CSI: The Holey Shower Curtain

"No one who practices deceit shall dwell in my house; no one who utters lies shall continue before my eyes."  Psalm 101:7

 

Occasionally we have an unsolved mystery here at the house.  Real whodunits since no one ever fesses up to committing the crime.  I told you of how I’d become the Toothpaste Detective a while back and now I’ve had to broaden my scope.  I’m now Captain Bathroom!

You see, most of our crimes occur in the bathroom.  From mystery pee spots on the wall, to walking in hours after someone has been in the bathroom to the water in the sink still running, to the child in the bathtub who has no towel to use when he gets out because someone stole it, we have a litany of bathroom offenses.  Most punishment for noticeable offenses falls back to the known repeated offender, who admittedly may not be the offender at the time, but I think it sends a message.  Plus it evens out the workload in case they might be in cahoots.  And they clean the toilets for me. 

Our most recent bathroom crime: The Case of the Holey Shower Curtain. 

I have one child that showers and one child that bathes, so when I stepped into the shower one morning and found the plastic curtain had finger shaped protrusions all over it, it wasn’t hard to discern a culprit.  Said culprit was brought to the crime scene, asked to confess, and told to never do that again or suffer the wrath of Captain Bathroom.  Said culprit was agreeable to all terms of his verdict and we’ve lived with protrusions on the shower curtain for weeks without further incidents. 

Yes, I could have replaced said shower curtain, but I thought leaving it for a while might be a visual reminder to his conscience in case boredom strikes in the shower again.  Wash yourself and GET OUT!!  How many times do I have to say it?

So last week, after a late night at soccer practice and a messy bathtub from bathing baby ducks, I commanded my usual bather to shower after his brother.  All was fine and dandy and it was business as usual until I stepped in the shower the next morning. 

Here’s what I found:

 

Now where the simple protrusion had once been there was a distinct hole.  I called the two primary suspects to the crime scene.  Both entered a plea of not guilty.  But since I have one showerer and one bather, and one honest-to-a-fault and one liar, I could pretty much tell you who did it without even asking them.

The incriminating evidence was as follows:  

• The showerer had already been read the riot act on poking the shower curtain and swore he’d change his ways. 

• We’d not had any repeat occurrence of a maimed shower curtain until the appearance of the bather.

• And bather just happens to have a history of innocence when all fingers point to him.

I sent them to their room to decide between the two of them who had poked the hole in the shower curtain.  After much deliberation, the prime suspect comes in with the verdict.

“Since your finger fits in the hole, YOU must have done it!” 

I had flashbacks of the OJ Simpson trial:  If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit! 

 

And so the mystery of The Holey Shower Curtain remains just that, and Captain Bathroom is still on the case.  From the looks of things, my investigations may never cease!

Cat Attack

“Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.”  Romans 12:15

 

Remember the orange cat?  He’s grown up nicely into a very sweet loving kitty cat that I love despite his color and has provided us loads of entertainment with his sweet gestures of flopping down in front of where ever we may walk wanting us to rub his belly.  He’s also started a little game with us called “Sneak into the House”. 

It all started about a month ago when we had a little cold snap.  The kids wanted to bring him in. 

Okay, it was me.  I thought his little kitty paws might be cold. 

Anyway, I let him wander around the house and he found a wonderful spot called “Under the Bed”.  He could hide just behind the dust ruffle and then when he noticed I sat down on the floor right on the other side of the dust ruffle to play with him, he could sink his claws right into my bottom causing me to holler and my son to almost wet his pants from laughter.  It was quite the little game we had going.  Ha ha, hee hee. 

Then he found that if he moved to the exact center of Under the Bed, no human arm could reach him.  Well, it had been so long since we’d had a cat in the house, I’d forgotten about flushing them out from Under the Bed with the broom handle, so we just let him be, thinking he’d come out when he was ready. 

We thought he’d come to us.  But he decided to go out the other way and see what adventures he could find in the rest of the house.  What he found was the Hamster Cage!! 

