the long, long road to hurricane shutters
Mike Jankulak
Those of you who have read my little slices'o'life in
the past may recall the Great Bathroom Moliation of '99.
[Those of you who *don't* read this stuff: hint, hint,
this is another one.] It took the Aberlak household a
long time to recover from this Sad And Dark Period --
no grand renovation schemes were attempted in 2000, but
as 2001 rolled around we found ourselves... willing to
try again.
We'd planned two very simple tasks for the winter of
2000/2001: the main job was getting *real* hurricane
shutters made up for the old part of the house and
some or all of the apartments in back. [We currently
only have the aluminum, secure, easy-to-put-up shutters
for the new part of the house built in 1995. The rest
of the house gets boarded up with the same plywood
sheets that were bought and fitted for Hurricane Andrew
back in 1992.] Before tackling the shutters, though, we
figured we'd have the windows replaced in the foyer --
these are the only windows in the house that are older
than 1995, and we wanted windows we were *happy* with
before we spent a fortune to protect them.
Alas, the path of true moliation does not run smooth.
Smoothly. No, smooth. It runs *unsmoothishly*.
Late last November, I found some termite wings by a
window that I don't usually open. We have a contract
with a termite company (they get a maintenance fee,
we get free inspections and treatments as required)
so we called them... to make a long story short, we
have a very healthy infestation of termites and the
house requires fumigation. You know, a big tent is
erected (so to speak) around the house and pumped up
with lots of very unpleasantly lethal gasses for a
day or so. Obviously, the Aberlaks and their cats
had to move out for a few days. But where?
This also seemed to be a good time to take care of
the (increasingly loud) noises in the attic. Whatever
it was, living up there, we'd rather it pursue its goals
and dreams somewhere else and *avoid* dying up there
during the fumigation. I can stand the noise, but I
sure didn't want to put up with the smell. I'd seen a
possum in the driveway a month or so ago, one night
when I was returning from errands, so I'd been wondering
if our upstairs neighbours were possums. I got an
animal-trapping company (www.trapperjohninc.com, I Kid
You Not) to come over and check things out.
"Rats," the guy said, looking at the huge hole in the
eaves of the Florida-Room addition. "But they sound
*big*," I told him. So he poked his head up into our
attic and waved his flashlight around. "Dude, you've
got possums," he said. "There's one right there, looking
at me." Not only that, this possum was *young*, maybe
four months weaned from mom -- and possums usually have
two or three in a litter, so he estimated that a family
of *four* lived up there. This, you understand, is in
*additional* to the legions and legions of rats that
live up there, too. Did you know that possums like to
eat rats? I didn't.
Okay, so poison for the rats, traps for the possums,
repair for the hole in the eaves, *then* fumigation, and
finally, then, window replacement and hurricane shutters.
Not so fast.
Early in December, in ways that probably aren't entirely
appropriate for airing in a public forum, we got wind of
an unpleasant development -- one of our tenants had been
arrested for drug use. Crack. The police had been in
the neighbourhood, guys drawn, looking for an associate
of his. Neighbours complained about mysterious acts of
burglary. There were rumours of intimidation, threats.
All very murky, which made it all the more alarming.
This all came to our attention one Saturday, and only one
day before Sim was scheduled to leave town on business
trips that would last a week and a half. I was freaked.
I couldn't seem to get *any* information -- not from the
neighbours, not from the police, not from the Broward
County Public Records Office, not from the Fort Lauderdale
Housing Assistance Program that was sponsoring our tenant.
Were we in any danger? Was our tenant a drug *dealer*?
What had been going on back there? Could we *stop* it?
As it turned out, the story was mostly over before we
we aware of it. Our tenant never got out of jail, because
of his repeated crack-related arrests and convictions,
and he's still in jail now, waiting for a space to open
up in a rehabilitation facility. I'd mostly had the wrong
end of the story -- it was a sad story, not a scary movie.
