Take Two of These and Call Me In the Morning

A few weeks ago we bought a new treadmill. At first it ran backward until Todd Macguyvered it and now I don’t have to jog backward. Even though I run forward on the treadmill, the lights dim as I run. They dim when each foot falls on the tread, which results in a rhythmic light show timed with whatever song is on my iPod.

I called National Grid, the local electric company, to have them send someone out to take a look at our connection. We just had an electrician out to the house to upgrade us to 200 amp service, so the disco effect shouldn’t be happening. Last night at 8:30 the National Grid truck rolled up the driveway. In the kitchen I bent down to put a hand on Nemo, so that he wouldn’t tackle the repair man. I stood up quickly, and smacked my head on the open cabinet door.

The hollow coconut sound of the door's corner impacting skull reverberated through my ears and vibrated in every bone in my body. I doubled over and clutched my head in pain until I fell over and howled. Todd raced over and asked me if I was OK. I couldn’t breathe, tears stung my eyes, my ears rang and spots clouded my vision. I caught my breath and told him I was OK.

Once back on the couch, the National Grid guy cut the power to the house as he repaired a connection to the house. I balanced an ice pack on my head and grimaced in pain. In the dark.

This morning I woke up, head still throbbing in pain. The lights didn’t dim as I ran on the treadmill, but the pain pulsed right on the top of my head with every step. Later on in the morning the blow dryer scorched the spot, and I winced just a little harder.  At work, the pain settled behind my eyes. I downed a small arsenal of Ibuprofen. Nothing changed. So I emailed Todd.

“My head hurts. A lot. It hurts behind my eyes.”

“I’m sorry honey. Want to go to the doc after work tonight,” he wrote back.

“No. I think it just has to hurt for a little while. I’ll just ice it again tonight.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. But I think ice cream will help. Like, if I eat it really fast and get a brain freeze? You know, treatment from within…”

“Good idea.  If I were to pick up some frozen therapy, which flavor do you think will have the best penetrative healing ability?” he replied.

“Well, Karamel Sutra has that caramel ooze in it, which will make the medicinal properties of the ice cream act quicker. It’s clinically proven.”

“That’s convenient. I hear there are free samples of Karamel Sutra available. They have a guarantee, if the pain isn’t gone in 3 days you’ll get a tub for free.”

“Now that’s a guarantee I can get behind,” I replied.

“OK, I’ll swing by the pharmacy on the way home tonight.”

A half tub of Karamel Sutra, and wouldn’t you know it? The pain behind my eyes is gone.

Excuse Me While I Lick My Walls

It all started with a crappy fridge. The house came with a crappy side by side fridge and freezer. It was ridiculously impractical, as both sides were impossibly narrow. We couldn't fit a left over pizza in the fridge side, nor could we fit a frozen pizza in the freezer side--a huge problem due to our excessive pizza consumption.

We lusted after the french door style refrigerators until we bit the bullet and bought one a few weeks ago. It was great, and humongous. It wouldn't fit in the space where the old one lived. We tore out the cabinet over the fridge, which was fine because all we kept up there was a gigantic bag of chocolate chips and my medicine from last year's bout of hot tub herpes.

The wall wasn't painted all the way behind the cabinet. So then we knew we had to paint.

If I was going to paint the walls, I may as well paint the ceiling first, right?

I spent a lot of time looking at the ceiling, and happened to notice the disgustingly filthy recessed lights. One of them had a reddish brown stain smeared on the side, and now I wonder if my kitchen was a crime scene before we bought the house.

Here's the before picture. After the ceiling's been painted and Todd yanked out one of the horrible recessed lights.


Then we haggled over the paint color. I envisioned a cheerful color. In fact, I won a poker hand in which the stakes were the color of the kitchen. I won apple green walls. But Todd was right about his initial assertion about color, and he was proven right by a $5 piece of software I bought at Lowes. (Totally worth it if you want to paint a room and can't pick out a color!)

Now my kitchen is the color of a chocolate milkshake. And all I want is a chocolate milkshake. Eventually my lack of fitting into my jeans will likely force me to repaint to a less suggestive color.

Todd had to frankenstein up these light fixtures. He cobbled together various components that I never would have dreamed of putting together. And it totally works. I don't have the heart to turn them off, and I am a complete nazi about turning the lights off when we're not in the room.

I think I just heard angels sing.

