EW!

File this one under "TMI."

So, last night at around 7:45, John told me that Josh had shut off the valve to the toilet and it looked like the toilet had been leaking.

That is the set-up. You can see where this is going.

Read on only if you choose.

No one would fault you for not.

Consider yourself warned.

Still with me?

I asked him where it was leaking, and he said he thought it was leaking from the front.

Now, we had planned on eventually replacing the toilet with the same dual flusher we put in our on-suite bathroom upstairs. But, aside from it being extremely nasty when we moved in, the toilet downstairs was in good condition and would suffice until we had the money/time/inclination to replace it. John thought it might be a problem with the wax ring, so we rationalized that if we've got to go to the trouble of removing the toilet to check the wax ring, we might as well replace the entire toilet. So while I finished my homework, John sped off to Sam's Club to pick up this beauty (which is eligible for a SWEET rebate from our local energy company and winds up only costing around $10 after the rebate!).

After he got back (around 8:45), we ate dinner while gleefully watching the first half hour of GLEE. I tell ya, it really took extreme will-power to pause the DVR right as Tina started in on "Tonight" from West Side Story. REALLY EXTREME. Like, I think it used up my entire life time supply of will-power, and I will now buy magazine subscriptions from door-to-door salesmen, and donate money to any charity that asks, and accept any request to babysit cats, dogs, rodents, reptiles, babies, and drunks. Yes, THAT much will-power.

But, I paused the DVR, went to the bathroom, and began inspecting the toilet. I felt around the various hoses and gaskets, felt the wall for moisture. Found nothing. I turned the water back on, flushed the toilet several times, and nothing. Paranoid idiots, I thought, and was getting ready to bleach my hands and go back to enjoying Tina's serenade.

Then John walked in and said "See where it's leaking?" as he pointed to the silicon caulking around the base of the throne. The once-white seal had a lovely orange tinge to it around the front of the toilet where it met the floor. I noticed a small bead of water forming in the orange tinge territory, and my stomach sank. Sure enough, the toilet was leaking. Or, more accurately, the water et al wasn't entirely making it down the drain.

Now typically at this point in our little home repair adventures, I'd normally break out the camera and start taking pictures to act as a photographic narrative of what all we were doing and fixing, so that I could later upload them here for you all to marvel at our mad home repair skillz.

But (feel free to applaud) I did not get the camera.

I did not snap away.

I did not record for posterity.

I will not subject you all to that.

(Now I expect applause, so your hands had better be flapping away!)

So instead of subjecting you to creepy crawlies that fear the light, and all kinds of human waste, I will insert a picture of Albert.

Followed by a picture of Elsa.

And for good measure, a cute picture of Sarah's kitty Calypso sticking her tongue out.

And just so he won't feel left out, Elliot, too.We removed the toilet, and while John trashed it, I bleached the hell out of the creepie crawlies that are, evidently, impervious to bleach and continue to creep and crawl. Yay for them. I squished as many of them as I could using the paper towels John was tearing off for me and bleached some more. I sopped up the liquid, and we got ready to seat the new toilet. At this point, we've installed two other toilets, and figured we could be considered OLD PROs and didn't need no stickin' instructions.

I put a bead of silicone around the lip, and John heated the wax ring in the microwave to get it soft. He put it over the drain flange and we lowered the toilet over the flange and through the anchor bolts. The tiles directly behind the toilet are a bit uneven, so we shimmed it as best we could, measured it for level, and shimmed it some more. Then we realized that it really wasn't straight, so we moved it into position, shimmed and leveled it again, and began to tighten down the throne to the anchor bolts. When we were done with that, I looked through the parts bag and noticed that we had forgotten to put the anchor bolt cap and cover into position, so John took the nuts off added the cap and re-nutted the bolts. We then put the tank onto the base, and turned the water on, figuring that the extra weight from the water would help to weigh the toilet down, making it easier to caulk the edge. John flushed the toilet, and then....

Wait for it.....

(You SHOULD be able to see where this is going....)

Water gushed out from under the toilet base.

It seems that, because of all the time we spent trying to get the damned thing in place, anchored, weighted, level, shimmed, and shined, the wax ring shifted. Or, after reviewing the directions for installing the toilet, we realized that perhaps, since the FLANGE doesn't sit above the floor level because of the lovely ceramic tile installed in the bathroom, that perhaps we needed to actually get the little extension thingie that the instructions referred to. The instructions went on to say, "For installations that require the [extension thingie], it is best for a professional plumber to do [it]." At this point, it was 11:45PM, and we were tired and covered in sewage water and said, collectively, "FUCKIT." We told Josh he couldn't use the toilet, and that we'd take care of as soon as we could. We took turns showering and burning our clothing, and went to bed at ~1AM.

When I woke up this morning, I was greeted by a faint putrid smell.

