…until it actually looks like progress.
But that hasn’t happened yet.
Lots of work has been done. The floor
has been completed. There is a protective path taped to it. The ¾
round edge trim has been painted, but not put in, so it still looks
unfinished. Large appliances have been moved here and there, but are not
back in place. Even with all the work done, the house still looks like
this.
It’s a process. Trust the process.
The cabinets in
the dining area are all already down. Time for the kitchen cabinets and
counter to also go.
They look pretty
good from a distance, but they’re not really in very good shape. From the
kitchen and dining area together, there were forty-four doors and drawers for
us to empty, and by “us” of course I mean Judy.
But I did help get
the stuff she couldn’t reach down to where she could reach it. Because
that’s just the kind of guy I am.
A crew of two this
afternoon taking it all apart.
And this close to
done by the end of the day.
Tomorrow the floor
comes up to repair the remaining water damage.
We are staying out
of the way as much as possible; monitoring progress and discussing issues while
we try to leave them space at the same time. So far, the workers leave
the house habitable for us when they leave at the end of each workday. Judy
and I go back over there to spend the evening in our own house and to sleep in
our own bed. But with the progress and modifications that have been made,
careful planning is involved. There is a toilet but no shower in the
front bathroom. There is a shower, but no toilet in the back
bathroom. Timing is everything.
The living room is
mostly done. We get the weekend off. Monday morning though, they’re
going to tear out the kitchen counter and cabinets so they can repair the floor
underneath. No more morning coffee on this side of the street!
The rats and mice
in our neighborhood stand falsely accused. Upon further inspection, and
some demolition, it has become clear that it was not the little varmints
that chewed through our water line and caused all that damage, it was the big
varmint. The possum did it! Who knew possums would eat water lines,
and other kinds of plastic as well? He got up through the sub-floor from
under the house and tried to eat through the bottom of our garden tub, which we
took out because we’re not using it and would rather have the floor space in
the back bathroom.
The crew is making
good progress on the floor. Vinyl planking. Snap together.
The front office.
We’ve gone with a
lighter color; keep it bright inside. It feels a little more modern.
In the meantime,
we’re staying as much as we need to in a little park model known as the
“casita” right around the corner from us.
We try to stay out
of the house during the day to keep out of everybody’s way as much as
possible. So far, we can still sleep in the house if we want, and make
coffee in the morning. On Monday they’re going to take out another
counter and disable the kitchen sink though, so we might be here in the casita
a lot more after that.
It’s a mess
because we’re emptying out the cupboards and packing up anything that’s
loose. We’re doing that to get out of the way of the workers who are
going to fix everything up for us. They’re fixing everything up because
the bottom of the cabinets and the floor in front of the sink are saturated,
because there was a water leak, because there was a hole in the PEX flexible
plumbing, because a mouse or rat chewed on it while we were gone, because the
skirting around the base of the house wasn’t perfectly sealed and the varmint
got in. Don’t know why he chewed the plumbing. We’ve had mice
before and none of them ever chewed through the plumbing. I guess that’s
his personal superpower.
While we had the
skirting around the house open to let the water dry out another possum got in,
so Donald the pest control guy came out and set a trap. Here is the
possum playing possum.
…but I digress.
That’s a big
section of floor that has to be repaired and replaced so we’re just doing all
the floor in the whole house and it will all match. We can’t just pull
out one section of cabinet and replace it with a dry one, like the insurance
company is limiting its coverage to, so we’ll upgrade the cabinets while we’re
at it. We needed to anyway. The cabinets are trailer furniture;
pressed wood with a paper layer to look like wood. The paper was
peeling. (We’ve been here fifteen years already.)
We bought this
gear when we were in Maui for our twenty-fifth anniversary. It’s special
because of the lime green flippers. Every day for two weeks, we had a cup
of coffee in the condo then headed for the beach. We were on the towels
on the sand until it started to get hot, then we’d go in the water to cool
off. Snorkeling the shore reef in front of us was the way we cooled off
in the water. It was the Pacific Ocean, so eventually we got colder than
we wanted to be and headed back to the sand to warm back up again. I
tended to stay in the water longer than Judy each time and it turned out that
these green fins were a way she could track where I was and confirm that all
was still well. I wanted to spend as much time as I could underwater and
as little time as possible on the surface. Out there, with other
snorkelers also paddling about, those bright green fins were easy for Judy to
spot every time I did a flukes-up dive.
