More Excuses Not to Climb. But Wanting to Climb....Sort of.

Last night I painted the ceiling in one of the upstairs rooms. It has slanty walls because it used to be the attic, so it wasn't very difficult because the ceiling is only like four feet wide. The hardest part was tilting my head back to look up. I've been putting this project off for almost a month now. I bought all the paint in November and I had originally planned to get it done before Stoker's parents came out for Thanksgiving.

So my back hurt like crazy last night. Stoker slapped some Icy Hot on it, bless his heart, and I think that helped. I also took about fifty ibuprofen before I went to bed. Then, when I was laying in bed not sleeping because of the muscle pain, I realized the knot causing all the pain is my climbing knot! Old friend, I said to it, I haven't seen or heard from you in so long! We embraced and there were tears on my cheeks, and tears on the knot's cheeks. It was a Kleenex commercial.

I've already written about the climbing gym in Nashville so there's no need for me to explain why I don't go there. And because I don't climb at the gym, it's also unnecessary for me to expound on the reasons why I don't have any climbing friends in Nashville. Mike D. (climbing friend in Salt Lake) seems to think that if I just hang out at the gym long enough, I'd make a few friends.

Of course, I explain that because I'm not married, single people have no reason to strike up friendships. There's nothing in it for them, and really, not much in it for me. Even if these potential friends are all female. Single people like to travel in groups and a married person is a real downer in single people groups. I'm not saying this is gospel, I'm just saying that's what I've observed having been both single and married.

Raise your hand if you have NOT been to a party where there are both single people and married people. Probably a lot of you raised your hands. I went to a party like this once when I was single (not a cocktail party, those weren't the kind of circles I ran in back in the day). It was at sweet ol' Jason Campbell's house. His married friends all sat around the dining table and talked and pretty much ignored the single people, who were all gathered around the kitchen counter and the humongous TV, ignoring the married people (they made us uncomfortable). It was a very interesting atmosphere.

In any case, all I'm whining about is that for me it has been more difficult to make friends as a married person. I've never been one to rush into friendships. And since my climbing skills have been out of use, I'm sure to suck. So that makes it even more uncomfortable to be at the climbing gym. I told Mike D. that I want to build a small climbing wall in the garage. Stoker is down with that and if you saw our garage, you would note that it's perfect for a bouldering wall. The knot in my back even thinks so. But Mike D. says all I need is a hang board. Then I slapped Mike D. and said hang board a bear's ass.

The problem is, how will a hang board help me if I have no strength to hang? It's not fun to just hang there. I wouldn't hang enough to build any strength, so the proposed hang board is a terrible idea. It would be a waste. The bouldering wall is probably a terrible idea too. I probably wouldn't even use it.

What you're saying and thinking to me right now, I can feel it (the knot doubles as a brain wave receptor), is that I'm just making excuses for myself. You're thinking that IF I really wanted to boulder/climb, IF it was REALLY that important to me, I wouldn't be making EXCUSES, I would just do it. What you're really saying is that I'm lazy. Jerk.

Honestly. The hang board might be an okay idea. I just did a quick search and found that Metolius makes a more elaborate hang board than I'm used to seeing. Back in the day, son, these hang boards were just a piece of wood, a 2 x 4 screwed to the wall. On the other hand, Metolius's description makes it sound like EVERYONE is climbing at home. I hate being part of a trend. I'm a trend bucker. Buck that bucking trend (the second buck is a substitute for a word that rhymes with buck. That's right. Clever). Screw climbing. I'm going to start balancing on the edges of skyscrapers to get my thrills. No protection. Just me and the gargoyles. Oh damn. Both Batman and Spiderman have already done that. Crap.

Moving Made Harder

My advice to you is, when you buy a house, don't wait a month to move in. Unless you have to. Unless, in your excitement the day after closing, you tear up all the carpet and linoleum to refinish the hardwood floors, and you rip down all the ugly paneling in the "den" and frame a wall to put up new, modern drywall (as opposed to plaster, I guess), and moving in would mean not finishing the floors. Because you really ought to finish those damn floors before you move in.

I guess waiting a month is rough, because instead of the house being a home, the house is a project that you carry with you to and from work and your real home. It wears one out, I think. But we didn't know that until we'd done it. No one offered any advice, really, and if they had we probably would have told them hush up, we know what we're doing.

Also, if you're not living in the house, it's real easy for a dripping bathroom faucet to turn into a gushing fountain that could potentially flood the entire basement. What? Oh, yeah, yeah, that happened to us. But see, we thought the dripping faucet wasn't anything. We thought the puddle of water in the basement was from the toilet. Later that night, we figured out it was the sink (turned off the faucet, everything dried out).

The next day, when we stopped by to put up drywall, the toilet had flooded and the basement was a mess again. It was the tank, see, it never stopped filling. We turned off the valve to the toilet, but the next day it had flooded again (ghostly? The valve WAS turned off). Three days in a row. It's like a sign from God or something. He deals in threes, you see.

If we'd been living there, those enormous water problems wouldn't have ballooned like they did. We would have caught them at the trickle stage, right?

So, we moved in all the way on Wednesday. Or rather, we moved everything out of the apartment and into the house. We were up until 3 am on Wednesday night doing all that, you know, vacuuming the apartment before we left so they didn't think we were quite so piggish when they came to clean it up for the next tenant.

Something that took longer than we'd expected was moving the cats. They were very frightened. We only had one cat kennel, so we held the other two in our laps. Well, Bastet rode in my arms, Sobek rode on Stoker's shoulder. He really loved riding in the car. Sobek did, that is. (Stoker likes riding in cars, too.)

