August 9, 2008

Please forgive me, it has been two monthes since my last confes..I mean, my last posting.

Summer is a busy, fun time, and since life is short, I've decided to spend my summertime doing stuff what needs doing instead of potatoing away in front of a computer screen. Fun things, but unfortunately, work things, too. Yin, yang... :/

A work update on my doings and goings and hitherings and yonnings: mostly consisting of me slaving like a dog trying to organize all the crazy crap I've collected over the years. Because we've finally gotten around to getting the foundation fixed on our old citadel of a house. Meaning the entire basement needed to be emptied of its contents. Just the sheer volume of crap we've collected over the years would have been enough to incur fear and doubt in even the most serious DoGooder from any of those televised home cleanup crews and freeze him in his tracks. Or her. Fear knows no sexism :)

The basement of this fortress was built to be virtually indestructible. That is, to everything the builders could think of: war, locusts, plague, insanity, famine, earthquake, giant sand worms from Dune, bloodrayne, zombies, and termites. What the builders didn't bank on was that most deceptive of destroyers....groundwater. It has infiltrated its evil way into the cracks and crevices and over time has frozen, thawed, negotiated and insinuated its liquified self into the very soul of our home, melting its way placidly through solid cement. It took years, this patient, pervasive invasion of our space. This stealthy pillagement, this wily violation of our dear home. Maybe not so stealthy, we figured it out years ago. But the time has come to reclaim our castle, take back our territory, and tame the trespassing torrents.

What all that means, is that I've spent the last couple of monthes sorting and packing boxes of crap and moving it all into storage. Years of stuff, some good, some not so much, some useful, some not so much...and either tossing it or hauling it all away and paying upwards of 200 bucks a month to keep it under lock and key and camera surveillance (prolly under the watchful eye of some wanker with a porn addiction and too much free time at work). What remained was a large, empty, slightly damp, sorrowful-looking basement with a badly cracked floor and an aspiration to greater things. And a month without my washer and dryer, a month!! The sheer torment of having to wear the same clothes for days at a time. And they say the pioneers had it bad. Try giving a woman a thousand dollar machine to clean things with and then taking it away from her...folly, says I. Sheer folly. Lucky for them I didn't climb a bell tower with a sniper rifle.

Then the men came with big strong tools (hehe) and jackhammered their way (heee) through our poor, violated floor and removed all the old cement, right down to solid Canadian Shield bedrock. Then they dumped in a gabillion pounds of gravel, re-laid new plumbing and drains, some plastic sheeting, some metal grids, and finally a nice smooth four inch topcoat of lovely grey cement. Spankin!!

Now, we await the resurfacing of the basement walls, the installation of new windows, a new heating system, and then on to my favorite part: redecorating our new space. The washer and dryer have been re-installed in the soon-to-be new laundry room, and the rest of it is blessedly empty. We will probably start hauling stuff back in early September, depending on how fast the rest of the work progresses.

Fun update: In between stuffing boxes and housework, I spent my time wisely. Roller coasters, water slides, shopping, car shows, and movies.

Busy busy busy, a girls gotta bee :)