Journal

“Do you journal?“

Ugh.

This is the second time in the last day someone asked me that. And my therapist says I should.

I journal mentally but the thought of writing things down in a notebook seems like a lot of work. I’m always thinking about my day and the emotional wreck that is my existence. I just don’t really write it down. The closest I have come to consistently journaling or real journaling is…surprise, surprise…this blog.

I guess the advantage of a written journal is that whatever random thoughts and touchy feely stuff I put in there just sits in a notebook on my nightstand and doesn’t sit inside me, and I don’t have to worry about my mom reading it. (Don’t worry, she doesn’t know where I live, let alone how to get inside the house).

There is a long list of things that stress me out from a three year plus divorce process, my kids that hate me, a job that can be of uncertain security even on its best days, avoiding wallpaper removal, and a cat that is so needy he turns me to the dark side of avoidant attachment style. Journaling would definitely maybe help me out. And journalling would make my therapist and girlfriend proud.

What’s fun is that the more I write here about pointless (and not pointless) stuff, the more it starts to look like I’m journalling. This is great!

Okay, I don’t feel like pouring my mind out tonight, but at least it’s a start. Better than playing games on my phone or spraying my bad cat with a water bottle.

Yay me!

I’m writing…er, journalling…and that’s progress.

New Day

It’s been about two months since we moved out. Or I guess the boys and their mom moved out. So I decided to change the header for this journal. Now it’s just a picture of the horizon I took years ago last time I was in Florida with the boys.

I’ll keep the title of the blog. Not sure I have a reason to change that. The four apples I took are still in my fridge, getting wrinkly but generally still holding their own and not rotting yet. I wonder if there is a way to preserve them.

Writing has always been therapeutic. And this digital journal has always been more about me than about anything you might learn here. But if I helped someone learn something or avoid a mistake then that’s a good bonus.

I’ve got a bathroom and a kitchen I want to remodel in the new house, so hopefully I’ll have the mental energy to share those projects with you.

I’d love to get this little house fixed up and aim to sell it in the spring and find something with a basketball hoop for the boys. And a place to re-erect the trampoline. They aren’t currently talking to me, but I like to dream of a day when they let me back into their world.

I don’t expect anyone to understand. And I’m too tired to explain. At least too tired tonight.

It was another tough day.

Luckily tomorrow is a new day.

Moving Day

On August 16th, 2023 we closed on our home eleven years and four months after we moved into it, closing out the chapter and book of what I’ve been writing about for all of these years.

Over the course of about four days we spent a lot of sweat and tears, hastily at times, getting everything moved out of the house. The hard work was a great distraction for me, as I didn’t want to ponder leaving, too much. The 15th really was the toughest day of my life. It was a really challenging and sad day. The hopes and dreams of this house, in contrast to the realities were a lot to think about during those days. The boys were really great in helping out during a tough situation for them.

When I was fourteen my family sold and moved out of the home I grew up in. So I thought about that and hope that the boys would be okay with a move. At least the house part. The separation of their mom and dad probably not as much.

Not much about life goes as planned. The truth is we checked all the boxes and there were lots of smiles over those eleven years. And there was a lot of falseness and loneliness that went unrecognized. My hope would be that this is for the better (or at least survival) and the boys will someday understand.

The house was everything I planned and wanted, but I never not felt alone there. Every night was reconciled alone, and every morning started alone. My best friend on my darkest days, my cat, I didn’t even get to bring with me when I left. Everything about that place was wrong where it mattered. We were way over extended and it wasn’t sustainable any way you look at it.

As we packed up, we did do a few things to say goodbye to the estate. The last photo we took was of me in my, less than stellar, apple orchard smiling and crying. Juju bee got to take the last shot at the basketball hoop as did his mother and I.

He made both shots he took.

I missed mine.

Having moved out of the house some eighteen months ago helped me a bit. The place barely felt like home when I lived there, it felt borderline foreign those last few days. Most if not all of my pain was focused on the boys and their discomfort in having to leave.

I don’t know if I’ll ever establish a good relationship with them. It would be great to go to therapy the three of us to work through our grief and maybe in time we will be able to. I know the last four years have helped me, having someone to process things with and work on how I show up in the world. The boys have only ever stayed at my house one night but I hope in time they will want to hang out with me. And maybe it’s what I deserve for being so alone in that old house.

Life is really hard.

I wish I could write something more profound, or smart in this situation. But I don’t know what to say. I really wish we were past all of this so the rebuilding and healing could truly begin. We, as people, really don’t do a good job of building a life conducive to honest nurturing, vulnerability, and communication. I am hopeful the future will be better and this will all make sense. I am working hard to model the behavior for my boys that I want them to see…calmness, presence, love, vulnerability, courage, listening…

So where does this leave this blog?

