The Runaround.

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m just dumb, or don’t speak English correctly, or have a short attention span. Whatever the case, I can’t make heads or tails of the Baltimore County Land Records website. All I want to do is get a better copy of the plat for our property, so that I might begin the process of understanding exactly where the fuck my lawn ends and where the neighbors’ begins. The copy of a fax of a copy I have shows a trapezoid with vague and blobby notations of distance, but no point of triangulatory reference for anything except the west corner of our road frontage. Which means our garage could be in someone else’s yard. And there’s no mention of actual distance from the pavement to the beginning of our property, just a smudgy line which could be our hedgerow. Apparently I will need to hire a surveyor, at the approximate cost of one months’ salary, just to nail a ribbon on a tree and say “It’s here”. Before I can do that, I have to get the plat, and in order to do that (as far as I can tell from this suck-ass website) I have to make an appointment, with… somebody. There are names and numbers listed, but none of them say “I’m the guy who will help you get that thing you need”. Searching on their website for the obvious stuff, like “copy of plat” returns a “Google Custom Search Result”, which is quickly becoming Internet shorthand for “we don’t give a rat’s ass about you, and we’re too cheap to catalog anything properly.”

* * *

In the meantime, I’m shopping for a new laptop. Idiot Central, the 17″ MacBook Pro I’ve had for four years, has only sported half a usable screen for the last month or so, and I’m tired of not being able to use it without an external monitor. I’m also really sick and tired of opening my bag to find that it mysteriously woke from sleep and cooked itself like a Hot Pocket. The trackpad button has been sticking in the down position, which means it’s always wanting to select something. It’s still a good, fast machine, so it’ll likely end up as a production unit on my desk, but its days as a primary computer are done. I use a laptop mainly as a travel rig these days, so I’m looking at a 13″ MacBook Pro as a replacement. It’s portable, small, and fast, and I don’t have the extra $500 to pony up for a 15″.

Update: It gets better. Remember how I was talking about the trackpad sticking? I did a little poking around this evening. The trackpad sits directly under the battery compartment.

See that bulge? That means the battery is fooked. It’s been swelling in the center and putting direct pressure on the trackpad above. I guess it bulged to the point where it finally disabled the trackpad completely. The funny thing is, my boss at work, who also has a 17″ MBP of similar vintage, just had his battery replaced today at the Apple Store due to the exact same issue. I have to see if he got it replaced under warranty or not, because I think we may be heading to the Columbia location this weekend, and we may be walking out with a new iPhone, a MacBook Pro, and a replacement battery.

Automatic Weapons and Boundless Love.

This afternoon I’m listening to some live Soul Coughing, courtesy of the Internet Archive. I miss good music.

We got back into Maryland just in time for a couple inches of desperately-needed rainfall. The rain barrels are almost full, and I’m fully expecting the grass to be lush and green for about two days before going back to a post-apocalyptic shade of brown.

Finn seems to be in the grip of the Terrible Twos; there is suddenly much whining and crying and carrying on over the smallest of things. Mama and I are resolute and speak to her in even, measured tones about how she should use her words and explain what’s wrong instead of making keening noises. Hopefully this, too, shall pass quickly. Potty training, though, is going along like gangbusters. She makes me so proud.

Monday, Tuesday.

Still Scoutless. The plastic (technically, phenolic resin) main bowl of the carburetor is so old that parts of it have worn away and are allowing fuel to pool after shutdown, making any sort of adjustment impossible. So my mechanic is trying to source a new (used) bowl to replace it.

Verizon Wireless needs to go bite a bag of dicks. They have been spamming me at least five times a day and for some reason their spam makes it through my filters. I DON”T WANT YOUR WIRELESS SERVICE, YOU DON”T HAVE THE PHONE I WANT. Leave me alone, please.

