Life of Riley Week 78

This is week 78 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment. This edition was a lost episode that was written later and back-posted just to keep the dates straight.

Sunday (Day 539): Wiring And Engineer OCD

Nothing was unpacked, and there was crap piled everywhere, but #1GF! really expected me to make a nice breakfast for her because it was the first Sunday in our new home. I don’t refuse the girl much, but we had no idea where the soap and sponges were, and I wasn’t going to be leaving dirty dishes in the sink for who knows how long. And with everything that had gone wrong, I didn’t want the paramedics to have to climb over boxes and crap piles when the stove inexplicably exploded and maimed me. Oh, don’t act like it’s completely unlikely given the story so far.

So, we went out and had a nice breakfast. I typically eat like someone is going to steal my plate, but today, I was happy have my ass firmly planted in one of the 70’s dark wooden chairs that looks like it would be better suited to a pirate ship than a local restaurant. I chewed slowly. I drank a couple of cups of coffee. I didn’t move to get up quickly after I was finished. Even though there was a ton of unpacking and things to do, I was creating a momentary eddy in what felt like a river that wouldn’t stop rushing. I was enjoying a few minutes away from the house where I had nothing to do.

When we got home, #1GF! tested all the appliances and read the manuals. She then applied felt to the bottom of things to protect the floors. I hung a blind in the bathroom so that the neighbors wouldn’t have to stare at my wiener a couple of times a day.

A blind install takes about fifteen minutes. It’s drill, drill, clip clip, pull cord. …Unless you’re one of those people that shorten the blinds and the cords. Then, it’s a half hour install. …Unless you’re one of those people that have to make the cords perfectly even. Then, you’re sitting there an hour later marveling at your even cords, and wondering how the day slipped away from you.

I started on the network and phone wiring. I went to the basement to figure out where the wiring would have to come up through the floor. I always measure a number of times before proceeding, and today was no different. I measured the best I could and drilled my first hole. The light streaming through the hole into the basement told me that I had made an error in my calculations.

I ran upstairs. “Shit. [calling out to #1GF!] Ok, don’t come in the TV room. There’s nothing to see in there. If you find a hole in the floor of the closet, it was totally there already. I’m not ruining our floors or anything. Ok, see you in a while…”

I had drilled through the bottom of a closet a full three inches from the back wall. I ran back downstairs and figured out my mistake. Even though I measured the hole a number of times, I was measuring in relation to a wire that a previous electrician had drilled instead of in relation to the edges of the house. From that point on, I measured all holes from the edges of the house and drilled halfway through to make sure I wasn’t hitting flooring. The other holes went off without a hitch.

An engineer friend came over to check out the house and see how I was doing on the wiring. When I wire, I wire in an almost OCD fashion. Network, phone, and cable are all grouped and separated, nothing runs parallel to power, and power lines are crossed at right angles. Engineer OCD is so much worse than normal geek OCD, and makes my detailing look sloppy. I feel normal next to engineers.

Anyway, my engineer friend and I were discussing the most efficient order to mount the switches and patch panels, and worked out a decent solution. Even though I wouldn’t agree to drilling holes to hide patch wires behind the panel, I did allow the engineer to take the extra time to make sure that all of the components were centered to within a quarter of an inch.

I was out of daylight and done for the day, so #1GF! and I asked my engineer friend a number of times to come out to dinner with us. He refused, saying he had better get home. He left, and a half hour later, #1GF! and I went out to get some food.

It was 9 PM, and nothing seemed open, so we ended up at a Chinese restaurant that we never go to. And who do you think is sitting in a booth by himself but our engineer friend. I called him a dirty liar about needing to get home and he said that he had a feeling that we might show up. I knew he was still on a lying tangent because everyone knows that engineers don’t have feelings. They have calculated responses. We forced him to sit with us through the rest of his dinner as punishment. He took it like a man and didn’t cry once.

Monday (Day 540): The Plumbing Stack Part Deux

The cable company sent a guy over to install our cable, and I asked him to do a new run from the pole and run it through a hole that I already drilled. There were no extra jacks, no runs inside the house, and no extra work. Everything was set up so that all that he would have to do is get the wire in the house and test it at the box in the basement.

The installer wanted to run a preexisting wire through where the electrical service entered the house to avoid running a new wire from the pole, but I wouldn’t relent. I knew that what I had laid out would work, and had the feeling that if he started drilling holes, the side of the house would fall down or something.

