Besides moving really important stuff to save into my office and throwing really unnecessary stuff out, we also had to do some administration: for these, I put red stickies on everything that we wanted left behind (and over the course of the next two days I sometimes restickied and restickied as the stickies fell off. Because off-brand postits aren't very sticky, it turns out.)

We finished! But it was 10.30pm or so Sunday. And then I still had dishes to put away and ... I dunno what else. I only got to sit down and rest around 11.30pm, with a need to be up at 7am to reconnoiter our parking spot.

You see I'd weeks ago gotten the permit and no-parking sign for our spot for the two days our movers would be here. And I put the sign out Thursday evening to give the appropriate three days notice. No one gave it much heed until Sunday, at which point all the cars parking there became very short-term.

And then in the late afternoon, just before sunset, a trashed, grafittied mini-RV with an out-of-state license plate pulled in: one of the campers that have been illegally parking up our streets at night for the last few years, with the open knowledge and acceptance of our city council. A few hours later I was fearful that I'd need to be getting them towed in the morning, because they obviously didn't care about laws, and it'd be a whole thing because someone was living there ... and so there was relief when they moved along not long before midnight.

But still I was now worried about getting up at 7am, early enough to have someone towed if needed, before our moving folks showed up.

I awoke anxiously at 6.45, stumbled to the front window to see the space free, stumbled back to bed ... but by that point I was up for the day.

Our shippers showed up about 8.30 and I gave them a tour of the house, pointing out the red stickies showing that things were staying, and giving them verbal descriptions room by room. They then set forth to pack what I hadn't packed (and to label that which I had).

I had some silly idea that I'd be able to keep up with them and verify what they were doing and give guidance if our frantic two days and one evening of moving stuff and stickying it wasn't enough. But they had four different people each working very quickly in four different rooms. I soon realized that I just had to hope we'd got everything laid out right. I'd make a pass of the house every once in a while, and a few of the guys asked me about stuff here and there. But mostly I just had to let it go. I actually got some work of my own done while they worked.

Great guys. Very nice. Super competent. (Well, we'll see by how much of the stuff arrives in one piece, but they seemed very competent.) They even brought bolt cutters on day #2 to help me free up my BBQ (and went to a lot of effort to use them). I'd praise the company, but there are at least four different names, so I don't entirely know which we were working with yesterday. Royal Hawaiian is clearly the largest scale operation, working with local companies. And that I think is the same as DeWitt Move. And it looks like North American Van Lines is the nationwide company getting things from here to (I presume) the Port of Oakland and then (finally) I think Foster Van Lines is the Bay Area company that was doing the actual work. (And then there was a fifth name on some of the boxes! Like Someone's Moving Company!) So I *think* Foster Van Lines is who deserves the particular recognition for the great staff here (one of whom also played great music from the '60s and '70s that Kimberly I loved pretty much all of).

We're likely to pay around $13k to move what's been estimated as low as 7,500# of stuff and as high as 8,211#: it'd be $12,675 at 7,500# or $13,055 at 8,211#; and somewhat unamusingly because of their stepped rate system which is pretty much a half-assed way to make sure they get paid per container, even though they apparently have to legally charge by weight to get some sort of US approval, it'd be $12,948 at 6,999# or $13,518 at 7,999#; or if we were really lucky $11,830 at 7,000# or $12,720 at 8,000#. Which is to say: about $13k. But what I mean to say in all of that is, it's actually amazing that it's not more considering the 4-5 companies apparently involved.

Anyway, our shippers mostly finished the work on Monday. Which is what I'd kept telling them would be the case, because I knew how much I'd boxed and how much we were taking. So, they got everything left boxed on Monday, and moved everything from the upstairs to the truck, which filled it.

("I assume we're not going to have any problems fitting into a 20' container," I said, because that was a caution that Royal Hawaiian raised, before finally convincing me I should go with it, because a 40' was unlikely to fit on our street in Kauai. Our shippers laughed, because it obviously would.)

And then today two of the four-man crew came back and worked from about 8.15-10.00 and finished, which just required boxing a few things in the garage and then emptying out the downstairs.

So we have a kind of cavernous house. Our Living Room is mostly still there, because we kept our ratty couches and sofas and cat tree here, alongside our old, cheap coffee table and our "entertainment center" that's too small for modern TVs. (We got the biggest one we could fit last time we traded up our TV, but it's still hard to read letters and messages in modern TV shows where they assume you have a huge screen.) And our bedroom still has its bed, because Kimberly doesn't like it because it has big balls. (Kimberly says I should have a picture of the bed to better explain that statement, but that's a lot of work. But she also said the super-fancy word: "finials is what they're usually called". For the rest of us that means: "an ornament at the top, end, or corner of an object." So the balls are at the top of the bedposts.) And my office has its desk, because that's Skotos'. And the Dining Room as its table and chairs, because Eric is taking them.

But the art room is empty, and Kimberly's office just has a cat-scarred leather chair. And there are no bookshelves, except a couple still squirreled away in closets that need to go. And in fact there are no books other than a few library books that I have out. And I believe there are only four games, Pathfinder Adventure Card Game and three co-ops that I want to finish up case studies for before I leave, for Meeples Together.

I mean generally, there's a lot of stuff to still get rid of. Most of it junk. Some of it to be given away on the street, which works very well in Berkeley. And some of it to be given away on Craigslist or Freecycle. (I've taken pictures for that purpose of: our fireplace equipment, our cat tree, our beloved Wedding grill, our bed, Kimberly's teeny kitchen table, the coat rack, and Kimberly's antique-ish dresser.)

But we've got a big echo-ey house.

Speaking of getting rid of stuff in Berkeley. It's generally been entirely successful. I mean, I moved our CD rack out to the curb with a free sign when the shippers cleared it yesterday, and it was gone by the end of the day.

But we also had some encounters with the Berkeley sociopaths in the last day who I always assume may destroy anything put out. A nice humidifier (which would be totally undesired in Hawaii) had its power cord either cut off or ripped off, so I had to throw it away. And then this afternoon some asshole managed to rip our laminated no-parking sign free of the invisible hanging cords and threw it on the ground. And that's exactly the type of random, unprovoked, and unnecessary vandalism that I expect in Berkeley. On Friday and Saturday nights, it would be drunken students; on Monday night and Tuesday afternoon, it was probably Berkeley's ever-growing transient population.

Meanwhile, life goes on.

I have two remaining house crises.

Our heater has been getting really flaky this year. I'd hoped I'd fixed it with a new thermostat while Kimberly was in the hospital, but five days later it started shutting down for hours every day again. We got someone out this afternoon and he said it was the gas valve, which gets too hot and then shuts down, which matches with the behavior I see. But he says he needs to pretty much replace everything, because it's all original ('60s or '70s) and way out of code. So we get to replace all of the meaningful mechanical parts of our floor heater for a $1,300 that I would have preferred not to spend, because we're already way over on the move due primarily to the painting (and gardening). I'm hoping our money isn't going to get tight at the start of the year, until we sell. But, it needs to be done, else it could have a big impact on selling, and I can't even say that this was bad timing, because it had happened a few times in previous years, just not a few times a week as we've been seeing in December. (OK, maybe bad timing nonetheless.)

"It'll be a whole new heater system that'll work for another 40 or 50 years," Heater repair guy said. "I only care if it's working next month," I kept to myself. (But of course it needs to be working well or we need to disclose otherwise.)

And, we're still waiting on splashes to complete the work on our vanity and actually make it look good, but I've now got the handyman to commit to coming on Friday to do it. More money there, of course.

And this afternoon I went with Kimberly to her post-op appointment. Where Dr. R. said she's healing great, but that the continued pain she's having is unusual, bad luck having to do with a nerve, and that it should clear within three months. Which we're trying not to think is too much like what happened with her foot, but he says it's totally different.

But that should be the end of the medical marathon (other than a few lesser follow-ups that Kimberly has) and that should be the end of the house marathon (other than work that is already scheduled and hopefully doesn't need our oversight, after those crises are resolved in the next three days) and we're done with the shipping marathon (other than anything we mail at the last minute).

So, maybe things get simpler for the next two weeks? We'll see ...

A few months ago, I told Kimberly, "I never realized how expensive it is to sell a house." Because this is something that we've never done before, so it's all new to us. But we've had a number of things fixed in the house. And we've done some minor remodeling at the request of our stager. And we had the whole exterior painted. And we're having the interior painted. And we just had a landscaper out.

