Power wash and a few patches

Today the guys are finishing patching bits of rot here and there and power washing.  Tomorrow they will start very very early when the wind is calmest to paint. 

Today's noon sandwich:  BLT, bacon, sliced apple, sliced fresh mushroom, sliced avocado, chopped Spanish onion, flour tortilla wrap.

Today's 4 pm sandwich: Kosher dogs with sweet pickled sauerkraut, used some left over pickling vinegar, snappy and for
sugar boost, rice crispy treats. 

 

Green tomato pickles!!!

A kind friend dropped off a plastic bag full  of green tomatoes.  Yayyy!

RECIPE:  (originally from my Grandmother Horn)

DAY 1: Slice 7 lbs of green tomatoes, cover with 2 gallons of cold water, mixed with 2 cups of lime. (Calcium carbonate, I got mine at Freddy's sold as pickling lime).  Let stand 24 hours.

DAY 2:  Rinse and cover with cold water, let stand 3 hours.  WARNING:  Do NOT dump lime down the sink unless you want it cemented shut, take it outside and dispose of it away from dainage system. 

DAY 3:  Drain and cover with 2 quarts of vinegar, 1 tsp of celery seed, 9 cups of sugar, 1 tsp ground cloves, 1 tbsp whole pickling spice, 1 tsp salt and enough water to cover.
\
DAY 4:  Heat slowly and bring to boil for 35 minutes, can while hot. 

DAY 5:   Grill some burgers, grill the bun, mayo, slice green tomato pickle and burger salt pepper.   My FAV!! ENJOY.

Empty is good.

Oh lovely empty shelf!  One of my fellow associates has been steadily working to get this over flow of records from this small administrative office back into the actual office.  Hooray! Today was the day.  About half of the current files have been thinned and files older than 2010 are being filed in the old department.   Oh my roomy!  The files will continue to expand but at least we have places to go now.  I wonder if they will let me make an offer for those old cruddy rusty (well in a few spots) shelving to go into our new store room at home?  Hmmm, better check with plant operations.

Back at the original project

Ooh the deck railing is back up and will look fabulous once it is painted.

The other view of the deck.  The guys are looking into tread that can be put on top of the membrane so one could perhaps put a chair out there for sunning etc.  Remember this is on the wet southern Oregon coast.

OH and I may have to stop sneering about the ugly red drug house.  The current owner is doing a one man (with occasional help) demolition and reconstruction.  Put in new wooden supports underneath the house, rebuilt the porch, and are now in process of taking off old wooden shingles. Hope they get a chance to paint it when they are done. 

Oh, our Honey-Do contractors took a closer look at the pest and dry rot inspection list and some window and door surrounds are rotten and need to be replaced in order to meet the requirements for re-fi.

AND the plumbers will be returning to replace all the iron pipe. 

Cancelled the Porta-potty

Tri-County crew digging very deep hole.

Tri-County crew filling very deep hole.

The round blue cap thing is a clean out, courtesy of Tri-County Plumber.  Said it took him 3 hours to clean from there to the sidewalk.  Dang.

This is the section of pipe they cut with a hot saw, and what I thought was a "smallish" hole turned out to be the entire length of that section.  Hot saw is smelly, hack,hack.

Go ahead and flush the toilet.

OK. 

Stop, we gotta cut some more!

This is the second piece of pipe that leaked. More smelly hot saw.
The plumbers will come in a couple of days to replace the cast iron.  But in the meantime we can FLUSH and have running water.  Wunnerful.
 

I attempted to Google funny pictures about Medicare...

For those of you who are trying to do the right thing...think carefully.

A friend who recently applied online for Social Security Benefits encouraged me to do so myself.  Apparently it is a law or some darn thing.

So I went online, clickitey, click, click, click, send.