I’m not sure. There are plenty of DIY projects to continue to cover. I do like writing so I’d like to continue to do so. Maybe a little bit of DIY and a little bit of life. Maybe some talk of what’s next. I am working on a vision board, working on my budget and goals. Maybe I can share some of that adventure. Maybe the blog evolves into something else. As I approach fifty years next week, it’s probably the right time to pivot.

Ok, I’m rambling. Here are some photos from those last days. Stay tuned for what’s next.

Checking the cabinets one last time

I took an apple from the four trees that were bearing fruit

Our last sunset 8/15/23

That’s all folks! Me in my orchard for the last time.

Two Weeks

Two weeks until we hopefully hand over the keys to the next owners of the house we started building in 2011.

For years I’ve been worried about how I’d feel leaving for good. The house, land, and I have been connected for a long time. But the reality is I started moving on a long time ago. Magic gave way to reality. Fleeting highs could no longer infill increasingly vast lows. I lived in that house alone for a long time. Leaving means rebuilding, and rebuilding means not only survival but thriving.

So, yes it’ll be sad in a way to leave. But some good memories were built there. And a new family will hopefully make many more.

And I’ll be making many more great memories myself.

A house is just a place after all. It alone can’t make any of us happy, and it’s sad when it is shared alone in plain sight. I always was made to feel like an outsider there. In my little place I’m in now I’m doing well. And learning to be content and at peace. Finally.

I have a few things to pack up. I’m guessing there’s a lot of things that were once important that are being left behind for me to figure out what to do with. Oh well. I’ll figure it out, I always do (out of necessity).

I’ll take some pictures.

Walk around.

Visit my trees.

It’ll be okay. I’ve moved on and will remember the things worth remembering.

I’m proud of what I helped build and how the vision became a reality. It was under contract within two days, for more than was being asked. A testament to the vision. It’s a good place but it was time to move on a long time ago.

I’m so very glad to be where I am at, and the love I’ve found and am finding in so many places.

I am so hopeful for what is on the horizon.

Thriving is a wonderful place to live.

Jack of Spades

On top of a cabinet, where only I could spy, I noticed a playing card face down, with a layer of dust on it. This was likely flung up there by playful boys flinging cards at each other years ago.

Turning it over, a jack of spades was revealed.

In school I played a lot of euchre, and jacks are the best cards in the deck. For many years I carried a retired jack of hearts in my wallet from a trip with friends half of my lifetime ago, some twenty-five years.

I don’t know what to make of it, but this jack will go in my memory box.

Makes me wonder when the other two jacks will show up.

For Sale

We broke ground on our home July 11th, 2011.

On July 11th, 2023 I walked two realtors room to room, and the house was unceremoniously photographed to be put in a brochure and online.

A drone could be heard buzzing around while I hid in my studio waiting for it to be over.

The house will have been listed by the time you read these words.

I had a chance to walk the orchards and noticed at least three of the nine apple trees had apples on them! It’s funny that after all these years I never got apples on all of the trees, yet three trees is probably my best year ever. They look a bit small and spotty but maybe they will make it to fall.

Mother nature was in all her glory on photography day. The sky was the deepest blue you could imagine and the clouds were painted in place. No way could they be real. And the yard was a color green that you can only find in your imagination.

I snapped a few shots of the inside myself.

Notches

Every year on their birthday for the last ten years, two little boys would stand up straight, proudly against the white one inch by four inch trim of their bedroom closet. The shorter boy against the trim board on the left side of his closet door, the taller boy against the trim to the right of his closet door. Their mother would press a book down on their head, level against the trim and they’d dart out with smiles to see how much they had grown in the last year. One of us would grab a pencil and make a little mark and I’d write a number next to the mark.

4 to 14

2 to 12

And the last step each year was to take an x-acto blade and make a small notch in the wood.

Just in case the pencil ever wore off.

Zero Apple Trees

I think I need to write again.

It’s been a few weeks since I last checked in.

About a hundred and twenty weeks to be exact.

I’ve got a lot going on, and a lot has changed in that hundred and twenty weeks. But then I remembered why I started writing this blog in the first place. Writing kind of helped me out during the stress of building a new house. And despite everything that is different now, I am still fiddling around with household things like installing lights and painting things.

In that time since I last wrote and you last read (me), there was a pandemic. That was pretty stressful for us all, I bet. Also I made the decision to move into a new house. I bought a small box of a house, about 1,300 square feet in Akron, Ohio. It was built in 1959. It has three bedrooms, a family room, dining room, kitchen, basement, and one and one half bathrooms.