Now obviously we're dumping a fair amount of money into this venture because we think it will quickly multiply. When we bought the house, it wasn't exactly a junker, but it was very poorly positioned to sell. The hardwood floors were heavily worn. I mean, aside from the burn marks where candles or whatever got knocked over and left. The roof was in need of replacement. The water heater was balanced on a rickety pedestal in the back yard. A few of the rooms were painted ugly colors and there were various holes and nails and hooks in walls and ceilings. And there were students lounging about everywhere (and as we'd later learn: selling drugs out of the house). But, the Bay Area housing market was heating up, and so we weren't being picky. We were just pleased that we could afford a house that met our requirements for space (as two people who need space from other people). And we fixed some of those problems, and we left others to this day.

I'm pretty sure the lack of care cost the previous owners quite a bit. Because they'd put the house on the market a year earlier for $100k more, and hadn't been able to sell it. They dropped the price and put it back on the market, and we got in before anyone else. Thus, there was no bidding. But the sellers probably could have gotten that $100k more if they'd actually worked on the house a bit.

So, we're not doing that. We're listening to the advice of our realtor and our stager and our landscaper and we're putting in, well probably more money than I'm comfortable with, but I'm trying to use their advice to offset my innate cheapness, and that will hopefully be to our benefit.

But, boy I didn't know how expensive it was to sell a house. And that's yet another example of how the rich get richer in our country and our world. Because we had the money to do some work to make this house look (hopefully) pretty nice. And as I said, that'll hopefully multiply. And if someone doesn't, then they get taken advantage of by the scumbags who mail or call us every couple of months, offering to buy our house with no cost to us (and presumably far below market).

All of this work is expensive in time as well as money, so that I feel that almost all of our extracurricular work in November was about preparing the house for sale, not preparing us to move. (But obviously, they're closely connected.)

I actually have a big checkmarked list that I printed out a month ago or so, when the number of requests from our realtor and our stager had exceeded the point where I thought I was likely to comfortably remember it all.

We got new overhead lights to replace three that our stager thought looked dated, worn, or bad. And I cleaned every other overhead light in the house and replaced all the bulbs with "soft light" LEDs. Our house now looks more yellow and less white than I like.

We "finished the remodel" of our bathroom by ordering a new vanity (to replace the one that my dad and his friend Bob P. installed in 2000 or 2001) and a new mirror. And that's not actually in yet, but we've got it scheduled for next week.

We had a landscaper out to quote fixing up the rest of the front strip and back yard to make it look nicer. Because it's all about curb appeal.

We had a heater guy out to make sure there were no problems with our floor heater after the house inspector raised some concerns.

I fixed the upstairs faucet, and I've mostly scheduled what needs to be done in January after we leave.

I've got 14 unchecked boxes on my master list, though a few are things where people have committed to them, and they're occurring after we leave, so they're really not my problem any more. Hopefully. And I've got 43 things I checked off in November, from a list almost entirely about preparing to sell our house.

We have been doing a little moving work.

In particular, Kimberly helped me cull through a few rooms where I hadn't been able to do that. Her office closet, the art room, and the kitchen. And the stuff we culled in mostly gone at this point, thanks to the students and/or homeless of Berkeley. (The main thing no one has been willing to take: spatulas. What's up with that!?) We're getting close to done here, as the shipping company will pack up everything we didn't and they're showing up in less than two weeks. (The big last push, probably the weekend before they arrive, is figuring out how to set aside the things they're not taking; I have some bright red postits that I hope will give us a start).

And I got the no-parking sign to reserve the parking space outside our house for the container when we move.

And, though I didn't do them, I have a few other things scheduled: drugs for the cats at the vet next week (and we'll need to take them in one more time after Christmas to get health certificate); driving lesson for me just before Christmas (and I would have liked to do maybe one more, but hopefully this will help get me comfortable in a car again).

And of course the other thing taking up time in November was dealing with Kimberly's health. Time has gotten so muddled since that (serious) problem came up that I can no longer entirely figure out what was when: everything feels like it was simultaneously just a few days ago and forever ago. But, November was when Kimberly had her first surgery, the less invasive one that sadly didn't resolve the problem, and December is when she has the second one. So in between was a bit of health limbo, when Kimberly spent way too much effort working to get results sent and tests scheduled.

And now we're most of the way there: tomorrow is D-Day, which is to say surgery day, the first of several momentous days in the next month: Kimberly has her surgery (tomorrow); Kimberly comes home (hopefully 3-4 days later); our stuff gets picked up to go to Hawaii (in a week and a half); and we move (in four weeks). Ayy.

When I visited Secret for gaming tonight, I realized that it might actually be my last visit. Probably not, but it will depend on Kimberly's health for the next few weeks. And then it's Christmas and New Year's, and we're in Hawaii. Hopefully.

Lots to do still, which is not how I hoped things would be going after a year of work.

BC. Thursday: The House Inspection. Thursday we had our house inspection, yet another step in the seemingly infinite series of requirements to sell your house. Or, rather, I should say: the requirements to sell your house for its true value. Because our realtor said that house inspections used to be done after an offer was accepted, but then the buyer would often use that as an excuse to shake down the seller for money because of some deficiency that was found. Truth to tell, we did that when we bought the house and discovered we'd have to replace the entire roof, so my step-mom hardballed the sellers to reduce the price of the house appropriately.

I was kind of stressed out by the house inspection. Every slanted floor, regular creak, and cracking plaster was starting to get to me, because they all indicated problems that might be just below the surface that we couldn't see, and after painting the exterior and committing to painting the interior we're getting to the point where we couldn't stand another big surprise expenditure without it impacting our ability to furnish our new house in Hawaii.

But David came out on Thursday, and he was great. Shockingly knowledgeable, and shockingly in-tune with the house, able to turn up any minor defect with ease. And, he explained it all articulately. I kinda wish I could shadow him for a week. Besides getting to see the insides of all kinds of neat houses, I could also get a master's course in house design.

He explained the defects as we came across them, and it was all small stuff. Sometimes he'd say "which is typical for a house of this age" and sometimes he'd say "which is actually in surprisingly good shape" or "you really added to the value of your house when you did it." Very comforting, so my fears of a huge, costly problem with the house were mostly gone by the time he exited.

He did find some minor (hopefully minor) pest problems, so we'll still have to find out if there are costs we should deal with after the pest inspection, but I don't have visions of a cracked foundation or something any more.

We got the report today, and he mentioned a few defects with our floor heater than I hadn't heard before that our realtor wants fixed because they sound "scary". (And apparently if something "sounds scary" is the determiner of whether you fix it, or just add it to the disclosures.) And, we need to paper some work that TIm the toolman did installing hatches on our crawl space, because David also mentioned some past history of rodents there. (I expect raccoons, actually.) But that's it. A few things for my overflowing list. (In fact, I wrote down the whole list this evening because these knew items pushed it over into the too-much-to-keep-in-my-head zone.) But not a lot.

AD. Saturday & Sunday: Hanging with Kimberly. I cancelled my gaming on Saturday as soon as Kimberly was confirmed for her surgery on Friday. And, I'm happy I did, because we found out that she'd be on a soft diet for three days, while her colon started to get better. So I had to do much running on Saturday to Safeway and Trader Joe's to pick up enough soft foods to practically overflow the freezer. (Which fortunately gave her nice variety.) And, Kimberly was still in some notable pain on Saturday, so I wouldn't have wanted to be out.

By Sunday, things were more normative, other than Kimberly being understandably withdrawn, but I still hung around the house, other than a trip out to the library to do one of my regular book exchanges. (What will the libraries be like in Kauai? Not nearly as good, I fear.)

AD. Monday: Hiking the Hills. Kimberly was doing well enough by Monday that I was able to get out and enjoy Veteran's Day, as I'd hoped. I took the bus up to Tilden Park (or close to Tilden Park: the driver seemed entirely bewildered that I'd ask if he was on a holiday schedule, so he didn't go into the Park). Then I had a very nice hike down and over to Jewel Lake, then alongside Wildcat Creek, then up to the ridge line, then over to the fire trails behind the campus, and down to South Berkeley. About 14 miles or so total.

