The Old Man and the Street

If eyes are the “windows to the soul” of a person, then windows are the eyes to the soul of a house. When we first saw the Old Man, the eleven stained glass windows were one of the things that really caught our attention, but for three very different reasons: First because there were so many of them, second because they were so beautiful, and lastly because they were in such horrible condition. Several of the windows were missing pieces of glass, and another few had broken pieces of glass in them. One had been repaired with scotch tape, and another looked like someone had tried to glue the broken glass back together with wood glue.

We walked away from the Old Man that day and continued our house hunt elsewhere, but fate (and a very determined wife!) brought us back to the Old Man six weeks later. We found that, in addition to the myriad other small repairs and fixes that had been made, the owner had repaired the windows that were missing panes–and done a really fine job of it. It made a huge difference in the way the house looked and we went ahead and made an offer on the Old Man–one year ago today in fact.

However the remaining stained glass windows still had problems. The window in the foyer had two broken panes and air was coming in through the cracks. One window in the living room was bowing outward, leaving huge gaps between the glass and the lead, while the other window bowed inward. In the dining room, the leftmost and rightmost casement windows bowed out precipitously and had gaps worse than the windows in the living room. On top of that, every time I’d open and close them, they would shake and rattle horribly–making me wonder if they would finally give way.

We knew that we’d eventually have to get the windows repaired, but kept putting it off because we had no idea how long it would take and we weren’t terribly comfortable with the thought of living in a house with half a dozen boarded up windows for potentially weeks and weeks. Besides, the repairs were somewhat cosmetic and there were so many other really important things that need to be done around the house…

Well last week I stopped by Circle Studios, a stained glass studio that I frequently drive by. I often admire the beautiful stained glass windows and lamps in their studio as I drive by, but this was the first time I went inside. In short, it was breathtaking–an incredible combination of glasswork whose beauty made me absolutely giddy. I asked them if they did repair work, and it turns out that not only do they repair stained glass, but they repaired the three broken windows in the Old Man right before we bought the house!

Today, Joseph, who founded the studio, came over to make an assessment of all the windows and determine which ones needed urgent repair and which ones had minor cracks that were purely cosmetic. After looking at all the windows and tapping and prodding them, he recommended that we repair the five windows that I described above, which is exactly what we expected needed to be done. He even drew us up a quote for repairing all five on the spot. He thinks that they can remove the windows, board them up, repair them, and have them back in place in about a week’s time, which is a lot faster than I expected!

M. and I are going to mull over the quote for the next few days and then decide whether we’re going to have Joseph and his crew do the work. The price is about what we expected, so it mostly has to do with figuring out the best time to get the work done.

But enough about that, here are some pictures of the windows.

The Old Man basically had the month of July off while we tended to the often-neglected thing known as The Rest of Our Lives. After suffering from a minor bout of BlogGuilt(tm), I’m back with a relatively uninteresting post that will serve as a cure for insomniacs the world over!

The most excitement we’ve in the last month was when a bottle of Lestoil in the basement cracked while we were away for the weekend. It didn’t ruin anything, but the whole basement reeked of Lestoil, which smells an awful lot like some kind of flammable liquid and gave me a bit of a scare at first. However, the Lestoil did eat the paint right off of the metal shelf it was sitting on. Hmmm… maybe I’ve found yet another paint stripper!

Our garden is going like gangbusters. We planted five tomato plants under the assumption that only a couple would flourish, and wouldn’t you know it that all five are doing great? In fact, we have two yellow cherry tomato plants that are delivering like 15 tomatoes a day. By the end of the month, we should have tomatoes for the whole neighborhood.

Last year, a mere two weeks after we purchased The Old Man, I was at a conference in Oregon. At that conference I ran into my friend Chris who I hadn’t seen or spoken to in months, mainly because he had moved to England earlier in the year. We greeted each other and when Chris asked how I was doing I told him that we had finally found a house and we were really excited about it. And he blurts out,

“Oh yeah! I heard about The Big Red Fan of Death!”

Now seeing as Chris has been living in Europe and I haven’t spoken to him about the house AT ALL, much less about THE BIG RED FAN OF DEATH, my brain pretty much stalled and proceeded to do flip-flops for a moment.

How did Chris know about The Big Red Fan of Death? Was he a spy? Was The Old Man bugged? Was my neighbor with the tin-foil hat really onto something?

The only people that knew about The Big Red Fan of Death were (the four) people who had actually been to my house, and Chris did not (to my knowledge) know any of those people, nor was he one of those people.

I looked at Chris and drooled intently for a moment.

After regaining my voice, I managed to stutteringly ask Chris how on earth he knew about The Big Red Fan of Death.

“Err, um… how di.. did… fa-fa-fan???”

