Sight Unseen

The tile arrived yesterday, wrapped up tight in cellophane after its long trip from Phoenix. I got the call from the truck driver around noon, and he was the friendliest-sounding guy you can imagine, like he wanted to be my best friend forever, like he felt privileged to be able to come to my home and meet me in person.

It was one of those huge vans. As I went out, my new friend was lowering the pallet on a hydraulic lift. Oh gosh, he seemed to say, I'm so glad I'm here. When he got the tile on the ground I stopped him and said that I just needed to inspect the tiles.

OK, after talking with the tile company I knew there was a good chance that the delivery person would not allow this. And, sure enough, my new truck buddy said. "Oh, you're not going to like this, but I can't let you open this before signing for it." He went on to explain that I was free to inspect the boxes from the outside, which he said were as pristine and beautiful as any he had ever delivered. And anyway, his hands were tied, he said almost crying, since it was company policy, and he was just doing his job. If I wouldn't sign, he'd have to send it back.

"Alright," I said, "send it back. I can't accept it without taking a look."

"I completely understand," he said, fighting back some tears. He started up the hydraulic lift, then began pushing the pallet back into the truck, and I knew he wasn't bluffing. And I knew I wasn't about to let that knucklehead drive away with my tile. After all, the boxes did look fine. And who knows if I would ever get them back?

So I had him push all of it into the garage, and I signed the paperwork, but not without a few cuss words, which I'm afraid wounded him deeply. Fortunately the tiles look OK. And the new sink is cute.

Slipping Some Milestones

Of course Willow is excited about the new bathroom project. Here is she, posing for her new company portrait. Image is important when you are climbing the corporate ladder, and this will be her biggest project ever--never mind that I'll be doing all the work, as usual, while she takes the credit. (Notice that I'm not in the picture.)

My ongoing illness has been a thorn in her side, though, delaying the project start by one day and then another, and these delays reflect poorly on her management capabilities, so she is desperate to motivate me into action before the corporate bosses send in a new goon to shake things up (and replace her).

I do feel better today, but not nearly enough to get started, especially when you consider that the initial phase of the project will be the violent demolition and dismembering of the bathroom, down to the wall studs, followed by the tedious removal of those hundreds of pounds of broken tile and wallboard, with me lugging it all down the stairs and outside to the curb. And that's just to get started.

I'm taking my sick days, no matter how often Willow calls me aside and gives me the stink eye. Let the milestones slip.

In the meantime I'm reading possibly my favorite book ever: Mark Twain's autobiography, which was published just a few months ago, according to his wishes, 100 years after his death. It's given me an idea (more on this later).

Tile Ordered

The tile has been ordered and should be here next week, never mind how much it will cost. By buying the tile from a store in Arizona, I've avoided the sales tax, and that savings almost cancels out the shipping charges. Let the hand-wringing cease.

I'm slowly, by inches and snail steps, getting over this flu, or whatever it is, but I'm still not quite right, so I continue to rest and wait. The tile will find a cozy spot to stay in the garage until I'm ready for it, until after the demolition, plumbing and carpeting prep work is done. But still today I'm a little dizzy. Not quite ready to pull out my favorite tool--the baby sledge hammer.

Also, I wrote a long, rambling, preachy post this morning about gun control, mental health and other issues, all related to the shooting in Arizona. I posted it, but it didn't feel right so I pulled it. The problem is that we have too many guns and too many crazy people, but I just haven't figured out how to fix it yet. The bathroom project comes first.

Remembering the PC

The initial calculations are done, thanks to some help from Excel and no thanks to my flu-fuzzy brain that can't seem to perform simple math, like yesterday when Cheryl and I worked through some ideas for the bathroom mirror, which will be bordered in the smaller tiles and which presents a chicken/egg problem--but I will discuss that later.

Here's my spreadsheet. It reminds me of my days working for a big aerospace company. I was in the IT department, back in the days of mainframe computers, when PCs (personal computers--you don't hear that term very often any more) began to emerge slowly, with their primitive spreadsheets and databases on blue screens and white block letters, long before Windows or mice (or is it mouses?). No email, no Internet. At the time I was the only person in the department to program exclusively for the PCs, so I was pretty much a joke to the mainframe programmers, who considered themselves to be the true professionals, though I wondered if they ever did anything other than drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and stare into space.