Eric V. called while I was up in the hills and asked if I wanted to go out just to talk and I did. So after dinner with Kimberly, I headed out, and we had a relaxing time at Au Coquelet, which neither of us had been to in some years.

AD. Tuesday: Dentistry. Finally, today, after putting in three quarters of a day of work, I headed out to my dentist for a last checkup. See, this is one of the problems I'm running into: I'm not just getting us ready to move and the house ready to sell. I'm also having to do all these things that I want to do before we leave Berkeley, like last repairs to my laptop and to my teeth.

Unfortunately, my dentist wants to do a fix, which means yet one more appointment on my overbooked schedule. It's these stupid old silver fillings that butchers put in in the '80s. They expand over time and crack teeth. So she swapped out one for me early this year, when I got a chip on that tooth. And there's this other one that's got some cracklines and she's been keeping an eye on. She says that usually she'd just take a look at it again in 6 months, but that it's eventually going to need to be refilled. And we both prefer she do it. So one last delightful bit of dentistry and one more afternoon blown next week.

And that is life, for the moment broken in two by Kimberly's surgery last week. The house inspection BC seems like a million years ago. But the flurry of events is picking up again, and we're rushing ever onward.

So the exterior housing painting is done. The funny thing is that it looks about the same as it did $11,000 and 40 man-days of work ago. But that's a visceral thing. We'd long ago begun to automatically edit out all the cracks in the stucco, all the places where the paint had begun to erode, and even all of the fairly badly damaged wood on the house (which was really the reason that we did the exterior painting at all). We'd composed a platonic ideal of a house in our heads, and the difference is that the reality now matches that.

I do not know if we'd have done it if we'd realized how physically and mentally grueling the process would be. But it's done (other than one window which requires more TLC and some more hours of labor).

And maybe we'll come out even in the house sale, maybe we'll dramatically increase the house price by improving our curb appeal, and maybe we'll just have contributed something to our neighborhood on the way out. It's all good, anyway. (And the impending sale of our house is probably the only time in my life that I could shrug off an $11,000 bill like that, so good timing I guess?)

There was one bit of damage to our curb appeal: the front-yard plants that we've so carefully cultured this year got STOMPED.

Sigh. Three steps forward, one back.

The poor guys got largely crushed. I'm pretty sure that one is a lost cause, but it's never prospered, so sour grapes, eh? I'm hoping the rest are salvageable, though one looks oddly wilted and withered, even though it didn't get crushed.

So we've sent out the Gardener-signal, and hope he can assess what can be repaired and what needs to be replanted. It's very unfortunate, as the plants were starting to actually look mature, rather than something we just put in.

Here's why I'm most grateful we're done with the painting: the morning wakeup. I was up early every morning, with no chance to pet the cats and wish them good morning. Instead, I was scooping up cats and tossing them in the room of the day before I was even awake. Then there was a visit with the painters to make sure they had their parking pass and/or the stress over whether our neighbors actually managed to leave out their sideyard key, and finally when all was settled I could shower.

By the time I was done, it was still an hour before my normal workday, so I was doing some of my freelance Bitmark work first thing, which has been running at an extraordinarily high level this month (because of course it has!). And then it was off to the real, Skotos job!

And then on the backside of the day, I wouldn't have enough time to do everything I wanted, typically more Bitmark writing, more packing, more house cleanup, and, y'know, a little R&R.

(I think I mostly lost out on the R&R, but some days it was packing instead.)

And, no we're not actually done. There's a badly damaged window that still needs to be fixed, but we ran out of time on that because the owner was sick during part of our project.

And we're also doing a few big-gish interior projects, one of which we've already got a quote on: the inside of our sunroom, which has a lot of damaged wood as well. The quote came in at 3 or 4 days of work, which is fine, though there's the concern that our neighbors will throw fits again and make it hard if we so much as open the windows while working (and maybe even if we don't).

But that's for the future: the window, whenever, the sunroom sometime after Prague.

Because this project with its few days of delay has run screaming into my preparation for my trip to Prague. I've already been collecting things like cat food and cat litter that Kimberly wouldn't be able to get on her own. And for days I've been meaning to get some Czech Korunas ordered (but I was largely trapped in the house for the last few weeks). And ... there's more prep to do, I'm sure.

Oh, and hey, our first day of post-painter freedom coincided with move-in day at Cal. So there are students all over again.

(Yes, it's time to move out of a college town.)

Second verse, same as the first, but a little bit louder and a little bit worse!

So we had our second full week of house painting this last week, taking us to 13 days of waking up early and interacting with our painting crew in some way. We're exhausted.

(Though two days of weekend has helped me at least.)

As we expected, during this second full week our painters were no longer working fully in the house, so there was less disruption to our life in some ways. But there was more disruption (and discomfort!) in other ways.

The big problem was that we slowly lost our windows over the course of the week. Over last weekend, our windows were all glazed, which means they looked cracked and spiderwebby (but more notably were protected against paint). Then early this week the windows started getting covered by plastic. Pretty soon, the only free windows we had were on the east side of the house where we had the work all done first due to our narcissistic and highly entitled neighbors (more on them soon! Joy!).

Worse, we had a heat wave last week, making it one of the hottest weeks of the year. So if you imagine our house as stuffy and uncomfortable all week long, you have it right.

Because of all of this, my office continued to be largely unusable. Its southern windows are covered with plastic, its northern windows are partially painted shut, and what was left couldn't keep it cool. So I was again consigned to our art/junk/former-guest room.

Except on the days they were spraying paint right outside. Which was two different days: one for the windows, one for the walls itself. I wasn't going to keep myself and the cats in a room with single pane windows where they were spraying paint right outside. So we retreated to my hot office. Except one of the days it was so hot back there (probably +10 to +15 the actual 85-90 degrees outside) that I was worrying about the' cats health, so we eventually retreated to the bedroom, and I did part of the work day sitting on the bed with my laptop in my lap.

Good times.

And then there were the neighbors. We thought we were through with them after completing the main painting on that side of the house last week, but they (she, really) ended up throwing two different fits.

First, she threw a fit when she saw them prepping out kitchen window for staining, because it's a special bay window that's all framed in unpainted wood on the outside. She demanded that we cover her house again because of the high danger of stain fumes on the other side of their walkway, up in their house, and that we give them 2-3 days notice of doing that work and/or do it on a cool day. Fortunately, this was Thursday, and the painters had already planned it for Monday, so I told her Monday, and all was well (maybe). Then there was a second fit the next day because the painters were spraying the front of our house and she felt that the coverings that they were carefully managing to control the blow of paint weren't tight enough and were going to impact her house 20 feet away.

The thing that pissed both Kimberly and me off the most was that she accosted our workers both time, instead of texting me or call our home number.

Tomorrow we get the joy of waking up, and discovering if they've created another 8am key crisis by not leaving out the key that we need to get to their walkway to cover their windows as they have asked (a crisis that they've already created twice, once the previous Monday, once the previous Thursday, which means they managed to get it right exactly two days out of four, and suggests we have at best 50/50 odds tomorrow).

But, we're getting really close. Staining tomorrow, and some work unsticking those sunroom windows, and general cleanup to get all the painting details on the trim where something is slightly off right. Maybe into Tuesday.

When we decided to take on this painting job, we based it almost entirely on the price tag. It came in at about 1% of the expected sale price of our house, and we thought it might increase the value by that or more. What we didn't price out was the emotional and mental wear and tear. I mean, we knew that having workers about the house for more than two weeks would be tiring. But I hadn't expected to have my office unavailable for two weeks, I hadn't expected to be moving from room to room like an office nomad, I hadn't expected our house to be stifling during a heatwave, and I hadn't expected our neighbors to be prima donna assholes. I'm not sure we would have done it if we'd realized how taxing it would be.

But one or two days left.

And the house will look nice; maybe we'll increase our sale value; and we'll have left the neighborhood better than we found it. (Generally the case: we've done a lot of good work on this house over the last twenty years, despite being somewhat negligent homeowners in some ways.)

The last week and a half were the most stressful time thus far of the move prep, as painters have descended upon our house.

The work began a week ago Wednesday, but it was a slow start. E., our painting manager, just looked over the project; and then that Thursday they brought in equipment; only starting to assault the stucco on the house that Friday.

