AtomicMrX

Well, this is becoming a yearly event. We had to call Roto Rooter this morning because after Shannon took his shower and went into the basement for his clothes he discovered the floor drain was flooded and created a nice eight foot pond. Roto Rooter showed up at 10:25 AM and left at 12:10 PM and it cost me $242.00. I don’t have extra money - I live paycheck to paycheck. So this is a horrible surprise.

Luckily in a week or two we have attendance awards at work and this will be my ninth year in a row with perfect attendance so I get $300.00 and 200 points (points are like cash). I was going to use that attendance money for getting new eye glasses but it is gone now on the Roto Rooter bill.

Maybe I’ll be able to use the income tax return money this year toward new eye glasses. I’ve had this same prescription since I moved into the house - so three years. It is time for a new prescription and new frames.

If I didn’t have that attendance money coming up I would be in a heap of trouble this month.

I got up this morning and spent an hour or so on the front steps and drive chopping and shoveling off all the ice/snow mixture. We got a little bit more sleet on top of it this afternoon. I better get out there and put more ice melt on it.

So far we have had to call Roto Rooter once a year since I’ve been in this house. I need to start a preventative measure to keep it from happening so often. Although the guy said that houses need their main line done about once every three years and that would make this visit right on time. But I don’t remember my folks having to do this so often. Maybe this neighborhood has more trees and it causes the problems.

Last Monday we got outside electrical outlets put onto the house. One in front, one on the side facing the street, and one in the back by the deck. We got a great deal and the electrician is a former Gill Studios employee Dave Smith.

Today I decided to try out the new electric leaf blower with the outside outlets. The gutters needed to be cleaned and my Mom said it was quick to do with a leaf blower - all I had to do was get up on the roof.

Here is my problem. I don’t like heights. Yes this house is a piddly single story ranch house and should be no problem for anyone to get up there and back down. I’ve tried before numerous times to get onto the roof and chickened out quickly one I was at the top of the ladder and tried to take my foot off the ladder and place it on the roof. All that runs through my head is “HOW WILL I GET BACK ONTO THE LADDER TO GET DOWN!!!!” So I panic and go back down the ladder.

Well today was a nice day. Beautiful 78 degrees and a calm cool wind with sunshine. So I practice with the leaf blower on the driveway and the deck so I won’t have any surprises on the roof. I go up the ladder with blower in tow and place the leaf blower carefully on the roof next to the ladder but out of the way. Now the hard part, to get off the ladder and onto the roof. I make a couple of stance tries and then finally get up onto the roof, but not completely off the ladder. I say to myself “Okay this is how I need to place my feet to get back onto the ladder and down.” I make it to the roof and sit for a second or two to take in the view and get comfortable with the height.

Not too bad. My roof is about at the same height as most of the second story windows around me. This is okay. I sit on the roof and start up the leaf blower and practice a bit in the sitting position. There are a ton of leaves and fall hasn’t even really got going yet. I can walk on the roof pretty good but when I get to the edge I prefer to scoot around on my butt and carefully lean over enough to get the tip of the leaf blower down into the gutter and blow all the crap out.

Okay, now I’m finished and need to get back down. I unplug the leaf blower and carefully toss the cord onto the deck then place the leaf blower and my gloves near the ladder but out of the way.

This is were I sit on the roof for a half an hour to forty-five minutes trying to get onto the ladder. I can’t seem to remember my leg positioning when I got off the ladder and onto the roof to reverse it and get back onto the ladder so I can get down. At least I found the whole situation funny. Unnerving, yet funny.

I called my friend Ron and got some suggestions from him - I made several attempts, then talked to my Mom for a while and then it was time to try and do it again.

The ladder is very narrow about only a foot wide and I am a big fat pig and the whole thing is freaking me out. I see the ladder falling away with me halfway onto it. If Shannon was here to hold it I doubt there would have been much of a problem. But Shannon is not here and I’m sitting on the roof baking in the sun shine.

So I figure it out in my head where to put my feet and try again and chicken out again. Okay! So I sit real close to the edge and just look down the ladder and deck and just get comfortable with the whole thing. (When I stand on the deck I can touch the guttering so it isn’t a great distance)

I think calming thoughts and take a deep breath. I put my right foot onto the ladder (like so many times before) and then decided to put my left foot through the ladder opening at the top instead of around the side like before. I slide my left foot down my right leg to the step. Okay now I’m on the ladder but still stuck. I am leaning onto the roof so much that I can’t get my foot off the rung and down onto the next rung. Great! So I push my self up off the roof surface and try not to think about me and the ladder falling away from the house. Now I slowly slide my foot from the rung to the next but I can’t feel it. I’m slowly twisting my toe of my shoe searching for that darn rung below. I finally barely touch it and then try to move a little more so I can get a good solid step onto it. Once my foot was solidly onto that next rung I was home bound. There was no other problems after that. I doubt I will go back onto the roof unless someone is here to hold the ladder for when I get back down.

My hands and arms are exhausted from the stain of trying to get onto the ladder from the roof. Plus the surface of the roof is very crumbly so I felt I was not going to get a good grip but just slide off.

At least I didn’t kill myself. Yeah!

Well, some of you will have thought I fell off the face of the earth, some not. I have just been busy and lazy at the same time.

Work has been crazy busy. We’ve been putting in the overtime so that means getting up at 3:00 AM (note AM not PM) and starting work at 5:00 AM (usual start time is 7:00 AM). We have a second shift where I work and so the possibility of everyone staying after work instead of coming in early doesn’t work well. Most of the employees share the same computer with the other shift and there are few “empty” seats on both shifts. So we come in 2 hours early and the second shift stays 2 hours later than their shift.