This week is getting out of control, so we’re interviewing a cleaning service tomorrow afternoon to have them work on the house while we’re getting everything ready for the party. I’ll have you know Jen was planning for the party in April (possibly March), and we still feel like we’re behind the 8-ball. Grrr. However, I put the mister together last night, and it works perfectly.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that federal and state-based handgun bans are unconstitutional, nullifying bans in cities across the country. I find myself torn between the two schools of thought here; on the one hand, I respect and appreciate my right to keep and bear arms, and I intend to exercise that right sometime in the future. (Last night, before I even knew about the ruling, I had a dream where I walked into a gun store and shopped for a pistol. I tried out revolvers and small automatics that didn’t fit my hand, finally settling on something that looked like a Glock.) On the other hand, I have several cousins who are uniformed policemen. I have nothing but respect for officers of the law, and I appreciate the impossible job they are faced with daily. Therefore, I do not agree with and cannot abide the NRA’s assertion that anyone should be able to purchase assault rifles, teflon bullets, or other military-grade hardware legally. Furthermore, I think the federal government should man up and write strict country-wide rules for the sale and purchase of guns, so that cities like Chicago and New York, who are struggling with controlling guns purchased out-of-state, can better police themselves.

Minus Humidity.

Today’s weather is a little less like being in the moist maw of Hell and more like being in actual summertime, which is a nice break. Unfortunately, our basement humidifier, which has been going strong since about 2005, decided it had finally enough and began to make louder and louder rumbling noises as the compressor cycled on and off. Things started feeling a bit stickier down there, and a recent reconnaissance of the litter boxes revealed some fuzz that doesn’t usually belong there. So I got up early this morning and hit the Lowe’s for a new unit, and picked up some extra parts for a mister I’m going to set up at the parade party. It’s essentially a 3GPM mister head hooked up to a set of 1/2″ PVC piping via garden hose, with a ball valve to turn it on or off. The only thing I haven’t been able to figure out is how to get it standing elegantly; I’ll probably just use a couple of pipe clamps and attach it to a wooden spike in the ground, and then wrap that with some foam pipe insulation to protect little hands and feet.

Some Minor Updates.

1. We have plumbing in the new (old) half-bath on the side porch! Mr. Scout and his plumber hacked, sawed, and felled a 300-lb. cast iron vent pipe from the side of the house, replacing it with a temporary in-wall unit until after the 4th of July. This morning, after delivering Finn to daycare, I picked up a new toilet and sink from the Gucci Lowe’s. They will get installed tomorrow along with the door and some temporary drywall to make a functional bathroom for the parade.

2. The carburetor on the Scout is being assembled as I type, and hopefully I will get a call this evening with an update and the go-ahead to pick it up. Which is good, because we have new piles of debris to haul away from the house.

3. I made a few edits to the files here on the site in an attempt to speed up pageloads. Let me know if you see any difference (it’s that little link to the left that says “comment”).

4. Plans are afoot for a vacation stay in the Outer Banks in September right around Finn’s birthday. We have a house picked out with a stunning view of the beach and a lovely in ground pool for the girl to splash around in. We are excited to have something fun to look forward to.

Rainy Days and Wednesdays.

The garage has been empty since the weekend. The Scout is out at the mechanic getting a carb rebuild, which makes me happy, but the rain we’ve been getting today, which was coming down so hard that it slowed traffic on I-95, has surely soaked the seats to the springs. I didn’t get the chance to put the full soft top back on before we ferried it down, which I’m regretting now, but I’ll be happy to put a plastic bag on the seat to get it home. Plus, we’re supposed to get two days of sun starting tomorrow, so maybe it will dry out by the time it’s ready.

The garage is even emptier as of this morning, because a nice man backed a dump truck up to the doors and hauled off six contractors’ bags worth of debris, as well as the pile of concrete that’s been sitting on the side of the driveway since 2008. He threw in all the brush I cleared off the garage a few weeks ago and some junk from the side porch, and raked everything smooth. Jen says it looks beautiful out there now, which makes me very happy. It’s good to have that taken care of in time for the parade.

