"Like you always say..."

..."Ancient Curse"

So this morning I was trying to get ready for my last day of classes. Low and behold when I pulled on the button to turn the shower on - the faucet snapped.

So there was much water pouring in all the wrong places. Much more cussing.

No time to fix it so I had a =very= cold shower before going to campus.

Good news: Tomorrow my grandfather is coming over to look at the problem and (slightly more importantly) I no longer have to deal with my criminology students.

Go me!

How I spent my Labor Day

... A Pictorial Essay.






Notice that the man in the gray shirt was present in the last picture. He, my father, still lives.

And people say that I'm not filled with compassion.

I'm positively a font of human kindness.

Tseo says Hi

Two posts in one day...

Amazing.

Once I got home from the lake, I decided to fire up the outdoor kitchen again and cook something for lunch. When I was finished and putting things away, I saw something gray walk down from the hillside and into the back yard. Originally I thought that it was one of the stray cats in the neighborhood coming down to eat at the bowl of food I put out for strays.

Well, I was half right.

Week 1, down

... Fourteen to go.

Project Updates:

Chalkboard: 90% complete
Wallpaper: 60% complete
Driveway: 5% (ok, so I've -thought- about doing it a few times)
Painting Car Port: 5% (yup, you guessed it.)

The chalkboard that I've been working on with Josh is almost complete. This past Friday I got the board and we primed it with two coats and then put on two of the black, chalkboard paint. Today was the application of the cork board border. I know me and I will definitely have a few dozen things posted up on the edge of reminders and designs or projects that I'm progressing. The wallpaper has all but been removed from the walls of the middle, or "living" room. I have to continue to scrape and sand the wall here and there to remove any loose bits of paper that refuse to be scraped free. This is, essentially, the easy part. Once all of that is complete then I can start the arduous task of -FINDING- a replacement wallpaper. Putting it up is fairly easy.

As for beating the driveway into submission or painting the carport - well, both of those have suffered this first week of my summer vacation.

I'll post some pictures of the two projects that have gotten any kind of attention as soon as I figure how to yank them down from my new phone.

Until then -

Go see Star Trek.

-Tom

Freedom

Well, it's that time again.

As of 5 p.m. this afternoon, I have posted the last of my exam grades, handled the last of the emails sent to me by students hoping / pleading for "understanding" or "assistance" with their grade.

It may be yet another constant in the universe, but whenever I assign extra-credit for my classes, the only students who actually complete it are the ones who don't need the extra points. All those who blow it off are those who could have really used the help by the end of the year?

What does this mean? Well, it means that I can usually shut down any of the begging, pleading, and general childishness that I get from some students by simply asking, "Did you do the extra-credit?" When they reply, "Well, no, but I had a good reason." I usually end the conversation. Life is too short to hear yet another excuse for poor preparation or performance.

Now that I'm on my summer break (aka, being unemployed), I can work on my house projects. Last summer started off with fixing a bathroom sink. This year it's been ripping down wallpaper in my living room. The old wallpaper was put up some time ago and needed to be replaced. It shouldn't cost too much to repaper the old walls, but more on that later.

As for now it's late and I need to get some sleep. Tomorrow I plan on attacking my driveway with a sledgehammer.


See ya.

-Tom

A Tree Grows in Ohio

Today was one of the first not-rainy days of this spring break and after three years of planning, I finally got a tree planted in my front yard.

In years previous, there was always some combination of forces (lack of money, weather, time) that conspired against me planting a tree in my front yard that would hopefully provide some kind of shade in years to come.

I would have liked to have put an oak tree out there but they were hard to come by (in a large enough form that would make it easy to transplant) so I settled on a Silver Maple.

So out into the weather and just before a large mass of "green" (rain) came my way, Josh and I pulled out the post-holler and shovel and got to work. It didn't take a lot of work since the ground was already semi-muddy from the previous two days of rain. I hadn't handled a shovel in a while since I'm just now recovering from winter and the ensuing plagues so it wore me out a bit but it felt good.

This spring break was fairly uneventful - nothing really was accomplished except for the tree - but very restful; and that was needed even more so. With only five or six weeks left in the term, it's going to be a mad dash through April and into May to finish out the school year.

And then who knows what I'll get into.

-T

Merry Moving Day

Well, it's come.

Today is Moving Day.