When we went downstairs to head off to work, we were accosted by a putrid STENCH.

Josh said it woke him up.

So, today, between 2PM and 5PM, we're meeting a professional plumber at the house and letting this kind professional deal with the shit.

Literally.

Birthday Booty!

A-hoy!

John enjoyed his birthday (thank you for the calls, messages, and well-wishes). In addition to the warm thoughts and praises, John snagged himself some swanky swag. Behold John's Birthday Booty (*not* that kind...sorry, Jer):

From Mom and Dad
Eddie Royal Jersey*
From Rachel, Albert, and Elsa
Bronco bench, almost center field, FIRST row, "obstructed view" (obstructed by the PLAYERS).
From Sarah and Jeremy
(imagine a photo of John being pleasantly surprised when undisclosed gift arrives :o)) <--I'm closing the parenthetical phrase--NOT showing you that even my smiley faces have double chins!

From Josh
(imagine a photo of a $50 gift certificate to John's favourite sushi restaurant!)

From David and Becca
(imagine a photo of a receipt for dinner at a nice Teppan/Japanese restaurant)

From Howard and Chang (owners of John's favourite sushi restaurant)
(imagine a photo of John and my stupefied faces when the proprietors of the restaurant insisted that our lavish sushi dinner was on the house because John is their beloved).

Not too shabby!

*John has a bit of a curse. He owns the following Bronco's jerseys: Elway (great, but retired), Portis (traded, has had a respectable career since, but could've been great), Walker (traded), Bailey (suffered a season-ending injury last year, team suffered from his absence), Cutler (TRAGICALLY TRADED), and Lelie (traded away). I'm not quite sure what ramifications him getting an Eddie Royal jersey will have for the team, but precedence doesn't look too good....Of course, all that other stuff happened under the leadership of Shanny, so maybe things'll be different under McDaniels. Right. Right?

A Boy and His Dog

Lately, I've gotten in the habit of whining, "I want a doggie!" everytime I see a cute dog. Since most dogs are cute (sans, of course, most instances of the Chinese Crested), John's heard me whine that a LOT lately.

Then, I remember that we DO have a doggie.

(Lately, Albert's been running up to the front or back door in the evenings, pawing at the frame, and meowing. We didn't know what he wanted--figured that maybe he saw a stranger kitty lurking about outside. Finally, we put him on his leash and took him outside. Now, I think he expects it.)

While he only rarely prances like a show dog behind John as he walks, he's still got his dog-like tendencies. And that'll suffice until we're ready for ALL the freaking responsibilities a dog entails.

Awesome!

On our lunch, we took a trip to ReStore (which we haven't seen to since 8/15--that's some kind of record for us since buying our mortgage). They must've gotten a tile warehouse's overflow, because they have pallets and pallets of ceramic tile.

Hiding behind some stacks of perfectly respectable ceramic beauties were....

Three full boxes of 12" x 12" tiles of filled and honed travertine, in a beautifully subtle beige tone. There was also a half-full box of 12" x 12" sheets 1" x 1" squares of travertine with netted backing. The plain cardboard boxes were simply marked "MEXICO" with a Mexican crest stamp.

We got approximately 36 square feet of travertine tiles for around $1.80 a square foot.

MAJOR SCORE.

(I think they know we're contemplating gutting the master bath......)

Mmmm....BEADS....

I am, periodically, an avid beader. It harkens back to the time I spent crafting with my grandma when I was a kid. As a pre-adolescent, I tried my hands at braided bracelets using embroidery floss, and quickly realized that my lack of hand-eye coordination would forever limit my weaving skills to patheticness. Beading seemed like a good alternative, so I worked my way through spools of dental floss, creating what I thought were highly fashionable black beaded necklaces of varying lengths and blackness (I assure you that I was too white-bread to have dillusions of Gothness, but I still believed that anything--ANYTHING--looked better with a black beaded necklace!).

I started small (geddit!) with seed beads, and graduated to bugle, chevron, Cloisonné, lamp work, and everything in between. I would refashion store-bought necklaces and earrings to better suit my needs, and I would drag a complacent John or my sister to bead stores wherever I could find them. When my grandmother passed away, my mom very nicely sent me a beautiful selection of glass, ceramic, and wooden beads that my grandma had collected over the 40 some-odd years of her crafting.

