Sunday, 17 August, 1997 10:31

Finally! A good nights' sleep!

We had a beautiful line of thunderstorms move through last night. On the national radar, the line stretched from southwest of here about a hundred miles to the east coast. Pretty damned impressive. There was not too much wind associated with it, fortunately. Karen and I sat out on the front deck as the storm was building, and the heat index was still around 97F, and this was about 22:00! Then the wind picked up as it moved in, and the temp dropped into the high 60s. Shivers went up and down my spine. My mood was immediately lifted into the primal state of the exhilaration of just being alive.

I love storms. Like you couldn't figger that out....

I decided to make the atheism site unavailable for a while at least, until I figger some things out. This has more to do with what I don't want to be (or be perceived as) than what I do want to be (or be perceived as). The True Believer by Eric Hoffer is changing some of the fundamental ways that I think about religion and other things.

And I'm going to start rotating the things at the top of the javascript box on the main menu, kind of a "feature of the week" thing; but it won't be weekly, of course, but just whenever I feel like it.

We went to the hardware store yesterday and bought a new faucet for the kitchen sink. I installed the last one three years ago, and it's been leaking for the last year. So we bought a good one, with a 30-year warrantee. It did cost more than the $29.95 that I paid for the last one, though... It hasn't been installed yet, I didn't have enough ambition to start a plumbing project, given that it will probably take me about twelve hours to get it done.

For years, Karen and I have been wanting to build a double garage, and turn our present garage into a kitchen-dining room. We have never gotten the money together to build, though. We've kept a car in the garage off and on, but right now it's full of junk. No room for a car.

So... we've been talking of just cleaning it out and going ahead and putting a kitchen in there anyway, and to hell with the garage part.

The additional room will be about 12X22'. We have adequate heating and cooling power so I can just run a couple of additional vents into the room without overtaxing the system. I also want to put in a couple of skylights to minimize the artificial light needed in the area.

The plumbing and major electrical stuff will be on the wall next to the present kitchen, so that shouldn't be much of a problem either.

So, the first thing will be to draw up the plans and construct the floor. We have steel exterior siding, so I will have to find a way to match that up when we remove the garage door. We want to do the exterior so that it doesn't look like a garage was ever there... which is pretty hard to do, I've seen a bunch that look like exactly that... a renovated garage. I hate that.

The neighborhood where we live was built in the early fifties, right after the great '51 flood. One of my older neighbors told me that the construction company came in and build the basements first, laying the sewer (orangeberg) and water pipes on top of the ground, then they graded out the street five feet below the top of the basements. They piled up the dirt around the basements and graded an incline down to the street level. Then they built the rest of the houses.

The drainage worked well for about twenty years. At that time, many of the foundations started cracking, water in basements, etc. The construction company was, of course, long defunct. The upshot is, our foundation is cracked and the kitchen/garage portion of the house is slanted towards the back of the house. The northwest corner is about five inches lower than the southeast corner.

I have to fix this before I can really do anything else. I fixed the drainage problem years ago, so it hasn't progressed any, but I will have to jack that portion up off of the foundation and fill it in with something.

I dunno... sounds like a lot of work for a lazy guy.

Fun day... Karen and Kim and I went out for breakfast. We started off wanting to go to Shoneys' but there was a line coming out the door, so we went to Applebees instead. Kim and Karen don't really like me going out with them very much (especially Kim) because I "cramp their style" ; however, this wasn't a shopping excursion, so they didn't mind too much. We had a nice meal and then went to exchange some pants that Karen had got for me yesterday. Then Karen and Kim dropped me off and went off by themselves, the way they like to shop.

Tyler and I sat around and looked at each other for a while, trying to decide on whether or not we had enough ambition to go fishing. Of course, we decided that we did, finally, so we loaded up and went.

It was a fine day for fishing... it has cooled off a bunch, and fluffy little clouds were scudding along. The humidity is still pretty high, though, in the mid-eighties, so it was uncomfortable when the sun wasn't behind a cloud.

And most of the time it wouldn't make a difference... we'd be catching enough fish where we wouldn't notice. Today was different, though. Probably the high pressure front that came in turned the fish off or something, but they weren't biting worth a damn. I caught two and Tyler caught one during the four hours we were out there. But we had fun anyway, naturally!

We got home and Karen was marinating some shishkabobs; I put them on the grill while she fixed some wild rice, and we had an excellent meal. She also got a couple of movies while she was out, Mother is the name of one of them, with Debbie Reynolds (remember her?) in it. So this will be a lazy night.

We're going to get up tomorrow and head for Abilene for our anniversary, and we will have fun. Later....