Aromatherapy

'Didn't you say you'd left me some steamed cabbage?'

Tuffy gets home late on Wednesday nights, and prowls through the kitchen for leftovers.

'It's in the steamer,' Scarecrow told her.

'There's nothing in the steamer.'

This is not good. Our dogs get veggies from time to time, but a) they're not supposed to steal them off the counter, and b) whippets and cabbage are a lethal combination. You wouldn't think a small(ish) dog can make the air in an enclosed space totally unbreathable, but I tell you, they can. Greyhounds can be bad that way, too, but our creaky old greyhound's counter surfing days are over. It's still too cold to sleep with the bedroom windows open, but we really had no choice.

I really hate it when our house smells bad.

The guy who lived in our house before we bought it was a serious smoker. The carpets reeked. Even the tile in the bathroom smelled like stale smoke. After four years, you'd still occasionally get a whiff of stale cigarette smoke.

And of course, there are the dogs. Gastrointestinal issues aside,  greyhounds and whippets are not particularly stinky, but still.

In the course of remodeling our house we ripped out all the carpeting, and threw out the area rugs that were in the living room and dining room. That helped, some. I'm really looking forward to being able to open the windows. What we really need is fresh air.

My mom is a major consumer of air fresheners, and I admit her house always smells nice. It just seems like using one smell to cover up another doesn't really address the problem, and besides, an early traumatic experience with air fresheners left me scarred for life.

Warning: if you're easily grossed out, you might want to skip this next bit.

I was a TA for a Marine Mammalogy class at UCLA back in the early 17th century. We collected specimens of dolphins and pinnipeds for dissection labs, but these were not the tidy specimens of fetal pigs or dogfish sharks that you get from a biological supply house packed in formalin. They were real specimens that died of who knows what, washed up on a beach somewhere, and sat there for who knows how long before winding up in a freezer at the County Museum of Natural History. By the time we got them and thawed them out, they smelled really bad. Really bad. People on the fourth floor of the Life Science building were complaining about the smell. The lab was in the basement. My office was right across the hall from the lab.

We set up a line of room air fresheners in front of fans in each corner of the room, not really because we thought it would help but because we had to do something. It didn't help. The scent of assorted air fresheners on top of decomposing marine mammal pretty much turned me off of them forever.

Maybe we'll just use some Murphy's Oil Soap on the hardwood floor, and wait until it's warm enough to open the windows.

Pecked to Death By Ducks

On days like today, I wonder how I ever managed to get any real work done when I had a day job. There are a bunch of tasks that I need to do something about but can't actually finish, so they don't go away. I need to keep all the balls in the air, remember where I'm at on each task, and what I need to do next. My to-do list (my heroic but inevitably futile attempt to keep cats herded and ducks in a row) looks like acronym soup: ING, LTD, FAFSA, IRS, LoC... and sounds like a recipe for disaster. I'm getting pretty darned whiny about it.

Most of these tasks aren't even interesting or fun. One that's a little out of the ordinary involves calling the power company to tell them my bill is too low. According to them, we have used no natural gas for the past two months. None. Imagine that. Since we have an on-demand water heater and a daughter who doesn't get out of the shower until she runs out of hot water, this seems unlikely to me.

After several weekends of nonstop shoveling, Scarecrow and Tuffy have laid bare the entire living room and dining room floor. We kept more junk than we probably should have, but in our determination to make our belongings fit in the available space, we got rid of a lot of stuff, too. There is one item, however, that has us stumped. Where do we put the passenger seat from the van? It doesn't look that big when it's in the car, but it sits on a riser to accommodate the lowered floor, and when you take it out of it's natural habitat it's ginormous. It needs to be someplace relatively clean, relatively dry, and vermin-free (whippets excepted). We don't have a basement or garage. The seat is too heavy and awkward to haul up the narrow pull-down stairs to the unfinished attic-y space. This being Seattle, the carport and outdoor shed are too damp. It's currently looming over the rest of the furniture in our front room. Bareit thinks it's wonderful.

Assuming we can figure out something to do with the stupid seat, the final step in the remodel-that-wouldn't-die will be getting moved into new office. I jumped the gun a little, putting up a sign I displayed prominently in my office before I retired. I still like it.

Our Weekend Project

Last weekend, Scarecrow and Tuffy finally emptied out the self-storage space we've been renting during the remodel-that-wouldn't-die, and moved everything that was in it back into the house. That's one more expense we won't have every month, and I'm ecstatic about that.

Of course, since we've managed to get along without this stuff for almost a year, you've got to wonder how bad we really need it. And if we don't really need it, wouldn't it have made more sense to get rid of it before we paid to store it for a year? Yeah, well, OK, next time for sure.

In order to clear out the storage shed, we took a perfectly usable, newly remodeled office and turned it into an indoor garage.
This is not actually a picture of the mess we've made of the new office. It's actually an unretouched picture of my dad's garage. In fact, it's an unretouched picture of part of my dad's garage, although the whole thing looks pretty much like this. As does our office. (I would like to believe the disease that causes this condition has no heritable component, but I fear it does.)