Finally, Mr. Scout is studding up a new wall around the bathroom on the side porch in preparation for the plumber to come in and rough in a new toilet and sink. It looks like we’re going to pull the floor and drop in a subfloor in order to level it and butt it up to the hardwood. I have to figure out where to put the huge pile of insulation that’s out there (most likely in the new empty space in the garage) so that little hands don’t play with it, and straighten up/vacuum/childproof the rest. As much as an unfinished space can be childproofed.

Hungry Girl.

As you may have noticed by the lack of activity around here, I was at my computer for about 5 minutes in total this weekend, which is kind of how I like it. The three of us spent two very hot days running around trying to get the house shaped up for the upcoming parade party, but for all of the effort expended I don’t feel like we’re any closer to being done.

Finn and I enjoyed our normal morning breakfast hike despite the heat, and Saturday morning we found a set of old-school ratcheting box-head wrenches, a vacuum gauge, a pair of metal shears, and a dwell tester for the sum of $6 at a yard sale. After a quick trip to the Lowe’s (one of many this weekend), she and I had all the components to build a new gutter over the back deck purchased, but then it was time for swim lessons.

After the pool and lunch I test-drove a local Scout to gauge its worthiness as a donor vehicle (verdict: it’s a go) and then got to work in the yard on the gutters and hedges before it started raining.

Sunday the heat rolled in, and we attempted to stay cool while continuing work on the house. Finn and I returned to the Lowe’s while Mama was at yoga, and after a short nap she was up again, thwarting our attempts to split up and get things accomplished while she was asleep. Note to Daddy: even if she’s tired, feed her before naptime.

Somewhere during this time period I pulled the leaky cartridges out of our kitchen sink to replace them, and found out the hard way that Price Pfister is using cheap plastic/brass assemblies instead of solid brass. The brittle replacements are made in China, and I destroyed one just trying to get it to seat correctly. I also broke the brass three-way connector on the hot water line attempting to follow a slow leak back to the source, which mandated another trip to the Home Depot for parts.

We rolled that in with a ferry ride to Crownsville in the Scout, which is getting a rebuilt carburetor this week—fortuitous timing, as it turns out, because the idle speed is now so slow that she was stalling out on me as I came to stop signs. Let’s just say that bringing a 4,100 lb. brick to a halt with no steering or brakes is an interesting challenge.

Returning to the house via the H-D, I replaced the three-way connector, blew the spout off the top of the faucet in a shower of cold water (I hadn’t screwed it back in place), and found that the second hot-water cartridge I’d bought was missing two tiny internal valve assemblies. So back to the store I went. Again. Poor Jen; I was so irritated I could hardly talk. Thankfully, the fourth time was the charm, and I got everything back together, but I’ll never buy Price Pfister again, and I’m going to specify solid brass assemblies in any faucet we purchase from now on.

Then, I ran back outside to finish the front hedges and get the sidewalks edged. After dinner and getting Finn to bed, we were cleaning up the debris of the weekend until 10, at which time beer and pound cake were necessary, along with some mindless TV. I fell asleep on the couch by 10:30, wondering how the weekend got past us so quickly.

Progress.

The big news around the Lockardugan estate these days is a successful mortgage refinance, which (among other things) has consolidated several large bills into one smaller payment at a lower interest rate. We will be seeing additional benefits beyond a smaller monthly outlay, beginning with forward progress on the side porch and atrium.

To recap, the day before Finn was born, we installed a door between the living room and what used to be the exam room in preparation for renovations. Predictably, the 20 months since then have been filled with all-baby-all-the-time, so the exam room sat untouched while we gathered some shekels and got her moving under her own power. Our main stumbling block, even before she was born, was how to organize the space in the atrium above, due to the need for plumbing—the plan has always been to use that space for a master bathroom adjoining the front bedroom. The jigsaw puzzle goes together like this: In order to finish off the downstairs, we need to put piping in for the upstairs bathroom. In order to get piping upstairs, we need to have a plan for how the bathroom up there will be laid out. In order for piping to go in, we need a chunk of cash to pay the plumber.

So, we’ve got the cash. Now, for the plan. On paper it sounds simple, but we have been stumped as to how to fit a sink, toilet, and bathtub into a space surrounded by windows and flanked by a fixed attic staircase. Working with only one interior wall makes planning difficult, because a shower on an outside wall is always going to be chilly.

