Life in the Slow Lane

First of all, YAY! I have a renter. He moves in on Sunday. God, I can't believe it will be May already.

Before he moves in, I have to fix the toilet. I had turned the water off downstairs because there was a leak in the basement. Originally I thought a pipe had frozen during the winter (and I wasn't looking forward to figuring out where the leak was). Upon closer inspection, though, I realized that the leak was actually in the intake pipe for the toilet, and was just dripping down the water pipe into the cellar. I didn't know if the fill assembly was also leaking, so I bought a replacement assembly just in case. Total for that and the intake pipe: $11.

This afternoon I took a break from my buglist and replaced the intake pipe. That fixed the leak, so now I have an extra fill assembly hanging around. Given the extremely yucky state of the current float in that toilet, maybe I should just replace it.

As I was getting friendly with the toilet, I noticed that I could still hear a trickle of water and, sure enough, every 30 seconds or so the toilet would fill again. Great. So I pulled out my official Toilet Flapper Tester (long-handled pasta scoop utensil), and pushed the handle down hard on top of the flapper. No more trickle out of the tank. Of course, a new flapper was the one thing I didn't buy when I was at the hardware store today....arrrrrrrgh.

Now we come to the important part of this post, which is a new law that I have decided to name after my dad, a fabulous Mr. Fix-it:

Bruce's Law:
The replacement part you need will be the one part you didn't buy.

Well, I did get half the repair done so at least I'm closer now. And fortunately it only took about 5 minutes. Woohoo.

Today was a gorgeous day in Portland. After picking up my freshly-rehaired bow, trading musician gossip with B., teaching the kids at PATHS, and cleaning my apartment, I strode out the door for a walk to church to pick up the music for Sunday. On the way back, I stopped at the Paris Farmers Union to pick up a new flapper for the downstairs toilet.

Once back at home, I quickly made the flapper switcheroo and was delighted that the tank filled and remained filled. Woohoo! Not wanting to throw the old flapper away (though what I'll use it for I have no idea, I just can't bear to pitch it), I debated about where to store it. Finally I decided on the under-sink cabinet in the bathroom that I never use. I opened up the cabinet, and there on the shelf was...a new toilet flapper. Actually, a 2-pack of flappers, with one missing. From the previous homeowners. Yup.

This requires a corollary to Bruce's Law.

Bruce's Law (Corollary 1):
The replacement part you bought was the one you already had but didn't know it.
Bruce's Law (Corollary 2):
The replacement part you bought was one that you know you have somewhere but you told your wife you don't have one because you can't find it because the cellar/garage is too messy. Ahem.

#2 applies to my dad, not to me, though sometimes I do wish I had a wife, or at least someone to occasionally cook me dinner and rub my feet and knock some sense into me when I'm doing something dumb/insane/dangerous/fattening. Although I'm not into girls, so it would have to be a husband. Do husbands do that? If so, sign me up!

That was one of the comments on my first Probationary Teaching Report after the assistant principal observed my Thursday morning class. I didn't realize until later that day (chatting with some other teachers) that most teachers tell their students ahead of time when someone will be observing! I had thought it would be more indicative of the usual classroom experience if I didn't tell my class, so I didn't. Instead, Brian arrived and I said, "Mr. Britting is here with us today, so try not to set anything on fire." I hope he knew I was joking...

I keep pinching myself to make sure I'm really teaching. Everything seems to be going well, and I'm now actually getting some sleep during the week. Yay!

I spent the first year in my house getting to know the seasons and how they affect my house and yard. I had planned to sheet-mulch a section of the yard this summer for a garden, but just hadn't gotten around to it. Too much biking, sailing, and sunbathing during the weekends. :-)

Today I rolled out of bed while the frost was still on the ground and staked out my 8-foot circle. This circle will eventually be a "keyhole bed", a permaculture term describing a circular garden with a path leading into the center. (This gives you the maximum amount of accessible garden for the minimum amount of path).

Dad had offered to bring over the rototiller to prepare the ground, but I decided to try it without. I did aerate the area first, using my weight to sink the tines of a manure fork deep into the ground and then using my body weight to rock it back and forth. It was a beautiful morning and the whole procedure became a kind of dance that left me free to gaze at the trees, the sky, the frost on the ground, and reflect on a glorious Fall day while completing my task. I think pre-MS I would have just muscled my way through it; now I am better at using my body wisely to accomplish physical things with less effort.