But the big focus thus far, and the one that took up most of this last week, was the sun room. You see, when we priced out painting the house, our only real demand was that the wood on our exterior all get cleaned up and repainted. We were willing to consider the rest of the exterior being painted if the price came in right (and it did), but the wood was the priority. And a lot of that wood was outside of our sun room, which has eight nine-panel casement windows. So days of effort last week went into getting the exteriors of those windows all cleaned up (and painted).

This was all made more difficult by the fact that our lot is just barely bigger than our house, and the sun room, an overhanging part of the house, pretty much hugs the property line. So we had to work carefully with our eastside neighbors, and get access to their external walkway, and alleviate any concerns that they had about paint fumes and their newborn baby.

And it was all a pane. Much of it had to do with difficulty in getting them to unlock the gate to the walkway. After the first morning of that, when I was told that they'd given instructions that they weren't to be bothered until 11am (three hours after our painters arrive), I finally managed to get them to leave the key in a cunning outdoor hiding spot. But by the fourth day, when that work was supposed to be done (but wasn't quite), the key was gone again.

Sigh.

And I ended up as a middleman when there was a problem, such as the morning that our painters started painting without covering our neighbors' windows as promised. And that was very uncomfortable, because I wasn't a party that wanted anything (other than a painted house), but still I had to negotiate between two parties who did.

Anywho, this all led to the painters doing a lot of that extensive woodwork inside our house rather than outside, and that meant in the sunroom and/or in my office which is directly adjoining. So I was cast out of my office most of last week.

We fortunately have a mostly empty former-guest-room (now "the art room") that has Kimberly's art desk, so I was able to work there last week. But I didn't have access to my desktop computer or my files.

And I had two cats who were alternatively super affectionate or spazzy. And Callisto spent the first three days freaking out, constantly whining at me that something was wrong. I finally put some towels with catnip down at the end of day three. And on day four everyone was super chill, either because this was the new normal, or because the room now had a catnip odor.

Hand in hand with all of this, I've been waking up early, when the painters get here, and that's left me without enough time for packing or writing in the evening. (And I never entirely get that time back in morning hours.)

And I've been sleeping badly, probably due to stress.

And on top of that I woke up with a painful upper back on Monday which spread to my neck on Tuesday and didn't go away until Friday.

(No idea why.)

And meantime I was worried that my posture was poor at my temporary desk was making it worse.

So, sigh, tough week.

But that side of the house is done.

So no more neighbor interactions. Little more inside work. I can choose where to work (though unfortunately my office now doesn't have screens on most of the windows and the casement windows aren't opening right, and so the office is getting too hot, like it used to before it got screened, and the Bay Area started heating up today ...)

Meanwhile, I was really on my last nerve by Wednesday or Thursday last week, and simultaneously feeling like I wasn't getting work done with regard to packing and some freelance tech writing I have on the side, so I decided to cancel my saturday game.

I felt bad about it, as our saturday game sessions are scarce few left, but it was good. I did a bit of tech writing and tech writing organization in the morning, then did a relatively casual hike to Orinda in the afternoon, then refused to do any more work in the evening, and just read and napped. It definitely helped.

And today Kimberly and I celebrated our 19th Anniversary a day early at Millennium, where we've probably celebrated about half of our anniversaries in the last 20 years, at three different locations.

Happy Anniversary again, Hon (and for real, by the time you read this).

And today I also got a few boxes packed, and was able to move them back under some of the windows, clearing up space. (They'd been moved away due to the threat of powerwashing, which finally occurred on Friday; only two windows suffered any wetness inside, but one of them was above some of the boxes I moved, so good thing.) And put another hour into my freelance tech writing.

So onward.

Whew. But the painting starts again tomorrow, and likely has five days left.

I must admit that I entered this week with a bad attitude related to our handyman ("Tim"). He cranked up the price of our door twice last week, and also had really underbid on materials costs. Meanwhile, the joyful fact that he wanted to show up at 11am often turned into noon or 1pm, and then he wanted to stay until 6 or 6.30. Then on Tuesday, his first day back this week, he was scheduled to show up at 1pm and ended up here at 3pm.

Fortunately, things went smoother from there. He constructed the hatches for our crawl space under the house, and they looked quite good, minus the fact the he reused the frames from old, past hatches that were missing when we moved in. But we're hoping the house painters can clean that up. Then he did a good job of getting three of our ill-fitting doors upstairs opening, closing, and latching better (but still asked for the median of the variable price he'd quoted for four doors). Then he actually found a cartridge for the lock in our sunroom door and got it all installed and working beautifully. Those are all things that will definitely add to the value of the house.

I do feel like we got taken for at least $1000-1500 in the process, in that the bid which I originally thought was high got increased, with the materials also being underbid. But I'm doing relatively good at not caring. We'd been having troubles finding handymen, and at this point we really needed one for a variety of work going back years and years.

Did I say house painters? Yeah, getting that going was our big July initiative. I definitely wanted them to fix up and paint the wood on the outside of our house, but was willing to also look at a quote for the entire exterior. They *only* gave us a quote for the whole exterior, and it's expensive, but it was just over my number where I thought we should flat out take it. So, we've got them starting on Wednesday.

I'm not thrilled to have them so close after the handyman work, as it was exhausting managing Tim for four days while I kept the cats locked in my office (though part of the exhaustion was two days of simultaneously filing and shredding Skotos material). But Kimberly has thus far been our main contact on the painters. When they get here, they'll be more self-sufficient, and hopefully Kimberly and I can share the responsibility more when they need to talk.

My share thus far has been talking to neighbors. We have a teeny, teeny lot, just a bit bigger than the footprint of our house. So the painters identified two areas (the kitchen and bathroom walls on the east and the bathroom and back hallway walls on the south) where they'd need to get into neighbors' yards to safely put up their ladders. I thought the condos on the east would be more problematic, because their side walkway is locked and the painters wanted to put up some plastic to protect our closest neighbors and we needed to talk to at least two different households. But, I was able to get ahold of six different people (our two closest neighbors, then the owner and three tenants for another apartment accessible by that walkway) within 24 hours and everyone was totally cool. I thought the house to our south would be non-problematic, because we've worked together before (on killing Acacias) and the work is quite far from their residence, but I haven't heard back from them at all yet. (They could well be out of town, their comings and goings and usage of the house have always been mysterious.)

Oh, and I moved lots of boxes. You see, the work is going to start with power washing the exterior, and the painters' contract notes that this can cause leakage, particularly on older windows. We *have* redone about 50% of the windows in the house while living here, but almost all of the windows that I'd piled up boxes under ... happened to be old windows. So they all had to be moved interior. (I've got one line of boxes under the newer windows in my office, and hopefully they'll be fine, but maybe I'll pushing them back a foot or so after I finish up work on Tuesday, and can have my office more clogged up.)

A few more bits of house work and we're done: interior painting; fixing collapsed drywall and a closet and fixing some ripples in plaster (also to be done by interior painters); putting up a new exterior light and taking out an unused light switch (to be done by an electrician on Tuesday).

Weekends continue to be one of my prime restorative times, especially if it's a Saturday when I can hike or bike. So this weekend I decided to head out to the largest park in San Francisco that I'd never been to, which is John McLaren, number 3 in the city (at 312 acres) after The Presidio (1480 acres) and Golden Gate Park (1017 acres). Big jump there, and of course none of these reach the size of the parks I regularly hike in like Tilden, WIldcat Canyon, and Redwood Regional Park (which are all around 2000 acres) — but still pretty big for an urban park.

So, I BARTed out to Balboa Park, which I found is a world of difference from the affluent Glen Park area, just one stop up. It's a bit more of a run-down urban area. Not bad, but occasionally sketchy and the bike routes were much rarer, despite the streets being pretty busy. I stopped and had lunch at a Popeye's that was amazingly busy.

The actual park (John McLaren, not Balboa!) is one of those urban parks that gets lots of practical usage. So, the ugly southside of it is all kinds of sports parks while the northeast side has a lake and playgrounds. But there's lots of attractive, quiet park in between. The very middle was the only bit that felt like wilderness. I did a hike on the "Philosopher's Way", which is a loop with some side paths here and there that runs from the middle of the park up around the north and back. It was some pretty neat hillside walking toward the middle, and then some quieter forested areas around the north. There was really an amazing amount of diverse terrain in a relatively small area. And oh, there were beautiful views of the city and bay whenever I was walking on one of the edges.

One of the neat things about the Philosopher's Way was that it had these big granite trail markers which just featured understated arrows. They were really easy to make out, and kept you going the right way among the park's many paths.