What we've got now.

We enlisted the professional aid of Mr. Scout to help visualize a solution to our problem above, and get the ball rolling on the space below. (The immediate goal is to have a working bathroom on the first floor in place by July 4 for parade-goers, and the long-term goal is to have a functional den completed by, oh, let’s say Thanksgiving.)

The upstairs room is, as mentioned before, completely surrounded by old, creaky windows. The basement steps drop down into the back third, right next to a doorway that was tacked on to the rear of the porch. The staircase is next to a surround which encloses the chimney.

Our checklist for the upstairs bathroom is:

• A shower
• A toilet
• Dual sinks
• A large, usable closet
• Sunshine
• An over/under washing machine/dryer (not necessary, but would be nice)

Option 1

Mr. Scout did some measuring and some thinking, and suggested a radical solution: Make the back bedroom the master. Flip the current “closet”, push it forward to meet the depth of the chimney, and make the back 1/3 of the space a dressing room. Chop the attic stairs and devise some kind of hinged stair solution that can be folded up and hidden. Delete entirely the doorway into the front bedroom. Delete all but a few of the windows on the side of the house and take back that wall space. Put a tub/shower against the back of the closet and some kind of vanity/built in cabinetry against the front wall with the sinks. And put the toilet along the outside wall so it’s not the first thing you see upon entry.

Option 2

I did another variation on this idea where the tub becomes a stand-up shower in order to fit the washer/dryer alongside; we’ll have to measure that exactly and see if it can go somewhere else instead. I’m not entirely sure I want to delete the doorway to the blue bedroom, but if there’s another way to arrange the room to make things work better, I’m on board.

Downstairs plan

Downstairs, we’re altering the original plan just a touch to make the new bathroom more usable. Mr. Scout suggested widening the room from 44″ to 50″, turning the toilet and widening the window above to center them visually, and then using a 24″ door against the office wall, opening inward, for entry. We’ll level the floor and tile it. The casement windows I was originally considering for the den will change to a trio of double-hung units like we’ve got throughout the house, and the back door will be enlarged from a miniscule 24″ to a standard 32″ 15-pane glass (although this one will be exterior-grade steel). I’m still on the fence about what to do with the window over the radiator on the back wall; it may come out and it may stay in.

We’re shooting to have a working toilet and possibly a sink in place, surrounded by some roughed-in drywall for our parade guests. After that hubbub dies down we can get to the serious business of new windows, siding, and what to do about the floor (the end cutting pliers and I have a date with the floor sometime very soon), as well as insulating the coal cellar below (more tigerfoam) and doing something with the rickety porch off the back.

Weekend Wrap-Up.

Saturday morning, I let Finn talk quietly to herself in her crib while I snuck downstairs and got her breakfast together. Weekends are my days to wake with her while Jen sleeps, and she knows the routine well enough now that when I’m the one who opens the door, she’ll whisper, “Mama seepin” and stay quiet all the way down the stairs. While she ate her breakfast, I sipped coffee and planned out our route based on the yard sale signs that appeared Friday evening. After she’d finished and we changed her diaper, I dropped her in the backpack and we slipped out the door.

The first one was right around the corner, and it was the best of the day. For $11, I found a tricycle with a training handle, and three Melissa & Doug puzzles in fantastic shape. We ran them back home and then continued on into town for breakfast, stopping off at four more sales along the way. There were some interesting items and some total crap, but nothing we really needed, so we picked up food and turned for home. By the time we got back, an hour had passed and Mama was awake, so we sat together and enjoyed a quiet morning before the day got started.

Finn is getting more and more comfortable in the pool as the weeks go by. She tried jumping into my arms from the edge of the pool last week, and it’s now one of her favorite things to do. We try to stay in the water as much as possible, though, because they have the place chilled down to arctic temperatures for some unknown reason. Usually by the end of the session, she’s shivering even as she’s laughing, so we try to bundle her up into the locker room as quickly as possible. We’re actually going to look into switching facilities for that reason, because we don’t want to give up on swimming with her.