Our tenant's close friend moved his stuff out of the
apartment and gave us back the keys.
Well, life handed us lemons and then squooze them into
lemonade for us, because now we had a place to live while
the house was being tented. In fact, since this is
technically our *second* crack-addicted tenant in that
apartment, and since our own office/guest space in the
house is a mite cramped, and since all of our bookshelves
are stuffed to the gills, we don't plan to rent out the
apartment again, ever. It'll be our library-slash-guest-
house. And it has gas-powered cooking and hot water, so
it'll be *perfect* in the event our power gets knocked
out (longterm, I mean) by a hurricane someday. So
instead of the usual between-tenant renovations (replace
carpet, paint, misc repairs) we are doing the place over
*nicely* and replacing the carpet with tile.
I fucked up the painting work already. It's a new guy,
a gay contractor who was recommended to me by someone
I knew at Nortel, where I used to work -- and he was
hired to do all the repairs and painting. He said it'd
take two days, but at the end of the first day he told me
he was done, except for some "touching up" he'd do the
next day. I had a quick look at the ill-lit apartment
with wet paint and (foolishly) paid him the balance.
That was over a week ago, and I haven't seen him since,
so I'm beginning to worry -- he's supposed to stop by
tonight, but he said he'd be by *last* night too and he
didn't show. The paint, now dry, very obviously needs
another coat in some places, and it's not clear that any
of the repair work we'd paid extra for got done. I think
the truth is that he could be a perfectly honest and well-
intentioned contractor but I was an idiot to have paid
him so soon so there's no telling when/if the work will
be done. Damn, damn, damn.
The tile work is going a bit better. Sim and I picked
out a tile in the maze of tile stores west of Miami
airport, and Monday I drove down and picked up 500 sq.
feet of the stuff (two trips). Man, that shit is *heavy*.
What I forgot to mention is that I'm "on the bench"
right now, between contracts but with one or two
opportunities stuck in paperwork/funding delays, so
I'm actually getting my regular pay while I devote 100%
of my time to coordinating the various people who are
taking our money. I had a whirlwind contract (can you
have whirlwind contracts in the same way as you have
whirlwind romances?) that sent me to Ottawa in January
for a week, but since then I've been a free agent.
So now I'm just fighting with the termite folks, trying
to get some guy to call me back so we can set a date
for the fumigation. [Right now, he's still "some guy."
If I still haven't heard from him tomorrow, he's in
danger of becoming "some asshole."] The folks who will
be laying our tile are back there now, tearing up the
carpeting and generally getting the place ready to start
work tomorrow. The guy who sent me to work in Ottawa
just called me to ask "have you ever heard of Manitoba?"
It's all kind of surreal.
mike computer work is looking better and better jank+
PostScript: just as I was typing "surreal," the phone
rang. It was Alex, from Terminix (our termite killers).
Finally! Except he's not asking about dates for our
fumigation... he's trying to sell us his services.
But we already subscribe to your services, I said.
No, I was told, we subcribe to their *termite*
services. What Alex was trying to sell me was their
*pest* services. You know, other insects, rodents,
that sort of thing. Oy.
PostPostScript: it's a *zoo* around here. My paint
and repairs contractor-guy just stopped by to finish
his work. Well, the tile-guys are back there now,
laying duorock (?) and preparing the place for the
work that will start tomorrow. So the paint/repair
guy promises to come over the evening of whatever
day the tile work is complete. So hopefully my
despair on this front was premature.
--
"I wound up in Normandy the same way my mother wound up
in North Carolina: you meet a guy, relinquish a tiny bit
of control, and the next thing you know, you're eating a
different part of the pig." (david sedaris)
rich...@library.tmc.edu
wrote:
[this was too good to pass up...]
>
>Not so fast.