Chopsticks: The Home Improvement Tool of the New Millenium

In 1997, when Todd and I started going out, I lived in the world's smallest apartment. It was the kind of place where the kitchen was so small I couldn't open the fridge all the way. It would open halfway because the walkway between the fridge and the sink was so narrow that the fridge door couldn't open all the way. Putting leftover pizza away was a feat of engineering that usually required a plate and foil.

There was no storage space to speak of in this apartment. There were two tiny closets. The closets were not deep enough to store clothing. I had to turn the hangers slightly to be able to close the closet doors. The building was erected some time before the wheel was invented and I suspect people used smaller hangers then, and didn't store leftover pizza in the fridge.

The bathroom had its own issues. Sure the tiles were charming, but a radiator pipe ran floor to ceiling right near where I stood when I used the sink. If I had a nickel for every time I burned my shoulder on that hot pipe I could have covered the rent for at least 2 months. There was no faucet with which to fill the tub; I had to run the shower to fill the enormous tub when I wanted to have a soak. Located high up on the wall, near the ceiling, was the bathroom window which allowed a scenic view of the bedroom if you stood on the sink on your tip toes.

Storage was lacking in the bathroom until Todd came over for the weekend and built a shelf. He bought a piece of that white wire shelving and fastened it to the wall using hemp string and a chopstick. I knew on that very weekend that he would be the man for me. He secured a shelf using a chopstick. How MacGuyvery cool is that?

Now it's twelve years later we're preparing for our new fridge to be delivered tomorrow. The one that came with the house sucks. It doesn't close properly. Griffen ate the handle one day when he wanted to get something to eat. It's a side by side fridge freezer jobbie, that we can't, ironically, fit leftover pizza into. Tonight we pulled the old fridge from the wall and disconnected water line that runs to the in-door water dispenser. Todd disconnected the main water line that runs into the house from the well, so we wouldn't have to work in a puddle, then we moved the fridge to the other side of the room.

"So, this presents an interesting problem. We'll need the water on tomorrow morning when we take showers. But it'll just pour out of this line if we turn it on," Todd stroked his goatee, deep in thought.

I wasn't paying attention to the water dilemma until he called up from the basement "I am going to turn the water back on. Tell me if water comes out of the water line."

I sat and waited, no water came out, "No, it's not. It's fine!" I called back to him. He joined me in the kitchen when I asked him, "So, what did you do?"

He pointed to his genius fridge water line plug. Jammed into the end of the water line was a chopstick.

Former Self, In Cardboard

When we moved into this house, on March 31st, 2008, we lobbed a load of boxes into a room that is just to the right at the bottom of the cellar stairs. This room is unfinished. The prior owner put up ceiling tiles on roughly 1/3 of the ceiling, and put of 2x4 studs against portions of the foundation in a half-assed effort to finish the room. A single bare light bulb in a socket in the center of the ceiling illuminates the room. There is no light switch, and a slight twist of the light bulb is how we turn the light on and off in that room. Toward the end of moving our stuff into the house, this became the “Oh screw it!” room. Boxes of our stuff were stashed in the room in exhaustion at the end of the move. "Oh screw it, just throw it in there, we'll sort it out later" was what we said over and over in the days of the move. The boxes contained stuff that we wanted to keep but hadn’t yet decided where it would all go. Books, photo albums, two bean bag chairs originally purchased for movie nights at the dive shop—back when we owned the dive shop.

I originally envisioned this space as expanded pantry space. Todd, in his love of cooking, has been accumulating a crap-load of kitchen stuff. He now owns a slow cooker and a pressure cooker. He has lots of stock pots. He has foil roasting pans. All of these things are not used in our daily kitchen use, and we both would prefer to stash them away somewhere so they are not underfoot. I imagined this room would eventually contain racks that contained cleaning stuff, Todd’s kitchen implements, dry and canned goods, etc. We stood in the doorway of the room, looking at the enormous pile of stuff on the floor and speculated about the future of this room.

“Well, I got what I always wanted, the workshop. What’s something you’ve always wanted in a house?” Todd asked me. The way he smiled at he told me that he already knew the answer. He knew I was taking one for the team by suggesting that we turn the room into a big-ass-walk-in pantry. “How about you get the gym you always wanted.”

