Checking on the progress in the cluttered chaos my hating retirement husband calls a cellar, I was delighted to see these:
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Looks like someone took my advice about using brackets on his shelves…. and if that’s not a genuine grade ‘A’ miracle? Ethel Kennedy didn’t own a black dress.
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Shelves are making their way along the newly insulated front wall…
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And might have a better chance at withstanding the onslaught of useless junk treasure that’s sure to follow.
After an unusually warm winter in Maine, cold weather has finally arrived.
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The arctic blast that’s been moving across country finally found us and with the strong winds? Even my menopausal hot flashing self has to put on a coat to go outside.
There are places in Maine that are seeing 60 below zero wind chills today but Mount Washington, New Hampshire? They just dropped to the coldest wind chill temperature ever recorded in the U.S….. 108 below! Now that’s winter.
But a little brisk, even for me.
While I woke up to no cold water in the kitchen, which is normal when you’re an idiot who forgot to let the faucet drip last night, this was a new phenomenon at Casa River –
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The house was cracking and banging last night with the frigid temps and we thought we heard one giant contraction when we were watching tv in the living room.
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So this was our bedroom picture window when we woke up.
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Seal clearly broken and a circle of solid ice.
It also happened on a side window.
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Looks like we’ll be doing some replacing this year.
Work continues in the underground crap filled cave basement, one small section at a time because my husband is still miserably bored by retirement.
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He clears and cleans a few square feet..
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Having moved all the cobwebbed clutter that resided there…
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Behind him to the section he previously cleared, insulated and ceiling’d. (That’s the past tense of ‘put up a ceiling’ in case you were wondering.)
He’s shuffled more useless junk around in the past month than Fred Sanford did in his 6 year television series run.
To be honest it drives the OCD part of me a little nuts. Now would be the perfect time to sort, clean, and organize… but he won’t. No matter how many times I suggest it or offer to help. It will be so much more work to do it later, but the man cannot multi task to save his life. The last time I brought up the subject? He snapped at me and said “One thing at a time!”
So he’s down there now, alone. Having turned the corner on the front wall…
We’ve all said “Oh, you really shouldn’t have” when someone does something nice for us or gives us a gift. It’s an automatic response, though what we really meant to say is …I wasn’t expecting this. But thanks, I’m glad you did!
But when a friend of mine gave me a gift the other day? Out of nowhere, for no reason, just because? It was a lovely gesture and of course… I said, “Oh, you shouldn’t have.”
Sure, millions of dollars would be nice… maybe we could have a roof that doesn’t leak and that private jet I’ve always wanted…. but paying someone else to stain the deck so I wouldn’t blow out my knee? Changing doctors when I knew mine was an idiot so I wouldn’t be misdiagnosed and need surgery ? Not letting our cat outside on the day he was run over by a car? Or having the chance to spend more time with my father and ask him all the questions I should have before he died? I’ll take that over a giant bank account any day.
I’ve heard people call it the zoomies, but I can’t quite wrap my tongue around that.
Whatever the nomenclature, it’s when your pet goes spastic and starts tearing around the house like a whirling dervish. For Lord Dudley Mountcatten it happens every evening around 7:00. He starts to twitch, gets a wild look in his eye and he’s off. Sprinting across the living room, down the hall, bouncing off a wall to the second hall, up and over the bed, across the top of a chair, back down the halls, through the kitchen, ending under the dining room table with a toy.
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Last night it was the blue feathered whale and as you can see, he was having a grand old time.
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Wish I was that limber.
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I’m not sure why he has a fascination with furniture legs…
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But when he’s in rippin’ mode he always wraps around them to play.
Once you get past the ick factor, you have to admit it does make sense.
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“An average flush for a modern, Western-style toilet uses 6 liters (1.6 gallons) of water, and the average adult pees about seven times every 24 hours. That means that each day of weeing takes 42 liters (11.1 gallons) of toilet water to flush away. Assuming that people urinate the same way every single day, this means in just one year, the average person uses 15,330 liters (4,050 gallons) of toilet water. There are 319 million people in the US, so assuming they all pee the same, which they don’t, but we’re making broadly accurate assumptions here that’s about 4.9 trillion liters (1.3 trillion gallons) of water flushed away in the name of urine every 365 days. For comparison, that’s like flushing away 1.97 million Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth per annum.”
“Now, if you peed in the shower, you’d massively reduce this figure. Say that this means that you only pee in a toilet six, not seven times, per day. This means that in just one year, you’d save 2,190 liters (579 gallons) of toilet water. Extrapolating this to the entire US population, that’s 699 billion liters (185 billion gallons) of water saved.”
Since we’ve established my husband doesn’t want me to lend a hand in the basement, alternative helpmates must be employed.
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Meet the Dead Man.. otherwise known as my husband’s personal assistant. Since my spouse can’t lift, position and hold a piece of plywood over his head while screwing it into the floor joists, he built himself a friend. One who doesn’t offer advice or disagree with him like I do.
And speaking of holding things in place….
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When the old insulation is ripped and starts to sag?
Grab a broom.
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And balance that broom on a box, which is balanced on a few old books, which are top of another box which is on a table not meant to support that much weight.
Good times.
🤣
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Where there's only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.