Interestingly, the Philosopher's Way avoided all the more trafficked parts of the park. So I had to go out of my way to see the teeny little manmade lake to the northeast and to cross over some of the "Hidden Bridges" (which were very nice, long bridges among relatively forested areas, crossing over streams and ravines). Also, to go the Upper Reservoir, the park's sort of other lake — and also the only place I saw a homeless person all day, in an experience totally unlike modern-day Berkeley. Just past the "No Swimming or Wading" signs, he was bathing in the Reservoir. I also investigated the "Philosopher's Labyrinth", another one of those little stone mazeways or spirals that seem popular in San Francisco. And then it was back to my bike and down the hill to Glen Park Station this time (because I didn't want to mess with the streets and neighborhoods around Balboa Park Station again).

Overall, it was nice to see a new neighborhood of San Francisco, and nice to see a new, interesting park.

I have no idea what San Francisco's fourth or fifth largest parks might be, but I've been to many of the largest green areas in the city at this point.

Last year, when we walked the house with our past and future real estate agent, we highlighted a number of things to fix before we put the house on the market.

And then we spent about half a year not getting them done. Our first handyman of the year totally flaked in between looking over what we wanted done and giving us a quote. Then Barcelona happened, then Kauai, then sickness. And last month I finally found a handyman who gave us a quote. And this week he finally started work.

The biggest task on the TODO-list was replacing the backdoor. It's a 31" exterior back door, which is apparently small. And it's pretty much wedged in between our pantry and our back window, with pretty much no clearance on either side (and the door frame doesn't even go all the way around.) We'd tried at least one other previous time to get it replaced, but that handyman flaked too. The problem is that the door was getting to the falling apart stage due to sun and exposure, and it was never a good door. At one, point, for example, I learned that the deadbolt was placed in the door so delicately that when I tried to replace it, I nearly ripped out the side of the door. Which means that old deadbolt was giving us just about zero protection, but that's another story.

But replacing it was apparently hard due to its small size. One of our previous handyman talked about searching Urban Ore type stores to find a classic door in good condition, then cutting it down to fit. But as we know, that never happened.

This time around, our handyman just searched Home Depot until he found one that fit, and grabbed it (with our OK), even though it really wasn't what we wanted. (Basically, we'd wanted a door with a window, like the old one, and instead got a solid door. Which makes me feel like there's a blind spot int he corner of that room, though there's a bit of homey-ness and privacy that wasn't there before.)

But, oh, there was effort to get that door in. He in fact brought a different one first (an all-window door), but apparently that didn't work because it quietly went out of the house afterward. Then he told us he was getting a prehung door instead of a door slab. No idea why that made a difference, but whatever, we just wanted the darned door replaced.

Eventually it happened, after most of a day's work. And LOTS of banging. And for some reason it involved cutting a hole into the pantry and even dissecting one of the shelf supports. I just don't ask why this sort of thing happens, just that it be repaired.

And then much of day #2 was spent putting in trim around the door on both sides because that had all been removed and/or partially destroyed.

The price spiraled up over the course of the day, because of the move to a pre-hung door (why? I dunno) and because of the decision to also replace the trim outside. The result isn't perfect, but looks pretty good other than it feeling like there needs to be better insulation on some of the sides.

But, cost and perfection just don't matter as much when we're trying to get the house ready to sell.

And after that, work started on project #2, which is hatches for the three crawl spaces in the back of the house, a project that's literally been on our TODO list for 19 years, since we bought the house. Better late than never? Yeah, but this project is older than LAST year's incoming freshmen at Cal.

And I am entirely exhausted from two days of shepherding the work while simultaneously doing my work for Skotos. (And keeping the often annoyed cats shut up in my office.)

But we're clear for three days, with the rest of the work to be done next Tuesday and Wednesday and maybe Thursday. (I've scheduled some real brainless work for at least the first two of those days, which is getting all of Skotos files organized and up-to-date, with several years of filing needing to be done, and then boxing them all up. I can blast my music, pile up files, and watch the cats jump on them, and hopefully not tucker myself out as much.)

Yeah, we kind of fizzled out in our move prep in March. It was just too busy for me, with my Spain trip at the top of the month, and then a week before I recovered, and Kimberly has of course continued to have problems with her foot and the side effects thereof.

I did get one notable thing done: I finished dealing with my filing, which meant emptying a drawer of financial stuff (mostly statements) dating back to 2000 or so. Most went to recycling, some went to shredding, and a tiny, tiny bit went into our files. And I also got rid of years and years of stuff that needed to be shredded.

But we still need to deal with Kimberly's files and piles, many of which are our joint filings. And sometime down the road I have to deal with Skotos filing. And I still haven't tried to contact our handyman one last time (because I decided it needed to wait until after our next trip). And we removed very little from the house. So, minimal progress toward the big move in March.

But I think we've got good things planned that we're going to manage for April & May (spoiler: we already are). For April, we're going to get boxes and start the long process of packing, which will also be another route for getting stuff out of the house, because we'll cull as we go. And for May we're going to try and get the cats' paperwork all in order for the trip.

Meanwhile we've been playing with something else that we plan to roll out more fully when we move: smartifying our house. My mom and Bob are to blame, because they got us an Echo Dot for Christmas. And we fell in love with it. We used some of our other Christmas money to buy some other Echo Dots and it's been great being able to make lists and ask questions and play music from a few different rooms in the house.

But these last few weeks I finally got a smartplug and a firestick setup that we also purchased with Christmas money. The firestick is great because it works so much better (faster!!) than our Tivo for accessing streaming services. And it has more streaming options, including HBO, which we may just be using in the near future. (Can't imagine why!) The audio commands are more meh because they don't work great when you're watching a show. It takes a few seconds to go out to Amazon and back, and sometimes Alexa doesn't hear the commands over the TV audio. So, you tell it to pause and then you have to wait, which is less than ideal, and you might not have it work, which is even less so. But it's great to be able to issue arbitrary commands like "rewind 1 second" or "rewind 10 seconds" or ... whatever. Perhaps we'll find it more useful as we get used to it (and ditto for our smartplug, which is on the TV).

We're thinking about more cool smart stuff when we move to Hawaii, like an integrated smart-fan/smart-ac/smart-thermostat system. But right now we're just testing out the ground ...

K. is off in Seattle to see a YouTuber show tomorrow. I am home alone.

This actually hasn't happened in many, many years, so I've got an unnaturally quiet house. Callisto hasn't even started yelling at me that her wet food is overdue yet.

So what do I do with an evening all to myself?

I biked up the Ohlone Greenway to El Cerrito Plaza for some delicious shrimp tacos at Rubio's.

Then I biked back until I got to Cedar Rose Park, where I settled down and did some writing of next week's Mechanics & Meeples article and a revision I'm working on for the Paizo article in Designers & Dragons. I got to see the sunset too, which was stunning, probably due to all the particulate matter in the air from the North California fires, which set my allergies into overdrive on Sunday and Monday.

When it got dark, I headed up Rose Street to Safeway to do the week's grocery shopping, which is a challenging bit of uphill. That was my regular grocery store for a few years while ours was under construction, but I came to hate it due to their horrible staffing, which often left you waiting in line for 20-30 minutes while you gazed hopelessly up at the signs that claimed they'd open a new line whenever there were three or more people in line. (Spoiler: they didn't; there were sometimes 10 people in each open line.) Today it wasn't bad, probably because student move-in day isn't until next week.

Then I biked home.

The exciting life of a 40-hour bachelor.

Speaking of home, we have taken the first step to selling ours. We had our real-estate agent out two Fridays ago. We talked about home valuations and times to sell (she is quite certain that January is a fine time due to the limited inventory) and work that we should do to ensure we get a good price.

So, we now have a list of home repair stuff to do, to put on top of the work we need to do to get our cats ready for a quarantine-free trip to the islands.

I'm hopeful we can get going on some of it very soon, now that Kimberly's big Seattle trip will shortly be in the rearview mirror.

And it's just a hair less than 17 months until our planned move to Hawaii.

On Monday our handyman finished up work on the bathroom.

We have a nicely retiled tub, but more notably, we've also closed out something like two years of problems. It started sometime last year with water flowing through a wall onto the floor during showers, and also through the floor.