He seemed pretty psyched about the install, as most of the phone and cable guys end up when they deal with me, because I handle all of my own wiring. The reason that I handle my own wiring is because you never know who they’re going to send out to do an install. A lot of the time it’s a yahoo who wants to drill holes everywhere and take the shortest route from place to place, even if it happens to cut through the center of a room at knee height. Doing your own wiring keeps those guys from learning their trade on your house, and keeps the skilled guys happy and chatty.

Once the cable was in and working, #1GF! and I went to the local home improvement store for a list of stuff that they didn’t seem to carry. Then, we went to the apartment to pick up clothes, plants, and clean the place out of the last remaining items.

We dropped everything off at the house and then went to snap the tonneau cover on our borrowed truck. We didn’t have enough light, so we headed down to the beach to sit under a streetlight. So there we were in the cold, under a street light trying to snap the cover on. We didn’t know that there is an order in which the snaps have to be snapped, or that they are more difficult in the cold. We got three sides done and drove home, expecting to tackle the remaining snaps when we had some daylight.

We didn’t want to cook, so we ran out to get a sub. We sat at our kitchen counter and were relieved that we were finally fully moved out of the apartment. I took the first bite of my sub, feeling a nice wave of quiet relief. I stopped chewing. “Ifth tha wawa?” We were both wide eyed. We ran into the bathroom and watched the toilet overflowing all over the floor.

Simultaneously: fuckfuckfuckfuck (me) Are YOU KIDDING ME? (#1GF!)

I dove for the shutoff and threw whatever towels I could reach on the floor to stop the tide from reaching any further than it had to. I was standing using my feet to hold the towels in place to create a nice pool around the toilet. I thought it was just clogged, so I started plunging. Whishhaw. Nothing. Whiisshhhaw. Nothing.

“This better not be more fucking sabotage”, I said.

I went to the basement and could hear that the toilet wasn’t the problem. The plumbing stack was full of water.

“Fuck. This is bullshit. You think that the only thing you have left to worry about is unpacking, and the house drags you right back in to the fray. It would be nice to be excited about moving into a new house, but this in never fucking ending. I’m starting to feel like everything is a process. Nothing in this house goes off without a hitch.”

We had to go dig through the boxes for our phone chargers because we suddenly needed them. The house was making us need them. Fuck. Not a half hour before, I was feeling like a new me. I was going to write books instead of blogs. I was going to stare out at the ocean and smile about the brilliant ideas that came to me. I had turned the corner and I wasn’t going to be mired in bullshit anymore.

I was suddenly very understanding of why there were so many torture devices created during the middle ages. There were probably a lot more contractors back then. I called the plumber, and he said he’d call the drain guys to get them back out in the morning. #1GF! and I went to bed with one eye open, unable to drift off to sleep because we were both waiting for the next thing to go wrong.

Tuesday (Day 541): The First Flood / Remember Your Roots

I woke up at dawn because we don’t have any shades or anything blocking the sunlight from making contact with us in the morning. I don’t know what time it was, but it was only light enough that I could make out the trees against the sky. #1GF! woke up soon after. We laid there for a minute listening to the rain and wondering what we were going to do. Whatever fluids we put down the drain had a good chance of ending up on the basement floor once the drain guy showed up. That meant no use of any plumbing. No peeing, no pooping, no cleaning. Welcome to your brand new house circa 1753.

We decided to pack up the shower curtain and towels and head back to the apartment to shower. Even though it was my first shower in days, I didn’t end up feeling better. I felt like I had a cloud of bad luck hanging over my head. I went back to the house to wait for the drain guys and left #1GF! at the apartment to shower. I called the plumber, but got no answer. I went to the cellar to check on the pipe and found that the cellar was flooding from the rain. Awesome. Pile it on!

When I went out to investigate, I found that a downspout had been turned to face into a window well. Once the window well filled, the only place it had to go was through the basement window. It had been raining pretty steadily, so there was a fair amount of water. I turned the drain pipe around, and as I bailed out the window well with a bucket, I couldn’t help wondering if it human or nature that pointed the drain pipe that way.

I went back in and moved all the newly moved in basement junk out of the way and started vacuuming up the water with my shop vac. It didn’t take long before I was finished and covered in mud. I couldn’t wash my hands because I couldn’t use the water in the house. #1GF! showed up and I explained the situation. I then suggested that we go out to breakfast. I figured I could wash my hands and we might at least be comfortable while we waited for the plumber to call us back.

