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ice cream scoops of brain cells"
Saturday, December 14 2002
Today Gretchen and I ran some errands in the pickup truck. It was another rainy day, and temperatures stayed well above freezing.
Our first stop was a Woodstock tile place, where we picked up 900 dollars worth of Italian 12 inch tile for the upstairs bathroom. This came to 240 tiles, and it was so much of a load on my pickup that I thought it prudent to take them directly home. On Gretchen's insistence, though, we stopped at several furniture and antique places on the way home to look at dressers. The way Gretchen is outfitting our house, one would thing we have two adult children living with us. These phantom kids are "guests" and they have rooms, desks, and dressers of their own. In reality, though, Gunther, our plastic goose lamp, has a room all of his own.
At one of the antique stores we came upon an older retarded woman peacefully assembling a jigsaw puzzle on an upstairs table. This seemed like a much better application of her handicap than, say, being President of the United States.
After dropping off all our tiles at home, we drove up to Saugerties to pick up a dresser from an antique store. The woman running the place at the time clearly had some sort of mental disease. For one thing, she couldn't stop talking. She followed us around like pest, muttering a constant stream of saleslady talk. She hyped the virtues of everything we walked past, whether we expressed interest or not. Since she was suddenly declaring 75 percent off everything in the store, we thought we'd have a second look around. But then everything we were really interested in seemed to be exceptions to her 75 percent off declaration, including a spectacular four foot high plaster griffin grotesque and a putty-colored wood cook stove from 1910.
It was mid-afternoon luppertime, and we were hungry, so we went to a Chinese restaurant. It was one of those places with a single kitchen and two facades - a formal, ornate one for those eating in, and an overly-lit linoleum & formica mudroom for those picking up takeaway. We went to the dining-in area. Our Hunan dishes were so pleasing to the eye and nose that an older couple who had come in after us asked us what it was so they could maybe get some too.
Back at the house, I focused my attention on the P-trap in the floor beneath where the bathtub is supposed to go. This was to be my first experience with PVC welding. Unfortunately, though, on my very first weld I managed to attach the the down-tube adapter to the wrong end of the P-trap. After this demoralizing experience, though, all my other connections went well. Though I rather enjoy all the varied tasks I've undertaken in the homebuilding/remodeling adventure, I keep being reminded of why I wouldn't want to do this stuff professionally. In the process of welding the PVC, for example, the fumes from the cement had me feeling light-headed in the way that just feels like permanent damage is being inflicted (as if I am losing icecream scoops of brain cells).
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