This led to a parade of useless "experts" moving through our bathroom. I guess the plumber was useful, because he told us decisively that it was not the plumbing. But then there was the (very nice) guy who cut holes in our wall and put water traps under the house and could never figure out where the water was coming from. And then there was the guy who grouted over everything with mismatched grout that started washing away immediately. And then there was the guy who wouldn't even come out to give a quote without getting a fee for the quote.

At various times we thought we had the problem fixed due to this sealing or that grouting but it was all worthless work. And then the leaking would start again.

But now that's hopefully all done with. Because that shower was rebuilt from the studs up.

The particularly annoying thing last year was when we were simultaneously having other fairly major house problems. One was a leaky roof. And the other was a broken sewage pipe.

It was an annoying year for home ownership.

This year has been a little better, though there were a couple of months that we weren't using the leaky bathroom at all as we waited for our fix.

And we did have an electrical problem where an outlet started failing anytime we put current through. But that got fixed.

So Monday our shower work ended.

Tuesday our shower was usable. Our house was problem free for the first time in almost two years.

Wednesday the circuit that contained that supposedly fixed plug totally fritzed out. We couldn't get it to reset. And, it was a big deal because it's the circuit with our fridge, microwave, and dish washer.

So we went two full days without a household problem.

(I guess that's more days than the Trump White House ever goes without proving its abject stupidity.)

Thursday morning I was able to reset the circuit. So we're good for the moment.

But given the weirdness of the problem, and it not being resettable for at least 7 or 8 hours, and the fact that it was the same circuit that had the problematic socket earlier this year, we've called in electrical support.

They're out in January some time. Because why would anyone ever need electrical work quicker?

Thank goodness, our week of household chaos is now over.

The toughest part of it was being locked up in my office, with two cats, while simultaneously being available for our shower-retiling guy.

That's in part because the cats were terrible. Almost every day at least one of them was constantly wanting out. I think that on Tuesday they were mostly content, hanging out on the loveseat, but then on Wednesday they spent two or three hours begging at the door and fighting each other, and on Friday Lucy spent the whole day telling me she was in horrible distress and trying to dart out the door every time it was open.

But, purpose served: our tile is now all in place and grouted. It looks nice. The trim that K. was able to pick out looks particularly good. We had a bit of an issue with a weird angle in one corner, where the tile wasn't straight. Our tiler said this is due to the framing. Our previous tile was not notably angled there, but on the other hand, we know the back of the house has shifted in the last five years. End result: he was able to fix about half of the angling with some work, and the other half is a lot less notable with the grout in. So, yay.

We're not actually done. He needs to come back to apply one more coat of paint to some of the areas he had to repaint following the destruction and reconstruction of the tile surfaces. And he still needs to put the sliding glass doors back in. But he thinks he'll be done by noon on Monday. So my wake/sleep/shower schedule is still off. But not for long. Nothing is for long at this point.

And, he was able to clear much of construction stuff out on Friday. The back of our house is almost back to normal (other than a tub full of tools). And that clutter and chaos was as draining as the scheduling and the cat-locking, in its own way.

So, hopefully, we now have a leak-proof downstairs shower, like we did before we had T. renovate it all five years ago. And that was one of the top things that really needed to be done before we move. (There are still a few others like replacing our back door and repainting the house exterior, and if we decide to rent we should probably replace the dishwasher too, which apparently requires some reconfiguration of how it's connected. But for the moment: done, or close enough.)

Day two of our shower work ended yesterday with "concrete board" on all the walls, apparently the right sort of surface to build on (and the legally required one), not like what our contractor did five years ago.

Also yesterday, Kimberly went out to the tile store with our contractor to look at trim. We'd initially decided against trim, because of our previous contractor's inability to lay it in right, but this contractor proactively asked us about trim and also told us how the old contractor had used it incorrectly. So we changed our mind; Kimberly found one that she quite likes and was very pleased by having gone out to the tile store with our contractor to find it.

Current word is that we might be done on Friday, which would be day five, but the work might leak over to Monday. It'll be a question of when the wall next to the tub gets reconstructed.

Whenever we have work like this done on the house, the most annoying factor is that I need to lock the cats back in my office. This is because they're inside cats who can't be entirely trusted to stay inside, and workmen are usually in and out all day.

So I end up with cats around me all day who are sometimes overly friendly because I'm their only available human and sometimes very annoyed. Monday they mostly hovered by the door, yesterday they mostly crashed out on the love seat.

I don't think we've ever before had work like this done in the cold months, which reminded me of another deficit: because our house is heated by a single floor radiator, when you close off a room in the winter, it gets cold.

So I'm locked up this week in a chilly office with insane cats.

On the bright side, their cat tree is up in my office right now, because it's been replaced in the living room by a Christmas tree. So I tend to have one content cat in my office at a time. (Our six-foot-tall cat tree only seats one cat at a time; if there are two, there is waving of claws involved.)

And, I feel quite locked up this week, because not only am I stuck back in the office, but I'm also our main contact for our contractor during the day, because Kimberly is stuck upstairs with her broken foot.

Which means I'm mostly not leaving the house during the day.

And oh, the house is a mess right now, mainly because plaster dust got everywhere on the day of demolition. It just doesn't seem worthwhile cleaning it up yet with work still ongoing.

And our downstairs bathroom feels like a construction site right now in the evenings, when our contractor is gone. That's due to the tools lying about, the protective butcher paper on the floor, and the fact that the bathroom is being kept closed, to keep out inquisitive cats, and so is also chilly.

But work is progressing, and our guy really seems to know what he's doing, so we've got our fingers crossed that it'll come out beautifully this time, like we'd hoped last time, entirely separate from the fact that we hope it'll come out non-leaking this time.

The semi-decadal retrofitting of our main bathroom began today.

The early morning started with a rush out to the City of Berkeley Customer Service Center to try and get one-day visitor parking passes for our handyman, so he wouldn't have to move his vehicle every two hours for the next week. It's been a long time since I've gone to get City of Berkeley services, and I had very low expectations based on long, frustrating waits in the past. But this time it was quick and simple — but that might be because residential parking permits, once a way to help Berkeley residents keep students out of their spaces, are now a money-making machine for the city. But, I walked into an empty room (admittedly, it was 8.40, about 10 minutes after they opened), I entered my need into a computer, and one minute later the magic screens told me to step to a counter. I stepped up, handed the woman my form, handed her my driver's license, handed her $27.50, and came away with ten one-day parking permits, which should be more than sufficient.

Meanwhile, our handyman was tearing down all the tile that got put up five years ago. He was quite efficient at it, clearing it all in the course of a few hours. He also pointed out numerous mistakes made by our supposedly great builders of five years ago: like they didn't put concrete material behind the tiles, and they didn't caulk the corner of the tub lip to prevent dripping if any water did get behind the tiles, and they left a big gap for cold air to blow up along the pipes, and they didn't put anything behind our decorative blue trim, causing it to ripple.

I have high hopes that this time things will work out, to the point where we're going to go ahead and get some trim (if K. finds some she likes), which I'd previously written off after the failure to get it installed well last time.

Tomorrow, the concrete sheetrock (or whatever it is exactly) goes up. Then K. goes with the handyman to get tile and hopefully choose trim.

Meanwhile I get to go to the dentist. Because it's a busy week.

(Meanwhile, the rest of my routine is wrecked: I'm getting up early, and showering at night in our upstairs bathroom, and going to bed early. But it should be just for several days.)

Friday Night: Mauvais Genou. Hurt my knee. D'oh! Let a cat sit on it in an uncomfortable position. Lucy is made of lead. Then after I biked to Safeway and back, I discovered it was painful when I went went up the stairs. So I gave it ice and ibuprofen over the course of the weekend.

Saturday Morning: Acheter des Carrelage. Five years ago an incompetent builder remodeled our bathroom. When we asked if he could do it, he said that bathrooms were his bread and butter. He electrified our tub and installed our tiles such that they were leaking within a few years. Leaky bread and electrified butter.

So we've got a handyman who's going to redo it. We spent Saturday morning shopping for new tiles, up north of Gilman. We came up with one that's a little darker than we like, but otherwise OK. A little pricy, but for only 100 square foot of tile that doesn't make a big difference. Apparently rectangular, brick-like tiles are the newest fad, and we settled on one, but now I'm worried whether our handyman is going to be comfortable laying those in, which I have to assume is more complex, because you don't just create a square grid. If not, it's back to the stupid tile store.