We went into a local diner and sat at the counter. The sound of the overly bassy Christmas music being piped in was strangely comforting. It was like being in a movie, and nine times out of ten, movies turn out Ok for the hero. I washed my hands, and we ate at the counter, which, for me, is the only place to eat in a place that has a counter.

When we got home, I paced around waiting for a call back from the plumber. I didn’t want to be a nuisance, but I needed to know when the drain people were coming because I had no sewer service. I called him again at 11 AM. He told me that he had forgotten and would call the drain people and to get them scheduled them to show up in the afternoon. Nothing like being a priority. We went back to our empty apartment to use the bathroom. Even though we had a new house. Good times.

In the afternoon, the drain guy showed up and found that the trouble blocking up the drain wasn’t sabotage, but roots. It cost us over $300 to clear it all out. The guy said that it would cost us more in the spring if we didn’t rip up the bushes that were the source of the problem.

Before the drain guy left, he said that I was lucky because #1GF! seemed like a really nice girl. He actually told me that he was sorry that bad things like this happen to nice people like us. He then told me that he lived in the same house with his ex-wife and even sleeps in the same bed. I told him that there was no amount of money in the world that could put me in a similar situation, but I was glad that it worked for him.

Note to self for the future: If the guy cleaning out your drain asks to borrow a flashlight, say you don’t have one. If it’s sitting right there in the open, lie and say it’s really a wine bottle. No matter how nice you are, lending things to the guy cleaning your drain gets you things that are coated in doody or doody like substitutes.

The day didn’t get much better. The floor was covered in roots that smelled like shit, and even though I turned the downspout to the proper direction, the flooding window well had to be bailed out approximately every forty minutes. The water was pushing up from the ground, and nothing short of a bucket of water stop concrete would’ve slowed it down. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any water stop right then, but I did add it to my mental list.

As I was crouching in the rain watching the tiny spring undo all my bailing, #1GF! opened a window and leaned out. “I’m sorry about all this,” she said.

I just looked up at her and shrugged. “Eh, it’s no big deal. This is what home ownership is. You just don’t know it yet. Sure, a little of it is the white picket fence and cookies cooling in the window, but mostly it’s constant battle to tame a house that has absolutely no interest in being tamed.”

I ended up cleaning out all of the window wells to make sure that they didn’t fill up, and somehow ended up raking the yard in the pouring rain. #1GF! thought I was crazy, but the raking needed to be done, and I didn’t mind doing it. Sometimes, water is just water, and you can’t let it get in the way of doing things that need to get done.

After I finished up, I stripped off my soaked and muddy clothes and jumped into the shower. #1GF! threw a towel in the dryer for me and then gave it to me once she heard the water shut off. That’s what nice girls do: They think of little things like that.

Once I was dressed, I felt like everything was finally normal. There was “tentative” tacked to the feeling like a warning label on an unexploded air bag. Sure, we made it over the hurdles, but you would be hard pressed to get either of us to say anything that would require us to knock on wood.

Every time one of us flushed the toilet, we would listen intently for it to stop running. We were trying to relax while simultaneously being ready to catch the other shoe when it dropped. In that state, I was still not ready to test my luck on the new stove, so we went out for Mexican food. We ended up asleep by 8PM.

Wednesday (Day 542): Small House To Dids

We unpacked the kitchen, and despite all the extra space, it didn’t look like we would have enough room for our stuff. When the same thing happened with our clothes, I thought I was losing my mind. Thankfully, there ended up being plenty of room for both.

We finally returned our borrowed truck and got to hang out with #1GF!’s family for a bit. They had a dead PC, so I took it to see if I could scrounge up enough parts to get it working again. It was the least I could do for them for helping us move and lending us a truck.

On the way home, we went to the Abington Ale House for a little comfort food. #1GF! always seems to have some sort of chicken dinner, and I end up with a hearty chicken pot pie. When everything seems to be falling apart around you, a hearty meal and a full belly can do wonders for relaxation.

When we got home, I put up blinds in the office so that the neighbors would never know that I do my best blogging in the nude. I also had to scrape paint off of the glass with a razor blade so that if they did get a glimpse of me buck blogging, there would be no distortions. Of course I’m kidding. This is coastal New England. Blogging or not, the the nude layer is always at least three layers down in the winter here.

After the blinds were up, I took bleach and cleaned the sewer gunk off of my flashlight. Even after cleaning it with bleach, I can’t say that I was particularly interested in touching it, and I definitely didn’t want to put my tongue on it. So, I didn’t do either. I just put it in the basement with the rest of the tools, taking comfort that it probably had less poop on it than a McDonald’s hamburger.