Once I had finished, I hosed down the whole area (forgot to do it the night before), and then headed over to South Portland to meet Mom for a trip to the dump -- oops, I mean "transfer station". The Portland facility doesn't have any kind of mulch, but in South Portland it's free for the taking, all composted. Since we were going over there anyway, we took a couple of big old doors that Dad just replaced and I had to snap a picture of the past: a piece of plywood with an area for "notes for Mom". At the transfer station, we chatted up the Usually-Cantankerous Guy Who Overcharges You and I snapped a photo of the 24-foot-wide lawn mower.

Mom has spent the summer mulching a large amount of her lawn, and has it down to a science: scope out the pile for a large vertical "cliff" area, back the trailer right up against it, then climb up on top of the pile and use the fork to shear away huge amounts that are easily hoed into the trailer. With both of us working, we had a trailerful in about 30 minutes and then drove it over to my place.

My original 8-foot circle looked pretty small when I got back home, so I extended it to 10 feet. Then we laid down the cardboard, with Mom on hose duty while I went to the back of the garage to get last year's partially decomposed leaves. These went on top of the cardboard, and were also hosed down. I then applied some special "homemade" high-nitrogen liquid fertilizer that I had been harvesting for the past 24 hours. If you're thinking about human byproduct, you'rein the right ballpark. :-) I did this because the dried leaves are so high in carbon that I wanted some nitrogen mixed in.

Finally, we put on the top layer of the composted mulchy stuff from the dump, and voila! Instant garden bed. This will rot over the winter, and in the spring I'll plant some soil-building plants. Lots of deep-rooted ones like daikon radish and sugar beet, since I have a lot of clay that needs to be broken up, plus alfalfa and some others.

Before I went inside to collapse, I took some pictures of my swale/hugelkultur project out back. Last month I screwed together an A-frame level from scrap wood so I could dig the ditch on contour (the rope had a wrench hanging from it for the weight, taking the place of the beer bottle traditionally used in permaculture circles ;-P ). Once the ditch was dug, I filled it with brush, and will now fill it with grass & leaves, and then hoe the dug-out dirt back over it. Today I threw in a few leaves and old (super slimy) grass clippings; I'll probably get it finished just before the snow comes.

So, those daikon radish sprouts that have been underwater for an entire week are still alive. The yard finally drained today and I went to take a look. We'll see whether they will make it. I'm rooting for them. Sorry, I couldn't resist. :-)

Last night while Googling for asparagus guilds (a "guild" is a permaculture term used to describe a bunch of plants that support each other as a mutually beneficial system) I discovered the Portland Permaculture Meetup and signed up to go to this month's meeting. I'm looking forward to meeting a few local permies. The group organizer mentioned kiwis in a post so I definitely want to talk to her about that! I'm planning an arbor behind the first floor deck to screen it from the apartment house next door. Maybe then my tenant can use the deck without feeling like he's on display. I was originally thinking grapes or maybe hardy kiwifruit, but right now sandra berry is my favorite. Hmmm...should I do that first, or should I do the cob wall in the back so I can put in the peach tree? Or should I do the big trellis up the deck posts along the driveway and put sandra berries there, and kiwi over the deck in the back? Is this what M. means when he says I have too many projects?? Nawwww...

But speaking of "too many projects", (whatever that is), tonight after cleaning house and practicing the violin for a bit I made the 5 frame struts for my Murphy bed. I need to get a framing square and then I'll be ready to screw together the rest of the frame. The Sawhorse Fairies (how's that for a mental picture?) left me a gift of a beautiful pair of adjustable sawhorses, so I was able to work at a comfortable height. Wheeeee!

My fever has abated, the fridge's fever has stabilized at room temperature, Dad came over to loan me a cube fridge and, (with the help of the Fix-It-Yourself Manual), we discovered that my refrigerator's timer is broken so it always thinks it's in "defrost" mode. Now I'm nursing a headache, listening to tango, and finishing up my cheezy arrangement of the Wedding Song, ("There is Love"). Tomorrow, with any luck, Twin City Supply will have a replacement timer and I can install it before tango band rehearsal. If not, some fancy wiring will be in order to bypass the timer switch so I can have a working fridge for the weekend. Company's coming...