>
>Early in December, in ways that probably aren't entirely
>appropriate for airing in a public forum, we got wind of
>an unpleasant development -- one of our tenants had been
>arrested for drug use. Crack. The police had been in
>the neighbourhood, guys drawn, looking for an associate
>of his.
Drawn how? In pastels? Charcoal? Were they nude or clothed? Were they
quartered afterwards...?
rpj
Scott Carpenter
wrote:
>Well, the tile-guys are back there now,
>laying duorock (?) and preparing the place for the
>work that will start tomorrow.
Wonderful stuff, and if they lay it properly it'll be easy to take the
tile up later (for future remodels) without resorting to sledgehammers
and cursing.
lisa cohen
>
> Those of you who have read my little slices'o'life in
> the past may recall the Great Bathroom Moliation of '99.
> [Those of you who *don't* read this stuff: hint, hint,
> this is another one.] It took the Aberlak household a
> long time to recover from this Sad And Dark Period --
> no grand renovation schemes were attempted in 2000, but
> as 2001 rolled around we found ourselves... willing to
> try again.
<>
i would like to thank you for posting this and apologize for tormenting
you about the keys--you have just made me feel *so* much better about
the windows we're having replaced and the three little mice hannah
found.
lisa, who started wailing with laughter along about the time the possums
appeared
Mike Jankulak
>lisa, who started wailing with laughter along about the time the possums
>appeared
Then you'd get another giggle from what's in the cage on the
back patio... another possum. Smaller than the others, too.
Looks like an overgrown rat. Man, these animals is UUUUG-lee.
This is possum number five. Maybe we're trapping the neighbours'
populations, as well?
I called the trapper to let him know he had another pest to
collect. I also asked him about fixing the holes in the roof
to prevent new colonization. duh. His response, predicatably,
was "don't you think we should wait until we run out of possums,
first?" okay.
The termite guy *did* call back last night, so I promptly
scheduled the fumigation for a time when Sim would be out of
town. ooops. Now I gotta call him back and reschedule, and
*this* after I've made a pest out of myself to get prompt
attention. But he offered a date next week at first, at a
time we weren't available, and when his second offer overlapped
*one* *day* with Sim's trip (Sim would be here for the tent's,
uh, erection, but not for its removal) I just didn't have the
heart to reject him *again*. I gotta learn to be nastier.
I think I'd better call the gas company today and reschedule
the trip they're making tomorrow to come out and hook up
the hot water heater and stove to the tank -- this is a new
account under *my* name, the old accounts were under the names
of each individual tenant. Anyhow, I don't think the stove
is in the kitchen right now (as tile gets, uh, laid) so it's
going to be tricky (and maybe a little unwise) to hook it up
to the gas right now. I'll check with the tile d00ds and see
if the kitchen might be done by tomorrow, but I don't think so.
jank+
p.s. got a new cabinet installed in the (house) bathroom
this morning. We ordered it last October, and it had to be
shipped from Spain, got lost in customs, got delayed by the
holidays, and it wasn't, strictly speaking, the one we
ordered (which, it turns out, they don't make anymore) but
it's there and it's done and it looks good. Sim remarked
this morning that we're now officially *finished* with the
'99 molication and I didn't even slug him.
Kevin Michael Vail
Jankulak) wrote:
[snip]
> I gotta learn to be nastier.
You need David lessons. (BTW, I found he has his keys all lined up and
wouldn't even consider having them any other way. Go figger.)
> '99 molication and I didn't even slug him.
^^^^^^^^^^
that's "moliation". Sheesh, you made it up, you should spell it right!
:-)
--
Kevin Michael Vail | a billion stars go spinning through the night,
ke...@vaildc.net | blazing high above your head.
. . . . . . . . . | But _in_ you is the presence that
. . . . . . . . . | will be, when all the stars are dead. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Sim Aberson
posting them.