At the time, PCs were painfully slow and data needed to be saved onto big floppy plastic disks. The PC network was a nightmare, rarely working, and very, very slow. But I was sure that Microsoft would take over the world. And I tried to convince Cheryl that we should take some money (and, boy, she hates for me to tell this story) and buy Microsoft stock, and we certainly didn't have much money to spare. So we didn't buy it. But had we bought $1,000 in stock in 1989, it would be worth about $250,000 today. I'm just saying.

Anyway. I've sent off for a quote (including the extra 10% of tile, may it rot in the garage), so we'll see about the shipping charges.

Bathroom Project Planning (Scottish)

It seems that the flu-like symptoms that currently afflict me are pretty common out there right now, and one aspect of the bug is its resilience--some people have needed to return to the doctor twice, this according to my pharmacist. So I'm advised to avoid strenuous exercise until I feel well.

That's OK since the bathroom project is still in the planning phase. I took the initial measurements last night and began working on a tile layout plan, with all its borders and patterns, having a medium green as the background color and then a border and a lighter green reaching to the ceiling in the shower area (though it's hard to see the difference in this photo).


But the initial planning has already brought a few issues front and center so that I can't really ignore them--but more about them later.

My first goal is to determine the amount of tile that I'll need to order, allowing for the extra 10% that is generally ordered to account for cutting, etc., though this 10% already sticks in my craw like an undigested piece of animal cartilage, pressing against the full weight of my frugal Scottish ancestry so that I almost certainly will back away from it in the end, opting for a lower percentage if any at all, because what is worse than a box full of unused tile sitting in the garage, sitting there because I was scared and needed that precious extra 10%? (Ten percent?!? Have you lost your mind, man?)

We plan to create a tile border for the mirror. No problem. But our plan to tile around the window will need to be abandoned, and instead I will create a new wooden frame for it. The window is necessarily a flexible area. If we lived in a concrete block house, the area would be rigid enough for tile; but a wood frame opening, at least from what I've read so far, would eventually allow cracks into the grout if not the tile itself. And there would be a big mess. Oh, well, we can plan for a design on the opposite wall, in the upper area of the shower.

The remaining issue is putting ceiling tile in the shower area, which I promised Cheryl I would do, but now I wonder what possesses me when I make promises to her. Am I so eager for approval and admiration that I will claim any ability, any talent, any hidden knowledge or trick to impress her? So now I'm stuck with this final trick, setting heavy, oddly shaped, hand-made tiles upside down and with adhesive that's no stickier than peanut butter. We'll see...

Antibiotics

It's been a week since our return from Arizona. What started as a scratchy throat on Monday moved up into my sinuses during the flight, and my ears are still popping today, just like I've spent the past 7 days in that awkward, stuffy-headed, ear-popping condition that I usually feel after landing and on the way to pick up my baggage. By Saturday Cheryl convinced me to go to the walk-in clinic (a much nicer place than I expected), and she drove me there like a sick puppy since I was and remain somewhat hazy and tired, extremely sleepy despite my frequent naps this week.

The doctor gave me some antibiotics like I expected. So I asked Cheryl (I really wanted to ask the doctor--except he seemed pretty tired and not in need of idle conversation) how it is that we've become so dependent on antibiotics. What would happen to me, I asked her, if this was 100 years ago? "You'd be dead," she said, which is probably true, though I might have been more happy to hear some regret in her voice. "People died all the time."

I used to have some stronger feelings on the subject--about allowing the body to heal itself without resorting to antibiotics and other extreme measures (sending a pill in to kill everything not nailed down is pretty extreme). But a few years ago I put this belief to the test and powered through a cold by simply ignoring it. One of our dogs broke a pipe outside and I went out there to fix it, in the rain and cold, and by the next day I became delusional with a fever, thinking all sorts of wild thoughts. In particular I entertained the notion that my illness was due to some sort of poisoning that I received while haggling for a tapestry on the dark back streets of a market in Grenada, Spain, all of which are historically accurate facts, except for the poisoning. I had a bad case of pneumonia that took a month to completely get over. So when Cheryl suggested the walk-in clinic this Saturday I was quick to go.

As it is, the human race is full of people like me, people who probably should have been thinned out a long time ago, like when I have pneumonia in the 6th grade. Too bad--I like it here now.