Back to the ramble

I have been feeling a little sluggish the last few days, not sure if it is the change of season, all the bad financial news or the huge amount of work that needs to be done around the house after the plumbing repair, or a combination of all three. I haven’t even had the urge to do my work outs for a while. I just have had an urge to sit and read and do little else. My favorite time of the day is riding the subway where I can bury myself in my current reading, which happens to be ‘White Night’ by Jim Bucher. High toned stuff huh? It is a fun read, totally escapist stuff.

Not to say that I have been sitting on my butt all week, just that that I feel like I want to.

I was up early Saturday morning to pick up the car after the second repair session of the week, as I was too busy on Friday to pick it up before shop closed. The mechanic is just a short distance from the house, and it was a sunny warm morning so rather than take the T I walked over. It turns out that the lighting was great for a little picture taking. Here are a few shots I took.


Morning over the ball field


Sunlight through the fence


Steps to nowhere





Saturday was taken up with the usual routine items. The adult karate class is fun. It isn’t geared towards gaining rank, so there are no belts. It is more an overview, giving the grown ups a flavor of what the martial art is about. That doesn’t mean that we are sitting around listening to lectures, we are working on moves and stances and practicing punches kicks and blocks and we all manage to work up a sweat. I continue to feel totally uncoordinated. I was never very good in dance classes in college; I couldn’t remember al the steps, and the same thing haunts me here. Fortunately some of the others are in the same boat so I don’t feel so bad. I just wish that the boy wouldn’t sit in the corner of the dojo and laugh at us.

The weather has been beautiful for the better part of two weeks, Saturday we got out and worked with neighbors on cleaning up the triangle across the street. Everyone has been pretty busy of late and the place had gotten over grown. I am the designated mower, which is fine. One of our neighbors jack and a nice Toro mower that he keeps gassed and available, which make the job pretty easy even when the grass is as tall as it had grown. It only took a couple house of work to transform the plot from the vacant lot look to a nice community space again. Speaking of community plot, we got one step closer to taking actually taking possession of it for the community, as it is in fact a vacant lot. The city is requiring that we get the space surveyed and actually get specific about the improvements that we would make. We have a small grant that we got a year or more ago that we can use for that and there is a organization that has landscape architects who do pro-bono work, so this actually may come to fruition.



I spent a good portion of the weekend rebuilding the pantry closet following the previous weekends plumbing repair. I kept a fan running in it for the week and everything was dried well enough to enclose the chase again. I put some fresh insulation along the exterior wall, and rather than use sheet rock, I replaced the wall I demolished with plywood. Figuring that it is not beyond the pale that I may have to get back inside again. It will be a lot easier to remove the plywood, than demolish the wall once more. All that remains to do is paint the pantry closet. We have a large selection of leftover paint from other paint projects so the only issue is choosing a color from among the choices.

The small bathroom on the other side of the chase is another issue all together. That was where the wall was wet from the leaking pipes. Not only was the wall stained and cracked from the leaks, but I also had to cut a hole in it to get access to the pipe where I joined the old pipe to the new. That wall will need to be replaced with sheetrock. The trick will be mating it to the lower part of the wall, which is tiled, and keeping a clean transition with the adjoining walls. That is next after the pantry ..

Speaking of unfinished projects, I can’t seem to get rid of the old cracked pipe. I broke it up into small pieces about 2 to 3 feet long and left it on the curb on garbage day. When I got home from work the garbage and the recycling was gone but the pieces of pipe were still there. Now you have to understand that the garbage trucks pick up everything here. Furniture, box springs, mattresses, old refrigerators, you name it. If you put it out on the curb on garbage day, it will be gone by evening. What is wrong with my little pieces of cast iron pipe? I think I am going to try to fake them out next week and put a chunk in the garbage can rather than laying it on the street. Wish me luck.