First thing I did when I got home from the San Diego trip was hook a foot on the Christmas boxes in the mudroom and surf them down to the mudroom door, with attendant bruises.
I did better this morning. I usually get up at 5 to begin my day’s work in peace and quiet: I brush the cat, watch the morning traffic, have my first cup of coffee, all in the dark—then take my computer from the floor where I left it last night from my evening’s work, locate my glasses, and go back to my working chair in my room.
This time I hooked a foot in a cord stretched across the hallway entry (another Christmas relic) and, yep, found myself in a fall, this time with my computer, aimed at two doorways and a wall on short notice.
Well, when you figure skate you learn not to fight a fall, you plan it. Fast. Conclusion 1. Do not turn loose of the computer. Conclusion 2. Do not fall on the computer. Conclusion 3. Do not fall into the wall: there’s not enough room. By now I’m trying to turn in mid-crash and trying to fall with my head through the office door, not the office wall, while not landing on wrists or elbows or knees. There is not enough damned room, and the computer is too heavy to manage one-handed, except just to hang on to it.
So I landed on my elbow rather than let go. Ow. Damn. Ow. But nothing’s broken. Jane, soundly sleeping in her room down the hall, had a Whazzat? wake-up, and staggered out to see what I’d done. The computer works. My elbow does. That’s going to leave a mark.
We’ve been working so hard on CC, the rewrite, and the yard stuff we haven’t quite cleared out all the Christmas stuff, like stray power cords. Ow. Damn. Ow. We need four or five clones of us to help us catch up.
Meanwhile nothing’s broken, I am now on my second cuppa for the day, and it’s 5 minutes of 6. And I am typing this while trying to remember what I had plotted to do about a problem with the book, a conclusion I’d reached in my tranquil cat-brushing and coffee-sipping this morning.
Typical morning at our place.
Sympathies ….. hope you don’t have too many sore spots later today/tomorrow. I have a bad habit of walking into things; consequently I *always* wear long pants when I go anywhere public. (My mother used to shake her head and murmur “And to think you were going to be a ballet dancer.”)
Nice to hear that we are not the only ones who have not gotten the Christmas boxes into storage….. some things just seem to migrate to the back burner.
Another was to keep your little greenhouse from getting too cold at night is to throw something like a blanket over it….I use bubble wrap quite successfully.
HAPPY SPRING!! We have been spoiled by a week of warm weather…..daffodils by the south wall of the house are blooming….and I sat on the deck yesterday to eat lunch….we are celebrating Bach’s Birthday today…..any port in a storm! 😉
Good grief…that sounds like a morning around here.
As I gaze as the chaos that invariably surrounds me, the little narrator in my backbrain whispers–You need a *wife* (a clone wouldn’t help. A clone would be another ME rattling around in here and the chaos would increase…exponentially.
I have resolved to *clean* the back room…which hasn’t happened since…well, since November when I fell and wracked up my hands. It’s getting too congested to navigate safely in broad daylight!
(Jane, btw, has the link to the progress bar widget I installed last night and the inline posts widget that I used for my “Rifkind’s Saga” page is at http://aralbalkan.com/1016)
Ah, thank you. 😉
@threadbender, funny you should mention that, a friend of mine told me I needed a wife, or at least a woman in the house to make sure I clean up after myself. Haha, I’ve already had a wife, and I’m no longer looking for another.
I live in an old farmhouse in Ohio, I don’t know HOW old, but suffice to say the beams in the basement are 3″ X 10″. The wiring is the old cloth-insulated stuff, with one wire going one way, and the return wire about 18″ apart. Old-style rotary switches on the lights. So, I have a limited number of outlets in the house, One in my bedroom, two in the living room, one in my office, two in the other bedroom, and eight in the kitchen. I have extension cords all over, power strips here and there, and it’s still not enough. I have one extension cord from the living room to my bedroom, and I swear I’ve tripped on that thing more times than I can recall, plus the wire for the rear speakers of the stereo system are supposed to be running under the carpet, but manage to creep out from under the corner (one suspects the furry inhabitants of the house to be the cause). The worst times are when I’m dressing and try to hike a leg up so I can put on my pants. Occasionally, I actually make it, other times, I fail miserably and catch my foot in the waistband or the seat of the pants. Yes, I know I can sit on the bed and put them on, but I need to keep working my legs to regain my balance that was lost when the knee was replaced this past October. I’m always afraid of walking through the bedroom door, tripping on the cord or the speaker wires, and then banging my forehead into the corner of my end table.