In the last decade or so, I have amassed a serious collection of beads. It started out that I would store them in an old shoe box. Then they got so heavy and were bulging from the seams of the box, I had to transfer them to a plastic shoe box. Then it grew so much that I had to recruit a second plastic shoe box. Now I have four and three-quarters plastic shoe boxes full of beads and in sundry. I know the day is fast approaching where I'll need to figure out some better way to organize my lovelies. I'm a little scared for the future of my bead addiction, though...allow me an analogy that you're probably familiar with. When I was a kid, I saved my money and bought myself what I believed to be the most beautiful little wallet. I filled it with used gift cards, fake credit cards that came in the mail, and tape-laminated "ID" cards I made out of index cards. When I went to junior high and got my first school ID card, I proudly discarded my lame-oh fake ID cards. As I got older and accumulated more cards, I needed a better wallet. Slowly, I accumulated more OMGjustGOTTAhaveonemeatalltimes crap (lip gloss, compact, hair brush, dental floss, pens, etc etc etc etc) that I had to get a purse. I felt awkward and weird carrying around a purse, and would periodically bemoan the "need" to carry one, so I only used one big enough to carry my wallet, a make up compact, and chap stick. Eventually, I decided purses were kinda neat, and I really liked the bigger styles. And I found that the bigger the style, the more STUFF I could successfully carry around. Years later, I'm lugging around modestly HUGE cavernous purses from wince I cannot find a single damned thing (and having a black-case cell phone is the BANE of my existence!). So here's what I'm worried about with my bead addiction. I started out sharing a bedroom with my sister, and had a small tin container with beads. By college, I accumulated enough to warrant a shoe box. College necessitated a plastic shoe box or two. When we moved into the condo, it was two plastic shoe boxes and an old perfume box. By the time we moved into the house, it was almost 5 plastic shoe boxes full. So now I'm worried that I'll go all nutso and buy more BEADS (om nom nom nom nom nom nom) to compensate for the size of the house...

Scary.

Oh me, oh my how pretty!

In the last decade or so, I have ALSO amassed a serious collection of beaded necklaces. Previously, I used shadow boxes I snagged at Target to pin the necklaces up. This worked pretty darned well. But since moving and sorting through my necklaces, I decided I needed a better solution so I wouldn't keep wearing the same four or five necklaces all the time, and/or have to deal with the occasional tangled mess when I was too lazy to open up the shadow box and replace when I had worn. My sister has a teacup hanger/coat rack (similar to this) hanging in her bedroom and she sorts all her necklaces by colour/type. Ingenious, I thought.
A trip to Ikea led me to these lovely Grundtal rails. The fine folks at Ikea have them in their kitchen section, but also use them throughout their catalog/show room as an organizational tool. I scored 3 of them, along with some hooks.
The door to our master bedroom opens to a wall on the left. This is where I decided to hang the rails. After spacing, leveling, and marking my holes, I predrilled and then secured them to the wall using screws. This is the finished product:

I can easily arrange my necklaces according to attribute, and I don't spend valuable time in the morning trying to untie knots from tangled necklaces.

Of course, now that I have the room to expand my beading operation, I don't have the time to devote to it. I guess the beads will collect some dust for now. :o/

Anyone have a solution for sorting and maintaining a working bead collection?

The Little One Stops to Go to Heaven

Several weeks ago, we were driving back to work after lunch at home, and I started singing "The Ants Go Marching..." John gave me a bit of an incredulous stare as he navigated through the crappy court-bound traffic around downtown Riverside. He must have lived a deprived (depraved?) childhood. He'd never heard the song before!

I took that cue to fill John in on all the antics of the Little One (sucking his thumb, tying his shoe, climbing a tree, shutting the door, jumping and jiving, picking up sticks, going to heaven, shutting the gate, scratching his spine....).

I think John perked up a bit when he heard the bit about the Little One going to heaven.

You know how the vast majority of modern cities and metropolitan areas are built on top of older establishments? It's utterly fascinating to me that underneath 18th century cobblestone in London lies Viking London, and below that lies remnants of the Roman London. They're like a torte of human history! I believe that if archaeologists were to conduct an extensive dig in Riverside, they wouldn't find pottery and stone weapons from ancient human civilizations. No, they would find the petrified exoskeletons of ANTS.

During the later weeks of Spring, John spent a nice afternoon under the crawlspace, decked out in his Hazmat suit, lugging around a gallon of Ortho Home Defense. He emerged several hours later, coughing and covered in dust, but victorious. And for a while, things were fine. Then it got HOT and the frigging ants came barreling into the house.

The ants were bothersome and annoying and seemed to have the resilience of cockroaches. We'd wake up some mornings to see the shower pan covered in ants. Other mornings, they'd swarm the sink. Being that we have kitties, we were afraid of spraying any surface they might come in contact with, but that sure didn't prevent the ants from swarming the cat food bowl and automatic waterer. Oh no, nothing was off limits for them. We sealed EVERYTHING we thought they'd get into, and yet they always found something to munch on or some ingenious way of getting at what they wanted. We'd spray them with Bayer Advanced Home Pest Controller (and, yes, I shamefully admit to gleaning a bit of pleasure from seeing the little bastards stop dead in their tracks) when they infiltrated the house. But the clever little bastards would just re-route their journey and find another way.