I spent some time straightening out the back of my hair with the clippers, and ended up trimming the Wolverine hair that was starting to take over the sides of my beard. I was hoping to look less like a psycho, but I’m not sure how it turned out because #1GF! had gone to bed and there were no other people here to ask.

Thursday (Day 543): Thanksgiving

We headed over to pick up #1GF!’s mom for Thanksgiving. Her PC wasn’t working right, and we found it was loaded with spyware and viruses. We didn’t have time to look at it because we had a Thanksgiving dinner to get to and it was not a short ride.

#1GF!’s mom always brings trivia for the ride, but this time it was all Christmas trivia. I didn’t like the idea of holiday trivia when Thanksgiving had barely started, and the questions were so obscure that I didn’t know any of the answers, anyway. I ended up giving up and repeating whatever answer #1GF! gave so that I could allow my brain to focus on things like how awesome it would’ve been to be in Van Halen in the late 70’s.

The Thanksgiving dinner turned out great, and it’s always good to see the #1GF!’s family, but it seemed more like a turkey dinner with her family than a Thanksgiving dinner. My theory is that for Thanksgiving to feel like Thanksgiving, you have to have extra people there who don’t normally eat with you. Whether they’re friends or family, those extra people make it seem more like Thanksgiving. If you don’t have them, it sort of seems like a very difficult to prepare dinner.

After dinner, I cleaned out their family PC that was dead slow thanks to being racked with viruses and malware. This was the third #1GF! family PC in two days with an issue. This one had a copy of McAfee Antivirus running on it, but it hadn’t been updated in almost a year. Rather than sign them up for another bill that they’d eventually forget to renew, I set them up with Avast. I ran a full scan on the machine and then ran Spybot to see what I came up with.

I had known about the possibility of infected MP3 files long ago, but had never seen one until now. I started connecting the dots. I had three PC’s in #1GF!’s family that were having issues at the same time, and I wondered if they were sending each other some “really funny” e-mail attachments. I wasn’t sure what they were doing, but I gave them the standard warning about opening attachments and jokes that ex-virus guys are required to give family members.

Once everything was cleaned up, #1GF! and I made the long trek home in the dark, wondering what was menace was awaiting us at the forbidden house of doom.

Friday (Day 544): The Hulkster, The Maintenence Guy, And The Wiring Guy

#1GF! went back to work, and I tried to get a few things taken care of. At 9, I headed out to return the keys from our apartment, but when I got to the office, I found a sign that said that they’d be opening at noon because of the holiday. I decided that I’d go get an inspection sticker for ROCKET CAR and come back later.

I made the ten minute drive over to the inspection station, and a tanker truck was blocking both bays to drop off a load of petrol. Ok, then. Strike two. I rounded the inspection station and headed to get some grocery shopping done. Earlier, I had planned out these stops in a loop so that I could efficiently go from one place to the next and end up back at home with some check marks on my list and some groceries to put away. So far, I was halfway around the loop without completing a thing.

When I got to the grocery store, it felt like life was finally slipping back into that mundane grind. It was welcome and unwelcome at the same time. By the time, I got the groceries home and put away, it was still too early to go to the apartment complex, so I headed back out to the inspection station.

I had to wait in the office while a guy was doing the inspection, and it was a typical small gas station office. In the middle of the floor sat a man holding a small coffee and staring at the floor. If Hulk Hogan never lifted weights and decided to become a gas station attendant, he would have looked exactly like this guy. There wasn’t enough room to stay three feet apart in there, but the guy never looked up. I couldn’t figure out if he worked there, or if someone just gave him a cup of coffee and was letting him sit there for a little while to warm up. I just stood and waited for my sticker, silently trying to figure the guy out.

A younger guy walked in, and his beard was so kick ass that it would easily have earned him a spot in some sort of historical reenactment group. He was well over six feet tall, and I was almost positive that the doors would soon lock and either a giant Samoan or a guy in a kilt was about to come in for a high stakes gas station cage match. These are the days of legend, my friend. I thought about kissing my biceps, but thought I better wait just in case I was misjudging the situation. I didn’t want to look stupid.