Josh is in the process of gathering up his stuff to move into the dorms today around 1 p.m. We've already hauled most of his furniture to his parent's place and now he just has the little stuff that he'll take with him.

Well, I shouldn't say "little stuff", because he's got the idea that he's going to take a TON of things along with him. Josh plans on hauling all of his kitchen stuff with him so that he can cook in the dorms. He's never lived in the dorms and is operating on the idea that the dorms are just like an apartment.

The dorms are very similar to an apartment (two large bedrooms with three people each and a connecting living room) and there's a small kitchen area there for people to store food or to cook.
At 25 years old, Josh will be one of the oldest people in the dorms.

I'm sure that this will be a very interesting experience for him.

Once he's moved his stuff out, I'm going to be cleaning and rearranging the house a bit. The house has had a 'cluttered' feeling ever since Josh moved in. There just wasn't much room to put all of his stuff away so a lot of it sat in baskets and boxes in the front room. That combined with some stuff that I am storing for some other friends just junked up the front room.

Not that many people came over to the house, but the first thing that they would see was all of the stuff cluttering up the front room and it just bugged the hell out of me.

Oh well, that'll be fixed soon.

More later.

-Tom

What goes thump?

There are many things that make noise,
crickets, cats, and cicada and boys
but few of them make a thump in the night.

Now even if you allow
for the occasional growl
there are few things that go thump.

But that is exactly what awoke me at four in the morn,
a thump that sounded as loud as a horn.

The thump was that of a tree as it fell,
more accurately as it's crashing death's knell.

With a strong summer blow,
the trees twisted to and fro
and one did go thump in the night.

As I launched from the door
to see ever so more,
I spied what had given me such a fright.

'twas a branch and a limb and two trunks did fall,
for when one tree fell
it took them all.

Now I know the answer
of what goes thump in the night.
It's the sound of a tree
attempting to flee
and forgetting that trees can't take flight.

(This post brought to you because I can't get that damn 'Hippy Grandma' out of my head)

-Tom

I've been blogged!

Ok, so it's only Em's blog about my outdoor kitchen, but still.

Have a look here.

-Tom

Ancient Curse

Well, that's what it feels like sometimes.

I had plans to work in my backyard since before Finals Week. I need to haul all of the sandstone blocks that once made a retaining wall out from behind the car port and use them elsewhere.

However, since I made arrangements to borrow tools and set aside time to work on this phase in the project, it has decided to rain. Not -just- rain, but down pour. The temperature has dropped and it's stayed cool and wet which has mostly removed the idea of yard work.

One of these days I'm going to swear that my fate is the result of an Ancient Curse.

And one of these days I'll be right.

-T

My first morning

So I was hoping to sleep in a little today, as it's my first day off, and enjoy a lazy morning.

Well, that didn't happen.

My bathroom sink has not been draining well of late and I had it on my list (actually #11) for things to tackle. This morning I hear my roommate, Josh, tell me - "Dude, the sink doesn't work".

This is Josh-speak for:

"Thomas, I believe that the drain is clogged and you may need to have it fixed more quickly than anticipated."

So I crawled out of bed and grabbed my tools and went to the basement.

I SO need a tool belt.

The problem wasn't in the main drain it was at the sink.

Now let me paint you a picture of my skill with plumbing. I have none. So I took the sink apart (yes, the whole sink) and took the various parts out to the driveway to spray it out with my garden hose. Once things were cleaned out, I put it back together (and surprisingly had no spare parts) and it works fine now.

After some breakfast, I'm going to head into my next project: Beating my driveway with a sledge hammer. It's been quite uppity lately and needs to be taught a lesson.

Later. :)

-Tom

p.s. yes, that image of the plumber's crack will haunt you for the next 30 minutes.

Bedside Archaeology

Archaeologists often identify people by the objects found along side them in their graves. However, I was wondering what someone could tell about me if they were to examine the contents of my bed-side table.

So the question evolved into: What's beside your bed?

1. Field Book
2. Coffee Cup full of Pens
3. Lamp
4. Cellphone (and charger)
5. Laptop (and charger)
6. Dictionary of the Supernatural (Published in the 70's)
7. Introduction to Watercolors (Borders bargain books)
8. A small, cast-iron pipkin (think mini-cauldron)
9. Bottle of Water
10. A sleepy cat named Rusty (he decided to sprawl himself across the top)
11. The history and truth of the Unicorn* (A faux 'journal' with illustrations and some awesome calligraphy)
12. Marine K-Bar knife with sheath
13. Stack of blank note-cards

Lack of a Living Room

... Well, actually it's a 'front room', a salon or Parlor.