You could get the cable organizers and run your cords up over the door, instead of across it. And I will point out that running cords under carpet is a really bad idea. If they get frayed you are less likely to see it, and thus much more likely to have a fire.
That would have been the bright thing to do. When are we ever bright? 😉
@joekc6nix — maybe CJ will share the tales of what she and Jane found in the way of “supplemental wiring” in their home on Ski Island…and it wasn’t all that old!
When I moved in (I purchased the house from an estate, owner deceased, so there was no way to ask about oddities—and there were many) there was a long stained-glass sort of light you put over pool tables in the family room. If you touched the metal of the shade, your arm would go numb.
So, I decided to unwire it. It proved heavier than I thought, and slid off the ladder I’d put below to support it, so it broke, relieving me of the karma of a really ugly stained glass item (which is hard to create, I know, but damn, it was ugly)—
I separated the wires and went into the attic on a quest.
I found about 10 feet of varied wire running from that spot on the ceiling to, yes, the plugin for the upstairs airconditioner. Why this was operated by a switch in the downstairs family room, beside the side door to the outside, only the fool who designed it could guess. But that was it.
It had:
a) a diy plug clamped onto the end of house wiring cable. 220 v stuff. The clamp was bare metal, not insulated.
b)about 5 feet of 220 wiring, which ended in a hand-bent bare wire, mated (without insulation) to the crook of the next gauge of wire, ordinary line such as you’d find in a power cord.
c) the power cord wire was about 5 feet, and it went to a flat cable, for a few feet, the two ‘braided’ together and sorta taped.
d) the whole affair got down to ordinary see-through lamp cord, the sort you’d find on a table lamp, and went down through the ceiling, to the chain that supported the now-trashed stained glass fixture, with its long bar supporting 2 lightbulbs.
I kept this arrangement as a trophy, and as a reminder that nothing in this house was going to be ‘code.’ The same fool had put in a bath upstairs by cutting the stringer-board that anchored the rooftree. Naturally the upstairs began to sag. He helped it out by installing a concrete slab for the upstairs shower.
The fool had installed a 25 gallon hot water heater for the upstairs. A water heater has a blow-off valve and an emergency drain. This exited on the ceiling of the second downstairs bedroom, that we used for an office. That room was heavily mirrored, and mold got down behind the mirror.
The same fool had sprayed insulation/soundproofing (thank God, not asbestos) on the ceiling of the 1000 square foot family room…when heat was off in the addition: if you do this in subzero weather, the stuff won’t set. I solved this one with 20 gallons of ceiling paint: saturate the stuff and let it set. I defy anybody to get that off. The alternative was to totally scrape the ceiling and start over.
The same fool had installed a freestanding round fireplace in the middle of the family room. Its chimney was shorter than the adjacent roof-peak (the sagging one, right?) so that the chimney would never draw, and smoke would fill the family room. It had done so, to such an extent I used a succession of mops on the walls to get the thick soot off the walls before painting. Most, thank God, was paneled, and Murphy’s Oil Soap would handle it. The carpet I thought was green turned out to be smoked yellow.
Vacuuming this carpet, I discovered rimfire cartridges embedded in it. I had to get a metal detector to find them all.
The house wiring had so thick a ground wire, about the size of a skinny pencil, that it picked up passing aircraft conversations from the local international airport.
One of the charming features of the place was an inground pond, in the next addition to this rambling house, about 3’x3′. But they didn’t waterproof the waterfall behind it—or the brick around the whole office, which leaked.
They put a heavy air conditioner on this section of roof, which caused that roof to sag, until one day it gave way and poured a Niagara down the walls of Jane’s office. That had to be redone.
When Jane and I saw the movie “The Money Pit” we laughed so hard our sides hurt.
Ye gods… at some point you can start a thread about Crazy Old Owner home improvements, and what people have found when they buy a house and go into the crawlspace, basement or attic intending to replace the ceiling fan or whatnot.
In our house, I knew the previous owner from the library where I work; he was a former mathematician with just enough home repair chops to be dangerous. He had been doing home care of his ailing wife for several years and was apparently mortally afraid of having the power go out. He had rigged a series of inverters, like you use for charging car batteries, and was running a secondary set of wiring throughout the house. The power source was the phone wiring, which is independent from that which supplies normal house current. All that was immediately ripped out before it set the house afire.
We won’t go into some of the stuff we’ve found in other houses we’ve rented or owned.
O-M-G. What’s scarier than jury-rigged wires?
