It has been a while since I have done a general update post on my so-called life. Sorry about that ( Read more... )

And so it begins...
1.
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Chloe died last night. She started getting sick back in August just before Lily died. She began having seizures. She would tilt her head, and walk in tight circles, drooling heavily. The seizures would only last about 3 to 5 minutes, then she would snap out of it and be fine. At first the seizures were about 10 to 20 days apart, but they began ( Read more... )

About an hour ago, Ricky and I left the house to do a quick errand. We were only gone for about 20 minutes. It was just starting to get dark when we got back home. As I pulled into the driveway, I saw that the gate into the back yard was wide open. We normally keep it shut to make sure Chloe doesn't get out. Fortunately, Chloe was safely ( Read more... )

Last night at 1:20 AM, all hell broke loose in my quiet little house. I had just gone upstairs to get ready for bed when Ricky let Chloe out into the backyard to take care of business one last time. She caught the scent of something and made a bee-line for the back garden. Ricky tried calling her off her mission, but she was persistent ( Read more... )

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We have been busy doing some major structural work on the brick store this summer. After over 170 years of use, neglect and abuse, the building was in desperate need of some repairs to its wavy , bulging and leaning north west wall. About 25 years ago, the building's owner at that time, a local architect, hired me and my crew to do some stop-gap ( Read more... )

I pushed myself too hard last Thursday getting the water heater installed, and have felt under the weather ever since. I took a couple of days to relax and recover some. On Sunday, Rick , Matt and I finally cleaned up the tools and mess we left behind from the water heater project ( Read more... )

Both of the tenants in one of my two-family houses requested storm doors last year. We finally got around to building them a few weeks ago. I couldn't just buy ready-made aluminum doors because all of the doors were odd, non-standard, sizes. So, Rick and I custom built three wooden storm doors. My tenant, Steve, requested a storm door with ( Read more... )

A little over a year ago I wrote two posts about the past year's progress on the huge project I have undertaken to restore a mid-19th century brick store that I own. Here are the links to those posts ( Read more... )