We found him with front paws wrapped completely around the hamster cage, and his kitty nose pressed in desperation up against the thin bars that separated him from his prey, and a look of unfathomable luck upon his face.  We had to practically pry his claws off of the cage and sent him back outside. 

And then he had to live with the fact that we keep tasty cat treats in a cage in a nice warm house. 

And it was just too much for him to live with. 

So, for the past several weeks we’ve occasionally found Sunny hiding under the bed waiting for the right moment in which to unleash his Master Plan.  Lying in wait, I believe it is called.

He’d only made it into the room with the hamsters a couple of times, but was quickly discovered and ushered back to his natural outdoor habitat.  Sunny practiced his murderous skills several times in the past few weeks, picking off several birds that have visited my bird feeders.  He’s left their lifeless bodies on my front porch as a sign of things to come. 

Or maybe affection.  Depends on who you ask.

And so it was tonight that Sunny decided to finally unleash his Master Plan for either liberating the hamsters or having a tasty treat. 

I had left with the children to return two friends to their home, and the hub sat at the kitchen table working a Sudoku puzzle and reading the newspaper.  Sunny apparently sneaked in the laundry room door when one of the four children was exiting the house to get into the car.  In my mind, he probably went straight for the center of Under the Bed to wait for the perfect moment. 

So while the hub was enjoying an otherwise uneventful quiet moment to himself, Sunny pounced.  He jumped on the top of the hamster cage, ripping it from its perch on a stand by the window, knocking a hamster bedroom insert completely away from the cage itself, and exposing a large gaping hole through which he would retrieve his snack.  Unfortunately his plan did not include the hub grabbing him by the scruff of his neck, spanking his bottom, and depositing him back outdoors so quickly. 

Pine pellets and hamster bedding slung all over the floor, it wasn’t surprising that the hamsters had escaped.  The elder of the hamsters has been out at least on one other occasion since we’ve had her and she tends to run in a circle around the cage until the humans show up, but the other hamster is young and new and really doesn’t care for humans that much in the first place, so she decided to make a run for it. 

The hub said he could see her hiding behind the cabinet peeking at him, but as soon as she noticed he saw her, she would run to another spot.  The hamsters are robo dwarf hamsters, which the lady at PetSmart said meant “fast”.  The hub confirmed this definition after having several misses in catching the baby hamster before snagging her back into her cage. 

I returned after depositing the excess children at their home and found the hub at the table reading the newspaper and working a Sudoku puzzle.  He told me of all his action while I was out and I thought I would die laughing.  He didn’t find the experience as funny as I did. 

Probably a classic case of:  “Guess you (didn’t have) to be there!” 

The pine pellets and hamster bedding still remain on the floor.


He’ll probably laugh tomorrow when I have to clean them up! 

The Duck Quilt

"Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm.  But how can one keep warm alone?"  Ecclesiastes 4:11

My Granny Donaldson gave me this quilt.  She called me one day, sometime before I got married in 1997, and said she had something for me.  She was quite the quilter and had a huge quilting machine in her house.  I was less than impressed with the duck quilt, considering I’d seen some of her other creations, but I remember her telling me “I thought it might keep you warm.”

Granny Donaldson died in 2001 at the age of 96.  The duck quilt never found a prominent place in my house.  It’s a bit manly.  Doesn’t really go with anything, and the 20 ducks on it are a little too brown and orange for me.  Plus, Granny Donaldson is gone now and I’m never getting another one, so I should put it away and save it.  But…

In 2007, we experienced an ice storm here in Northeast Oklahoma that caused horrible damage and power outages and constraints on normal folks that I wish not to live through again.  Trees literally exploded with the weight of the ice breaking enormous branches.  Standing out in front of our house the next morning, we thought we were in a war zone for all the explosions of trees around us.  Our power was out, but the husband had secured a generator from his workplace for us to use. 

There was a mad dash to secure a generator if you did not have one, and we provided the cash necessary for our neighbor to buy a large one from a wholesaler who had come to my bank to sell generators.  Everyone was desperate!   

We have a wood burning fireplace, so we camped out in the living room for 13 days without power!  One of the things I did to conserve heat was to place this quilt in my doorframe that leads to the upstairs of our house.  I remember thinking then that “it had kept me warm” just as Granny Donaldson had said it would. 