Mountain Dews: 2
Mountain Dew: Code Red 1 (v. long day)
Massive Quantities of Supah Chinese Buffet 1 (ugh, I have Buddha Belly)
Trips back and forth to Ashland 3 (it was a lot of small trips in a tiny pick-up)

Almost the new year and I spent almost all day today hauling furniture down from Ashland in small, pick-up sized loads. My front room is full of stuff and there's barely a path through the huge lawn bags full of clothes and stuff. It'll take a few days to get through all of the stuff and get some sense of order but I'll get it taken care of soon.

For those who might actually care, I've got a new roommate for a while. A friend of mine is going back to school and needed a place to stay for a while - probably just for the term. I have a guest room that's not being used and he was in need. So, voila.

The Lime Green Leisure House is no more, but my place is always a haven for wayward travelers. I'm glad that I can offer my friends a place to stay as the need arises. I've offered people three-nights sanctuary from time to time. Friends from Huntington, Columbus, Parts-Unknown in Kentucky, etc.

"If I have it to give, then I must."

Sometimes I don't have much to offer but what I have is there for those who need it.

The last go-round was a few weekends rest for a friend who needed to talk, before that was a summer escape for a friend who needed to escape, and then before that was a few years of weekends for a friend who needed to game. It's not exactly Rivendel but hopefully it's been a place where people can come and relax and get their feet back underneath themselves once more.

Ok, it's late and I've been hauling furniture all day.

Talk to ya later.

Final Verdict

23:36 hrs
Someone play taps.

Ok, so it's not the 'FINAL' verdict, but it's at least going to hold until the end of winter. This is the old house; the Lime Green Leisure House, Tom's Home for Wayward Boys, etc.


The house (in its many shades of green) served me well for many years but I've finally caught the "House Bug". As soon as I finish one project, I see three more and realize how broke I am and probably going to be for the next year - especially on the salary of an Part-Time Professor.


And behold the birth of the new place. I already want to fix the front pillars, move the front lights and install a lamp post at the top of the stairs, etc., etc., etc. I think that the trim around the attic window and the three corbels need to be painted white to draw them out as architectural elements.

It may not be much, but at least it's home.

Home to many...

For above all things in this earth - a Maltharian is a most impeccable Host.

There, in a tower on a hill, lived a Monk.
Not a damp, moldy tower.
Nor a dry, bare empty tower.
It was a Monk tower,
And that means...Comfort.

A bit cheesy perhaps, but that's what makes it good.

-Tom

Half and Half

The last of the green was covered this weekend as the remnants of the Lime Green Leisure House fades into memory.

The tan and tan combo almost makes it look like some version of desert camo, but anything is better than the Green.

Let me repeat that:

ANYTHING was better than the green.

The only thing to be done now is to spray the rail white and look into some outdoor carpet for the porch.

-Tom

Night and Day

Over the past week and a half, I have been working on painting my house. The house, formerly known as the "Lime Green Leisure House" was painted a very minty green for years.

Ivy coated almost all of the north side of the house and the combination of forest green foundation and minty green house just was painful to look at.

Well, this fall - after the house next door was painted - my dad, the family's house painter, was "convinced" to help paint mine.

Step 1) I had to remove all of the ivy from the north side of the house. For years, this ivy was the source of bags and bags of decoration for the Winter Rose event for our Shire in Ashland. Even with me whacking off lots of the vines, it still grew back with vigor every spring. So this was a big step to try and kill it.

I've found that you can't really kill ivy unless you engage in chemical warfare. All you can do is destroy most of what you see and hope that you've encouraged it to grow elsewhere for a while.

So once I had all of the ivy off of the house, I had to deal with all the tendrils that clung to the wood. These things are a pain in the ass to remove even with a razor blade.

So that took me a very long time to be able to have the side of the house ready to be painted - even if only just to cover what couldn't be scraped off.

One hundred and fifty dollars in paint later, I have the front three sides of the house completed and trimmed and now my dad is adding the foundation paint to remove the last shades of green.