Jury-rigged power systems!
I have done or assisted in all kinds of DIY including chimneys, wells, houses….presently we are making a fish pond….but the one thing I do not mess around with electricity. I know of at least two potters who had very expensive fires, only avoiding complete loss of house and studio by being home, because they were saving money by wiring their own kilns. A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing.
Good luck on that fish pond. A project after my own heart. How’s it coming?
Worst thing I’ve found in my current place is a bathroom medicine cabinet installed by tearing out the wall stud that got in the way, seemingly with teeth, and stuffing the fragments into the drywall space. Said cabinet was then held in place (at an angle) with spackle and painted until it sorta stayed in place. Lovely fun. The place dates from ’86, though, so there’s less chance for stupid stuff having been done.
What I hate about falls or other shocking events is that they blow the ideas I had in my head clean out, and then it’s trying to find the pieces.
😆 Yep, re the fall. But I think I got it back.
Worst thing we’re facing is trying to find the leak in the bathroom plumbing, before it rots out the boards under the tub. This means sawing a 2×3.5 hole in the wall of a closet and inspecting the plumbing in action. I’m afraid to look. And I’ve sworn it’s got to hold until after taxes.
Same house with the phone-power-wiring had a leak under the kitchen sink. The original leak was in the hot water valve, which I mostly solved by putting a catch can under it and emptying it maybe every 3-4 days (it was a very small leak, and could be fixed by turning off the valve, if we left for more than a week). The drip had caused the particleboard under the sink to rot out, but replacing the cabinet was on the to-do list anyway. Then it stopped dripping into the can because capillary action was drawing the drip back against the wall. This scared me because I thought the plumbing had begun leaking inside the hollowtile (!) Problem eventually was solved when I bit the bullet and replaced all the plumbing from the valves at the wall up to the sink fixture. Replacing the cabinet is still on the to-do list, but the project has magnified to completely relocating the kitchen and knocking out a non-load-bearing wall to give us a nice big living room. All to be done in stages as the budget allows.
Carolyn, was the house you describe in such lurid detail the haunted one?
Yep. The previous owner died of, yes, emphysema…burning wood in the gas fireplace until the walls were, well, pretty smoky. You had to feel sorry for her. After her husband passed away, apparently every repair or alterations scam in the county beat a path to her doorstep. The place had a spooky feel on some occasions.
Of course they say haunts have to do with electrical anomalies, and the fact you have huge 50′ steel I-beams holding up the family room roof, with one solid wall of windows, a metal, copper-hooded fireplace sticking its inadequate metal chimney up into the winds, one 12′ I-beam driven into the shore of a lake as the core of the house, two silver-plated expensively, mirrored rooms, two iron staircases (one spiral, one straight and connected to more I-beams) with the electrics of the family room wrapped around the central I-beam, and the whole wrapped about not only with electric wire, but a copper ground-wire that could bring in radio transmissions (and did), next to a reflective lake and sitting on an iron-based soil—huh, do you think that could have had something to do with the oddness? It’s a wonder that loop antenna couldn’t communicate with passing spacecraft. It did bring in airplane conversations on our one grounded telly and the transmission static would find its way through the cable system to our other non-grounded telly within a few hours. So one telly would infect the other 1. The feeling in the 2 mirrored rooms was occasionally…odd. And one of them was my bedroom. Jane just got the upstairs bedroom that was tilting into the concrete shower and the whole affair threatening to land in the office below.
We still miss that house: we never could have afforded it if it weren’t falling down. But after we corrected what could be corrected, over time, it was a real money drain, and we never did get anything out of it like what we put into it, because we weren’t able to pick the market in which to sell it. Big financial mistake, but it was a really interesting house thirty feet from a lake.
I betcha a cookie that all the weird interacting EMFs had something to do with the general ‘feel’ of the house; they might not be harmful, but they can make a space — odd. Until we removed all the secondary power grid, our house (for lack of a better term) had a weird aura. I was contemplating having a kahuna come in and bless it to remove the bad jujus!
That’s for sure. It remained spooky. Some of the departed lady’s stuff was in the bathroom cabinet, strange antique labels, etc, and y’know, I just left it there. I dunno if the subsequent owners ever ran into her essence, but taking the mirror out of both those rooms (vanilla’ing up the house for sale) lightened the feeling of the place immensely—but not completely. I had my gran’s furniture in that particular room: I figured, on the superstitious fantasy-writer side of my brain, that if anything hostile every manifested, it would be no match at all for my gran. Oddly enough, when that furniture left the house (along with everything else), the place felt weird again. [Probably a plane was flying over and holding a conversation.]