It was without a doubt the worst camping adventure I’d ever had and I hope not to do it again!

Ever!

And then yesterday, our air conditioner to the upstairs decided to die.  While we didn’t have to worry about freezing to death, sleeping was a high priority last night.  We camped out, once again, downstairs, but this time we slept in the extra bed and bedroom since we didn’t have to keep the fire going.  And once again, I hung Granny Donaldson’s quilt in my doorway to conserve energy.  And I’d say it is working!  The upstairs thermostat is currently reading 81, while we are sitting at 73 downstairs.  The air conditioner has only kicked on a few times in the past hour, so I’d say the quilt is keeping me cool too! 

Thank God for two air conditioning units, local repairmen who will hopefully show up today, and a less than impressive duck quilt from someone who knew I would need it!

'It Happens!

Thought I'd share my excitement last Tuesday for any of you who live in the city, or even a small town, who have access to fancy things like a sewer pipe.  I miss those days.  In fact, if it were an option, I would jump on the band wagon again and hook into a mass poo poo removal system.  But as it is, I have a septic system.  Not an aerobic system.  A big old tank (1,000 gallons according to my receipt) outside of my kitchen that loses the grass in the summer time, and had been occasionally belching gas from its contents back into the house for about a year, off and on. 

The smell of rotten eggs always makes me feel welcome at someones house. 

So, last Tuesday, while I was being held hostage by AT&T for a four-hour period in which no one ever intended to show up, but whilst they planned their devilish plan to call me the NEXT day and tell me I'd missed my appointment by not being home, I got bored and decided to dig up the septic tank. 

Please add archaeologist to my résumé.  Ok, so I don't currently have a résumé, but I felt like I was digging up a tomb. 

With hatch located, I decided it would be a good idea to have it pumped.  We've lived here five years, it smelled, and that seemed to be the right thing to do.  Another reason why I should probably have a job instead of sitting around. 

So I called these guys. 

I liked the name.  Plus, one of my old crusty bank examiner cohorts used to use them and he was as tight as the day is long, so I figured I'd get my money's worth.  Turns out they were here before we lived here.  It had been 8 years since they were last out, so I can't take full credit for what we were about to see...

Just in case you ever wondered, like I have, what's really inside of that septic tank, here's what we found:

You know what they say, "'It Happens!"  I might be missing a few letters.  But apparently it happens a lot around here, as the tank was full of "solids".   And we also have a root problem as well.  

So Honey Wagon man got to pumping, 

And cleaned the whole thing out.  Except for the roots.  I was left to kill those myself with copper sulfate. 



It was a learning experience.  Expensive, but I learned a lot.  Ok, maybe not a lot, but I paid someone to take away my solid waste products.  I'm beginning to think it isn't Honey that he's hunting.  Maybe this is all connected to Winnie the Pooh somehow. 

Anyway, there goes my poo down the road. 

And I hope to never see it again. 

As for the Honey Wagon, apparently three years would be a more normal time frame, not eight.  So, I'd better start saving my pennies now!

Hope your week isn't "full of it" and may all your endeavors be as exciting as mine.  I need a support group.   

Smile! You're On... Nevermind.

“Don't let your dreams go up in smoke - practice fire safety.” -Author Unknown

Had a real life moment of suspecting I was on Candid Camera last night.


My smoke detector downstairs started to chirp a couple of days ago. I thought it wanted a battery, so I replaced it. It continued to chirp. So, I took the battery back out and had a theory that they must chirp for a while as a way of saying, “Hey Dummy, put a battery in me!”


I tried another brand new battery, but the same thing happened.


After thirty minutes of chirping every minute or so, it finally stopped.


All’s well with the smoke detector, I supposed.


Then a full day of no chirping. Problem solved!


Until I was dead asleep in la-la land at 5:15am this morning.


I could hear it in my subconscious.


Chirp.


(Long pause)


Chirp again.


After regaining consciousness and muttering a few choice words under my breath, I headed downstairs to the stupid smoke alarm.


