A Huge Injustice

We are PISSED!

A couple of years ago there was a story in the local newspaper about a couple of guys who had purchased an old house that had been turned into apartments. The story was about their journey to restore this beautiful old house called the Muzzy Mansion. I could give you all kinds of history about the house but they have a website that does it much better than I ever could. Visit www.muzzymansion.com to see the real deal.

Mike and Steven are great guys doing an extraordinary job of restoration. And they are Media Whores. I have told them as much and they know that it is out of jealousy that I castigate them so. Even more impressive is the hours of research they have done on their house. It has been very inspiring to Susan and I and gives us perseverance to keep going with our research...of which we have barely scratched the surface.

We ended up meeting them because of the article but they have become friends and we've really enjoyed watching their progress.

Last year they decided to try to make a modest living that will help keep them in the house by turning it into a Bed and Breakfast. They have jumped through a shit load of hoops to make the B&B work but this chicken shit piece of crap city government comes up with one new obstacle after another. I am amazed anyone is able to do business in this city.

Tonight, we received an e-mail that Mike and Steven sent en-mass chronicling their struggle in which they announced that they are throwing in the towel. They are putting the house on the market at a substantially reduced price and if they can't sell by the end of July, they might just walk away.

Congratulations Spokane! You've made the city safe from another potentially profitable business that could pay taxes.

I am so incensed over this that I can hardly stand it. You may think that we work hard on this place but trust me, we are amateurs compared to the work and research that these guys do. It pisses me off soooooo much that the city should make it so difficult for two hard working decent human persons who are really dedicated to a proper restoration to try and make a little money in order to continue to live in the house they care so much about that I write run on sentences that seem to have no end or congruent subject matter any longer.

Best of Luck to you, Mike and Steven. I'm looking forward to the final party with tears streaming down my face.

Precision Solsticing

The weather has been a major topic of conversation with everyone recently. Newspaper articles tell the tale of one of the coldest, dampest Springs in recent memory. We have experienced record single day rainfall. We have had several cold high temperatures recorded. You can't plan anything outdoors without some sort of indoor backup.

Yesterday was the Tenth Annual Solstice Party. I had been pensively watching the weather forecast for Saturday all week. First it looked sunny. The next day the forecast said rain. The following day foretold of partly sunny conditions.

As it turned out, the day was perfect. The weather was made to order for a Summer Solstice Extravaganza. We had a great turn out and there was (again) shit loads of food. The party petered out around 11 and Susan and I found ourselves fast asleep shortly after midnight with most of the clean up done.

We woke up this morning to rainfall and it hasn't let up at all. The timing was just perfect. We slept in until 10:30. I went out to get a couple mocha's and mine was free because it's Fathers Day. I even got a call from my son. We had a nice breakfast made up of left overs from all the food. We had strawberries, some turnovers and deviled eggs.

Today we are enjoying a true rarity for us. We are doing NUTHIN"! And loving it!! We have a fire going in the fireplace and we're just sitting around doing whatever. I'm trying to refrain from doing anything productive. As I write that, I hear the vacuum being put into service downstairs. I better go down and put a stop tho that right now.

New Night Light

Just in time for the Summer Solstice Party, I got the Newel Post Light installed. We are pretty happy with it although it is essentially a useless light. Perhaps that's a little harsh. It's a superfluous light. We certainly don't need it to light the entry way. But it does add a different texture to our lighting and it makes a wonderful night light.
So, to our list of remodeling expenses for the ol' money pit, add about $250.00 for a night light. Even more if you add in the time it took to drill the hole, the cost of the several drill bit extensions and the basement ceiling I have to repair.

Stairway Then & Now

The very best reason for keeping this blog and for all the inane amount of pictures I take can all be ground down to the wonderful composite picture below. On the left is our staircase as it appeared on March 6th, 2006. On the right, the same staircase as it appears over FOUR EFFING YEARS LATER. Geez we work slow!

That's all we are going to get accomplished before the Solstice Celebration. Now it is on to cleaning.