We came to the realization that the ants were actually living in the upstairs floor and the attic. We followed their goose-stepping ranks from whatever they were feasting on up the walls and into tiny crevices between the crown molding and the ceiling. We sprayed the perimeter of rooms with the Ortho killer, and they'd be gone. A few days later, reorganized, they'd find another route and go after whatever they fancied. They harassed the cats and pinched whenever we'd sit on the loveseat in the living room (at least bees have the decency to go off and DIE when they sting you!).

Barreling into/out of the crown molding.

When the chemically engineered sprays weren't working, I tried greener approaches like filling a sprayer bottle with a mixture of vinegar and water, and spraying that on kitchen surfaces. It worked for a bit, but later the same day, they'd be back. I also tried bay leaves, to no avail--they just crunched them up and took them back to their nest. I didn't want to try Borax because I couldn't think of a way of using it without risking the kitties eating it and winding up dead.

Frustrated, we got some packages of Terro Ant Killer, which we had some success with back at the condo; the main ingredient is Borax, but it's in a liquid form inside a trap. Hopeful, we put them out on the counter where the kitties couldn't get them. The damned ants SWARMED them, forsaking all other morsels of sweetness and grease.

PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE

The packaging promised the ants would eat the bait, take it back to the queen, and wipe out the entire colony in a Gomorrah-esque explosion of ant guts and gore. Except, the ants would eat their way through one bait trap, and traipse off to some other locale in search of more food, seemingly unfazed. So we started replacing the bait traps as soon as they were getting dry. While this didn't diminish the ant population of the Chocolate Lava Casa, it at least kept them in the same predictable spot.

Then we started hearing rumblings of this stuff called Amdro. It ain't cheap, and we were leery of purchasing more Snake Oil Remedies. Desperate, we bought a jug of it. John put some around the perimeter of the house, and I put some in little disposable condiment cups on the tops of the cupboards, and we waited. The weather cooled drastically for a few days, so I chalked up the disappearance of the pests to the more amiable weather.

Then it warmed up again, and NOTHING. I'm happy to report that we've had three GLORIOUS ant-free weeks! Next spring, we're going to pepper the entirety of the dead earth surrounding our house with this lovely stuff. I still haven't seen any chalk-outlined ant bodies. I'm sure that when/if we ever rennovate the upstairs like we have planned and we pry up the floor boards, we'll be met with mass graves that would make Vlad the Impaler giddy.

Head Stone

My friend Carrie's kitty passed away last week after enduring some months of ill health. The kitty was old for a kitty (15) and was loved very much.

Carrie's husband wanted to do something for the kitty, and asked me if I had any ideas. My foray into pet product retail work taught me that pet retailers try to accomodate owners by offering grave markers, but that the commonly stocked markers aren't anything special. Knowing this, I told her husband that I could think of something more fitting for the kitty and her bereaved owner.

Some years ago, my sister gave me some terracotta pots so I could start a window sill herb garden. To keep my pots straight, I bought some Deco Art Patio Paint. It's an acryllic paint line that is supposed to be outdoor safe, colour-safe and weather proof. I knew I could use this for the marker, but I had to think of something to put it on. On a trip to Home Depot to scope out tankless water heaters, I found a 6" x 8" x 1.5" travertine paving stone, similar to this one. It's smooth, cream surface was perfect, and the heft of the paver meant that it could be a suitable grave marker.

Carrie likes sunflowers, so I sketched out an idea for the marker, and got her husband's approval on it. Then I collected what I'd need to complete the marker (brushes, paints, cleaned paver, and water). I used Sunshine Yellow, Red Pepper, Woodland Brown, Cloud White, and Wrought Iron Black for the sunflower and lettering.

The sketch is upside down in the top left hand corner of the pictures, beneath the brush tips.

I pencilled in my pattern, and began to paint. The Patio Paint instructions warn not to dilute the paint with water, so I had an interesting time blending the colours. It took several applications to get the opacity I was looking for in the petals, so I had plenty of opportunity to colour-correct and modify the design. To achieve the impression of the seeded center of the flower, I stippled on white mixed with brown, went over it with black, and then again with brown, stippling the whole time.

For the letter, I hand-wrote the words. I tend to prefer organic compositions, so I didn't bother to use reference lines for straightness and letter height. The paint had a tendency to get gloppy (it's a word!) as it started to dry, so some of the lines weren't as crisp as I wanted, but they aren't really that noticiable, unless you're examining it with a magnifying glass. For the inscription, I used the Colette quote, "There are no ordinary cats."

This is the finished project.

Here's the picture, with the flash, and you can see the side profile of the stone.

If you look REALLY closely at the top right hand corner, you can see the spaghetti and meatballs I made for dinner!

I think it turned out well, and in the VERY VERY VERY VERY far future when we'll need one for one of our beasties, I'll know how to do it.