So that kind of explains the no new posts to the blog. By the time I get home I don’t want to touch the computer again.

I contacted the electrician that fixed my mystery plug when I bought the house to see if he could put in 3 outdoor outlets. We have none outside and it’s a pain! He gave me a very good bid so we’ll have them put in on October 2nd (and I get to take the day off and see how he does it, plus extend my weekend). I see outdoor xmas lights on the house this year! Shannon and I are splitting the cost of the outlets which will make it very affordable (there goes some of the overtime money!).

Jaki has three vertebrae that are too close together (in-between her front shoulder blades) and they got irritated/injured again Thursday night. She jumped off the couch when I brought Shannon home from work. She was in extreme pain all day Friday with lots of crying and screaming and by Friday evening she was acting a lot more normal. We have some pain/muscle relaxing pills that we give her when it starts acting up and we are almost out so today I will be picking up a new bottle at the vet.

There is nothing we can do but wait for the pain to subside and try to keep it from getting re-injured. It was heart breaking to see her in such pain and all we could do was comfort her and hope the pills kicked in soon. Speaking of, we gave her a pill Thursday night and I think it started to help her but she jumped up into bed with me in the middle of the night and I think that is when she twisted it and made things very much worse. The pill bottle says only 1/2 pill a day so I didn’t want to give her one Friday morning even though she was in such pain. Shannon called the vet when they opened and they said we could up the dose to two half pills a day but then we have to work her off of them when she shows a 12 hour improvement.

We have to get more diligent in keeping her off the furniture and no more jumping. Yea, right, this will be easy. It’s like telling a fish not to swim!

I bought an electric leaf blower/vac for $39 at the hardware store and it will come in handy this Fall with all our leaves. We have to pay to have them taken away so the 10 to 1 bag mulching ratio will help us out. Shannon bought an electric chain saw (small one) so we can cut up some of the limbs that fall from the trees to use in our cast iron chimenee. We are very anxious for the outdoor electrical outlets, can you tell?!

Well, I think we are up to speed!

This is a little late in appearing on my blog but I was busy, okay?

On March 28, 2006 I had my old kitchen window and sliding door replaced using my income tax return money (like all of it). I used a builder that my friend Jim used for his kitchen update and also a co-worker of mine got her kitchen updated by the same builder.

Here’s the pictures of the day. I took the day off so I could record and observe (maybe learn a thing or two and I did). Click on any photo to see a larger version in a new window.

The new window and door leaning on the side of the garage:

John and Lee taking the wood shingles off the house:

Out comes the old sliding door:

Big gapping holes in the side of the house:

John sizes the opening, holding the new slider in place:

The deck is their work shop:

The new window is in place and now to piece the wood shingles back on:

“Builder Bill” sweeping up during the install and Lee piecing shingles around window area:

The new window is finished and shades hung back up:

The new slider is finished and vertical blinds hung back up:

The finished look from the outside. Also there is our new gas grill (first gas grill - all others were charcoal):

Once the shingles shrink up a bit and we caulk up the gaps, prime them, then paint the whole house it will look like it was always there. The house is going to get painted here in the next month. We have the colors picked out - just need to wait for the weather to behave.

I can already tell the difference with the new kitchen window and slider. The hallway thermometer can say 68 and the kitchen use to say 65 with the old window and door. Now the kitchen is the same temperature as the hallway. It will make a big difference in the heating and cooling bills!

Well, I posted too soon before about the internet is mine again. I have an “intermitted” problem with my internet connection. Our cable TV is fine but the connection to the internet is a gamble. There have been 3 repair men out and still no clue as to what is wrong. The modem is fine, the computer is fine, so we are going to try again and have a service man come out (hopefully while the problem happens) on next Saturday morning between 8 and 10:00 AM. That is a common time for the connect to just go bye-bye.

Shannon and I went out to eat last night and it was a horrible experience! We went to Fritz Grille in Lee’s Summit and it is a kind of fancy place. We had been there a couple times before and no problems. This time it was bad. For starters the table they sat us at had a glob of what looked like mayo on the “clean table.” We asked for it to be cleaned off and thought nothing of it. We ordered Calamari and when it came we were very disgusted. It was under cooked and very rubbery. We sent it back and got another appetizer instead. While eating our salads I thought I felt something on the bottom of the my small appetizer plate. When I flipped it over to look at the bottom - it was covered with dried on carmel sauce.
Both Shannon and I felt nauseous and the meal was OVER! We showed the small appetizer plate to the waitress and she just asked if we were threw with it - she had no clue. We had to point out to her that the stuff was dried on and she gave it to us that way. We asked to cancel the rest of the food we had ordered and to charge us for what we ate. We paid and left. We will NOT go back!

We were still a little hungry after all that so we went to Perkins and had the rest of our meal!

I finally got my estimate from Builder Bill (his name is Bill and he was a couple of my friends’ builder for their kitchens - hence the name). We are getting out kitchen window and kitchen sliding patio door replaced with something less “breezy” hopefully! He will be ordering the window and door since I said okay on his price. It was well under my max price and still leave me room for “this will have to be fixed before we continue” problems they may encounter while doing the work. This is an old house and I just know they will come across something that will add to the price. I hope not, but I have the money just in case.

With the left over money I am going to put some into savings, some will go to a inexpensive propane grill (the charcoal one I use to have fell apart last Fall), and some for a new door to the garage or front entry. Both doors leak like crazy.