I'm going to have completed pictures once I get the foundation done, the hand-rail spray painted and all of that completed.

Phantom Kitty

So there I was on Friday afternoon working on the house so that it can be painted. I was scraping and ripping down ivy and all that while trying not to think about my tooth since there were no dentists in or any who could see me until sometime next week.

I hate not having insurance.

So when I sat down that evening, I heard a very odd sound. A kitten was mewing in the basement - in that "I'm lost come find me" kind of way.

So I went downstairs and figured that it was coming from the same place that Cinder had her litter back in August. I knew that she had two and one was dead immediately and the other died within a day or so. What I saw was a black and white kitten around two weeks old. So then I thought: "Did she have another litter?"

Well, I pulled it from the basement and found a box for it. Since my cats are quarantined into the basement for a while, I left the kitten's box under a table so that it would be somewhat out of the way. After about two hours of it crying, I started to wonder where Cinder was. Since she can't get out and she has plenty of food - I couldn't figure out why she was letting it whine so much.

I went down to check on things and saw Cinder and Rusty looking down on it as though it were some kind of alien life form that was disrupting the harmony of their basement kingdom.

So I picked up Cinder to try and coax her into the box, and that's when it hit me. She's not lactating. Her nipples are flat and dry.

This was somewhat confusing but since I don't know that much about the care and raising of cats I called in my expert; my mother.

Since the 'Time before Times' she's been caring for animals. It is this quality of hers that earned me my first nickname while I was still en utero. She had always been taking home stray cats and such and nursing them back to health so I was simply another 'Tomcat' that she had found. At least that's one of the stories I've heard on the topic.

She suggested that I show some attention to the kitten in hopes of getting Cinder to take care of it - some kind of maternal jealousy thing I think. That didn't work. The kitten mewed and cried all night long without so much as a five-minute break between bursts.

Saturday morning came and it was still screaming for attention or food or both. I went down to check things out and Cinder was no where to be found and Rusty looked like a new father who had been up all night long with a screaming baby. Not a happy camper. I got a hold of my expert and asked for some advice. She said for me to bring it over to her house so I bundled up the meow-machine and headed over.

She has a few cats at her place (to put it mildly) and one of them had just finished nursing a litter of her own. The hope was that she might adopt this new kitten. While we were waiting to see if her cat would adopt the strange kitten, I had a chance to look through my journals to find out some dates. There was simply no way for Cinder to have gotten pregnant after her litter and had this kitten that fast. It's only been a month. Maybe 5 weeks at best and the kitten is, itself, at least two-weeks old (due to its eyes being open).

So I have no idea where the kitten came from. I did have a hole in my basement window's screen for about three days so it's possible another cat dropped it off down there - but I would have thought that Rusty - who almost never leaves - would have informed her that it was a bad idea. Also, I sealed the screen gap on Wednesday morning and didn't start hearing the kitten until Friday afternoon.

So where did the thing come from?

Phantom kitty.

My Week

Monday All-Day:
Grading papers for take-home psych tests for extra credit.

Tuesday Morning:
Changed mind on house color from light gray to Tan (Coffee + Cream / Khaki)

Tuesday Evening:
Forgetting to pay cable: Last-minute payment.

Wednesday Morning:
I replaced the water pump on my car.

Wednesday Evening:
My buddy goes into the hospital with some heart problems.

Thursday Morning:
Another friend calls to tell me that she's in the hospital after an emergency Appendectomy.

Thursday Evening:
My tooth cracks and I end up accidentally swallowing it while giving a lecture in class.
It's broken off at the gum line.

Friday Morning:
Plan on buying some paint for the house
Find a dentist to pull tooth?

Saturday All-Day:
Painting the House?

Sunday All-Day
More painting?

The journey of a thousand miles...

It is often said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. Never has this been more literal than what I discovered last night. But I don't want to get ahead of myself.
Last night, I was working on moving furniture around from the front room in my house to the middle room - what was intended to be a dining room. As I moved piles of books from pillar to post, I saw red and blue lights flashing outside. This is, unfortunately, not an uncommon sight on my street as there are several families with questionable control of their kids; usually teenagers who want to be more rowdy than the audience at the last taping of the Jerry Springer Show.