I picked up a replacement timer for my refrigerator today. Of course it couldn't be a simple swap with an identical timer; these days there's one timer replacement that you wire differently depending on what kind of timer you're replacing and what kind of cycle your fridge is on. The lady at the counter said, "this comes with instructions, so make sure they read them when they're installing it." I assured her that "they" would. At home, I opened the booklet: "blah blah blah COMPRESSOR blah blah REPLACEMENT TIMER blah blah WARNING blah blah blah PERMANENT DAMAGE TO THE UNIT..." I gave up on the text and just read the schematics, connected the wires, reseated everything, plugged the fridge in, and turned the timer dial until it clicked. The compressor came on immediately. Yay.

I returned from band practice to an appropriately chilly fridge and to a bunch of notes from my dad, who had come by to check out my handiwork and to shove the fridge back into its crevice. He also vaccuumed. My dad is the best.

I feel a little silly that a working fridge is such a relief, but there it is.

I was thinking the opposite of "loose ends", but "tight ends" just makes me think of T. in my high school homeroom, who had to write "I will not hit up the tight end" 100 times for the football coach...why do I remember these things?

Tightened End #1: Maurice Cavalier is back on the road, with an inspection sticker and with an amazing body job by my dad. I am sooooo spoiled. He even painted. I tellya.

Tightened End #2: 3 blue zippers and a red zipper bought for 4 different garments that I will make during Christmas break. I was not supposed to buy any fabric, but I did. One cut. :-) I also walked out with a few yards of this half-paper, half-fabric stuff. I had mentioned to the lady who was cutting my fabric that I was going to have to make a pattern since I couldn't find any I liked, and she suggested using this instead of my usual muslin-plus-craft paper.

Tightened End #3: Marden's. (Official motto: "I should have bought it when I saw it at Marden's"). You just never know what you're going to find in there, but today I found 2 pairs of pants, 2 skirts, and a sweater. Total: $35. It would have been $43 but somehow I forgot to buy the jeans. Oh well. Now I have some great pants and a new tango skirt!

Tightened End #4: Moravian Star is lit and hanging outside. I had to take the handle off of the deck door and feed the extension cord in through the hole, and then stuff foam around it. Now that I've done this, I'm sure I'll need to use the deck door multiple times.

Tightened End #5, which was already tightened once last weekend: re-mailed Xmas package to D., after our delightful Department of Homeland Security decided not to let it leave the country because I had mailed it last weekend from a UPS store and not from the Post Office? Eh? Neither I nor the postal clerk could figure out what the problem was, but she just put another sticker on it and sent it off. If it arrives back on my porch next Saturday, I will be really annoyed.

During the tightening of End #6, a student called to see if she was playing the right notes for "Walking in a Winter Wonderland." Speakerphones are cool.

End #6: Christmas Concerto sixteenth notes learned for Christmas Eve. Figured out a new finger technique.

End #7 is still loose. I can't figure out whether I would rather learn the Korngold or the Glazunov for my next concerto. To be continued. No doubt G. will have some ideas, such as "are you nuts? You haven't played the Tchaikovsky and you want to play the Korngold?" Yes. I am nuts.

End #8 is still loose. I need to siphon the old gas out of my snowblower to see if fresh gas will make the motor stop racing and blowing puffs of smoke. Yikes.

Well, I wasn't burning down the house, only spending 10 hours of my Sunday in the basement with my dad cleaning out my furnace and adding some new controls to make it more efficient. My dad does all of the knuckle-banging and swearing and I hold the light and fetch tools and clean things and get water and so forth.

After 10 hours of this, my dad, (who recently went through his Oil Burner certification at SMCC), did a bunch of tests. Not running terribly efficiently. The last guy who serviced the furnace had, fortunately, left a note about what he had done...so we could see (looking at the specs in Dad's notebook) that my furnace currently has a nozzle that's too big for the amount of pressure the pump is at, meaning that I'm using about 10% more fuel than I should be using at that much pressure. Looking more carefully, we could see that the type of nozzle the last person put in is the wrong kind of nozzle altogether (solid when it should be hollow). You can bet my dad will be back soon to change the nozzle and up the pump pressure--doing so means I can use 20% less fuel.

Two words: gas boiler. :-) My oil furnace is extremely interesting, but I'll take "clean, efficient, and low-maintenance" over "interesting" any day. So when my dad said "if I could get you a good deal on a gas boiler, would you be interested?" Ayuh. I was.

