Day 2160

We went to a rescue event today. Dash was an ambassador for Dalmatian Rescue at Pet Fair. We told him he need to be on his best behavior. This meant no excessive loud barking, no knocking over other vendors booths, and no pooping in front of a crowd of little children. Generally, Dash was pretty good. He was a little too eager to sample the treats at the Hills Science Diet booth, but he let everyone pet him and was very friendly with all the other dogs.

Dot used to go to rescue events like this all the time. Sadly, she had to stay home today. These type of public events are simply too tiring for her. I drove home midway through the event to check on her and she was sleeping peacefully. I took her out to pee and she immediately thought it was dinner time. It was actually only 2:30 in the afternoon, but how was Dot to know? When she wakes up from a nap, she usually eats.

It was good to give Dash an opportunity to do something social today. It has become so difficult and time consuming to care for Dot, that we don't get out much anymore. He was still a little timid, but he seemed to have fun, making friends with other dogs and begging for treats from anyone who would feed him. When the days start to get longer again, we should probably start taking him back to our Wednesday training class. He was never that wild about the training exercises themselves, but he loved seeing the other dogs.

Now that I've had a chance to look around, I realize that we've got quite a mess to clean up in the back yard. Although the tunneling crew did a good job of backfilling their tunnel, there is still leftover dirt and mud all over the yard. I naively thought that the cleanup would be so good that there wouldn't be a trace that anything had happened. They did lay a bunch of 4x8 plywood sheets on the ground to protect the grass, but a lot of the excavated dirt seemed to land elsewhere. I'm probably going to spend the rest of the Winter cleaning mud off my shoes. When I take Dot outside to pee at night, I inevitably step in mud now. I guess stepping in mud is better than stepping in poop.

If I have time tomorrow, I'm going to reassemble the screened in porch that I had taken apart to give the tunneling crew access to the leak. I had thought about replacing the aluminum screen panels and buying some new wood for the finishing trim. In theory this would have been a simple task, but nothing is simple with this house. The extra wide screen material is not generally available in hardware stores anymore and standard dimensions for lumber have changed over the years. To exactly match the existing trim, I would have to buy lumber and have it milled to the proper size. It's not an ideal solution, but I think I'll just reuse the old aluminum screen wire and try my best to replace the old wood trim without cracking or splintering the wood.

I looked at the dehumidifiers they had on display in the store at Lowes and most of them were crap. You could never use one of these smaller machines to dehumidify an entire house and since they were all made of plastic, they probably wouldn't last a year anyway. Commercial dehumidifiers cost well over $1000 and are generally made in the USA. The machines at Lowes cost around $200 and were all made in China. Like everything in life, you get what you pay for.

I doubt that I'll make it to the gym tomorrow. I've still got lots of website work to catch up on and the house is filthy. My shower stall repairs didn't really work either. I'd prefer to take a long nap, but it looks like wall-to-wall chores tomorrow.

Puppies are today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2159

Life is returning to normal. Water is flowing. The large tunnel under the house has been filled in. The dogs have quit barking. The only reminder of our plumbing problems is a big blue dehumidifier humming away in our living room. Since I knew the tunneling crew would be arriving early this morning, I masked off the windows again so Dot wouldn't see strangers in her yard and picked up some take-out breakfast tacos instead of going out for breakfast like I normally do on Fridays. Apparently, it is much easier to fill in a hole than to dig one. The tunnel took about fourteen hours to dig, but only about four hours to backfill. By mid-afternoon, the crew had packed up their tools and left.

I turned the furnace on this morning for the first time since the leak started and the humidity in the house didn't rise appreciably. I no longer have to huddle around the little ceramic heater while I work. It seems decadently luxurious to have a warm, moisture free house with working toilets and a washing machine that can handle as many blankets as Dot is able to soil. I think we're back in business.

Dash got a bath today in preparation for a big animal rescue event tomorrow that he will be attending. I took a bath today to give the shower stall I've been attempting to repair one more day to cure and dry. That was a mistake. I'm definitely not a tub person. I'm going back to the shower tomorrow whether my grout work is ready or not. How can you wash your hair in the tub? I think it's impossible.

It is so sad to watch what is happening in Paris tonight. I'm glad that Janet and I had an opportunity to spend time in that wonderful city when life was sane and the city was peaceful. I've spent a lot of time in Europe and used to work there frequently. I don't know if I'd ever feel comfortable traveling there again. Every time I see wave after wave of refugees descending on European countries from the Middle East, I think that this isn't going to end well. I'm convinced that hidden in the midst of these refugees are many more of the same terrorists that are currently laying seige to Paris. Western nations need to start getting serious about closing their borders, or this is only going to get worse. I don't understand what our military planners are thinking. Bombing these people just makes them mad. What we really need to do is totally isolate them. If they want to continue living in the middle ages, let them do it in their own countries.