So, now there were three of us in this tiny office standing in silence, and the Hulkster never took his elbows off of his knees. Eventually, the gas line dinged to indicate someone needed gas, and the guy stood up, and walked out the door. He never made eye contact or seemed to notice that we were there. He was probably mentally preparing for the match and pissed that Jimmy Hart wasn’t there yet. I took his departure from the ring as a forfeit, and waited for the metal beard guy to go, too. He soon did. I was station champion by forfeit. I was master of all I saw. From the faded and cracked cream and orange linoleum tiles to the the white popcorn ceiling tiles, I was champion. There really can only be one.

I got my inspection and it was still too early to go to the apartment complex. I had 45 minutes to kill, so I figured I’d go to the library. As I pulled into the library parking lot, I realized that the library was as closed, just like it is every other Friday that I visit. I headed back home.

I called an engineer friend and quickly burned 45 minutes talking about home NAS’s, RAID sets, and general geekery. He suggested that I need a home NAS. As I hadn’t turned on the computer in a couple of weeks, had no TV, no job, and was living like it was the 1800’s without all the wood chopping, I couldn’t think of a reason why I did.

Hell, when you’re waking up at dawn and going to bed because it’s dark, and the most entertainment you have is classic rock radio, something to skin squirrels with actually ends up higher on the priority list than a home NAS. I don’t think I said these actual words to my engineer friend. I hope I didn’t say these actual words, but you never know. I was the World station champ, and more than a little drunk with power.

At noon, I headed to the apartment complex office to check out of the apartment for good. No more double bills, no more driving back and forth, no more spare place to poop if our plumbing goes all screwy. I turned in my keys and did the walkthrough with the maintenance guy. I’ve been there so long that he was almost positive that any damage would be marked normal wear and tear. He was a younger guy and considering a move to our town, but was from Southie and wasn’t sure that a beach town was a place for a young guy in the winter. He asked me what I thought.

The summer is great in a beach town, but everything goes dead in the winter. It’s hard to get anywhere from here, and it’s no place for young people looking for things to do. I told him that it wasn’t something that he should get mixed up in.

The beach atmosphere is a trap. You pop in to sniff a couple of sea breezes one summer, and then the beach attitude kicks in. You slow down and give up great restaurants for a regular place where the food is passable. Before you know it, you’re thinking of a forty minute drive as a journey, and a trip to the city as an impossible pain in the ass. You eventually buy a little house and spend the mornings staring out at the water. You know that it’ highly unlikely that you’re ever going to accomplish anything, but you don’t really care. Before you know it, you’re going out to dinner with people who wear sequined cats on their sweaters and playing bingo for fun.

I told him to move to Quincy. There are no in-town insurance rates (it’s about half of Boston despite being next door), there are plenty of things to do, and it’s central to everywhere. Then again, where the guy lives now is as lively in the summer as this beach town is in the winter, and it’s just as hard to get to. By living here, he’d at least have a really good time in the summer. I had successfully given him a yes, a no, and a maybe to his question. I don’t think I helped very much

I went home to cancel all of the utilities at the old apartment, but realized that the house phone wasn’t hooked up. It was sort of sitting on a table still wrapped up in its cord as if bound and gagged to keep people from calling. I pulled out my cell phone to make the calls. Mr. Paranoid hoisted himself onto my shoulder and told me that I didn’t want my cell phone number to be handed out to their partners lists and their partners lists, did I? I certainly did not.

I unwrapped the phone and took it to the cellar to make the calls. Unfortunately, the phone was uncooperative and claimed lack of battery. While I waited for it to charge, I decided to pull all the phone and cable lines to the jacks. I had a hundred feet of RG-6 and a 500 foot box of Cat-5(e) for a few jacks, so I figured that I’d have more wire than I needed. I pulled the cable measuring very loosely, using my six foot wing span as a rough measure.

On my last cat-5 line, I ran out of cable about halfway to where I wanted to be. I was about 20 feet short, and I noticed that there was about 18 feet of spare cable on the end of every line. Gah. It’s not like this is the first time I’ve wired a house. This is what happens when you run fast and loose like some young cabling hotshot. Pretty soon Iceman is snapping at you and telling you he doesn’t like you because you’re unsafe.

While I was figuring out what I could do to avoid buying more cable, some friends showed up to show their daughters the house. Or so they said. The girls are college age, so I assume they were really just picking out their summer parking spots before the summer crowds get here. I took a break from figuring out the most efficient runs to go upstairs and have a few laughs.

Their family dynamic is incredibly fun to see in action. It’s almost like instruments in a band. Yes, you can tell that a couple of them are similar, but for the most part, they run on completely different waves. When they all get going at once, it’s not like discordant experimental jazz of some families or a monotone hum of others. When they are all going at once, it’s a well-oiled jam. And it’s fun as hell to be around.