Got email confirmation. Got letter saying as of September 2012 I would start receiving a quarterly bill in the amount of $300.00 due and payable for part B Medicare. What!?  I called a nice man at the office in Coos Bay who very carefully explained that due to my current circumstances (working covered by group health)  I really only wanted to sign up for Part A and he would send me a form, get it back to him BEFORE September.  Letter came yesterday, I decided to bring it back personally.   I found the office and it is a very nice office. 

I walked in and a nice man in a uniform packing heat asked me if I had an appointment?

No.  

Was I carrying a knives, guns or weapons? 

No. 

Could he look in my purse? 

Yes. 

Go to the Kiosk and follow the on screen directions for a number.

Mine was 75D.  There was only one guy in front of me. 

75D!

The nice Federal employee looked at the letter, asked me a couple questions, got my application straightened out so I don't have to pay 100 bucks a month because I do not need it. (I am covered by health care plan at work). 

As I was leaving I asked the nice man what he did for fun.

He hesitated and replied, "I just go home."

Me,too.

Hardiboard looks nice.

The contractors got this far on Friday, the Hardiboard is all up, the new door is in, they cleaned the old membrane off the roof and put up a rubberized layer on the roof and tacked it down with some 2x4's to hold off the rain and wind.  They will take a long holiday and return Tuesday to finish that and paint.  One of our neighbors said it looked very nice..at least we are NOT second to worst looking house on the block next to the old red druggy house.

Plumbing -- all plumbers seem to be out of town.   I left a message with Bobbie B to please put us on his list for early next week.  In the meantime we took a room for two nights at the local motel.  It has a FLUSH toilet.  We will be popping in and out both places checking on livestock and utilizing the working plumbing.  I love modern conveniences!!

Interesting day in the 'hood.

The family plumber came and looked and said he could not do anything until the Econo-rooter guy came to visit.

Upper picture is right before the Econo-rooter guy snaked the pipes.  The clean out was older than dirt and he would have had to break it to get into it.   He had to move the toilet to use as the clean out.  So, he snaked as far as he could and stopped when he hit mud.   Not a good sign.   He said call the plumber.

Um, the longer I talked to Bobby the more he said things like, "Oh, THAT's not good, yikes!"  and he couldn't get to us until early NEXT WEEK.

I called Roto-rooter (who has a plumber on staff) and the most they could promise was Friday early afternoon. Okay.

I am now envisioning the movie "The Money Pit", a trip to the public laundry and a night or two spent in the local no-tell motel.

However, our construction crew suggested we call our home owners insurance people to see what kind of reimbursement we would get from that.  Hmmmm.  Will track expenses.

More tomorrow.

Got a phone call at work this morning

The toilet blew up!  The bathroom rugs are soaked!  I called the plumber, he will be here in a couple of hours. So I  brought some work home with me.  (Analysing exact number of ER visits comparing the ER log book with my spread sheet, the count is off, if I had wanted to go into accounting I would have done so....)

Husband turned off water at the main in the basement.  The leak was large enough for the contractor to move tools etc outside.
Husband then attempted to shop vac some of the water up and got an empty bucket under what appears to be an actual HOLE in a very large pipe that runs the length of the basement and it dripped nasty brown water (assumed to be sewage ew! ew! ew!) onto the top of my washer.   Husband is burning through Latex gloves at a pretty steady rate. 

One of the contractors said it actually sounded like back wash from the city mains.  Ummm,how does that happen? Will have to ask the family plumber when he gets here. Hope he can fix it, flushing and hand washing is a modern convenience we really don't want to do without.   So I will check back when crisis is partially addressed.

Been shoppin'

These are glass candle sticks in the shape of cowboy hats marked with name of Kessell.  Probably a give-a-way for something or another. No luck Googling to find out if Kessell is a previously unknown to me company of what. Any ideas? 
Kessel Motors?
Kessel Ketchup?
Kessel Kandy?

Any these have joined their brethren upon my fireplace mantle.

Day Two

Ah sweet breezes wafting through.   The header was about the only thing that did not appeal to the sugar ants who swarmed the guys like that old Charleton Heston movie set on a ranch deep in the jungle.

