Things are going well over here, settling down again into a comfortable normalcy. Tuck’s still alive and well and showing no signs of the deaths-door pallor he was displaying back in February. The weather’s warming up. Business turned around and we’re now farther along than we were last year at this time. And Kristi’s chomping at the bit for the school year to end.

As any homeowner knows, a house can be a handful. There’s always something to fix, upgrade, rearrange, redecorate, and of course clean; that goes double when it’s an old house like ours. Our house was built back in 1940, and there’s still a lot of 60-year-old idiosyncrasies lying about. To complicate matters further, the previous owners attempted several home upgrades and they didn’t really know what they were doing – so, instead of having to upgrade a 1940 item or a 1980 item, we often have to go around and decipher tangled, weird hybrid messes of 1980 spliced halfassed into 1940. But gradually we’re getting there.

One of our biggest headaches has been the garage wiring. This is where Previous Idiots really went the extra mile: hanging and taped-over hot lines, bare and dangling copper, weird wiring splices, interior lighting provided by two ugly floodlights designed for outdoor use. It was worse than a useless eyesore – we knew it was a fire hazard. But we just didn’t have the money to hire an electrician to come in and give the garage the overhaul it desperately needed.

As often happens, Kristi’s Dad came to the rescue. For the last several weeks, he and I have been spending evenings and Saturday mornings back there, installing duplexes and junction boxes and ripping down 60-year-old electrical cable and putting up new Romex. Down came the floodlights; up went two 80-watt fluorescent banks. We got the last of it done this weekend.

We learned that the situation was far worse than we thought. The wiring was underrated for the 500 watt floodlights, the wiring was plain screwed up. It’s a good thing we only had one working plug outlet in there – if there’d been more, we probably would have gotten a fire out of it. But it’s all down now, all ripped out and thrown away, replaced with a new system featuring eight outlets, a workbench light bank and two big light banks that light up the whole garage instead of just the corners. And now we can set up a real workbench back there without setting off a shower of sparks.

As always, big thanks to Don for everything. He did all the work; my role was mainly to pay attention, ferry tools as needed and serve as an extra set of hands when required. But I will say that I know a lot more now about home electrical wiring than I did a month ago. No doubt that will come in handy. As we were driving to the hardware store here in Modesto on Saturday, he also pointed out good places to buy wood and shop accessories.

A workbench and some basic power tools are probably in the near future now. Kristi and I have also decided that the next project has GOT to be the back yard.. it’s large and filled with the absolute cheapest, fastest growing, most invasive sod that the previous owners could have possibly installed. It’s a monster to mow, and even cut short it looks like crap. So we have to decide how best to rip all that out and replace it with something that we can better live with.

In other news, our roses have really taken off this year and the two maples we planted last spring seem to be doing well. And the orange poppies Kristi planted last year have roared back to life, starting to take over the gravel driveway. We have an expanding sea of orange back there now.