One year ago today: October 8, 2018, my still-vacant birdhouse.
Five years ago today: October 8, 2014, two happiest days?
Nine years ago today: October 8, 2010, an empty house, sigh.
Random years ago today: October 8, 2013, the Madonna school of thought.
JZ never showed. Where’s my five bucks? Today we get the cold water in or know the reason why. Y’day I fell asleep for 12 hours just not all in one stretch. It was a siesta that got away on me, assisted by one of those lame movies that bills itself as a thriller, but is all about how hard the job is on the schmuck’s wife and kids. Have you ever picked out that the wife and kids all have the identical problems? Neurotic, spoiled, ungrateful, and leftist. With them, it is always a good time to argue about what they want to argue about. Aw, I’m just sore about the five bucks.
Oh boy, another joist picture (above). If you go far back enough in this blog, you’ll recognize this spot. I pointed at it in 2017 and said that board is going to cause some complications. This location now has a name. It is the six-hour joist, and you can’t even see it. This is the other side of the bathtub, the second most termite-attacked part of the structure.
What’s show here is more like six one-hour jobs. Each time I got I almost done, something broke, moved, or needed ripping back out. That stub of a 2-by-6 just jutting out from under the joist is the repair. The tub sagged an exact 1-1/2” and the original sill plate cracked when lifted that much. Pity you can’t see me down in that dirt with the 30-ton jack. So I had to dig down that much, put a second full length plate and start over. This is a good demo of how I’ve learned to put new sill plates across the joists rather than try to repair them in place.
The bathroom plumbing you saw before is completely ripped out. The new pieces going are getting better with a little experience. Here is a photo for comparison. Oops, that photo was rejected. Here's a doggie at the shelter instead. The PVC
By expanding the welfare roles, family was no longer necessary to provide the household workforce. Free love, single mothers, feel good, it’s all cool was the mantra. The hippies could afford to be non-materialistic because their parents were paying the bills. It’s fine to reject the system when you’ve never had to work a proper job in your life. The important thing is, not only were these Boomers not the ready-made workforce of the family unit, but they raised their own kids to have everything they wanted and to expect instant gratification. That situation is well-studied elsewhere. My take [on it] is coming up.
That generation did not groom their children to take over the family business slash farm.. This was managed by living on credit instead of relying on family ties. Fly now, pay later, who needs kids for security when you can borrow all you want. The Boomers were able to live generation after generation on credit and thus ignore family values. Instead of having children take over the family farm, they saddled them with debt that cannot be paid in the foreseeable future. So, we’ve gone full circle. Now, instead of the children following in the parents footsteps, they are instead paying for a collective debt with every bureaucrat and banker taking his cut along the way. The living on credit was just a delay in the old children-as-laborers model that was as American as apple pie. Even down to the fact that the children were never asked is home grown Americana. We got it from the British.
The looming problem, however, is that the upcoming generations are woefully out of touch with the hard work it will take to restore some kind of sensibility to the whole economy. They didn’t personally borrow all that money and are hardly going to recognize that is what bought all the entitlements they’ve been enjoying. If mommy won’t buy them new things, they can vote for a living.
Serbian album cover.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Another full day and I’m looking forward to my first load of laundry maybe in a few days. That bathtub was one weird and laughable task. It’s been patched up a few times. The problem there is they kept reinforcing the existing joists. Nobody wanted to crawl under there and shore it up. That is now done, but you’d swear the house was haunted. I straighten one corner and a door in the next room swings shut by itself. The windows on the north side begin working again. The kitchen cabinets slam shut in the breeze. Or there is a groaning creak in the hallway as the beam I replaced flattens the floor again.
That’s what’s taking so much time, the floor. The easiest way to get at what needs fixing is to rip up the beautiful oak floors. The temp floor sheets have to be taken up in the morning and replaced each night. Add a half hour for that, as they have to be moved out into the hallway to make room. The majority of the new plumbing centers on one end of the bathroom floor, so once that is done, things will move faster. Meanwhile, you’ll find me doing several things at once while I’ve got the floor up in pieces. It also means zero progress on the sinks and vanity. But I would have likely finished roughing in the cold water lines today if I had not run out of purple [primer].
ADDENDUM
Today Ginger Baker died, and y’know, if they had not played “Sunshine Of Your Love”, I really couldn’t have said where I’d heard the name before. Maybe a backup singer for The Supremes? True, he was a rock icon to the masses, but not to everybody. I wasn’t quite a teen,I think, when the band “Cream” was formed. It was supposed to be the best of everybody, that is, the best drummer, best singer, best guitarist, etc. I was ready to hear something fantastic, not another 7-note song. Okay, it was rock, but what was the best about it escaped me from day one. As for the drumming, it’s your call who is the best. Drumming is drumming if you ask me. If he isn’t soloing, he’s keeping a beat simple enough not to throw off the other guys.
Anyway he’s dead. And so is Dimogenes, the bad guy in the “Book of the Dead”. Some lady named Constance threw the bastard into a volcano, no less. The poor baby, seems like today’s school shooters, he never had a puppy when he was a boy. Or something. It’s hard to fathom what the authors’ were thinking, with 86 named characters in the book. Most of them mentioned only once—but still forcing you to memorize it just in case. Preston & Child live in a world of their own, introducing the last character (Thomas Shoulders) nine pages before the ending. What are those boys smoking?
I pulled up the bamboo cuttings and not one of them even took. This means taking it to the expert, Charla. Yep, same lady who gave us the Devil’s backbone. She hesitates to say she has a green thumb because, get this, she can only grow plants that have no food value. Ornamentals. So I dropped in on the way back from Winter Haven. Turns out she has bamboo, but not the kind I’d like. Next time, she says, get a shovel and dig up the actual rhizomes and she’ll take care of it.
Last week she and a girlfriend took the day off, going to the beach. Aha, this is Florida. They got on the highway to Tampa, got caught in the traffic, and didn’t arrive at the seashore until 5:30PM. This time of year, that gives you maybe two hours of sunshine. Then along comes the patrol and tells them they have to vacate by dusk. TMOR, you see, America is very equal in this way. Instead of sending the patrol to kick out the few who were causing trouble, they use it as an excuse to kick everybody out. Can’t get much more equal than that, huh?