 

The basement where the new underlayment is going has been treated with some greenish substance that does not appeal to ants.  Can you believe that when we bought the house there were picture windows down there?!  We think it might have been a small pot garden at one point. Yeach. 

Today the guys got pastrami on rolls with mustard, mayo, lettuce and tomato.  Bon Appetit!!

And it begins.

From the front going down the stairs.  All rotten, drain was "fixed" at one time with duct tape. 

From the basement view, new supports, getting it all level, mostly rotten.

View from the back yard, that wall is about the only thing that will not get revised in some way or another.

View from the north bedroom. All of the railing has been taken down and will be carefully put back. The new roofing/deck  material will be nice rubberized stuff.  We need a new outside door to the sun room.  And all of the window sashes etc on the north side are rotten because they leaked from day one; no protected the wood surrounding the windows.  If we want to keep the glass windows it will cost an extra 600 bucks. Wanna wall it up?

Lemme think....

Yeah, The West window will let in plenty of light and the heat bill will certainly not suffer. View was not much anyway.    Should be done in three weeks.

I made the guys some tuna salad sandwiches with albacore tuna, with chopped apples, chopped onions, chopped walnuts, mayo and put it on nice bread.

I hope they don't get food poisoning, if so I will get it also  as I just downed my own tuna salad sandwich.  Yum.

da weekend

This is a picture of the front of the house after bush removal and pre power wash and pre paint.
The roots are still there and will most assuredly grow back, this is Oregon where stuff grows very fast.  Oy.

I was invited to go home with my friend Sue, who lives in Roseburg.  She came to work Friday and we left at 3 a.m. drove to her house, unloaded suitcase, rested up a bit and we met her daughter at Sheri's. I loved the Lemon Meringue pie.  Yummy.

Then we drove to Seven Feather's Casino.  I spent 20 dollars on a kind of fun penny machine and whenever you hit a win it takes FOREVER to give you your winnings.  I puttered around and hit 25 dollar pay out and I swear it took a good 10 minutes to ceremoniously and excitedly pay me. 
I cashed out discovered I was 20 cents to the good and decided that was enough for me.

The next day we went to Costco, The Mall, The bookstore and a couple of other places,what fun,oh and gas was $3.69 at the cheap place.

Then watched season 4 of Eureka. I have never watched the thing at all.  I will look for it now and take pot luck on re-run.

Current events

Before the construction there is demolition and before that is the clearing out of junk so the contractor can get to the demo.

Nice young local Youth Minister came buy to recycle much of it into the local land fill or turn in bottles and cans a nickel per.  Thanks, Roy!

Husband called local trash company to hire a "dumpster"  It contains the old sink, the old toilet and old downstairs sink.  Plus lots and lots of cardboard boxes.  Surprisingly the cardboard boxes I mailed down from Barrow in 1999 had survived their sojourn in the basement pretty well.   Oh there are a couple of old wooden and glass doors as well.  This load will get topped of Sunday and probably hauled off Monday.   Lovely.



The lady above is Turinesh Dibaba running for Ethiopia.  She won the 10,000 meter run last night (6.something miles) Did it in a hair over 30 minutes.  She won gold and both 10,000 and 5,000 in Beijing.  She was injured and has recovered rather nicely. The amazing thing is that there was a field of 22 women starting out, three Japanese women jumped right out in front followed closely by an Irish running.  They kept it up for about half way through. Then the Kenyans went to the front and put a good 50 yards between them and the pack. Ethiopia followed.   They took turns leading and on the VERY last round the bell sounded and Turinesh Dibaba took off like there was a two for one sale at Nike's. She passed them on a curve and opened up about 500 yards.  She has a kick that won't quit.  She cruised through the end with a big old grin on her face. Very impressive.  The commentators kept talking about her nick name "Little Assassin" and her finishing kick. Holy Cow!!! PS;  She and the Kenyans had to fight they way through runners they lapped.