>p.s. got a new cabinet installed in the (house) bathroom
>this morning. We ordered it last October, and it had to be
>shipped from Spain, got lost in customs, got delayed by the
>holidays, and it wasn't, strictly speaking, the one we
>ordered (which, it turns out, they don't make anymore) but
>it's there and it's done and it looks good.
You forgot to mention the non-standard wall, uh, studs, which made it
difficult to actually hang the cabinets. Just a little blip.
>Sim remarked
>this morning that we're now officially *finished* with the
>'99 molication and I didn't even slug him.
It's not done until we actually put stuff *in* the cabinet.
A house down the block was tented today, too. We also have a hedge
full of termites that we've spent two years removing and should probably
get rid of really soon.
Sim, my next post will be a grocery list for Mike.
--
"I can't afford hustlers because you bought tomato sauce." - Jank+
Mike Jankulak
>jank...@panix.com (Mike Jankulak) wrote:
>> '99 molication and I didn't even slug him.
> ^^^^^^^^^^
>that's "moliation". Sheesh, you made it up, you should spell it right!
Spelling-flamed for a word I coined myself. Yep, that's
gotta be a new personal low.
Mike Jankulak
>It's not done until we actually put stuff *in* the cabinet.
er, how much emotional investment do you have in the fact
that the cabinet is still empty?
>Sim, my next post will be a grocery list for Mike.
So long as it says "please" and "thank-you." At least you
didn't put your shopping needs in your .sig file. Think how
tacky *that* would have been.
jank+, with lots of girl-guide cookies now
Clay Colwell
> lisa cohen <lco...@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>>lisa, who started wailing with laughter along about the time the possums
>>appeared
> Then you'd get another giggle from what's in the cage on the
> back patio... another possum. Smaller than the others, too.
> Looks like an overgrown rat. Man, these animals is UUUUG-lee.
> This is possum number five. Maybe we're trapping the neighbours'
> populations, as well?
Send 'em to Texas. Our motor vehicles do a fine job of
exterminating the vermin (and tenderizing 'em for pie at
the same time).
David W. Fenton
<Lwke6.303905$IP1.10...@news1.giganews.com>:
And then you could feed them to the Vegans, and they could use the
fur to make cozy winter coats.
--
David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
dfenton at bway dot net http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc
Cornelia Wyngaarden
: David W. Fenton (dXXXf...@bway.net) wrote:
: :
: : And then you could feed them to the Vegans, and they could use the
: : fur to make cozy winter coats.
: Imagine the deep, deep tragedy of wandering the highways
: and byways for years looking to fashion yourself a complete
: ensemble out of peacefully retired pelts, only to be set upon
: by crazed fashion models splashing paint all over you
: your first day back in the city.
A first peoples artist I met in Banff collects roadkill for his sculptures.
corry
--
--------------------------------------
Cornelia Wyngaarden
--------------------------------------
Tim Wilson
> : fur to make cozy winter coats.
>
> and byways for years looking to fashion yourself a complete
> ensemble out of peacefully retired pelts, only to be set upon
> by crazed fashion models splashing paint all over you
> your first day back in the city.
"Highways and byways"? Has it come to Bobby Goldsboro earworms.
"See the tree how big it's grown..."
Sim Aberson
Mike Jankulak <jank...@panix.com> wrote:
>Sim Aberson <abe...@panix.com> wrote:
>>It's not done until we actually put stuff *in* the cabinet.
>
>er, how much emotional investment do you have in the fact
>that the cabinet is still empty?
It's not, and at least the floss is in the right place now.
>>Sim, my next post will be a grocery list for Mike.
>
>So long as it says "please" and "thank-you." At least you
>didn't put your shopping needs in your .sig file. Think how
>tacky *that* would have been.
Tacky enough to make the person who did such a horrible thing give up
the particular item for good a short time later.
>jank+, with lots of girl-guide cookies now
and you refused to share last night.
Scott Carpenter
<wils...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>"See the tree how big it's grown..."
Honey, I miss you, and I'm doing good.