(Also stupid: the city of Berkeley. Our local streets have had two-hour parking limits for non-residents for the last 20+ years, and it's been a constant thorn in my side whenever I have people over, and it's going to be a problem for our handyman starting tomorrow. I was hoping to get some daily visitor parking permits for him on Friday. Except the Customer Service Center where you do so is only open four days a week nowadays. Which isn't particularly good service. So I'll try Monday morning before work, as a bit of just-in-time getting stuff done, of the sort I hate.)

Saturday Evening: Ich Färbe Haare. Kimberly tried to re-dye her hair while I was in Cambridge, and just hurt her foot more. So she asked me to help now and we scheduled that for Saturday night. Oy! hair dye is pernicious stuff. Afterward, I felt like I spent forever getting it off of everything (other than her head). But I was successful. Then we wrapped her head in saran wrap and duct tape, so that she could leave the dye in overnight. We had blue duct tape, so she said it made her look like Marge Simpson.

She washed her hair out first thing Sunday morning, and I volunteered to clean the bathtub afterward, so that she wouldn't hurt her toe. I found blue on all the walls of shower stall, some of it in arterial sprays. It looked like she'd killed a whole tribe of smurfs.

The blue came out looking very nice.

Sunday: Klettere Jeden Berg Hoch. And on Sunday I rested. By going hiking.

The first step is always finding lunch I can bring up into the hills. This is more challenging on Sundays, but I opted for Ike's Overpriced Sandwiches, forgetting that they'd gone on my naughty list. The problem is that they've joined the list of bad San Francisco based businesses who began engaging in surcharge shenanigans when they were told to pay people a living wage (not that it's LIVABLE yet in the Bay Area). So Ike's has an "optional" surcharge to fund it, which of course isn't optional because they automatically charge it, and if you say otherwise workers might spit in your sandwich. But, it's false advertising because they list incorrect prices, and it's a passive-aggressive slap at minimum wage laws that invites customers to be at odds with the workers. I need to find a different sandwich place in downtown, because screw Ike. But today I had a very delicious if morally reprehensible cream cheese sandwich with an orange glaze.

I lunched near Jewel Lake, which I love, and then I did a hike out into Wildcat Canyon, which I love, up the hillside along the Conlon Trail, which I don't think I've ever hiked before, then across the Nimitz Way, and back down in Tilden. It was a terrific hike that warded away the cold of fall (winter is coming) and there were beautiful views due to the bit of rain we got last night. (The canyon was still quite wet, but the hillsides quite dry.)

Overall, a great day of hiking.

I didn't get enough R&R and downtime this weekend, but we definitely got things accomplished. Onward. There's still much to be done for Skotos, RPGnet, and Blockstream before year's end.

I'm going to be traveling in October, and thus I've started waking up earlier in the morning, trying to get myself on East Coast time (and closer to European time). The waking up earlier can leave me a little tired, but it pays out when I'm actually able to sleep on the earlier schedule when I'm back East. However, what really frazzles me is the lost of time in the evening, and everything gets pressed closer together, and I don't have the time to do everything that I want to do.

On the bright side, my usual pattern while cycling earlier is to go out for a one-hour hike above Clark Kerr first thing in the morning. This wakes me up in the early hours, and also helps me expend energy so I'm more likely to sleep at night. And I get a nice, physical intro to the day, and I interact with some people (and their dogs) even before I work.

The weather's been particularly nice. I usually shed my jacked before I get to the hills. And today we got bright blue and clear skies too. The Golden Gate Bridge was about as crystal clear as it ever gets

Anywho, short evenings aren't the only reason I'm frazzled. Lots of stuff going on too.

With help from a Facebook friend, I found a general contractor to take a fourth try at our downstairs tub, and K. actually got him out here last Saturday. He is pretty confident that the problem is that the proper, legally required waterproofing wasn't put in behind the tile walls. I had pictures of the tub under construction, and he said, yeah, it looks like they just put greenboard behind the tiles, which is how you did this sort of thing thirty years ago.

I can totally believe it given the problems we had with the initial bathroom guy, and I'd about come to the conclusion that all of the tile needed to be ripped out and new stuff installed. Which is what he wants to do. He can't do the work until December, but his estimate is about $1500 + materials, maybe $2000 total, which sounds reasonable at this point. (Though not reasonable in the scope of things where we had this bathroom renovated exactly five years ago!)

In the meantime, he offered to put up some plastic on the walls to make the shower usable again. Since the upstairs shower is much less nice this seemed reasonable ... but we didn't realize quite what he intended. So we've got hard plastic walls up now in the downstairs tub, in front of the tiles, which will definitely do the job, but is a bit wasteful for something only intended to last a few months. So it goes.

Meanwhile, our neighbor suggested a gardener for us. I'm always leery of that type of ongoing cost going into our budget, but we came to the conclusion this year that we wanted to start having our front yard look like something other than a prairie wasteland, so that we'll have good Google Maps pictures years before we sell, and so that we'll really have it on the path to looking regularly nice by the time we sell.

So K. had been scheduling with him, and he finally made it out on Wednesday, very late, and only after K. gave him block-by-block instructions because he ended up at the wrong place twice before getting here. He seemed nice and very conscientious and responsive to our desire to have the yard thoroughly deweeded, then something planted when it's all dead. The deweeding is supposed to start on Monday, and then it'll be three months before we're clear of weeds, and then he'll do some planting as winter edges toward spring, maybe in February. He thinks that succulents will grow best, and I'm totally OK with that if they look good and aren't cactus.

Meanwhile, Lucy has been having bathroom problems very intermittently for a while, so when I was concerned with that last weekend, K. suggested that we should bring her in, so I wasn't worried about her on my trip(s). So we did, and it was suggested we up her wet food from once a week to every day, which is a big pain, but we're trying it out.

It had also been years since we'd taken Lucy into the vet, and the vet suggested a senior screen. It was expensive, but we agreed. It came back with her being in very good health, other than her level of dehydration that we were seeing. In fact they said our little ten-year-old cat's kidneys looked more like a two-year-old cat's. Given we lost both of our older cats to kidney disease, we were extremely relieved to hear that.

What else? What else? K hasn't been doing entirely well lately, which certainly contributes to household stress. I've been very busy during my work-week trying too simultaneously juggle too many tasks and also do things necessary to prep for our trip. I had an extremely productive work week last week, but that sort of thing comes at a cost.

And today I finished up "Book One" in what I intend as a trilogy in my Burning Wheel Clockwork Campaign. Perfect timing, as I managed it just before my trip, but that's a topic I'd like to dedicate an entry to later.

Tomorrow: Sister Act. (Meanwhile, pedophile-apologist and Neo-nazi-supporter Milo Y. marches on Sproul Plaza, probably resulting in helicopter riots.)

Last Tuesday, Kimberly went to pop some corn in the microwave and the circuit popped instead. Or that's what it seemed at first.

I poked my head out the door, looked around carefully from druggies from People's Park (this morning's homeless hijinks: an ice-pick stabbing in front of Ben & Jerry's in downtown!), and when the way was clear scooted out to our electric box and flipped the switches that were most likely for the kitchen. (They're very poorly labeled, or unlabeled, and the circuits aren't entirely logical.) I came back inside and K. told me that she'd been able to pop corn again for several more seconds, then it shut off once more.

Further investigation revealed the problem was the outlet. If it was used for power for more than a few seconds, it went out. Not good. It kind of made me nervous, but for the moment we extended our microwave extension cord to run to the next outlet in the kitchen, which we'd replaced some years ago due to flakiness (hmmm ... I sense a pattern), and popcorn was popped.

So Wednesday I went to our fixit website of late, Thumbtack. I put out a request to fix our bad outlet, plus a problem we'd been having with a switch, which rebounded whenever you pushed it down too hard. And since I was there, I put in a second request for a tile repairman for our continued downstairs bathroom problems, after I didn't get any Thumbtack response a week or two earlier, and a third request for a handyman to fix a variety of holes and cracks that have appeared in our walls over the last 17 years.

Within an hour I had someone offering to do both the electrical and handyman work. I was a little leery of someone who wasn't a full-time electrician, but his profile listed electrician as his main category in Thumbtack. He also had good reviews, so I figured, good enough.

Sort of.

