Renovation Update 12/31/07

We're closing in on one year since we started the initial drawings and planning for the project.  The work has gone on for six months, albeit that six months included the five, three-week vacations that I don't remember being a part of our initial conversations.  I'm just happy our guys are well rested. 

Sometimes I get really angry at the wrong times and at the wrong people.  

I must admit, however, that we have come a long way since we took our big road trip last fall.  That was when my friend, Tony, who was staying at our place, called to ask if I was OK with a big whole in our house.  Typically I'm not, unless it's the valuable meteorite I always dream crashes through our ceiling and gets me both time off work and millions of dollars, so I asked him if it was a missile from space.  He paused and then told me it was getting cold because the contractors cut the door-sized hole in our foundation, and cut the 3-foot by 4-foot egress window in the new foundation, yet left them both unfettered to the elements.  So anyone, or anything, could walk in the egress cavity and stroll through the newly cut door and into our house.  No one did, luckily, not even a contractor, as they wouldn't show up again for two weeks.  

The wide-open apertures to the warm, wooden womb of our home was bad news, but even worse was that during a weekend that had me emceeing an event in Walden on Saturday, another in Boulder on Sunday, and our leaving for Baltimore on Monday, also included Sarah and I feverishly emptying out our old kitchen so while we wallowed in vacation bliss the guys could demo it.  They did not.  Now, three months later, we still have our old kitchen and I'm in the garage in my boxers and swearing a blue streak looking for the coffee grinder.  It's packed away with our pots and pans and all but two of our plates.  Sarah's parents are staying with us now and they've been nice enough eat quickly, wash their utensils, and then let us have our turn with the dishes.  I think they mostly do this so they don't have to hear me cursing in the garage.  That and it seems like I'm always the least dressed when I'm trying to find something in the garage.  Our beleaguered neighbors must have called Sarah and told her to suck it up and share the family fork. 

The progress that's been made includes the fireplace, the kitchen tile and the destruction of the wall between our kitchen and living room.  I have to keep this mind because it's in the kitchen where I find myself most frenzied to fondle Sarah. 

Now there's no wall between my unsolicited advances and our horrified guests. 

As with about every major step in this epic affair, Sarah and I are alerted only moments before someone shows up.  While that has put a damper on the random touching, it also has us harried and shopping for home improvement items that we long ago gave up on ever needing.  This weekend it was lighting.  Out of the blue, Javier, a massive man who's terrified of Paco, called to say he'd be there the next morning to install the fixtures.  Fixtures?  We thought the only fixture would be the huge dumpster in front of our house.  So Sarah and I dropped the kid on the grandparents and sped off to Home Depot.  

Bad idea.  Home Depot sports a lighting selection scavenged from Elks Clubs and seedy motels.  I swear we found a lamp  we threw away three years ago.  And getting help is impossible.  You only get assistance once you've made up your mind to leave, and then you can't get them to shut up.  I ended up with Christine, who is so important that someone had taken a Sharpie and written ELECTRONICS across her orange apron.  I was wondering if there was an official ceremony for that.   From beyond her radioactive orange hair her bug eyes accentuated her one and only piece of information; beware of fire.  Something bad had happened to HD Christine because she couldn't stress enough the importance of avoiding an electrical fire.  As per usual my hardened city wife just walked away while I engaged the dime store Dick Van Dyke and her very serious message about fire.  

Later we went to Lowes.  It's a bit better for lights, but their workforce has been decimated by cholera or something.  No one is there except for one squeaky high school kid whose terrified you'll talk to him. 

We did get some lights at Lowes and the next morning sprinted off for more.  And here's the most amazing thing.  At Foothills Lighting, a place for people defined by paying more for everything, we found the $19.00 light we bought at Lowes  FOR 485 DOLLARS.   That's a savings of $466.00.  It's these little victories that keep me glowing on the inside.

One other note; I've broken down some international barriers.  Last week I bought cheeseburgers for Manuel and his coworker, known only to me as the "angry Mexican guy who always laughs at my Spanish", and we all shared a meal in awkward silence.  It was cool. 

Adventure Baby

Whether you have a child, or will have one, or take care of other children or sometimes carry small drunk people, you need to get the Moby Wrap.  BTW...Q totally rocks the girls at the park.   

Local Boy Wages War on Sleep...

loses...

Something to Do

I was bored.  My father was cozied up to the Cookhouse bar and told me “ten minutes” about three hours before that.  Or so it felt like it.  In kid years a parent’s “ten minutes” is an eternity.  

