Written by It’s 63 degrees here this morning, nary an ounce of humidity in sight.
Just wanted to share. 🙂
Posts in category Everyday Life
Ouch
Written by One of the ongoing perks of my hormonal health has been migraines. I haven’t had one in maybe 4 months but today? Yeah, I’m ouching. I took medicine to get rid of the pain but I’m still waiting for it to kick in. I have nothing else to talk about, even though it’s my turn. I have the attention span of a gnat today.
Garage and Yard Update
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.
Flummoxed
Not exactly sure how I feel about this.
When I was in HS, we started supporting this struggling church on the west side, Central Baptist. Their pastor is named Wayne, totally awesome man, soft spoken, serious heart for the poor in Modesto. His assistant pastor who did youth was named Tim. We spent a lot of time over there, putting on VBS, had a joint HS choir. Tim lived in the manse on the church’s property and at one time, had a few of their youth group’s boys living with him. I lost touch with him when I moved to Chico but spent one summer in Modesto working at our church and was over at Central Baptist a bit when I was a jr. high leader.
When I moved up to Corning, I was looking for opportunities for our kids from there to do some mission work. So I called Tim and asked him if I could bring my kids down for VBS. We spent a week working in the summer and stayed at my grandparents’ while they were on vacation. It was a fun week so we came back for a long weekend with about 15 kids. We did graffiti paint over, worked at the church, all over Modesto. It was really fun and Tim and I became good friends.
After I came back to Modesto in ’98, I went over to Central Baptist with some of our kids to work for a weekend. Tim was no where to be found so I asked a lady who worked there where he was. She said he’d resigned. I was shocked because he was so dedicated to that church and well liked. I didn’t pry a lot but she said he was still living in the manse and if I wanted to talk to him, to go over there and knock on the door. I did but he didn’t answer the door. When I had a better opportunity, I asked what happened and she told me there were rumors of him being inappropriate with one of the boys in their youth group. Wayne asked him to go get help, that if he did he’d have a job to come back to but he refused. They asked him to resign. It was devastating for the church, for the people who really cared for him.
Fast forward to when I bought my house in 2000. I went into Kelly Moore paint store to buy the paint. Tim was working there. He didn’t say anything to me the first time but the second time I went in, I walked up to him and said hello. He seemed to be doing well. He was renting a room from someone nearby. Every now and then when I was in there, I’d ask if he still worked there and to tell him I said hi. I hadn’t seen him since I left for England.
Terribly sad for the people he’s hurt.