I didn't think that much about it as I continued to move furniture and then I caught a glimpse of two kids outside with their dads and a cop. The kids weren't the usual teenage trash on the street but rather a pair of boys barely in first grade. I was... curious. So I poked my head out of my front door and that's when I saw what an experienced tracker might call a trail of evidence.

The boys were attempting to explain how something (called a can of paint) could have gotten open and 'sort of' spilled at the bottom of my driveway. Their fathers had apparently been mortal enemies for a few months now since the two little boys were notorious for getting each other into tons of trouble. One dad, who kept telling his son that he wasn't going to mess around with him and the paint because his beer was getting warm, said that he and the other dad had already been in a few fights because the kids won't stop hanging around each other.

Apparently the boys had found the can of white paint in or near someone's garbage and decided, at night, to investigate. One of the boys was wearing tennis shoes and the other was barefoot. Do you see where this is going? Two seven year-olds, a can of paint, night, and curiosity. Yep, you guessed it.
Now, while you're laughing and trying to hold it in so that those around you don't begin to question what you're reading let me keep going with the explanation.

Someone had called the police since they saw the boys with the paint. The police showed up and found the boys. Then he got the fathers involved (oh yeah, I can bet that they got their buts whooped) to come down and clean the paint from my driveway. Unfortunately, the hot road had already dried all of their foot prints so it's going to take a while for those to wear off even if we have some good storms.

When you back up and look at it from a distance, you can see the curious patterns the one, barefoot, boy left as he tried to figure out what to do now that he had paint all over his feet.

I couldn't write stuff this funny.

-Tom

Visitor from Florida

Just after 10 o'clock this morning...

I'm up, showered and on the front porch waiting for someone I haven't seen in years.This will be the second time, almost to the day, that someone from my past has just popped up to visit. This time it's Stephanie, one of the few people that I'll speak with from High School. She normally lives in Florida but her father lives here in Portsmouth. She said that she's been up here since Sunday and they're leaving to go back tomorrow so I figured that hanging out with her today would be fun. I'm waiting on the drywall compound from my granddad so that I can repair the hole in the back bedroom wall. He said that he's not been able to find it, but will keep looking.

I've settled on a shade of blue for the office and will probably be buying it in a few days assuming that everything works out. Even when I get the back bedroom painted, it will take me a while to disassemble the furniture in the front and move it. I may go ahead and paint the shelves white since they can be painted and be drying while I'm working / waiting on the other steps to be finished.

Once the back office is finished, I can start to paint the front room and then move all of the bedroom stuff out of the middle room. This, then, will allow me to pull up the carpeting and start moving shelves around. The middle room is going to become something of a media room. The bookshelves are going to be moved into there and I'm thinking that the tv and such as well. The front room just isn't designed to have people comfortably watching television in there - not with the way the fireplace takes up most of the space. So, I'm going to convert it into something of a sitting room with a love seat and a few chairs for when I want to play with the fire or something like that.

The middle room, since it has much more wall space for furniture, will be the place to watch television and such. Once the old carpeting has been pulled up, it will be much easier to have hardwood floors sanded in both rooms and fix things up. I need to make sure that there is cable run to the front room and that they haven't cut it or something. The cable company is sending someone over this Friday to replace the cut cables in the back room.

The smell of rain is on the air. I know we had a storm last night that was more of a shower than anything else but you can still detect the traces of moisture in the trees. I wouldn't be surprised if we'll have another storm or shower this afternoon; probably while we're out at the lake.

I got a hold of Dan last night on Yahoo; he's moved into the house down from Barb & Zak and he and Heather are doing their thing. Dan was telling me how he WALKED home from classes the other day since they now live in town and that he was hitting the net with High Speed. I can't imagine going from what I have now back down to Dial Up; just gives me shivers sometimes even thinking about it. Granted, I also have a weird issue between a Digital life and an Analog one, but that is slowly getting resolved. I sent letters out on Monday and I enjoyed the whole process. I know tht writing letters is not necessarily a 'lost' art, but definitely a tradition or practice that has faded with the rise of the digital age. Most of my students can barely write legibly, but I'm sure that they could probably send you a thirty-word text message before they would even remember how to start a letter.

I figure that with our society going more and more digital, the ways of the Analog Anachronist will become viewed by society as clumsy if not abnormal. Why take the time to write and send a letter when an email is instant? Logically, emails are more efficient means of communication when that's all you're doing.