Our project for this weekend is to start going through all this stuff and either put it away, or throw it away. If there's no place to put it, it's out of here. This time, I really mean it. We need to at least start with a place that doesn't look like a landfill.

Fortunately or not, we have enough experience with our slovenly habits to realize that the office, once it's in use, won't look whole lot better than it does now. Even the threat of an avalanche of papers and books roaring out of the office and engulfing the rest of the house probably won't motivate us to become tidy people. And on our disability budget, the only cleaning that will get done will be the cleaning we do ourselves.

Good thing we've got doors.

It's Amazing What a Deadline Can Do

This is an anniversary, of sorts. The construction permit for the Remodeling Project That Wouldn't Die expires today. They tore into our house last December. It's been almost a year. Granted, we had a long list of things to fix, and they had to work around us, but still. I'm ready to be done. I'm tired of plaster dust. I'm tired of having plastic and cardboard taped to the floors. I'm tired of having our clothes on shelves in the dining room. I'm tired of the kind of utility bills you get when you have a sheet of plastic over a big hole in the wall in the dead of winter. And we're out of money. I'm so ready to be done.

The permit's imminent expiration seems to have elicited a flurry of activity. Sheetrock last Friday, mud on Saturday, paint on Monday. The electrician was at the house early this morning. We should have the inspector's signature on the permit by the end of the day. Then we're done, right?

Um. No.

There is still a bunch of stuff the inspector doesn't care about; finishing the trim and paint inside, getting the icky stuff off the floor of the office and finishing whatever we find underneath, painting the new siding outside, and, what may turn out to be the most challenging aspect of the whole project, coming up with a fence that will keep the whippet in. With the permit signed, there's a chance we'll revert to our previous leisurely pace of progress. In fact, realistically speaking, with the holidays and all, it's more than a chance. But we'll get there. Eventually. We're close. We're so close.

Cake, or Death?

When you were five or six, could you ever, ever, have imagined it would be possible to forget your own birthday? Back then, I started looking forward to it in February! We didn't usually have a party, but you got to choose what we had for dinner, and you were another year older, and it was a big deal!

It's my dad's birthday next week. Turning 89 is a big deal, especially since it didn't look like he was going to make it to 88.

It's not that I mind birthdays. I'm not birthday-phobic, or anything, and they're a lot better than the alternative. I just forgot.

Yesterday I had an appointment with the occupational therapist. It was mostly to figure out if I could get my insurance to pick up part of the cost of a shower chair, which they may or may not do. Since we were there, it was a chance to ask about some of the other questions the Red Queen has posed to us lately. I guess it's reassuring that there aren't any magic answers, that the solutions we've cobbled together are likely to be as good as anything the therapist can suggest. That's usually been the case. Still, it's worth asking. You never know. As bizarre as these problems are, we can't be the first ones to have them.

So I wasn't thinking about birthdays. It wasn't until I went to Facebook, and saw that Facebook had very thoughtfully reminded all my friends about my birthday. You'd think it could have reminded me as well, wouldn't you? So I could brace myself for it, sort of thing?

When we get home tonight, they should have the last of the sheetrock hung in the office and living room. A little mud and some paint, and it will start looking like a house again, instead of the inside of a barn. Not a moment too soon. Our building permit expires on Tuesday. I remember being incredulous when the contractor initially estimated that the construction phase of this project would take about six months. It's been almost a year. I'm ready to be done. As birthday presents go, this is a pretty good one.

Cake, or death? I think I'll go with the cake, thanks.

Taily Ends

I spent the last few days dealing with what I hope will be the taily ends of several ongoing projects.

The nice lady from the insurance company called on Friday to tell me that my claim for long-term disability was approved. I'm so relieved. I need to remember to fax them my SSDI approval letter.

I finally signed up for a Skype phone number. I used to have a VoIP soft phone for work, which let me use my headset to call regular landline or mobile phones from my computer. Since I don't have my work phone anymore, and can't pick up a regular telephone handset or cell phone, I was pretty much incommunicado, phone-wise. It was nice while it lasted. Skype and Dragon Naturally Speaking don't play all that well together, but for the price I'm willing to put up with a little inconvenience.

We finally got the van in for service on Monday. For the first time since we bought it. Two and a half years ago. Considering we need this van to run pretty much forever, this is not the way to make that happen. It took us a while to figure out the logistics. The mechanic we've taken our cars to in the past is very good and relatively cheap, but very slow. We'd just drop the car off and let them keep it until they got done with it. Can't do it that way anymore. Most cars can't manage my power chair. Without that van, I'm stuck wherever I'm at. Fortunately, this time, it was a pretty quick service job. The van is still on warranty, so they're not motivated to find a lot wrong with it. They did the work while we waited. As car dealership waiting rooms go, it wasn't bad.

Yesterday we met with our contractor. Our construction permit, which was good for a year (!), expires before Thanksgiving, so we are motivated to get this project wrapped up. Also, we're running out of money. The good news is it looks like we'll be able to reuse the built-in bookshelves and desk we ripped out of the old office. It's much nicer than what we could afford to replace it, in addition to which I really hate throwing away perfectly good stuff. The material from the fence we had to rip out should be reusable as well. Not that the escape artist whippet pays much attention to the fence anyway.