More trouble than they are worth, I’m thinking.


I perched myself up on the step stool, a perilous task for 5:15 in the morning, and stuck another battery in it. Then I headed back upstairs where at least another hour of slumber was waiting for me.


Right before I hit the stairs…


Chirp.


“@$&*!,” I thought.


This time I wasn’t bothering with another battery. I went straight for the screwdriver (another perilous activity for this time of morning) and unscrewed the sucker from the wall.


I threw it out on the front porch and closed the door.


My head had just hit the pillow when I heard:


Chirp.


I thought I must be hearing it through the door now! It seemed muffled in my sleep-stupored mind.


So I went back downstairs, took it off the front porch, walked it all the way back through the house, and put it on the back porch.


I had just made it back inside the house when I heard:


Chirp.


A few more choice words and a WTH???


I expected someone to jump out and say “Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!”


But I wasn’t smiling.


Then I looked up.


Last winter when I was inexplicably tired all the time, I’d bought us a couple of carbon monoxide detectors so that one night I didn’t go to bed dead tired and wake up so. This was before we had the Home Energy Audit that basically rendered such detectors useless due to the constant free flow of fresh air that our home enjoys. I remembered installing one in my bedroom, but had totally forgotten about this one. Opposite wall from the smoke detector. Kind of hidden by a tall cabinet.


Duh.


So I ripped it off the wall, found it to require a different kind of battery than the smoke detector (of course!), headed upstairs to search for batteries, got them replaced and went back to bed.


When I finally got up for good, I retrieved a perfectly good smoke alarm off the back porch. Stuck a battery back in it and screwed it back to the wall.


So far, the chirping has stopped and all appears to be well with our smoke/carbon monoxide levels.


I used to change the batteries when we changed our clocks for the time change, but I never can remember if it is in the Fall or the Spring, and I don’t like to waste perfectly good batteries.


Maybe I should get on a schedule.


Maybe I should change out the batteries in the ones in my bedroom NOW!


Maybe I’m the only one being outsmarted in the middle of the night by small appliances!


Who says I have no nightlife?

This Old House

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to tear down and a time to build.” Ecclesiastes 3:1, 3

Our house is old.

The courthouse says it is older than I am by 6 years, but I believe that to be true for only parts of it.

I believe the closets are from the 1930s judging by the wallpaper and plasterboard walls behind it.

So that makes it WAY older than me.

And then there’s the upstairs.

Strangely more modern but with impossibly small, steep stairs and creaky floors.

Was an architect or general contractor even consulted for this mish mash project??

Who knows?

Needless to say, every time we try to do an “upgrade” it turns into something a bit more than what we’d bargained for. But we always learn a lot. So, today, I thought I would share what we’ve learned living in our home about its past and life before us.

1. Our neighbor, who has lived in his house since 1955, says that there was once a house on our property that burned to the ground, and then they moved in a house and built on to it. I’m guessing a house built in the 1930s and moved to this location in 1970, the year on file with the courthouse.

2. For 15 years, my house had a porch and the entry faced west.

3. In 1985, the upstairs’ two bedrooms and bathroom and two-car garage were added, creating a laundry room downstairs and a North-facing front door.

4. This occurred shortly before the previous owner bought the house. He was a bit of a do-it-yourselfer.

5. We bought the house in 2005, and moved in on December 31st. We had two mortgages for one month because our other house had not sold yet. Our other house was brand-new when we bought it.

6. The first room we “upgraded” was the kitchen. We started out with appliances since the stove had to be turned on with at pair of pliers and was harvest gold in color. The dishwasher was so loud that you couldn’t talk over it, and during the rinse cycle it would belch out a column of steam into the kitchen like some kind of deranged dragon. It also had a sea foam blue interior and was more of a glorified rinsing machine, as it never actually “washed” any dishes.

7. The walls of the kitchen were covered with lattice-patterned fruit and floral wallpaper down to a chair rail. Below the chair rail was fireboard that looked like white brick. Fancy! There was also a fake enclosure built above the cabinets to connect them up to the ceiling.

