Shucking corn under the house

Thursday morning Rich flushed the toilet upstairs and the kitchen sink downstairs filled with water. I spent the morning bailing out the sink while he finished his shower. And then I sent an email to my father. Over Thursday and Friday my father and I spent a fair amount of time under the house. The plumbing issues involved moving the clean out from under the house through the foundation, using Daddy's auger to investigate the clog and cutting out a five foot section of iron pipe. But those details aren't very important.

The important parts of this adventure were all the little moments with my father. Daddy has a pretty intense paranoia streak so that when we met a significant resistance in the clean out line, he was convinced that our contractors from eight months ago had sabotaged our plumbing. He went down a list of every worker on that he'd ever had a conflict with, and that's not a short list.

We marveled at the strength of plumbers "back in the day" who could heft length of iron pipe around under houses. I waited while my father straightened pipe edges with the circular saw over and over and over until I worried there wouldn't be much pipe left. I learned that when my sense of smell is this keen, it's not the greatest to spend two days around raw sewage, burning PVC and iron and plumbing cement. And we spent a lot of time "shucking corn."

My father tells a story about a farmer that hired a farm hand to shuck corn. He told him to throw the rotten ears in one pile to be ground up and the ones that were still okay but not edible for people into a pile for the hogs. When the farmer came back at lunch, the farm hand had barely made two pitiful piles of corn. The farmer shook his head and decided to at least let the poor kid finish out the day but told him just to shuck all the ears into one pile. The farmer came back at the end of the day and the farm hand had made a mountain of corn! When he asked the farm hand why he had done so little that morning and so much that afternoon, the farm hand shrugged and said "all those decisions were slowing me down."

In any project our family undertakes we spend a lot of time deciding just exactly what we're going to do and then a smaller chunk of time painstakingly following through with those decisions. I spent a fair amount of time this week just observing and marveling at how my father and I work together.

My father and I never had a father-daughter dance at my wedding. We don't go out for fancy dinners to celebrate special occasions. But when he's lying in a ditch trying to find the plumbing cement I can tell him "Back. Over. Down." and he'll put his hand right on it.

These are the days our memories are made of.

Spring cleaning

Since it has been 70 DEGREES THIS WEEKEND I wanted to work on some random projects around the house. Earlier this week, I had bought a bunch of tiles from Flor.com to become our new dining room rug and they thankfully arrived on Friday! Wooo, crazy Friday night at our house! Sarah is a 12-year-old elderly stateshound and when sick or under stress has let us know by exploding in some portion of the dining room. Always the dining room. What can I say, she's a creature of habit. I have actually watched her start to get sick (usually from eating grass outside) and just before she pukes in the kitchen on its convenient tile, she will sprint on her creaky little legs to the dining room to puke on the rug in there. Ugh.

I have an elaborate system for cleaning the carpet but it's time-consuming and a bit neurotic. It keeps the carpet in good shape, but it takes a good hour each time it happens. When you have company showing up 45 minutes after you've discovered an accident or you're already late for work, this can prove inconvenient.

We started using pee pads in her favorite spots on the old rug and those were working great except that our dining room didn't have much decor what with the green and white diaper mats strewn everywhere. So I bit the bullet and bought a new rug.

This isn't just any rug, though. It's from Flor.com. They sell individual tiles that are 19.7" square (it's a metric thing) so you can mix and match. They all have rubber backings on them and they clean up amazingly well. I first read about them on Dooce.com when Heather raved on how she got wine off her carpet with a baby wipe - a baby wipe, people! I was instantly hooked. But they're not cheap and I was chicken to pick out a set for a long time. Until now.

I ordered 49 tiles for the dining room, not really sure how many of them I would use and how many would become spares. With some tinkering, we worked out 35 of them in a 5x7 pattern and have stored the remaining 14 to be replacement tiles should anyone decide to pee or puke in the dining room (not naming any names or anything). I can't tell you how pleased I am with these tiles! They went down super easy, the pattern was fun to make, they're designed for heavy traffic and if we decide to put them somewhere else, they stack and fit in the back seat of a car. Try that with a Persian rug!

I'm now shopping for tiles for my craft room, which is a funky shape with two doors in it and lends itself well to tiles of carpet. Soon I will have no excuse to not be sewing all the time!

Along those lines, we finally cleaned all the crap out of the spare bedroom upstairs. I still had Christmas wrapping paper and accessories up there (and lots of them) so it was time to tidy. Those went to storage in the utility room, the piles of recycling made it to the actual recycling can and after six months of living here, I finally took all my fabric out of the trash bags we moved them in and into tubs on shelves. I have a lot of fabric and I really should work my way through these piles before I buy any more. The whole room, though, looks a thousand times bigger! Hooray finally moving in!

Other than that, I haven't accomplished much. I'm headed outside to enjoy the sunshine a bit more before it's back to work for another week. Here's hoping this weather holds out or at least comes back to stay soon!

Keeping things in the family

I've been using a dead man's dish soap for the last six months. Some people may be uncomfortable knowing someone died in their house. I actually know the exact day that Barry died in this house last March and can only assume he died in his bedroom, which is now our den. We had already looked at the house to buy it when Barry thought he was going to recover from his cancer but didn't need such a large home. And his sister-in-law Anne was the real estate agent who worked with us again after it was Barry's estate that was selling the house. We're the first family other than Barry and his parents to ever live in this home. When his brother Kevin (the executor of the estate and Anne's husband) handed over the keys to us at the signing, the key ring had their family crest on it.

Because they wanted to sell the property so fast (I assume to help pay off his medical bills), it was only about 30 days from when we first agreed to buy the house to when we were closing on it and signing papers. Barry had lived in the house for many years and had accumulated a lot of stuff. Even with his fastidious nature, there were lots of things to donate or sell or remove. We ended up buying a home that had a lot more "extras" to it than anything brand new.

There's a beautiful mahogany-framed mirror Anne said I could keep. We got an extra push mower out of the deal. I have a new butter dish from Barry and several glass corn on the cob plates (which I didn't even know they made but can't wait to use this summer). Barry collected matches (as any chain smoker might do) and we have the giant plastic tub of them to prove it. We got a large fire safe that works much better than the tiny one we owned. And the number of yard tools in the garage would rival our local hardware store!

All of these things please me. They remind me of Barry, a man I actually never met other than through a few old photos I found in the attic. They remind me of his parents and how they built this home for themselves and their six children. They make me think that in some ways we're keeping Barry's memory around this house.

When we had our Nosy Neighbor Open House, we invited Anne and Kevin back to see what we'd changed. As they walked around the house, Anne started to cry. She smiled and said that when they were dating they used to sit on the side porch and listen to the radio and she's so glad we kept the side porch in all our renovations. I told her that's why I wanted her and Kevin to come back. I wanted him to see that the room Kevin waited for Santa in was still there and one day someone else might wait for Santa in it. I wanted him to see that all we did was make some updates and a few changes but we kept their home intact and would take good care of it.

Barry never got a chance to see what we did with this house after he was gone. But I think of him often as I wander around the house and we talk about him as if he's part of our extended family.

"Where did these books come from? Oh, right, they're Barry's." "I'm going to use Barry's mower to edge the yard." "I think Barry left us a spare valve for the furnace's gas line, I just have to find it." "Let's give Barry's grill to the neighbors. It's a lot nicer than theirs and we don't need it."

I just used up the last of Barry's dish soap last week and while it wasn't my favorite brand, I was a little sad to see it go. The greatest thing you can hope for after you're gone is that people will remember you. We never met, Barry, but I remember you and your family fondly.