Homemaking: April 2005 Archives

My apartment in San Luis Obispo is student housing, which means it's an illegal studio tacked onto a regular bungalow and rented out at rates which are ridiculously unaffordable if you have to work in a rural town like this. Being an illegally constructed apartment, it has certain benefits (it is invisible from the street) and certain drawbacks (no separate utilities from the main house, which is also rented out). One of those drawbacks is that the plumbing is nowhere near code.

So the rules are this: every few weeks, the toilet gets plugged up, and I spend a day or less thinking I can just add water to the bowl regularly and clear the clog. It teases me by making weird gurgling noises, but eventually I break down and plunge it, whereupon it clears immediately and with very little effort.

It got kind of funny on Friday, and I didn't deal with it. So when I got back tonight, I gave in and just plunged it right away, because I'd been driving for hours and required its services. And it hasn't unplugged. I plunged it with all my might, harder than I plunged it the day I had to climb on the roof with the help of the girls up front and dislodge something from the vent. And it is draining, but only very slowly. All is not lost -- I have a studio only five minutes away from here with an adequate toilet -- but it's awfully inconvenient to have to go to school to use the bathroom.

If it will not plunge clear tomorrow morning, I will be calling a plumber. I hope that this is something like a $50 service call, rather than something that requires fixing the fact that the plumbing lacks adequate slope to prevent plugs like this, which would probably entail ripping the crap out of the kitchen floor and leaving me without a bathroom at all. But with any luck, the toilet will recover its senses and start gurgling any moment now, indicating its willingness to give in.

My butt hurts. It hurts because I have spent the last several days standing in studio, working on a model. It hurts because I stood for ten hours yesterday, one of those outside in the cold talking on the phone about the foundation (stress, stress), then got in the car and drove home for four hours without stopping. I told Noel my butt hurt (while he was driving around the Marin Headlands last night trying to find a bunch of Morris dancers and not succeeding), and he said, "Why does your butt hurt? You've been standing all day." As if the only way your butt could hurt is if you sat on it.

Also, my knees ache, and I have a pop in my shoulder. Whine whine whine. You'd hardly think I was under 40.

So today I am lying down for the morning. In the afternoon, I will get my aching butt out of bed and drive into San Francisco, where I will first go to a yarn shop and possibly spend next quarter's tuition on yarn (don't worry; I pay in-state tuition), then meet up with some friends and go watch Noel make an ass of himself in celebration of his cultural heritage. Watching people dress up in silly clothes and hop around with bells on makes me very happy that my cultural heritage is less publicly goofy.

Tomorrow we meet with our contractor in the morning, then I have to drive back to school. We're almost halfway through the quarter, and this one seems to be going faster than the other three. I'm enjoying school, but really looking forward to living at home all summer. Unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes are great, and have saved us a lot of heartache, but they are not the same thing as being able to have stupid conversations in person.

I've been spending a lot of time working on house issues lately, having taken over as project manager from Noel. This means that when I'm not in classes -- and sometimes during the lulls in studio -- I'm out on the walkway, talking about contracts and materials and costs with our contractor. What it all comes down to is that $104,000 is more than a little bit more than $55,000, a simple fact that it has been taking our contractor two weeks to understand fully, as awful as the prospect is for all of us. It's much worse for him, of course. We get a new basement out of the deal, after all.

I've also been working on a new project in studio, for a ritual space, but right now it's in the messy, inchoate state with no photos. I do, however, now know that the staircase between the two wings of the engineering building has stairs that are in no way code-legal, and which vary in size from 5 1/2" rise to 6 1/2" rise, and from 11" run to 12 1/2" run. That's some substantial variation.

And I knit a penguin, which I sewed up all wrong and then destroyed while trying to un-sew it to fix the problem. It's a good thing I wasn't just made pope, because there's no way I could do that infallible thing. Oh, right, or the male thing, because we all know only boys can talk to God mano-a-mano.

Noel called me earlier to make sure I'd gotten home safely in the rain. Of course, it was POURING there, but it was just fine -- sunny and bright -- my whole drive down to SLO, so I had no idea what he was talking about except in the abstract sense (having heard the weather report on the radio).

Rosie came down with me again to give Noel a vacation from dog mornings and her more chances to try to sniff the entire beach. We took our time getting here (we stopped at Fry's to try to find some weensy clamps for model building), then we had a little walk, ate dinner, and did engineering homework (Rosie's a real champ at stress calculations). I was sitting down at the computer to check out the lecture notes for history when the heavens fell on the apartment. Hey, wow, is it raining. And that domed skylight in the bathroom is like a drum, isn't it? Now I see why he was concerned.