When I moved out I didn’t get to take my cat. So I adopted a new cat. The cat I adopted, his name was originally Mowgli, but his last owner named him Rex. I liked “Mowgli” better so I call him “Mowgli”. He was super affectionate at PetSmart, in his glass cage. I thought he liked me special and we had a bond. He would go up to the glass and meow and smile at me. Turns out he likes everyone that way. He’s super needy. Sometimes I’m super needy too, and he lets me hold him like a stuffed animal and we take naps. Mowgli loves wet cat food and wakes me up every morning at 4am to get wet cat food. We keep each other company.

I’ve lived in my new (to me) house for fifty-four of those one hundred and twenty weeks since I last wrote. This house has no apple trees. It has a big tree in the front yard, and really bad grass. The grass is so bad I only mowed it like four times last summer. I don’t have a lawn mower. I was allowed to borrow the electric one from the old house a few times. I planted two mums a friend got for me, and I bought a really nice basket of flowers for the front porch. It all looked nice.

Inside the kitchen and bathroom need to be remodeled. I got some estimates but I need to wait til I’m not broke to fix those up. The bathroom shower leaks but I think that’s because of the wall tiles. They were falling off. I fixed those with duct tape. I cut a big hole in the kitchen ceiling but the plumber and I couldn’t figure out where the leak was coming from.

I took the cabinet doors off the kitchen cabinets. I like the open shelf look and like seeing all my “stuff”. Keeps me company in the kitchen. Seeing my Tostitos and cans of soup. The cabinets are all painted green. I’ll probably get new cabinets. In the meantime I did get a refrigerator, range, and microwave. I’ve made several meals in the range over the last fifty-four weeks. I’d love to have a dishwasher but there is no hookup or space for one. I’ve washed a lot of dishes over the last fifty-four weeks.

When I first moved in, like night one, I went to turn on the hot water and figured out that the hot water tank didn’t work anymore. Some nice plumbers installed a new one that day. I like hot water. Mowgli doesn’t care either way, about water temperature.

There was mold in the attic, but I got that remediated for about two thousand dollars.

I got a washer and dryer, and built a little platform out of pressure treated boards to put them on. It was my first construction project at the house. Turned out pretty good. It makes the washer and dryer a bit tall, so if you’re a short friend, you’ll have trouble doing laundry. Mowgli doesn’t do laundry so he doesn’t see an issue here. I also demolished the original basement sink which weighed about 500 lbs. I broke it up with a sledgehammer. I’ve been throwing it out piece by piece for the last twenty-seven weeks. It was solid concrete. You see a one in every house built in the 1950’s.

I painted the dining room. All the trim in the house is not the greatest wood. It’s much fresher to paint this wood a solid paint color. I chose a new (to me) Sherwin Williams color collection called Urban Outlook. “Greek Villa” is an excellent off-white paint color. I painted the dining room trim Greek Villa; the chair rail and baseboard, and around the windows. The walls I painted Believable Buff which is one of my favorites from the old house. I’ll paint the rest of the rooms in time, including all of the trim. The floors could use refinishing too.

Hmmm….what else did we update…I had some new outlets installed. All the old outlets were the two prong types. So to be able plug in a TV or other three-prong things, I needed three-prong outlets. A few GFI outlets were installed in the family room and bedrooms. I also updated the porch lights to something new. They look nice.

One day the garage door fell off and tried to kill me. Mowgli was inside so he was okay. Anyway, I had to get that fixed too. The garage smells old, so I don’t go in there much.

Okay, this felt nice writing today. I had a tough day, and this helped. Thanks for reading. I’ll talk to ya soon.

This is Mowgli. He’s my cat and I’m his person. He’s a tuxedo cat, which is the best kind of cat (in my opinion).

O-Ring

“Can you change the water filter?”

That seems like a pretty benign request.

“The water is running slow and before I run the dish washer…” she said

Hmmm…

“Okay but I just changed it like four weeks ago” Anyway, who knows what’s going on, so I decided to change it. I just got a new order of filters. No big deal.

So I went downstairs and did the drill. We have a whole house inline filter that takes out the chlorine and any bad germs out of the water before sending the water to the rest of the house. Process is you shut off the water, bleed out the little bit of pressure and water between the two valves; you bleed it into a steel bucket I have down there for this job. You unscrew the canister and dump out the old filter and the water in the canister into the bucket. Insert the new filter, screw the canister back on, close the bleed valve and open the two inline valves. Some gurgling and air pressure sounds and you’re back online.

Usually when you screw the canister back on it’s fussy, you have to kinda align the filter and catch the threads and it stops turning just as it’s tight and ready to go. This time it wasn’t too bad, not as tight as usual.

Hmmm…oh well, whatever.

I closed the bleed valve and turned the inline valves on and water starts spraying out the side.

What the heck?!

Water off. Try this again.

I tried it a few times. No change. Still water spraying out.

I look inside and there’s a black o-ring.

Hmmm….

