The day is upon me...
…to make a post. I’m going to make a quick review of things since my last post because a ton has happened and I’ve been thinking about a putting up a post about life, but put it aside for other pursuits.
Let’s start with July. Of what little I remember, we had my son’s disability reinstated, so we could actually loosen the budget belt to “breathe without discomfort.” As I’ve put off getting a new computer for a few years now, Staples had a 16GB 8-core AMD with a 2GB video card for $750. At the time I was getting quite fed up with my old Dell because even surfing the Internet was becoming a significant problem, and my wife was also complaining that her computer was also slow, but there have been times that I’ve lost count of how many tabs she’s had open, but it must have been 30+ of “things she wanted to read later.” I called the Staples in Dieppe and they didn’t have any, nor could they ship them in because it was a clearance, so I had to count on the other store. This was the same week that Justin Bourque snapped and killed 3 RCMP officers, so that store was locked down. The next day they were open, and although I was prepared to hear that they didn’t have any, they actually had two of them. I was somewhat reluctant to shell out $1800 but there was some money in the bank and this purchase will likely last me 10+ years. I also went on Steam and bought a number of games on their summer sale, so I had 10 games for the price of a single AAA title. Then our tax money comes in and the return was significant enough to erase that debt and move forward on renovating the house.
The rest of July is pretty fuzzy, but here’s what I remember getting accomplished:
I started with fixing the support for the sunroom floor. It was originally a single 2 x 4 tacked on over aluminum siding and some sort of pressboard insulation which doesn’t have an R value. Although I was originally skeptical because it had held up for thirty years, I came to agree that it was unsafe and needed something more solid. So after purchasing the materials for the job, I asked my mother to help install the new boards, so I supported the sunroom with jackposts and a pair of 2 x 8’s, took off the old 2 x 4, cut off the siding and the pressboard and with some impressively large screws, put a new 2 x 8 underneath and then fastened another over top of it with similar screws.
I remember starting to excavate the wall with the intention of pushing it back, ruining the jack for the minivan trying to push it out. So I used a jackpost and I did make some significant headway in getting the damaged wall pushed back out. Afterward, I took the six inches of crushed stone out and found out that these walls were sitting on a solid concrete slab, not just a narrow footing with nothing but earth in the middle. So I proceeded to excavate that a bucket at a time. The kids were surprisingly helpful because it was a lot smoother when they were filling the buckets and I lifted them out and dumped them on the tarpaulin.
It had been ongoing with our reservoir tank that it was leaking, but I was uncertain because I didn’t know much (for lack of a better phrase) about how water systems work in a house. Eventually, I hear the pump run practically every time someone turns on the tap. I may not know much about water system design, but I am aware that having a pump start and stop all the time can mean that it will burn out. After a bit of checking out, I buy a larger tank, and with a little bit of work, I squeeze the new tank in there and get it installed. Outside of having to drop in to the local garage for a pipe wrench to tighten a nut, it gets installed without a problem and it sounds so good to hear the pump only on the odd occasion.
I also have some thoughts on Justin, because it is quite a noteworthy event. If it weren’t for the fact that he’d killed 3 RCMP, wounded two and tried to kill as many police as possible, he’d be what put the word “LOL” in lolbertarian. A police officer supposedly killed one of your friends? It would at least have made some sort of sense to even the score with the one responsible for it, even if the act would have been reprehensible. Instead, he decides to kill as many police as possible because they’re against freedom? It’s a shame that he pleaded guilty, so we can’t figure out what brought him to make a “stand for freedom” and how being a cop killer doesn’t make you a bad guy.
August
Well, August really started out well. On our wedding anniversary we had rainfall so intense; it was limited practically to the rural strip between Moncton and Miramichi. There were plenty of people in the Metro Moncton area who saw the clouds, but the rain fell in my area. I was just finishing the minivan and my wife went to take her afternoon nap when I was putting away some stuff while the squall outside is pelting down rain. I hear some water running and think “I have to reinstall it again?”
No, the water tank is fine. There’s a hole for the old well right next to it that has water running like it’s a wide open tap. I quickly assess that this isn’t something I can handle myself and politely roust my wife out of bed. We spend about thirty minutes at it when she discovers that the sunroom I recently excavated has six inches of water in it and is leaking in through a couple of cracks in the foundation. The basement has in some places two or more inches of water.
I can understand how flooding can make people feel so violated. We have water pissing into our house from two directions and it seems that we can do so little, not to mention that the numerous boxes we have on the ground have to be triaged. I can understand how when people have their houses flooded how violated they can feel. I only had a few inches and it was kept fairly contained, even if the flooding spread to other rooms. It would hurt phenomenally to see two feet of water or more in my basement and having to throw out stuff, possibly with a lot of sentimental value and there was so precious little you could do about it because you couldn’t see until it was too late. I take some fiberglass insulation from an old garbage bag and wad it in the spots around the hole and it slows it down to a mid-open tap rather than a fully open one. Then, I charge up my shop vac and proceed to bail out the basement. I call my neighbor, my mother and tell work that I’m taking the next day off because the cleanup is going to be too much for me to schedule for my weekend. We were incredibly fortunate that in spite of the trouble, the rain abated after an hour and we were able to get the water under control and then go to work on the cleanup.
It’s times like this that make me remember that my wife wasn’t always spending most of her time napping or in front of a computer feasting her brain on noncredible articles that would give normal people an entire family of ulcers. Even glancing at her Facebook feed makes my stomach feel funny. And because they’re geared toward her particular views on science and religion, they get a free pass to “trustworthy.” Instead, we decide quickly what our best course of action is and get the situation under control. It’s just a shame she spends most of the next day toiling in our vegetable garden, complaining the entire time about its poor performance while I spend it trying to clean up the inside of the house. While help arrived late, our neighbor dropped off his shop vac and a submersible utility pump. My mother also shows up with similar stuff, namely my old shop vac with the metal can and a well pump. While it’s not quite the same, it’s still a way to help her get stuff out of her house because she’s beginning to look like she’s hoarding.
Ironically, in spite of what happened, it was one of the best anniversaries I’ve had with her. Because in a time like this, we pulled together and kicked this problem in the ass.