Now I get to go write a mid-term. And clean my apartment. And do the 10 other things I thought I was going to get done today before the shenanigans with the furnace began. Argh. On the other hand, it was fun to hang out with my dad, and while he went to the hardware to get another kind of fitting, I drilled a hole through a basement window frame and wired up a plug so I can light up my plum tree. Merry Christmas!

Last night's "1 to 2 inches" left at least 5 on my deck railing and several drifts in the driveway, so I got up at 5:00 a.m. to clear the driveway before my tenant could drive his truck over it. And discovered, at 5:10, that my snowblower was not going to cooperate.

Now, this snowblower has never fully cooperated, but last year I could do almost the whole driveway before it would die, if the snow wasn't too heavy. No luck today. At least today's snow was all powder, so it wasn't hard to move it with the scoop, but it took almost an hour. Should have had breakfast first. I can't get a new snowblower because this is a "perfectly good" snowblower that my dad rescued from the dump (oops, I mean "transfer station"). Hmmmmmmm.

Fortunately, I teach at the coolest school in Portland. At 7:30 a.m. I described (apparently in side-splittingly explicit detail) the noises and motions my snowblower makes before it dies to the instructor of the Small Engine Repair class. Viola! [sic] My snowblower was retrieved from my garage while I taught my classes, repaired, and at 1:30 I was in the shop with him listening to what had been wrong with it and how he had fixed it. Tomorrow it will be spirited back to the garage sometime during the day.

Did I mention how cool PATHS teachers are?

Oh, and did I mention that WE HAVE SNOW! As in, maybe Sunday I can USE MY CROSS COUNTRY SKIS!

I've just sat down at my computer for some Web design work. Not exactly what I want to be doing during my vacation, but a nice break from pulling down tons of plaster on my head, which is what I was doing this morning and on Sunday morning. Now I am really done with the demolition part. I was worrying so much about the bed pulling the wall down that I decided to anchor the new closet walls to the floor joists of the third floor, requiring me to tear out more of the closet ceiling. But now I'm sure the bed will be secure. I figure if overbuilding was good enough for the ancient Greeks, it's good enough for me.

It's kind of a relief to be doing something again, after an enforced vacation yesterday due to torrential downpour, high winds and a 24-hour power outage. I'm lucky--there are a hundred thousand Mainahs out theyah right now who still don't have powah. Bonita's quite perky today, too, after spending yesterday curled into a tight ball of fur, shooting me baleful looks that meant "why is it 45 degrees in here?" Back to work for me and back to lap-sitting, pouncing on nothing, and tail-chasing for her.

Yesterday S. and I drove over to the Designing Women art/craft show at Woodford's Church. On the way, we stopped at the ReStore, a building materials depot run by Habitat for Humanity. It's been open for 6 months, said an employee. Trim, posts, deck hardware, sinks, lighting, doors everywhere, appliances...and for cheap. This is my new favorite store, partly because they have some great stuff in there for incredible deals, and partly because you never know what you'll find. Plus, now I know where to donate a stove or fridge or sink or...whatever, when I start remodeling the downstairs apartment this summer.

To get to the ReStore from downtown, take Forest Ave. north almost to Morrill's corner. Turn right on Morrill St., just before Meineke (or turn right across from Goodwill, either way). Drive towards the train tracks. At the end of Morrill St, turn right into what looks like a driveway and the ReStore is in there, about halfway down on the right.

The Murphy Bed isn't completely done yet, because I haven't painted it and there's no mattress yet. But today I mostly finished the trimming and am now ready to start the painting. Here's what I've learned:

• my jigsaw sucks. The guide in no way resembles where the blade will actually go.


• Irwin quick-release clamps are my friends. 2 or 4 of those are like having a person helping you who never gets tired, never drops anything, and never points out that you just sawed the wrong end off of that board.


• building goes much more slowly when you're building something so cool that you have to keep stopping and admiring it. :-)


• well-meaning men at Home Depot should not be listened to, because every time I do, I end up realizing that my way was better and I should have stuck to my guns.


• wearing a dust mask and safety goggles makes the goggles fog up. Argh.


• I still can't saw in a straight line with the circular saw. Howevah, I can now drill pretty straight holes.


• Building things is so much easier with plans! I think this is my first carpentry project where I was [mostly] following directions!

Painting next, then mattress. Then attach the pistons! Then something to fill in the wall between the back of the bed and the bathroom (I didn't see anything I liked at Home Despot, so maybe I'll try the ReStore). Pictures soon.