He excitedly walked into the room, stepped over the debris that is our stuff, and pointed. “We could dry wall in the walls, finish tiling the ceiling, put a flat screen over there, a treadmill over here….” Todd has an amazing knack for visualizing a space that I’d never seen in anyone else.

“Are you sure?” I asked him. “I mean, imagine how much we could store in here.” I stepped into the room and pointed. “Racks over here for all your big pots, a big huge cabinet over here for food…”

“No, I know you’ve always wanted a gym. I want you to have what you want too.”

Over the last few weekends I’ve been going through the boxes in the room that will become my gym. I vowed that I will not just move whole boxes into other parts of the house. I will unpack each box, and find a home for every single thing inside. My pile of papers, notebooks and texts from graduate school ended up in a pile as I unpacked the boxes. I finished my Masters nearly six years ago and since then I have not cracked open a single one of the texts I had accumulated, nor have I re-read my papers and the notations from my professors, nor have I perused any of the notes I scribbled during lectures. I knew that they had to go. I couldn’t imagine all the trappings of my former life as a graduate student taking up space in my house.

Before I recycled the pages from my notes, donated my old texts, or flat out threw away anything related to my graduate degree, I sat in one of the bean bag chairs and I read my old papers.

I don’t recognize the person who scored a 96 on a Consumer Behavior mid-term exam. I recognize her handwriting and I remember how she quizzed herself using flash cards as she walked from the Back Bay train station to the classroom on Tremont Street in Boston. She didn’t stop quizzing herself until she could rapidly recall the answer to every single question on every single card, and then she shuffled the cards and flashed them to herself again. And then again after that. I sat in my soon-to-be home gym and read the answers on the test, and wondered what part of my brain still might store that information. I held my hand over my handwritten answer and I tried to access that part of my brain and answer the question. Today I cannot answer the questions nearly as well as I had back in 2002.

Between the years 2000 and 2003, my Masters program took up a lot of space in my life. I went to class, I met people, I created presentations, and wrote papers. I studied in every spare moment. Friends and family asked me “So, how’s school going?” all the time. Normally, it’s the act of thumbing through old pictures that make me marvel at my former self. I marvel at how long or how short my hair was, or the definition in my quadriceps from my captain-of-the-college-track-team days. But this time it wasn’t something I could easily point out in a picture. I held quantities of information in my brain that I no longer think about, even though for three years the acquisition of that information was my entire life.

Who was that person that I dug out of a cardboard box? And who is the woman now who threw that person into the recycling bin?

Gaping Hole in My House 2008

When Todd and I bought this house, we knew that the front doors needed to be replaced. They were drafty, and we expected that the one at the very front of the house, at the bottom of the stairs, would likely fall into the house with a stiff wind. Being the do-it-yourselfers that we are we decided to take on this project by ourselves.

The first front door, the smaller of the two, went in without too much hassle—that is until we got to the expanding foam portion of the install. Todd sprayed the foam, which resembles puffy Easy Cheese, into the gap around the door and we watched it expand. And expand, and then expand some more. It oozed out of the gap, and began to drip onto the floor. I mopped at it with a fistful of paper towels, and before I knew it my hands were coated in spray foam.

We finished the clean up, and I noticed that the spray foam dried on my hands. “No matter, I thought to myself, it’ll come off in the shower.” Todd glanced at the can of spray foam and noticed the giant letters at the very top of the can that said something to the effect of “Wear gloves when you use this stuff, or else the spray foam residue will be stuck to your hands for a week and will be excruciatingly painful to try to peel off and will even make your knuckles bleed in spots from when you were overzealous and tried to pick the stuff off square millimeter by square millimeter.”

We learned a valuable lesson with the spray expanding foam. I even went out and bought another can of it, with an air of arrogance. I left it on the floor of the passenger seat of my car for the installation of the larger front door. Last week, Todd had been driving the Jeep to work so that he could take the dogs in with him. One day he was pulling into work, and Griffen—who completely lacks in impulse control—got excited and jumped from the back and into the front seat in anticipation of spending the day in Todd's office and getting pet by Todd's co-workers. In his excitement, he kicked the cover to my armrest compartment, which has been broken for more than a year now, and it fell onto the floor of the passenger side of the car. The very sharp screw, that is still on the armrest cover, lined up in precisely the right angle and punctured the can of expanding spray foam that was waiting on the floor mat.