Our handyman ended up spending around six hours at our house last Thursday and Friday. The amount of work he did was uninspiring, as was the quality.

Certainly, our house has challenges. It's over a hundred years old and it's had bad work done in past times. So the bad outlet was apparently very tightly packed and hard to work with. The bad switch (and associated outlet) was jammed in between uncut tiles, had a faceplate that wasn't really the right size and after it got accidentally shattered, we learned that that size was no longer being made.

But our handyman also didn't seem that good. Oh, he could do the basic work. He clearly knew how to rewire electrical wires. And he knew the basic techniques for patching our holes in the wall. But, given anything more challenging, like a switch and outlet where there wasn't a cover that could easily slip into the old spot, he was at wit's end, leaving me to troubleshoot. And he was also very sloppy. (If I wanted sloppy, unfocused home improvement work, I'd do it myself). And, he was also very messy. I spent almost an hour cleaning up after his first day of work, seriously messing up my Thursday evening's schedule.

After those six hours of work, we have:

An outlet that's working again, and just slightly crooked.
A switch and plug that may look better than they did before (and work cirrectly now), but which aren't wholly professional, and where the plug isn't totally stable in the wall.
Six or so patched holes, none of which are painted (because he couldn't get us a paint match) and a couple of which look very rough (due to sloppy work and a lack of texturing).

Sigh.

I mean, things are improved. Our two big electrical problems aren't problems any more. Some bare wall is covered. But I'm thinking about presentation nowadays, and most of this work fails the presentable-enough-to-increase-the-value-of-a-house test, to various degrees.

Our biggest lesson out of this is: don't use Thumbtack. I think we've gotten four people from them, and three have been disappointing. There was the handyman who built us OK shelves (but failed a little bit on that presentation), but just threw up his hands over our bathroom problems after working on them for a while and even cutting holes in our wall; there was the other handyman who worked on the bathroom and made the situation worse by grouting over our grout with a different color, which then started washing away weeks later; and there was thi electrician-handyman who did OK work but was very bad at finishing and polish. We did get a good roofer from Thumbtack, who did solid work on our leaking back roof and resealing our repaired garage roof, but 25% aren't the odds I want when having someone work on our house, especially when presentation increasingly matter.

Two Sundays in a row, Kimberly and I have bussed up to Tilden and hiked around, as part of her effort to get out and about more.

Last Sunday was very nice. We picnicked by Jewel Lake then hiked around the Loop Trail and up to the bus stop near Lake Anza along a very pleasant creekside trail that I love. We even stopped and wrote for a while at my favorite bench in Tilden, deep in the shade, near Wildcat Creek.

This Sunday was substantially less successful, because we're in a heat wave and today was apparently the hottest day of it. We picnicked by Jewel Lake again, and that was still very nice. But when we walked down the Wildcat Creek Canyon Trail we turned back almost immediately due to the heat. Then, when we were hiking through the Nature Area, Kimberly was getting increasingly overheated. When we stopped at the Little Farm she was very red-faced. After dousing her in some water, we headed back to the bus stop so that we could get her back to cooler places in the lowlands.

She still said she enjoyed the wildlife she saw, and we got smoothies when we returned to downtown Berkeley.

I actually made one other trip to Tilden in the last few days: Saturday, on my own, as part of my getting out and about on Saturdays, which I do while not gaming.

It was a fairly normative hike, from my house up to Lake Anza. Nine or ten miles. It was hot, but it certainly didn't feel as hot as Sunday.

I love being out on my own and just relaxing in nature.

I also did a lot of not-relaxing-in-nature in the last week. We had a BBQ scheduled for Thursday in advance of gaming, and that meant I had to get the backyard in order. So I spent about three-and-a-half hours between Monday and Tuesday, downing foliage in the backyard and filling our green bin. Twice.

I really don't understand how our teeny backyard gets so out of control. Our new neighbors behind us give just as little attention as we do to our (much huger) backyard. Last winter they grew clover up and over everything, totally covering their yard, but then spring came and it all died out. Now their backyard is certainly scraggly, but not particularly overgrown.

Meanwhile, we'd totally lost the entirety of our yard beneath ivy and bushes and purple flowers. It was probably an hour before the walkway leading from our fence to our back door was clear. And still the walkway around the back and side of our house are pretty impassable. (A problem for another day.)

But I definitely communed with nature. And fortunately my knee and ribs were mostly up to the task.

The BBQ that followed on Thursday was sadly less than successful. We could barely get any flames on the grill. The corn eventually got mostly cooked, but the various sausages went into the broiler, which did the job. (We think the grill was almost out of propane.)

The food was still quite tasty, despite the problems, but we did also have a less than successful game (the new Buffy co-op, which is flat-out a bad design).

Still, it was good company and that generally makes for good times.

And that was a week of communing with nature. Or at least a Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday of such.

The birthday festivities began yesterday. Well, not really. But, on my birthday's eve we have workers at the house all day. Plumbers spent about four hours taking out our old main stack from the second floor and installing a new one, then roofers spent another hour or so patching up the roof and rewaterproofing everything.

Seems to have all worked. (Fingers crossed.)

The big problem, as usual, was shoddy past work done on the house. At some point, running water got put in the house and for whatever reason both of the sewage pipes were put through the garage. Which is stupid, but this house is really tight on our lot, so it might have been required. And at some point plaster or stucco or something got mostly wrapped around the pipe in the garage that came down from the second floor. Which probably was not required and always looked ugly. So before the plumbers could take it out, they had to hammer the stony pipe covering away. It was a big pain, and shockingly looks much nicer now.

Still, total damage of something less than $2,000 to us, I think. We have the money, but it was intended to pay property tax in a few weeks. (We'll just have to sell a little stock, to pay various taxes, but I'd hoped to avoid that this year.)

Today was my birthday outing. I took the day off work, which I sometimes do for my birthday (particularly when it's weekend-adjacent).

K. and I were up bright and early and we went out to Cheese and Stuff to pick up sandwiches and chips and desert. We then long-hauled those out to the Palace of the Legion of Honor, out by Land's End in SF. It's always a long trip, since it's way in the back corner of SF.

It was raining the whole time, but the peristyle at the entryway has covered walkways to the sides. For some reason, every one enters the museum through the courtyard or the righthand walkway, avoiding the lefthand one like it's the plague. So, we were able to sit there, out of the rain, and eat our sandwiches.

Then it was into the Palace. We had almost 45 minutes before our viewing of the Monet exhibit, so we quickly walked around to our favorite exhibits: the Impressionist room, at the end of one of the arms of the museum and the Rodin sculptures in some of the center rooms. We also saw one of the visiting exhibits, a teeny room of art about letters, which K. and I both had a lot of fun with.

However, our purpose in going to the museum today was to see "Monet: The Early Years", and it was awesome. It contains about 40 paintings from 1858-1872, which means that we saw some of his pre-impressionist pieces (but most were trending toward impressionism). It was amazing to see him working in such a realistic style. But what I found particularly interesting was that by 1865 or so, he was varying between clearly realistic work and impressionistic work, apparently based on audience (and whether something was a "sketch" or finished piece).

The art was all beautiful. Some of it we'd seen before at the series of great impressionist exhibits that we got in several years ago. A lot more was new. We got to enjoy the Magpie again (and realized how faded K.'s print has gotten) and many more. The descriptions of the artwork were also written very well, with lots of discussions of Monet's technique and his character, all of which was intriguing.

I was thrilled to see another big (mostly) impressionist exhibit while we're still here in the Bay Area.

And now we have a year's membership to the Palace of the Legion of Honor and the deYoung, since the tickets for the Monet exhibit were almost the same price as a membership. I already know another exhibit we want to see, which is on the Summer of Love, showing up at the DeYoung in just a few weeks (and staying through the summer). The great thing about the membership is that we can go and have a day in the Park, and just stop by the museum to visit that, without feeling that we're "wasting our money" or something.

We headed home afterward. Hanging out in a cafe for a while, we worked on our current read-aloud book, Fool's Fate, and then were enticed to eat dinner there too. After we got home, K. played a two-player game with me (Saboteur: The Duel) in large part so I could review it, then we watched the first episode of Legion.

Reviews: Fool's Fate (excellent), PIQ Berkeley sandwiches (very good), Saboteur: The Duel (ok), and Legion ep 1 (very intriguing, but I feel like we just got to the premise.