I got my November invoices out today. Hmm. This isn't going to pay the plumbing bill. I've got to come up with a new source of income, or I'm going to be fretting about money for the rest of my life. I've gotten good enough at designing responsive websites that I could probably get hired by one of the big interactive design shops. Then I would have to go to work though. That's not going to happen. I don't think I'm even capable of leaving the dogs anymore. We have bonded. I'm not a team player anymore either. Actually, I was never a team play, but I was pretty good at faking it. When you get older, faking it loses its appeal. Poor, uncompromising, and a little frustrated. Maybe that's my destiny.

Puppies are today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2156

We've got water! The broken pipe was exactly where the plumber said it would be, which kind of amazed me. The leak was located right on schedule too, which amazed me even more. I was afraid it might take weeks to resolve this problem. If you're wondering what actually caused the leak, it turns out that a section of the copper pipe that supplies water to the house was located right next to a larger cast iron pipe that carries waste water away. There were places where the two pipes touched and over the years, the rusting cast iron caused the copper to corrode and fail. That's what the plumber said anyway. He showed me a small hole in the damaged pipe about half the diameter of a pencil. It's still hard to believe that such a small hole could have caused so much damage.

I asked the plumber if there might be other places under the house where the copper supply lines could be touching the cast iron drainage lines. "Sure," said the plumber. "There could be lots of places like this." "Is there anything you can do to prevent this from happening again," I asked. "Nope," said the plumber, "You could have another leak like this tomorrow, or it might never happen again." That wasn't the kind of reassurance I was looking for, but I guess I'll have to live with it. Even though there's a huge hole under the house, it only exposed a tiny fraction of what the builders had put there over sixty years ago. Lord knows what still lurks under the dirt.

In the grand scheme of things, the problems we've experienced this week are tiny compared to the disasters some people have to deal with. The house wasn't hit by a tornado. It didn't catch on fire. A tree didn't crash through the roof. Life was a little inconvenient, but it could have been so much worse. You always see these stories on TV about people rebuilding their lives from scratch after a major disaster has destroyed their home. I don't know how they find the strength to put the pieces back together. Just having no toilets or running water for a week just about drove me over the edge.

There is still a lot of cleanup to do, but life is already starting to return to normal. I ran the dishwasher today and will do a big load of laundry tomorrow. The tunneling company is supposed to come out in the morning and fill in the big hole they created. It's too bad they can't just add concrete walls to the sides and put a door on top. It would be the tornado shelter I've always wanted. They could just keep digging and we could put in a full basement, but it would be much cheaper to just buy a new house.

The environmental cleanup company is supposed to clean our vents before they haul away their big dehumidification machines and leave. When the water was off, I used the opportunity to re-grout the shower stall, so maybe we'll see some improvements there as well. We'll have a lot of bottled water left over when this is all finished with. I was anticipating a long siege and bought too much.

If there's a silver lining to all this, it would be that being trapped here at the house forced me to buckle down and finish the complicated mobile ready website I've been working on. I'm actually caught up with all my work now. Tomorrow I get to see whether the tunneling crew can make the huge mountain of dirt in our back yard disappear. I bet they can't. They'll probably leave us with a smaller pile of dirt and tell us to plant a garden. I'm going to miss taking showers at the hotel. Their shower was so much nicer than ours.

Puppies are today's Dalmatians of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2155

Maybe this is what hell is like. Being trapped in a house with no working toilets while caring for a sick dog who poops all over the place whenever she's barking at the crew of strangers digging a giant hole under your house certainly isn't my idea of heaven. I knew today was going to be a mess, but I was still surprised at how chaotic it actually turned out to be.

I thought the environmental cleanup people were coming back to remove the big dehumidifiers today. I never heard from them. The noisy machines are still running. The foreman on the tunneling crew doesn't like dogs. Apparently, even crippled dogs that can barely walk make him nervous.  I had to wait until the crew left for lunch before I could even take the dogs out in the back yard to pee. Even then, I had to keep Dash on a leash, because he immediately wanted to dig his own hole in the enormous pile of dirt that had been excavated from under the house. I don't know how long the tunnel is by now, but it appears that they're digging to China.

Dot and Dash were actually pretty good, especially considering all the commotion that was going on a few feet away.  I taped butcher paper over the windows in the areas where the dogs usually sleep so they couldn't watch all the activity outside. This seemed to work. The plan worked great with Dot, since she is almost deaf and is a little senile. As soon as she lost sight of the tunnelers, she quickly forgot about them. Dash was curious for most of the day, but he didn't bark much. The problem with Dash was that he always wanted to go outside. This wasn't going to happen because I knew he would either start digging in the excavated dirt and get filthy, run away through an inadvertently open gate, or fall into the huge hole under the house and break a leg. I couldn't even take Dash on a walk to burn off some of his extra energy because I didn't want to leave Dot alone with the unpredictable tunnel crew. She can't hear well, but she can still feel vibration. She wasn't happy about the jackhammer at all.