She passed out so completely on the car ride home that I had to scoop her up like a linguini noodle and pour her into bed without any lunch. While she slept, I joined Jen and we cleaned the house like a couple of tornadoes straightening up everything in sight for our dinner guests: S. and D., whom we haven’t seen in ages. They were kind enough to bring over a metric ton of awesome sushi, so we started pouring stoli & tonics and dug in. Finn stayed awake long enough to eat two full meals: a standard Finn dinner and an entire plateful of kid-safe sushi (cooked and vegetarian choices). After she went to sleep, we stayed up and almost killed the bottle. Thanks for a great evening, guys!

Sunday morning Finn and I repeated our quiet ritual and snuck out right at eight, hiking into town under a big umbrella to stay out of the drizzle. After picking up breakfast, we took the long way home, waiting for rainclouds to give way to blue skies. Finn chattered in my ear the whole way, making sure to say “seeyoulaterbyebye” to fire trucks, concrete trucks, pickup trucks, dogs, people, planes, flowers, and every person walking the other way. We took a new route and explored a whole area of the ‘Ville I’ve never really noticed, which was interesting.

At 11, after breakfast, we walked down to the center of Catonsville to take in the first day of the weekend Farmer’s Market with our friends J. and A., and we were pleasantly surprised by the amount of people who were there and the amount of people we knew. It was enough that for the first time, I actually felt like we were part of the community and not just people who owned a house in the neighborhood. The market itself was smaller than the weekday version, but with the turnout they had, I’m sure it’s going to grow quickly. We visited with friends, took in the stands, and picked up a wide assortment of sundries: A bison delmonico steak, six tomato seedlings (and one zucchini), a pound of organic strawberries, and one chocolate-on-chocolate gourmet cupcake.

With the new motor installed

In the afternoon, while Finn napped, we split up to attack different projects: Jen worked in the garden to plant seedlings and finish the back beds, and I started pulling the headliner out of the Saturn to get the sunroof closed. Following the directions I’d found online, I got the entire thing disassembled and down within about twenty minutes. Before I continued to page three, where it said pull eight bolts and remove the entire sunroof assembly, I decided, in a rare and uncharacteristic moment of intelligence, to plug the spare motor I’d pulled from the junkyard into the switch to see if it worked. To my surprise, it did—so I bolted it into place and closed the sunroof. At that point it was a simple matter to clip the headliner back up and bolt everything back into place.

After the tracks were down but before the glass went back in

Pleased with my success, I hurried to get everything cleaned up, then ran inside to give the newly-woken girl a snack, strapped her in the car, and hustled up 695 to the bike store to look at helmets and rear panniers before they closed for the evening. We wound up talking to the manager of the store, who was very helpful, and ordered a 1-3 y.o. helmet for the girl as well as a wicker and leather basket for the front of the tandem. We’ll have to return the pannier I bought—the whole point is that we got a free child’s bike seat at a yard sale that’s designed to snap onto a metal pannier, but the way this is constructed it won’t go on completely. So, back to the store I’ll go. (I found it hard not to be thinking about upgrades to my other two bikes while we were there, but we’ve got to get Mama something to ride first).

Dinner was quiet and delicious: leftover sushi and a garden salad, followed by our cupcake, split three ways. Finn has also learned how to clink glasses for a toast, drink a bit, then put her cup down and say, “Ahhh.”

When it was time to lay down, we wrassled on the bed in her room and made her giggle by kissing and tickling and zerberts, and then read a book until her eyes got heavy. She repeated, “Iluboo” as we closed the door and then quietly murmured herself off to sleep.

Yard Sale All-Stars.