8. One night, I threw a crowbar through that fake enclosure and ripped it all out.

9. Another night, I got mad and ripped out all the wallpaper.

10. Beneath the wallpaper we found that our kitchen had once been lime green, and so it was again, much to my horror! We also found that wallpaper and fireboard hides a lot of imperfections in drywall.

11. And then there were the beams. Two big dark wooden beams running across the length of the ceiling. We didn’t like them, so we ripped them out too. The only problem was that even though the first beam was decorative, the second was not. Ooops! So it had to stay. We drywalled over it and it now matches the ceiling.

12. The chair rail was attached to the wall with three-inch nails. Guess they were afraid it might not stay put.

13. The fireboard was GLUED to the wall and then nailed. Guess they were really afraid it was going to take off.

14. Oh, and the lime green walls matched the Holly Hobby themed green contact paper that lined all of my kitchen cabinets. Holly Hobby had to stay, as she had become a part of the cabinets and could not be removed. Holly Hobby must have been a stubborn girl.

15. Our pharmacist’s husband does excellent drywall work on his days off as a fireman and had our whole kitchen finished with new ceiling matching old in three days.

16. Making walls smooth again is called “refloating” the walls.

17. Dark red paint covers anything lime green very nicely.

18. It takes months to recover from “updating” any room of your house.

19. Several, and I do mean several, months later, we started on our downstairs bathroom.

20. Our bathroom used to be some kind of porch. We found the porch floor when we tore out the top floor.

21. The earthy smell that my bathroom had had when it was damp outside was actually the remnants of what had been quite a large rat’s nest in the walls and subfloor.

22. We found lots of rat droppings, an empty box of D-con, rocks, and a sock in the walls. Not sure on the rocks or the sock.

23. We also found rat bones under the tub and sink.

24. Sometimes a room will never be clean, no matter what you do to it, until you tear out all the walls and fixtures.

25. I wrote our names and date on the lower porch floor so that if someone ever decided to do it again, they would know they weren’t the first.

26. We also found a window behind the tub. It could not be resurrected, so it is still behind the tub enclosure. Only this time it is insulated and boarded up properly. We hope!

27. That disgusting feeling can sometimes be eliminated with a fresh coat of paint, or a ShopVac.

28. Our living room had a huge draft from the window behind (yes, behind) our entertainment center, so since the weather has been nice, we decided to “fix” it last Saturday.

29. The window was broken and installed in such a way that the window could not be fully closed.

30. The trim boards were (again) nailed to the walls with three-inch nails.

31. There must have been a big sale on three-inch nails.

32. Our drywall in the living room was placed directly over the paneling that had once covered the walls. It was that lovely shade of brown-gray so popular in the 1970s.

33. If a tornado ever comes, we have lots of wall reinforcement downstairs.

34. Our luck it will be the only house still standing.

35. You should always measure and have a replacement window in hand before tearing out an old window.

36. Nothing is standard size on my house.

37. Home Depot and Lowe’s take up to three weeks to get a custom window in.

38. The Habitat for Humanity Restore might have what you’re looking for, but it will be at the bottom of the pile, and your children will become very cranky.

39. A standard sized window can work if you have a husband and an uncle that are so inclined to remove the outside covering of your house, trim down a vinyl window to just the frame, move the header of the window and several side boards, and cut through the drywall inside the house.

40. We now have one standard-sized vinyl window.

41. And all the other windows on the downstairs of the house are encased in rock on one side.

42. Should make for interesting window replacement in the future.

43. More window replacement will not occur for several, and I do mean several, months.

44. Oh, and the old window frame had turquoise blue paint on it. What a colorful life our house has led!

45. The more work we do to our house, the more it becomes “ours”.

Happy home remodeling, if that so happens to be what you’re doing today. Otherwise, be thankful you’re not in the throes of updating!

Oh, and don’t come over just yet. We haven’t put everything in the living room back in its place just yet, since I’ve decided to paint it while the furniture is all moved. And then there are two more windows to replace, which will require all new trim… It could be several, and I do mean several, more months!

“The wise woman builds her house, but with her own hands the foolish one tears hers down.” Proverbs 14:1