Breakfast today was just a couple of Jimmy Dean microwave sausage biscuits and three toaster waffles. It wasn't great, but there were no dishes to do. Paper plates and plastic cups are the order of the day. The only concession I made to real dishes was my favorite coffee cup. I've got to have my morning coffee in my regular cup, no matter how much bottled water it takes to clean it.

There was plenty of work to do today, which was probably a good thing since I was trapped in the house anyway. I finally made some real progress on the new mobile friendly website I'm currently working on. I haven't done enough of these responsive sites yet for the procedures to permanently embed themselves in my brain. I still find myself re-learning tricks I'd used on a previous mobile site. Eventually, all the new things I've learned will stick, but apparently not quite yet. Today I had to re-learn how to get background images to resize properly when viewed on a tablet or phone. It took about five tries, but eventually I got it right.

Tomorrow the tunnel grows longer and deeper. Hopefully they will find the broken pipe soon. Today I was a little worried that they would end up tunneling completely through the house and my car, which is located on the other side, would fall in the growing hole. I hate to even think how expensive this is going to be. I have a whole new appreciation for water now.

Dot is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2154

This was the last day before they start digging a tunnel under our house, so there was lots to do. The day started normally enough. We got up early, cleaned up a small mess Dot had made and then took both dogs on their morning walk. It was surprisingly cold this morning. The temperature was in the low forties. For the first time in ages the outside humidity was in the low forties too, so we could finally open up the doors and windows and air out the house without worrying about raising the humidity again. We didn't even attempt to cook breakfast at home this morning and went to a nearby restaurant instead. This was a restaurant I'd been meaning to try, so I was curious about the food. The Eggs Benedict I ordered was good, but I still like my regular restaurant better.

I'm wondering if we'll have to go to the laundromat every day. Janet did a big load of dog blankets yesterday and there are more soiled blankets today. We had to go buy more water too. We forgot and used the wrong toilet in the middle of the night and had to refill it with 6 gallons of water instead of the 1.5 gallons that the more modern toilet uses. It's a learning process. Janet wants to buy one of those big dehumidifier machines now. The house really feels better now that it isn't humid anymore. The machines not only sucked out the moisture related to the plumbing leak, they continued to suck trapped moisture out of the brick walls, the rugs and even the clothes in our closets.

The big job today was providing an entrance for the tunnel diggers. They are planning to access the broken underground pipe through an interior atrium garden that is enclosed on three sides by the house, with a screened porch as a fourth wall facing the back yard. There are several panels to the large screened-in wall, so I decided to remove one of the screens. The 60 year old nails holding the trim in place seemed fused to the partially rotted wood. The nails had all rusted and were hard to remove without breaking the trim in several pieces. I was eventually able to remove the screen wire and might even be able to re-use it later. I cracked one of the wooden trim pieces than hid the exposed edges of the screen wire. All in all, the job was a success. I didn't totally destroy anything.

After I had created a passageway so the tunnel diggers could remove the dirt they were excavating, it occurred to me that Dash will want to investigate this new opening in the atrium and would probably jump in the hole and wind up getting stuck under the house. I went back to the storage warehouse and got some plastic fencing that we used as temporary kennels at rescue events. I turned this dog pen into a makeshift gate that will keep Dash out of the atrium while the tunnel crew is digging the hole.

It's nice having the hotel as a place where we can take refuge when necessary. When I finished taking apart the atrium this afternoon, I drove over to the hotel to clean up and take a shower. This is a nice hotel and I always look like hell when I arrive. I usually look much more presentable when I leave a few hours later. The shower in the hotel is really nice. The tile grout is sparkling white. The water is nice and hot. There's even a clever, invisible anti-slip surface so you won't fall and bust your butt. I guess we could have a shower like this too if we just ripped out the old one and put in something new.

When I was working outside this morning, it occurred to me that the weather was absolutely perfect. The sky was clear, the temperature was 68 degrees with very low humidity. There wasn't even any pollen in the air today. I was enjoying the clean, fresh air and then I began to smell wood smoke. Yup. That time of year again. When the temperature dips below 80 degrees, Texans start lighting fires in their fireplaces. I attribute this odd behavior to non-stop Christmas movies on the Hallmark channel, but it could be anything.

My last job for the day is to cover up a large picture window in the hallway with brown wrapping paper. I have this theory that if Dot can't see the workers tomorrow, she won't bark at them. We'll see how that goes.

Spot is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day