One minor note before signing off. My affinity for the human race has taken another blow. I had a meeting at our church after work tonight. I pulled up into the parking lot and parked like I usually do. I locked the car like I mostly do. After the meeting...about two hours later...I returned to my car to find the passenger window has been smashed. I large rock is lying on the ground next to the scattered remains of my former window. This was done between 5PM and 6:30PM on a bright sunny day in a wide open parking lot.
Something must have scared the low life scum sucking tweaker because he didn't take anything except a bracket that holds my phone that was suctioned to the windshield. My backpack was in the back seat and held my check books, a GPS, my camera, a sport radio, a brand new ipod and you're not getting any of it you MuthaFucka!

Sorry! I had to let that out!!!

Whirlwind Weekend Wonderland

When there is a suggestion that it's time to take it easy and relax and kick back and doing nuthin', I can be counted on the be at the front of that line. I'm lazy by nature and probably wouldn't accomplish much of anything if I wasn't married.

But I am married. And so we spent most of the whole damn weekend on projects, the main one consisting of decorating four skywalks downtown for the upcoming Hoopfest tourney.

While I am quite happy to sit back and do nuthin', I must say that there is a certain amount of pride and sense of accomplishment from going out and doing a moderately good job of painting windows.

Here are the pictures.

I really like these shadow pictures. The sun creates some cool images.
When we paint skywalks, we are at the mercy of the elements. Sure, we're indoors so we don't get rained or snowed on. But the nature of a skywalk leaves it less than well insulated. If the heat goes off as it so often does in the winter evenings when we paint, it becomes quite chilly. If the sun is blazing down as it was today, we are incased in a sauna. The picture below shows the direct sunlight staring us in the face as we paint.

When it's really cold, the paint freeses on the glass. When it's really hot, it dries almost instantly. This is when it is important to concentrate on how much money we are making. Among the many other activities of the weekend, held a yard sale on Saturday, earning a few sheckles and disposing of a lot of crap. We left that at noon to the capable hands of our friends Carine and Randy and went to a graduation picnic, left that after filling our gullets with sublime epicurian delights and headed downtown to watch a live broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion" at the arena.

Afterwards we met some other friends who attended the show and had some drinks. And then we went back downtown to paint some more.

We were out for se7en hours today and got everything done...thus giving us our sense of accomplishment which allowed us to go out for dinner and spend some of our earnings. Before that however, Susan attempted to fix her little screw up at the top of the stairs. She laid down a coating of varnish and everything appears to be back to okie-dokie.

Now we are in the final week showdown to get the house ready for the Annual Summer Solstice Party on Saturday, June the 19th. This means that the tension will start building at 5PM tomorrow when we arrive home from work to begin to scouring process. The tension will continue throughout the week and ease about 7:48 PM Saturday when Susan has had her fifth glass of wine.

First Night of HoopHell

We finally got the design nailed down for Hoopfest and got to work painting the first for four skywalks tonight. It went very very slow and we did not finish. The first skywalk we paint of any given skywalk season goes slow but this one was particularly bad. I think we'll have se7en hours into this one alone. that is bad!


I spent the first hour and a half cutting the giant stencil I had penciled out on butcher paper. Unfortunately, the best place to cut the stencil is when it's on the window. It's a nice hard cutting surface and there is lots of room.


We hope to have all four skywalks done by Sunday but with everything we have to do, I am not optomistic.

The End of Varnishing

We are now done varnishing. Susan has made that official declaration. I am all too happy to follow her edict.

The section of railing that Susan varnished yesterday dried sufficiently over the night to allow us to believe that varnishing the rest of the railing would solve the whole slow drying problem.

Usually when we have a screw up of some type with some project, the story begins with, "Stan took a paintbrush..."! Paintbrush could be replaced with hammer, power saw, sledge hammer, back hoe, or dynamite.

Today's story of a screw up begins with, "Susan took a paintbrush."

Yesterday, while varnishing, Susan attempted to do a little repair on the wood floor at the top of the stairs. It wasn't that bad, but the area needed a bit of a touch up with varnish or possibly stain. Susan decided to try both. The result was a streaky unattractive mess. Susan was quite despondent and upset with herself. I was quietly very happy that it wasn't me.