We saved them all
this time for whenever we went back to Maui. Well, we went to Maui for
our twenty-fifth and again for our thirtieth. Since then, priorities have
changed and those were our only two trips to Maui. As comfortable as we are
now, and as much as we’re enjoying the traveling we’re doing in the van, we’re
probably done with Hawaii trips. There is also a good chance that the
rubber might have fatigued a little over these last thirty years. If we
were to get them out to use them, we might find that they had aged out a long
time ago anyway as they disintegrated in our hands.
After all these years of not playing
racquetball, I’m finally ready to give up the racquetball bag.
I’m not too old to play. I could
still do it. But there aren’t any racquetball courts within hundreds of
miles of here. And there is that issue of the neck surgery. With
four vertebrae fused together I would be less competitive because I can’t just
glance back over my shoulder anymore to track the ball or the other player, but
I could still run around and whack the ball and have fun.
I would love that, but that brings me back
to the neck thing. The surgeon warned me that having those vertebrae
fused would put an extra strain on the adjacent joints and we’d have to keep an
eye on them. I probably don’t want to put that sort of rotational stress
on the part of my neck that still works.
It didn’t take me all these years to
recognize that playing racquetball again isn’t a good idea. It’s more
that I didn’t want to acknowledge it so clearly that I would give up the bag
and all the gear that goes in it. Shoes. Racquets.
Balls. Gloves. I’m okay with it now. The racquetball career
is over. And even without racquetball, I still have plenty on my plate.
Black-crowned.
They’re not everywhere in the world, but
they are in some places all over the world.
And yellow-crowned.
Found only in the
Americas. Quite a bit in the Eastern U.S.
Two different
species. That’s a record for us. First, in the bird blind at Laguna
Vista Nature Center, a deeply colored long tailed ocelot walked through the
underbrush, without giving us a clear view, but enough to be sure what it
was. Then, later on a trail, still at Laguan Vista, a bobcat popped
out. Long-legged, paler and grayer color, bobbed tail. I didn’t get
a good picture, just this one from his south end.
I learned years
ago not to play Sudoku right before bed. It’s a repetitive thing, and if
I get that machine in my head going, and there is nothing else to distract it,
the machine just keeps going and going and going; making up imaginary Sudoku
patterns and solving them.
Last night’s
mistake was to do a round of Spanish on Duolingo right before bed. Got
the machine going again, lying there making up imaginary situations that would
accommodate my limited knowledge of Spanish, then coming up with words and
phrases that would address them.
Sleep would have
been more appropriate.
We find javelina
in all sorts of habitats. I came up on this one in a wide-open grassy
field.
He waited until I
got pretty close before he decided to create some space between us.
Cool birds.
Big. Like chickens. And loud. I’ve sent out pictures of them
before.
They’re also
interesting because they don’t always look exactly the same. More
character. Here is one fluffing up to lie down in the dirt.
Looks so comfy.
Vultures are built
for efficient soaring, so they don’t have enough muscle power to fly very far
by flapping. They get exhausted quickly. They’re migratory birds so
they have to circle up on wind currents or thermals to get the altitude they need
to migrate long distances. When they have to cross a body of water, it’s
touchy. There are no thermals over large bodies of water, so no
lift. They had better be high enough to make it all the way across before
they start. That’s not a problem for vultures here in the Americas
because they can just stay over land. It is a problem for the vultures
migrating between Southern Europe and Africa though. If they try to cross
directly over the Mediterranean, drowning is the most likely result. A safer
route is an extra thousand miles to go around to the east, or go west to the
narrowest point, the Strait of Gibraltar, for about an eight-mile
crossing. But I digress…
We have two
species of vultures that we see here, the black vulture and the turkey
vulture. They look different. Here is a comparison of their
silhouettes from below.
Turkey Vulture.
Black Vulture.
Different wing
shape. Different coloring. Different tail shape. The turkey
vulture has that red face, but you can’t always see that. The black
vulture isn’t really that much smaller, the bird was higher.
That’s a gray hawk.
It’s not a migratory bird. It picks
out where it wants to be and stays put year-round. It wants to be at the
southern tip of Texas and along the Southern Arizona border. From there
down through Mexico and Central America, to South America.
From way over there, this guy took off.
And flew right over my head.