Bastet is pretty good at riding in the car with me because she's so well traveled. She's been from Mesa, AZ to Salt Lake, and from Mesa to Nashville. She's also ridden on a plane with us. She's a jet-setter, that cat. A hippo jet-setter (I don't know, something about her screams hippo. She's a hulking creature. Beautiful and hulking). Polly (short for Neopolitan, like the ice cream) rode in the kennel -- she's still quite skittish.

The cats hissed a lot in the house, at first. The previous owners had cats who left behind lots of terrible smells. So I think the cats were waiting to be jumped by enormous tom cats or something. That or I'm right about the devil room and there ARE ghosts in the house. Cats can see ghosts, don't you know?

Anyway, it took us longer than we thought to calm the cats down, and even when we left they weren't calm. When we returned from buying new cat litter, Sobek was burrowed between some pillows on the couch. He was like a kid hiding from thunder (I used to hide from thunder under the velvet throw pillows on my mom's couch, so that's how I can make that comparison). When Sobek saw Stoker, he ran into his arms. It was like a Kleenex commercial or a Cat Fancy sponsored music video for "Reunited." It really tugged at the heart strings.

The cats are doing better, the odd thing is that suddenly they're all sleeping on our bed with us and so I can't move at night, lest I kick a cat off the bed. Bastet has successfully rubbed against every possible object, to claim them, as the supreme cat in the household. I think she worked herself into such a frenzy from marauding about the house, shooting out her scent, that now she has a cat cold. Her little eye was a bit oozy last night, poor thing. I told her to rest today. Get some sleep. Recuperate.

Anyway, moving was the most horrible thing I've had to endure for a long time. I thought the glue-scraping was rough, and it was. I thought the sanding was a burden, and it was (especially the devil room. I NEVER thought we'd get through all that black tar. And it WAS tar. I've had it confirmed by several sources). I thought filling the nail holes with stainable filler was rough, and it was. But moving stands as the number one shitty thing a person has to do in their lifetime.

It could have been worse, I could have been 8 months pregnant with a two year old, two cats and a dog, and it could have been from DC to Miami, or Southern California to Miami, or Miami to Denver. Take your pick. Luckily it was from one side of the circle that is Nashville-Davidson, to the other side.


P.S. The floors look excellent, and who can complain about new appliances? Especially a side-by-side fridge when all you've had your entire adult life has been the top-freezer monstrosities apartment complexes offer. The beasts!

The Devil Room in our House

I've been telling people for about a month that I'd post some pictures of the new house. Here are some:

There are three things to note in this picture. First, the wood paneling. It's gorgeous. It's really thick, heavy paneling. Some would call it knotty pine, though I'm not in the know about lumber, so I have no idea. Knotty pine? Probably. We ripped it out. Second, the enormous hole in the wall. Would you say that's CRT television size? It is. This is the red-neck flat panel TV. The back half of the TV comes out in the bathroom closet. Oh, and the holes in the wall (there's another one by the back door)? Yeah, they were covered by the previous owner's furniture. The first time we saw them was in the final walkthrough. Third, yes, that is BLACK carpet. Lovely, isn't it? You can see Stoker gathering up the pink carpet from the hallway (pink and black carpet. Who comes up with this crap?). We ripped that out too.

There were black and white vinyl tiles underneath the black carpet. Apparently these kind of tiles may have had asbestos in them, a possibility that we were totally unaware of, as you can see from the photograph. Stoker isn't wearing a respirator or anything (but he IS wearing flip flops. They're great for working on the house). I think the little spots in the photo are absestos floating around (these spots don't show up in the other rooms). Or evil spirits. Honestly, it's always been difficult to take pictures in this room, every image shows up with spots in it. We call this room the devil room. It has a thing for being black (so we're going to paint it white. Or yellow. Take that, you devil room!) and gloomy (the paneling really sucks up the light).

Notice that underneath the vinyl tiles, the floor is completely black. We think that was tar. Underneath the tar was the most perfect hardwood floor ever. It was unbelievable. No dents or scratches. It was immaculate once we sanded the tar up (but since then, as Stoker has been rewiring and dropping tools, it has gotten dented). During the sanding stage we wore masks. But I'm sure the damage was already done to our lungs at that point. The problem with the tile and everything was that the day after we closed, we stopped by the house to see how it looked. Stoker thought he'd dig right in and start tearing everything up. We didn't have a plan and we hadn't consulted anyone about how to do things, so we didn't know that it was a good idea to wear a respirator. But you'll be glad to hear that we wore them when we tore down the hideous acoustic ceiling tiles in the devil room.

Here, you can sort of see the floor underneath the tar. It might have been a good idea to use a paint scraper to get the tar up, but at that point, we were so tired from scraping the paint and glue up in the OTHER two rooms. I think if we could do it over, we would use the drum sander because it's a tougher sanding machine, or so they say. We went through a lot of sandpaper. The worst part about this was that the tar turned into a dust that settled on our hair and skin. Also, the floor took forever to sand. It was very demoralizing.

So all the pictures have Stoker in them. But I worked too, I promise. We took turns sanding and I was the one thinking about pictures, I guess. This room is almost finished. We've already stained it and coated it with polyurethane. The walls have been stripped and rewired, plus we added a wall to split this room. We made a utility room where the back door is, and where it joins the kitchen. Now we just need to put up the drywall.