Tonight she went after her remedy. She used some very fine grit sandpaper and applied a small amount of Liquid Gold and lightly sanded the area. This technique worked. The floor has returned to its original luster.

I was quietly upset that I had lost leverage for the next screw up I cause.

Soggy Weekend

I am amazed at the amount of rain we have been getting over the last week. I haven't had to water the lawn or any of the plants for a good solid week. Today I noticed this little plant taking root and starting to grow. Unfortunately, it is growing out of the fungus laden outdoor carpet on our deck. That is not a good sign as to the cleanliness of our deck. We got some more varnishing done today and I bounced around the neighborhood doing a variety of things. We removed the park sign from the posts today and man oh man, was that a heavy mofo. There were three of us and we did an okay job of getting it to Mac's front porch, where I will install the decal.

Susan varnished a small section of the railing that was not drying and we will see if that does anything to facilitate the efficacy of the drying.

The Unvarnished Truth (about our rail)

Saturday is my day to work at the bar and Susan usually gets to have a relaxing day to herself without the burden of me. Today however, she had an all day sort of affair with the catering company she works for. I think she had to be at work at 10:30 this morning. Here it is eleven o'clock in the P.M. of the evening and she is not home yet.

That means that I had better do something productive here at the house tonight or I will be the main ingredient in the shit sandwich of life that is clearly coming my way.

Fortunately, I am able to read the writing on the excrement and headed directly to the staircase to lay down another coat of varnish. It went much faster this time. With the first coat going down, it soaked into the wood rally fast and required quite a bit of varnish. The second coat went down with nary a soaking issue in sight.

The problem we are having is getting the hand rail to dry from the stain. The main rail is still very tacky. I put a heater and a fan into the area and that does not seem to be doing much to dry the stain. I've been thinking that the high humidity we have been experiencing in the form of deluges of rain has been hindering the drying process.

So far, it's still just a wait and wait and wait kind of process.

Cats and Varnish

We began the varnishing here on the eighth night of Memorial Day Weekend and we completed the whole staircase. Not the newel posts or the railings but all the risers and treads all the way up. Or all the way down since we started at the top. And when I say we, I mean Susan. She did most of the work. However, instead of just sitting around watching TV this time, I actually put myself in a support kind of mode. I fetched beer, kept the music going, answered the phone (except for the one time it actually rang and Susan got it), and ciphered out a way to keep the cats away from the stairs.

While I was doing that, Susan suggested that we close the pocket doors in the living room, block off the door into the TV room and somehow block the hallway. This reminded me of the backstairs discovery I made when Susan told me about the backstairs. It was pure genious on my part...the part where I listened to her. I keep wondering when she is going to figure out that I married much better than she did.

This picture doesn't show the blockade very well and of course, it remains to be seen if we have really outwitted the cats. They are crafty little mammals and usually figure out a way past our previous blockades. I guess it won't be too bad to have cat paws and cat hair permanently infused into the varnish.

Skunk Free Zone

We have been living with the impression that a skunk has taken up residence under the Carriage House. This impression was created by me when I saw a skunk go under the Carriage House. There were also lots of telltale digging signs.

I have set traps several times over the past week and have come up empty. I filled in a big hole the other day and it remains filled in. I am therefore declaring us a "Skunk Free Zone" and going on about my business.

Concerning the stairway, Susan put another coat of stain on certain parts of the stairway while I banged around on my table saw and created new areas of work from the damage.

As such, the Memorial Day Weekend continues.

Memorial Weekend Day Four

Anyone who says we can't finish this project over the Memorial Day Weekend is not familiar with my ability to play fast and loose with the data involved in determining the actual length of any given Holiday-ish type of Federal Event. Clearly, we have completed our task of staining and only now have to complete the varnishing over the remaining three or four days of the aforementioned Holiday-ish event, thereby completing our project on schedule and on time and with limited run-on sentences.