To make a really long story only slightly shorter, it turns out that he found out about The Big Red Fan of Death from Greg, a friend of mine that Chris didn’t even know.

Greg had been in town the month that we closed on the house, and he had stopped by The Old Man while I was ripping out the basement ceiling. Greg had been so very impressed by The Big Red Fan of Death that, upon returning to the West Coast, he regaled an entire party with a story about his visit to The Big Red Fan of Death. Chris had, of course, met Greg at that party.

And so The Legend of The Big Red Fan of Death was born.

When we first saw The Old Man, we noticed that he had no central air conditioning. We knew that we’d want to install central air, but figured that the ceiling fans would help keep us cool provided we could get some breeze through the windows.

When we opened the door to the walk-up attic, we were greeted not by a light switch, but by a strange clock-like protuberance on the wall:

Odd, but not the strangest thing we’d seen in a house–perhaps some sort of light timer? However, eight steps into the attic, we found ourselves facing another door. After opening the second attic door, I stepped up into the attic, and before I could vocalize the question of why anyone would put a second attic door halfway up the stairs, I saw why: I saw The Big Red Fan of Death.

Now it may be hard to get a sense of scale from this picture, so here’s another picture with my cordless drill (fearing for its very life, I might add) sitting in front of The Maw of The Big Red Fan of Death:

For those of you who are counting, that’s a whopping thirty-six inch diameter, twelve inch deep fan blade. It’s powered by a small motor that’s mounted to the base of the fan. This remarkably quiet motor drives the fan by means of a fan belt:

So, by opening the main attic door and closing the second attic door (on the steps), you effectively make the fan the only means for air to pass into (or out of) the attic. Open the attic windows and a few windows in the house, and you can turn on The Big Red Fan of Death, and draw a profound amount of Fresh-Air through the house. I know it’s Fresh-Air because The Big Red Fan of Death says so:

If you stand in the attic doorway while The Big Red Fan of Death is on, you can actually feel the air pulling you into the stairwell. Since we don’t have any kids (or small pets, or birds, or elk), we used The Big Red Fan of Death a few times last fall before we moved in (despite the fact that our home inspector wrote DO NOT USE in HUGE letters on our inspection report). It works amazingly well at drawing the hot, stale air out of the house. Whoever installed it was obviously a genius.

Except for one small detail–the small detail that puts the “Death” into The Big Red Fan of Death.

It has no safety features. None. At. All. You could easily lose a finger in this fan. Or an arm. Or a small child. Or a Zebra.

It has no screen, no grill, no grate, no bars, no warning label, no nothing; zero, zip, nada, a big fat goose egg. What’s the international symbol for “decapitation hazard” anyway?

This is the kind of fan that would make Darwin proud.

But maybe I’m being short-sighted here–if you had kids in this house, you could really take advantage of having a Big Red Fan of Death handy:

Mom: Eat the rest of your vegetables!

Son: Plblblblblbttt! I don’t have to!

Mom: You will eat your vegetables right this minute or I will feed you and your vegetables to The Big Red Fan of Death.

Son: CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP

---

Dad: Pick up your room!

Son: I don’t wannnnaaaa!

Dad: Remember what I did to your former sister when she didn’t clean up her room?

Son: Sir! Yes Sir! Picking up Sir!

And that’s the story of The Big Red Fan of Death.

Every week or so, I’ll find a pie tin full of corn flakes in one of my garbage cans. I’ve always just assumed that someone was putting out food for the birds or the squirrels and someone else was disposing of it. Come to think of it, I’m not sure that birds and squirrels like corn flakes.

Last week, however, I found a huge ham bone in a tin tray sitting next to the garbage can, apparently some sort of offering to the carnivorous animals (tigers? vultures? I have no idea.) in the neighborhood. That went into the trash.

While I’m OK with tossing some food out for the squirrels in the morning, and even with keeping a bird feeder full, I’d prefer not to become known as “Caterer to the Rat World.”

But this week… ah this week, it got weird.

In the lot of the condos next-door, along our side fence, I found a pie tin of candied walnuts. Not just a few nuts, mind you, this must have been about 2 pounds worth–enough to send our local squirrels clear into a diabetic coma. That was odd, but nowhere near as weird as what was sitting next to it.

Next to the tin of candied walnuts were two Cool Whip containers full of–I kid you not–red Jello. Now, I can understand the Corn Flakes, and even the candied walnuts, but Jello??? What in the heck would inspire you to put a bowl of jello in your backyard???

I… I… I…

…Come to think of it, I really don’t want to know.

We’ve had a delightful break from working on the Old Man this month: We’ve had houseguests. Lots of them. First, we had some good friends out from California. The weekend after that, one of M.’s sisters stayed over. Last weekend, we had some other good friends from California out.