Spending a lot of time at the Cookhouse was nothing new for me or my brother or sister.  We were time-killing geniuses.  Spinning on the barstool was most popular; making drink straw jewelry was second.  This story takes place long before Tom, the bar owner, got the poker video game.  It wasn't gambling, just an old computer game that made really loud noises and irked the old men at the bar.   I did convince myself, however, that if I were to beat the high score actual money would come out of the coin return.  It didn't.  So before the poker game, a thing that really created quite a stir, we ate a lot of free peanuts and popcorn.  Tom had both of those available to his patrons, who, no matter where they lived, were in for a long, harrowing drive home.  Any food would be a welcomed blessing to a digestive system steeped in alcohol.  Had anyone just passing through known how many drunks were pulling onto the Scenic Byway, they would have gladly brought pizzas.  One night even the county sheriff drove off the road trying to get home.  My brother pulled him out of the ditch and earned a “get out of jail free” card that would come in very handy on the night when the Mini Mart ended up in the path of his pickup.  

This night, the night after I’d impressed every patron I could with my fish impersonation and my ability to tie a cherry stem in a knot with my tongue, would not be so exciting as the one when my brother lied to the cops about “a bunch of Mexicans stealing his truck.”  No, this night would have Pete and I washing bar glasses just to stay awake.  When those were all clean (most everything came directly out of a bottle so additional vessels were few), I came across the mind-molding destiny of a bright red dot in my path.  

It was a thumbtack.  And it would have me do one of the dumber things you can do in a town of ten.

Shooting the Snow Darkly

Christmas day brought the Denver area about eight inches of snow, the day after was pretty dry, and now day three brings us another few inches.  Apparently it’s supposed to snow through the night.  This is huge for local news as it finally gives them purpose other than being well coiffed parasites clinging to the last school shooting, and eagerly awaiting the next.  Which makes me think that most school shooters, or in the case of the last big one, the Omaha mall shooter, are like Make-a-Wish kids who die young but not before having their dream of national notoriety fulfilled.   The news goes nuts covering every last second of their lives.  The snow makes better news.  Of course in Colorado most of their predictions are wildly wrong.  I mean not just wrong as in, “they said four but we got six inches,” but as in they’ve successfully predicted all 100 of our last ten storms.  Except, of course, for the big one we got on Christmas day.  No one said much about that.  My brother-in-law reported he read one weather report saying that there wasn’t much of a chance for a white Christmas.  That report was posted ON Christmas day.  

They might as well try and predict school shootings.

My tone might be considered sardonic, right?  I’m thinking that’s what it is to be mocking and cynical all at once.  

You’d think it hard for me to be so dark, especially when we just got Quin’s birth certificate in the mail.  He’s official.  You might be wondering why it took so long to get here.  He’s already four months old.  It’s my fault.  I didn’t mail the application until last week.  I don’t think I wanted to get too cocky about his making it through the first three months.  Like my putting a stamp on an envelope would mean I was overly optimistic about his survival.  That’s my stupid superstition, and I don’t think Sarah is all that far from me in thinking if you somehow declare something like, “Christmas will be wonderful,” then you’ve jinxed this year’s holiday to a painful duration of family quibbling and bad food.  Neither of us said a thing, as a matter of fact we second-guessed the whole tradition right up until a very nearly perfect day of turkey, beer and happy children.  

Being overwhelmingly dark is not something that you just one day wake up and decide.   It takes years of parental tutelage to get to where I am today.  Or at least the continued experience of purportedly making the best of things by imagining the worst of things.   It’s a conditioned response, I guess.

This is where I get to take you back to a bar bathroom and show you how these things start.  

We’ll take highway 14, recently designated by the state of Colorado as a Scenic Byway.  It rises up and then falls down from the ten or eleven thousand feet of Cameron Pass and rolls clear up to Wyoming.  But in the forty miles in between you’ve got the seat of Jackson County, Walden, and the seat of my childhood, Gould.  That’s where a flat, straight stretch of the weathered pavement runs right past the Cookhouse restaurant.  Or so it did before the recent owners tried to exorcise the buildings demons by changing the name.  For a while it was the Howlin’ Coyote, and now I think it’s something about Cowboys or Wranglers, touristy names to trap the families so happy to see civilization.  

I was there twenty-five years ago, and twenty-one and eighteen and twenty-three, but it was about twenty-five years ago when I was seven and when I would scratch my name into the establishment’s bathroom.  I’d also be doing my part to scratch into my psyche the need to be very, very negative.  

I have a lot to do

But I can't stop looking at this baby.

Kids Table has Never Been so Cool

On the scientific front of making great progress in children's activities...