A Purple Bedroom

Tuffy moved into her new bedroom last night. It isn't new exactly, because it's mostly in the same place it was before, but it was shuffled around, losing space to one closet and taking some from two others.

And painted purple, and a color I would have to describe as dark toothpaste. But she likes it, and she has promised to paint it again before she moves out. She's almost 20; how much longer will she be living at home, do you think?

When we get home tonight, I expect they will have ripped into what used to be the master bedroom. The last step in this interminable remodel will be replacing one window with two, and turning a small-ish bedroom into a very small but accessible office.

So, after 10 months, we've got:

• A carport we can get into with the van, even when the power chair is loaded. Before, the van would bottom out at the break between the steep driveway and the level carport. If I wanted to go anywhere, Scarecrow would move the van to the bottom of the driveway, I'd go down the driveway in the chair, and we'd load the chair in the van at the bottom of the hill. Rain -- this is Seattle, remember -- or shine. Coming home we'd do the reverse. I do not miss this procedure even a little bit.
  
• A ramp to the front door, instead of two concrete steps.
• A front door with a minimal threshold, that opens to the center of the room. I used to have to negotiate a very lumpy threshold and immediately make a 90° turn (usually with the assistance of two dogs who were very happy to have us home) to avoid running directly into a wall.
• An on-demand hot water heater. With an adolescent daughter, never running out of hot water is not necessarily a good thing. It was a trade-off. We needed the space.
• A generously wide pocket door between the hall and the new master bedroom. I can even go through at a slight angle.
  
• An accessible bathroom, about which I have gone on at great length before. The novelty has not even begun to wear off.
  

The last step will be turning the space that's left into a very small office, since there's not enough to even pretend to be a bedroom. That's where we're at. So close...

The Taste of Plaster Dust

Insulation... sheetrock... mud... plaster dust everywhere. Progress is being made, albeit at a glacial rate, on our remodeling project.

We leave in the morning before the crew shows up, and they're usually gone by the time we get home in the afternoon. We wander through the house, looking for signs of activity by the construction fairies. Kind of like an Easter egg hunt only, you know, not. To be fair, it probably would've gone a lot faster if we had moved out of the house during construction. If we had known of accessible, dog-friendly housing we might have done that, but the prospect of finding such a thing was daunting, and living someplace else for however long it took would've been expensive. The contractor was willing to work around us, so if it takes a little longer, we're good with that.

So far, she says, knocking firmly on wooden skull, we got lucky with the paint colors we picked. My previous attempts involving anything other than boring off-white have been unmitigated disasters, so I was uneasy about venturing further out on the color palette. And greens are tricky. I was looking for that soft, sagey green, somewhere between, and perilously close to, toothpaste and pond slime. The wrong brown can be similarly unfortunate, but even the burlap-brown in the bathroom looks good. This is where it gets scary. I'm starting to think we could put something other than off-white in the living room, and not live to regret it. And in theory, it seems like you should be able to choose the color of your own bedroom. In practice, I wonder if it makes any difference that Tuffy's favorite color is purple.

Virtual Happy Dance

We moved into our new bedroom last night. The remodeling project we started last December has finally produced an accessible bathroom, and a bedroom I can get into without having to calculate the width of the doorway to the nearest angstrom. We're not done yet -- in fact, I guess we're still a couple of months out -- but progress is being made.

We moved here 3 1/2 years ago, from a house about a mile away. In our previous house, there were always stairs between where you were, and where you wanted to be. When I started having trouble getting around, that began to be a problem. It would have been possible to make that house accessible, at great expense, but it would never have been convenient. So we moved here.

This house is on a single level. We knew we'd have to make some modifications. The two concrete steps up to the front door would have to go. Getting in the front door required negotiating a very lumpy threshold and then making an immediate 90° turn to avoid smacking into a wall. Doors were kind of narrow, but that's a relatively easy fix. There was a bizarre 2 foot wide, 6 foot long hallway (we called it the habitrail) between the master bedroom and the door to the master bath. I still have no idea why that was there. But we knew we'd have to tear out the master bath to repair some rot anyway, so what the heck.

When we moved into this house, I could still walk, kind of, using forearm crutches, but I mostly used a wheelchair indoors, a scooter outside. I could still get in and out of the bathtub by myself, although I didn't feel particularly safe doing it, and shower without help. Fortunately we planned the remodel to accommodate someone who was more disabled than I was at the time.

We worked with an architect who is in a wheelchair himself, as a result of a spinal cord injury. His design preferences are somewhat different  from ours, but when it comes to adapting for a disability, he totally gets it. The planning/design process took almost exactly 3 years. We went through several iterations, but I'm glad we did it on paper instead of after we started to build.

So far, we've moved the front door, and built a ramp to it. We have an accessible bathroom, with a wall-hung sink that I can reach, and a roll-in shower. There are pocket doors into the bedroom and bath. There is more to do yet; we need to get the living room reassembled, sheetrock and paint and stuff. Of course, this whole thing cost way more and took way longer than we expected, but we're likin' it. We're likin' it.