I’m glad you’re OK (and that the computer is OK!!!), but please try to lead a life with less Interestingness in it.
My most interesting wire artifact was a power outlet that only worked if you switched on the light. Unfortunately, it was the one I meant to plug my fridge/freezer into; which led to a lot of extention wires running through my kitchen; but in comparison, it seems rather harmless.
@philospher, the wires running under the carpet are speaker wires, the extension cord is not placed under any carpet, it’s right out in the open where I can see it. The closest outlet and in fact almost all of the outlets in the main rooms are in the floor, not the walls. Only the bathroom and kitchen have outlets in the walls. I don’t even know if those are GFCI, even though they have a GFCI outlet, it doesn’t mean it’s really GFCI.
I was told it would cost around $8000.00 to bring this house up to code. Since it’s not my house, I have no say in the matter, other than suggestions to the landlady.
Ah… that makes more sense. The house I bought in Austin had a huge great room, and I was remodeling and decided that it would be smart to put a four-plex outlet in the floor in the logical area for the couch/sitting area to be, because my only other option would be to run extension cords from the wall outlets to the table lamps and what-not. That was an interesting experience: Jack hammer a trench in the concrete slab, run conduit from the wall to the place for the outlet, pour concrete over the conduit to match the rest of the slab, and then I put laminate over everything. At the end of the day it was a very nice touch in a very nice living room, but I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in the place with all the outlets so far away from where the sofas go. (It was a very long rectangular room, with a step down from the entry foyer, a huge fireplace with built-in bookcases and the patio door on the wall across from the entry way, dining room on one end, and the wall opposite that had the cable connections and the door off to the bedrooms. So really the only logical way to arrange the sitting was to put the TV on the end wall, and make an L of the sofa and love seat facing the fireplace and TV.)
I hope you’re recovering from your fall! I’ve only managed to plan my fall on two occasions, once to save my tailbone (I could NOT take another 3 years of pain like I’d had the time I’d been bumped by the car while on my bike), and managed to twist enough to surf down a full flight of stairs on half my butt. The other time I made sure to save my hands, well enough that I didn’t spill more than a tbs of my coffee, although I did twist a knee doing it. I don’t skate, but I do tai chi, and while falls are not part and parcel of that, it does teach something about muscle control.
I’ve yet to experience the joys of homeownership, but I have a friend who went to rewire the light switch in the baby’s room, and upon going into the attic, found wires that were arcing electricity across 5 feet of flooring. And when my sister went to replace her back door, it turns out the frame had been held in place with six nails — and they’d been so good about locking it too. I think my brother was able to remove it with his bare hands. The one time I almost bought a house, I had my dad look at it, and he found about 20 expensive problems in the space of 20 minutes. And the realtor seemed to think there was still a possibility I would buy it…
gasp. Arc, yet. That’s one for the books!
Re house doors: in the haunted house, we had a solid core wooden door for a front door. My folks had come to pick us up to take us to the airport for a trip to Britain—and—I discovered I had just locked both the house keys AND our plane tickets inside.
There was about a minute or so of handwaving, and then I got so upset, and after finding a tiny bit of wiggle in the door when I lost my temper with it, I took aim with a good hip-thrust, a second, and the frame shattered, the door went inward, and we were in. So much for security. Mum stayed to watch the house while Dad got us to the airport, and Dad came back and re-did our inner door frame, this time with oak instead of pine. I hate to tell you, but if a door wiggles, there’s a good chance you could do this. And those silly chains they put on the molding around the door are worthless unless you have bolts going clean through the door and into the studs. Which no one does. Once upon a time, when my brother and I were younger, he and I were playing chase—over something, I forget what. I put on the security chain to give him trouble when he came chasing me; he did: and this 11 year old kid hits the door, breaks the molding clean in two—and off, and rips the other end of the chain off the door. We stand there somewhat dismayed in the wreckage—and our parents gave up on security chains.
If you want to be sneaky about it, it’s also relatively easy to undo a chain if there is enough slack to get your hand inside. I had a roomie who liked to take afternoon naps in college, and had to learn to do that in order to get into my room.
Carolyn, I think wearing tin foil hats in that old haunted house might have offered at least a modicum of protection. Just sayin’
I think the tinfoil hats were worn by the guy who planned that wiring. There must be several hundred pounds of copper in that groundwire…