Excesses

Here's another version of the sunrise photo I posted a couple of weeks ago. This version has been intensively Photo-shopped for more drama. I'm pretty happy with how it came out.

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There's gold in them thar hills: We are looking into buying a gold claim. Not for the gold, mostly just for a place to go and camp when we want to get out of town. Yes, we live in a town that is smaller than most public campgrounds, but we still want to get away from it all. I am not sure there is really any farther away from here that we can get, but we are sure going to try. I don't know where this is leading us... Perhaps we will eventually devolve into cave-dwelling hermits, who emerge in the springtime, point our gnarled fingers at the young whippersnappers, and retreat back into the darkness.

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We now have something like 8 cats. Is it true that once you name it, it's yours? Ruby and Poppy have been with us for almost 4 years now. Squirrel came with the house. Buster and Chili were kitten gifts from a friend, a couple of weeks after we moved in. Mama Kitty is Squirrel's semi-feral girlfriend, she appeared about a month ago. Sprite, Dustin, and one other as yet unnamed are her teenage feral kittens. I was able to sneak up on Sprite and snap this photo of him or her yesterday. We try to limit the number of cats whose meals we are subsidizing, but really, now, how could you snatch a food bowl away from such a cute little furball? Look at those green eyes, that snowy white mane! There's yet another black cat who has been creeping towards the porch in recent days. One hopes that we will have the good sense to avoid taking him in as well.

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2005 may be remembered as the year of the many bathroom remodels. The first and second remodels were in our old house. We wanted to just slap in some new tile to make the house saleable, but ended up doing some sub-floor replacement, new fixtures, and then finally the tile in both bathrooms because of the water damage we found under the old tile. We are now on remodel number three, with number four threatening to pop a gasket at any moment.

In our new house, we are converting a half bath into a full bath so that we can do a major remodel of the existing full bath, and still take showers. The good news is that the room dimensions of the half bath are set up perfectly to accommodate a tub. The bad news is, everything else. But we are making some headway. We tore out all of the old irrigation type PVC pipe in that part of the house and have replaced it with code-compliant CPVC. We've got the plumbing supply roughed in for the tub and the relocated sink and toilet. We'll be installing the new ABS drain pipes later this week. And we got the tub into the 'perfect' sized room without sending anyone to the hospital.

If there was ever an unsolvable geometry problem, this might be it. How do you take a tub that is 60" long, 18" high, and 30" wide, and fit it into a 60" width opening? You can't just rotate it into place, because one corner or another of the tub apron is going to dig into the wall, and bust up the wallboard in the adjacent room, or get stuck on the studs. You can't bring it in vertically and then flip it down, since the foot of the tub on one side will wedge into the floor, and on the other side will get jammed on the wall. You can't slide it in the wide way, because you just had to bring it through a door, the narrow way. And besides, the rest of the room still has wallboard on it, which makes it 1" narrower than 'perfect'. Oh, and while you're at it? That plastic drain that sticks out 10" from the bottom of the tub, make sure not to bump that on anything, because we wouldn't want to break that pipe. It will be completely inaccessible once the tub is in place. And don't even think about setting the tub down on the floor to rest, since you'd definitely snap that thing right off. I don't know how we did it, but we finally got the thing in there. And I don't care what, it's NOT coming out again.

I would say that the hard part is over, but the next part is picking out fixtures and tile. And if there's one thing we have a hard time agreeing on, it's tile. Or is it fixtures? Maybe paint color. We will probably have to agree to disagree, and do this bathroom in Gavin's style, and the next one to my taste. I will bite my tongue when he picks out an oak Hollywood-style vanity light, and he will roll his eyes when I select a stark chrome something with halogen spotlights, and we will go merrily on our way. Good thing we have two bathrooms.