Early Saturday morning, Finn woke up from a bad dream and called to us from her crib. I went in (Mama has weekends off) and soothed her, laid her back down and tried to leave quietly, but she wasn’t having it. After I settled her down again and laid on the spare bed in her room, she snuffled her way back to sleep, leaving me to try and catch a few more Z’s before dawn broke. I’d just found my way back to REM sleep when it was time to get up for some breakfast, and we went downstairs to find Mama was already out the door on her mission for the morning: to check out the nearly new sale at the Howard County Fairgrounds. No sooner had I hit the bottom step when she called in to check on us; she’d seen a used red wagon that had been snatched from her grasp at the last second and wanted to know if we’d left the house yet. Finn and I wolfed down some breakfast, changed into dayclothes, and hit the road for our mission: picking over the community yard sale across the street.

In years past, we’ve found all sorts of useful things for sale in the surrounding area, from cameras to toys to cars. We were hoping to fill some of the small gaps in Finn’s wardrobe and maybe find some larger used items so that we weren’t paying full dealer price; the depreciation on little red wagons is atrocious as soon as you’ve driven them off the lot. Because we’d gotten a late start, she and I didn’t hit the bricks until 9:30, a full hour and a half after the official starting bell, so much of the good stuff was gone by the time we made the rounds.

This year’s sale seemed to favor fussy wingback chairs, Christmas decorations from the Reagan era, a metric ton of stupid glassware (always with the glassware, these people) and ramshackle pressboard furniture, but little or no interesting or useful stuff. There were some isolated deals on children’s books, and when Mama joined up with us, we scored a pair of $.50 Converse lowtops with room to grow in for the girl, but otherwise the local selection of kids items was thin. Perhaps the biggest surprise, then, was when Jen pointed out a sign at an otherwise uninteresting sale which mentioned radiator covers. Curious, we followed the seller back and peeped out a metal cover in excellent condition stored in the back of a garage; we hurried home with measurements and a phone number, and confirmed that it was perfect for our dining room.

After returning home, we bundled up the girl and headed out to her swim lesson. She’s doing really well with the stuff that scared her the first couple of weeks, like being underwater and floating on her back. She still has a look of confusion when she comes back out of the water, but she’s not as prone to crying about it like before. We played together until I could feel her shivering in my hands, and then it was time to go home. But not before checking out a fire engine in the parking lot! The local volunteer department brought it down for kids to check out, so Finn got to sit in the rear jumpseat and poke around the cabin while we chatted up one of the firemen.

Saturday afternoon I started working on cleaning up the clutter in our basement, first by hauling our old kitchen cabinets from of the center of the floor and hanging them on the back wall of the garage. At that point I realized the garage was in far worse shape than the basement, and commenced to organizing and cleaning as much as I could in there. Into the cabinets went the piles of debris from the workbench, a crate of motor oil, and a crateful of garden fertilizer and tools. I pulled the remainder of the rodent-chewed insulation off the walls and bagged it for disposal, reorganized the handtools, and put parts spares up into the attic. Nothing is going to make the floor any cleaner, but having the raised portion cleaned up is very nice. And when I’ve got a dumpster parked outside for the side porch, I’m going to find a way to disconnect the old gas stove and make that disappear as well.

One of the things I keep running into as I’m working on our cars is an unorganized toolbox filled with an explosion of wrenches. I’ve got two sets of SAE and one set of metric box-heads, and being able to find them quickly would be really helpful. After looking through the organizational section at the Home Depot and coming away unimpressed, I decided something simple would be the best solution—I’ll be happy to buy a couple of these when our budget allows. I’ve also got to find a way to organize sockets by size and type so that I’ll wind up with the correct handle for the right socket.

Sunday was just as busy. Finn’s friend Stella turned 2, so we stopped by her birthday party and sang, danced, painted, and played games with a group of other children the same age. By the time we left, she was pooped, and slept pretty much the whole way home.

While she was down I continued working outside, getting the back lawn mowed for the first time, then doing some battery swapping with the Slattern. It looks like the battery I bought last fall to replace the original is bad, but I’m not 100% sure; I replaced it with the Jeep battery and the car seemed to fire over a lot more happily. I also switched out the taillight wiring on the off chance there was a short in the original, but I’m going to try to see how well Pep Boys honors their 1 year replacement warranty this evening before I call this fixed.