While it’s always nice to have people over to visit, it’s absolutely delightful to have guests from out of town stay at the house. For one, we now have a guest room that is only a guest room, so there’s no need to relocate someone’s office stuff for the length of the visit. However, the really nice thing is just to have huge swaths of casual time to spend catching up, hanging out, and relaxing with good friends.

Nothing beats getting up on a Sunday morning, cooking up a nice big breakfast, brewing up a few pots of coffee and tea, and chatting with good friends for a couple of hours. Sunday breakfast is one of the things that enjoyed immensely when I lived with 3 other roommates right out of college, and this really takes me back to those carefree (and somewhat hungover) times. When the day starts like this, the sun seems brighter, the food tastes better, and I almost feel like the Old Man is smiling deep down inside.

Early this morning, almost a month after purchasing a snowblower*, we got enough snow for me to use the darned thing. During the day today, we got enough snow for me to use it again! And it’s still snowing! I’ve had my fun now can you please STOP WITH THE SNOWING??

Listen.

I grew up in the South. I never saw snow fall until I move Up North for college. Remember that cheesy claymation Christmas special where Jack Frost touches the windows in the house with his finger and they frost over? I had no idea WHAT IN THE HELL THAT WAS. “Mom, what is that stuff all over the windows? Why aren’t they cleaning it off? Is it permanent? Is it carcinogenic?”

I never had to shovel snow–instead, I got to mow the grass for nine months out of the year. In the middle of the summer, I had to cut it every five days in the raging heat and humidity. To this day, I’d rather saw off my arms than step foot behind a lawnmower, but snow, now that’s different! The novelty of snow still hasn’t worn off, and I don’t mind shoveling or sweeping it, but I, really like blowing it.

So I bought a snowblower.

I’ve discovered that there are a few tricks to buying a snowblower. First, get out and buy it before the first big snowfall. After the first big snowfall, your only choices are going to be the cheepie plastic ones that run on 9 volt batteries, and the $1500 ones that, in addition to removing snow, can also rip up sod, shrubs, and 200 year old redwoods. Second, go to Home Depot and scope out the models that they have. Then spend hours Googling and clicking around Epinions.com to help figure out which brand and model you want. Now once you’ve decided on the one you want (I decided to go with a Toro), if Home Depot carries that model (and in my case, they did), scour the internet for the cheapest price you can find for the snowblower in question. In my case, I found a site that had my snowblower for $129 cheaper than Home Depot. Print out the page in question and bring it to Home Depot–they’ll honor any advertised internet price that’s cheaper than their price.

Back to the snow.

The snowblower works really well–starts immediately and throws the snow REALLY FAR. So far, in fact, that I had to re-do the sidewalk after overshooting the front lawn from the driveway. Heck, I could blow the snow onto your driveway if I wanted to. The real trick is moving snow from the middle section of my driveway, which is wedged between my house and the building next door, to either the front yard or the back yard since I can’t really pile it up anywhere. This entails blowing the snow towards the end of the driveway and then blowing it again onto the front (or back lawn). M. was watching me the whole time with that “Are you done playing?” look. Well, it was fun…

So now it’s off to bed, cause I’m going to have to get up in the morning and displace another six inches of the white stuff. And you know what? I can’t wait.

* Yes I know it’s technically a snow thrower, but it’s just so much easier to say snowblower. Snowblower snowblower snowblower snowblower. See?

So I’ve gotten a bunch of emails from folks wondering if I’ve disappeared off the face of the earth.

Short answer: No.

Long answer: November 11th was The Big Move. Between packing, moving, and unpacking (although that’s *hardly* finished), this sucked up every spare second of the entire month of November. Add to that the fact that M. and I were out of town for Thanksgiving and a week on either side, and you’ve got a recipe for a nervous breakdown.

I’ve got plenty more stories coming up about The Old Man, so stay tuned!

Having lived in either an apartment or a condo for the last 10 years, I haven’t given out Halloween candy in ages, so I was really looking forward to doling out the goodies today (even though we didn’t so much as have a pumpkin outside for decoration). We had about 140 pieces of candy to give out: we started at 3:30 and by 6:00 we were completely out.

Now I guess I’m just Halloween-Naive, but I expected lots of little kids escorted by their parents. What I didn’t expect were: The teenagers who couldn’t be bothered to stop talking on their cell phones as they stuck their swag-bags in my face; the parents trick-or-treating (actually asking for candy!) along with their kids; the “ring the doorbell 12 or 15 times” morons.

Maybe 40% of the kids that came to the door remembered to say “Thank you”, and a few of them seemed downright annoyed that they had to trek all. the. way. up our front steps just to gather their candy. I didn’t need any costume help to be the Cranky Old Curmudgeon.