Expanding foam sprayed out of the can and all over the car. It sprayed, and expanded. Sprayed and expanded. Then sprayed and expanded some more. He pulled into the parking lot at work, and frantically threw the can out of the car and scooped expanding foam out with his hands until the car was clean. He began to attract a crowd of laughing co-workers as he scooped and scooped foam that was expanding as he tried to clean it up. Without gloves on, of course.

At any rate, here are some snaps of the construction.

I like to call this one "Gaping Hole in My House, 2008."

This is the first door we installed.

This is the big front door. It weighs roughly 4,973,452 pounds, and we lifted it approximately 573 times over the course of the installation.

This is the front door from the outside. We're debating on whether to paint it black, to match the garage doors. What do you think, Internet?

And this is my impossibly handy, MacGuyer-esque husband standing in the lawn admiring our hard work.

Too Much

I am going to summon Dave Matthews' song "Too Much" to help me with this post. At the moment I have "So much to say, so much to say, so much to say, so much to say," that I couldn't possibly express it all on my own.

"...I eat too much..."
Yesterday Todd brought home our fabulous new grill. He's had his eye on a Vermont Castings grill for a very long time, and we finally brought it home yesterday. On the way home from the grill store I popped into the market and bought him his favorite, rib-eye steak. I grabbed some turkey dogs for myself, as I am a recovering vegetarian and still can't sit down and eat beef. So while Todd was dignified eating his rib-eye, I was chomping down my hot dogs lamenting that I hadn't thought to buy beer nuts too.

Here's Todd manning his new grill:



"...I drink too much..."
Actually, lately this has not been true, despite the fact that our good friend Mike brings beer when ever he comes over to hang out in the hot tub with us. I am still fighting off a cough, which I've been told is a "bronchial spasm" and have been downing Tussionex every night so I can sleep through it. I haven't touched a drop of alcohol in the last two weeks for fear of ending up in a coma as I sleep.

Though I did plug in our beer fridge, and it is stocked with the beer we moved from the old house. I also unpacked whatever booze we have. I now have a fridge full of beer and a jug of vodka and orange juice in the house just waiting for my bronchi to stop spasming.

"...I want too much..."
I dedicate this line to Griffen, here he is in his single-minded wanting for someone to please just throw this damn frisbee:


"...too much..."
This line is devoted to the expulsion of our ancient woodstove. Here it is, on the day that we moved into the house:


If you look toward the bottom left of the stove, just to the left of the bottom hinge on the door, you will see that the seams on the stove are warped. Due to the fact that this stove has a hole in it, is ugly as hell, and that we would prefer to have a fireplace anyway we have decided to get rid of the stove. Then the clincher for this decision came when the chimney sweep told us that the design of the stove is extremely unsafe and is a house fire waiting to happen.

The stove weighs roughly 400 pounds, and it took us the better part of an evening to get the thing off the hearth, onto a dolly, out the door and to the curb. This was no small feat, and required the whole of the lobe on Todd's brain where all his MacGuyver tendencies are stored.

We very gingerly edged the stove off the hearth and onto the cart. Then we laid down plywood to protect the wood floor as we very slowly rolled it to the door. We discovered the stove wouldn't fit through the door, and had to very carefully turn it as it sat on the cart. We edged the stove to the door, and pondered how we'd get it down the stairs and onto the lawn. We laid down some 4x4's we had kicking around, and hoped for the best:


We gripped the cart as it rolled down the planks, hoping that it wouldn't topple over and forever remain implanted in the front lawn.

Next we addressed the matter of stove disposal. We decided that we'd haul the stove out to the curb and see if a passerby would want it. We have already discovered the scavenger tendenies of the people who drive on our street. We have discovered that we can put virtually anything on the curb and it will disappear within 12 hours or so. We hoped this would be the case with the wood stove.

Here Todd is making a plywood road from the house to the curb, so the stove on the cart would more easily roll away from our house:


You can see how far we'd gotten before I thought I break out the camera:

We tipped the 400 pound beast of a stove onto the side of the road, and rolled it onto the grass. We joked that we will be looking at this thing for the entire summer because nobody would be able to lift it even if they wanted it.

Within 24 hours the stove was gone.

Yesterday I hauled out a metal futon frame that the old owners of my house had left behind, and a TV stand made of pressboard and veneer that we don't need anymore. By nightfall, those were gone as well.

I am glad that somebody who drives on this street is making use of our cast-offs, which makes the recycler in me sing with joy.