I fiddle with the o-ring. Take it off. Try. Put it on the male part of the coupling. Try. Fiddle with it some more.

Now I’m worried.

Nothing I could do was fixing the issue.

That’s it, call a plumber. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m a carpenter, not a plumber. So I franticly go upstairs and google “emergency plumber repair”. I call the number and give my info. Of course it’s 6:30pm on a Monday. This never happens at 10am on a weekday. They say they’ll have someone contact me after 7pm.

“No water. You all are gonna have to stay at a hotel.” I proclaim to the family while waiting for the plumbing people to call me back. There’s nothing I can do and if they can’t fix it tonight it will be at least tomorrow. And this is the only water supply for the house. And that supply is off.

A little after 7pm I get a call. Thank god. The guy on the other end of the line is Randy and he didn’t seem as worried as I was.

Randy: “Is there an o-ring?”

“Yea.” I replied

“I’d hate to charge you $130 bucks just to do this. There’s a groove you have to seat the ring into in the canister top.”

“Yea, but…”

“…the o-ring seems too big?” replied Randy

Jesus, this dude is reading my mind.

“You just gotta seat it in there. Use two hands. If it’s not working you can try some vaseline. Or you can go to Home Depot and get a new ring. It’s not something we’d have on our truck anyway. Give it a try and worst case call me back if you can’t do it.”

So me, the spouse and kids all fiddle with the o-ring. Damn thing is too big. After all these years my o-ring has worn itself out maybe and is all loose and sloppy. That’s kind of depressing.

“Ok, I’m going to Home Depot.” Everyone else headed out the door to find a house with working plumbing and I headed to the store.

I went to Home Depot and the guy looked at me like I was nuts.

“I don’t think we sell anything like that” but he pointed me towards aisle 44 where they sell the “wrenches n such for that sort of thing” pointing at the large wet, blue canister in my hands. None of the water treatment systems there looked like mine. But…they did have packages of o-rings; one looked too small, the other looked too big. I’ll go with too small.

And to hedge my bets I went to Lowe’s. Same deal. Package of too small and package of too big o-rings, each with a little tube of vaseline.

I went home and took my canister, and it’s old oversized loose o-ring, and tried to fit what seemed to be the closest of my “too small” o-rings into the groove. I lubed up the new spritely o-ring.

Man….it was not working.

I had goo all over my hands and a too small o-ring slithering around the top of my canister, mocking me. Maybe if I had an extra set of hands, but everyone was off enjoying modern plumbing at someone else’s house. Hmm….

On a whim I took my old, loose o-ring and lubricated it. Not really sure why this would work I slowly used my gooey hands to place it in the track.

What the hell?!

As I circled around the o-ring that was previously an inch too wide, joyfully slid into the groove and sat there happy as a clam in brackish water.

Seriously, what the hell?!

With skepticism I marched downstairs, inserted the new filter into the canister and screwed it on. Kinda tight to be honest but with one last revolve it was aligned and seated. Saying a tiny prayer to the person upstairs (god, not some actual person…’cause, as you know, everyone left to find a house with working plumbing) I closed the bleeder and opened the inline valves.

Voila!

Seems like it worked. [knock on wood]

So far I think it worked. I’ll check on it before bed and in the morning. I have no idea why vaseline was the trick to tightening up my o-ring but I’m glad it worked. And I’m only out about ten bucks for the o-rings I apparently didn’t need, but will hold on to.

On the down side I realized my metal bucket has a leak so all the water in the bucket leaked out onto the floor.

I still have no desire to be a plumber, but I’m grateful it’s fixed, whether I had to pay someone or not. Thank you Randy, wherever you are! I owe you one. And I should have tried the vaseline first.

Fire Circle

I can’t believe it took me eight years to figure out what to do with the extra cultured stone that had been taking up space in my garage. The stone is leftover from the fireplace project when we built the house. At the time I had planned to do a couple extra corners in the fireplace design, and when we simplified the design we already had stone. So the result was a bunch of extra corner pieces.

Over time I tried to give the stone away to other people building houses and fireplaces but never got any takers. Then last weekend we had people over for a social distance cookout that included a campfire and s’mores. I mowed the pond dike and scraped away the grass where the fire pit was. I was worried about catching the grass on fire, so I had a bucket of water handy. The campfire worked fine and no fire spread beyond where it should have.

That night someone, maybe me, had the idea…boy, I could use those two boxes of stone to create a fire ring. So, the next day I loaded up the wheelbarrow, twice, and hauled all the stone back to the fire pit area. I simply stacked it around in a circle as my eye saw fit. Nothing fancy and not much labor other than digging the pit a little and arranging stones in the 85 degree heat and humidity.

I like how it turned out and look forward to our next campfire there.

Let me know what you think…