We laughed quite a bit, and it was admitted (and I’m putting this down for the record) that my beard, while once reviled and harangued, has been accepted by the mother of that particular den. I only grow this beard every year to so that her husband will eventually be allowed to grow back his kick ass mustache and buy a Camaro without it seeming like a big deal. That’s what friends do for each other.

I don’t know if they had to really leave or what, but they excused themselves and headed out after a short time. #1GF! and I were supposed to get back to work. Instead, we went to the local home improvement store to pick up some random things and some extra cable to finish my run.

Can I tell you a little something about home improvement store cat-5? Can I? Yes? Well, it sucks. It’s been stretched so far and coiled so tight that it looks like something that was pulled from an old data center as scrap. You Do It’s cable doesn’t look like that. You Do It’s Cat-5 looks like a smoothly covered copper vein waiting to deliver important data all over the house. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices to get the job done. Right? Yes. Sometimes, you do. I bought a small amount of their crappy cable and threw it in the car. It was not You Do It cable.

We went out to dinner on the way back, and by the time we got home it was 9:30. I fully intended to keep working on the wiring, but the tiniest nudge from #1GF! pushed me off of my path and I gave up for the night.

Saturday (Day 545): Finishing Up the Wiring

I woke up later than dawn, which foiled my currently 1800’s lifestyle. I watched the sun rise over the ocean, showered, and had a blueberry bagel. #1GF! and I then ran over to the storage space so that our pal with a shiny new dump sticker could get rid of an old mattress for us. I have no idea what the payback for helping someone move and going to the dump is, but I can’t imagine that it will be pretty or cheap.

Once we left there, we went to the local home improvement store for more random stuff. Once we got home, I went into the basement and didn’t emerge until I had run all the wiring downstairs. The network was separated from the phone, and the phone was separated from the cable, and it all was in perfect little runs from the patch panel to the jack locations, each wire waiting to be patiently to be punched down or terminated to their proper jacks. The downstairs wiring was complete.

There were times when I could hear my engineer friend silently judging certain imperfections, so even though he wasn’t there, I would pull out the cosmetic imperfections and correct them. I made sure to call and leave a message for the guy that I joined a new support group for people who knew him called YOMOMMW or “Your OCD makes my OCD Much Much Worse”. I may have called him a motherfucker, too, but I can’t be sure because he didn’t call me back. He was probably too busy repeatedly touching the doorknob repeatedly or working with talking lasers.

What I Learned

  • Engineer OCD is so much worse than geek OCD.
  • If you can’t find an eddy, create one. Otherwise, you’ll get whisked away by the current.
  • Making blind cords perfectly even is a complete waste of sanity.
  • When Drilling a hole through a floor, measure off of the outside walls of the house, no matter how sure you are of the accuracy of other holes drilled into the floor.
  • Drill half a hole to make sure you’re not drilling up through a hardwood floor.
  • there is a certain way to snap a tonneau cover, and it doesn’t go as well when it’s cold out.
  • Don’t lend tools to the guy cleaning out your drain unless you want whatever you loan to come back covered with poop.
  • Measuring cable loosely can be costly.
  • Home improvement megastore cat-5 is so much worse than You Do It cat-5.
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2 Responses to “Life of Riley Week 78”

  1. n0ia Says:

    My delirium tremens have finally been suppressed. Every day I wake up hoping that my precious Thunderbird will report to me that a new post has been made.

    Even though I think it was absolutely evil of you to post TWO LOR posts in one day, I have to say that I’m overjoyed. What’s the word count on those two posts?

    I was anxiously waiting to find out how the house story (read: nightmare) ends for you. And perhaps it’s not over, but for all of the good things that have come out of it, I’m happy for you.

    Oh, and for the 45 women who need a lumberjack for their forest… you know how to get ahold of me. I’m pretty good with a chainsaw. Just don’t ask me to use an axe.

  2. Jon Says:

    The word counts are ~4,200 for Week 77 and ~6,000 for Week 78. That’s a good 40 pages of text for those interested. I know that’s a lot of volume, but there are so many posts waiting, that I have to get them out as soon as they are done or I’ll never catch up.

    I am also waiting to see how it all ends. I was just on the phone with a drain company, so I can guarantee that the nightmare will continue…

    I’m toying with the idea of changing my name to Walter Fielding.

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