Today I signed off on the kitchen, it is clean, it is rebuilt. I've got a decent work flow set up to feed six at a time. Wooohoooo. BFD. I only have to feed me.
The living room is restored as well, still full of odds and ends going out the door to here, or there, but restored. For now it only serves me, and the beasties. I've discovered that dogs get addicted to television just like humans. Several times they've asked me to turn it on for them. They don't seem terribly picky about what they watch, but there's supposed to be pictures and noise over there, and without it they get nervous in the evenings. Who would have thought. Turn on the tube, the dogs relax and start to snooze. Something for PETA to foam and fornicate about I suppose. I've often wondered if PETA ever read any of Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer to be specific, the chapter "Peter and the Pain Killer" to be precise, the one where Aunt Polly finally comes to the conclusion that what is cruelty to an animal just might be cruelty to a boy as well... Oh, well.
So today I started in on my garage. It was in horrible shape, neglected for months, stuffed and overstuffed with the junk and crap that accumulates when you let others borrow your shop. For example, how do you convince an idiot kid you don't save the worn out parts, the ones you just changed? If they were any good you wouldn't have been changing them, right? He tries so hard to be like me, and doesn't have but half a clue what he's trying to be like. Daddy is a scratch mechanic, and they always have piles of old parts laying around, never mind that the ones you save are those that still have life left in them, you throw away the worn out junk. It's all appearance to him. He doesn't realize that's why he does it, but it's the truth. He's still socialite in so many ways, at the levels below thinking about things he still thinks appearance makes a flying fuck in the world of fire and steel. I'm trying, but sometimes I almost despair of teaching him very much. But... he's mine, I do love him, so I keep trying.
It took all afternoon, worked the poor little air compressor like a rented mule, but you can walk through it again, the floor is clean (there's no broom made to match 100psi and an eductor nozzle for sweeping with), all the tools are put away, things are starting to return to normal there.
I need my garage, I do. I need a place that has always been mine, where there are no memories to give ghosts a portal back into the day. And anyhow, soon enough the boy will have his old truck over here, and then the 302 will have a new home (one engine gone!), and maybe the brother will score a buyer for the 5.4 Triton he picked up by accident (cleaning up behind a crook of a mechanic who told the lady her engine was blown without even really looking at it... she showed up at his house with a salvage yard engine in the bed, paid the bro to swap it out... later found out not a thing wrong with the old mill, just a blown heat exchanger and a dishonest dealership trying to screw a woman out of 6500 dollars... bro felt bad that he didn't get to it first, do a proper diagnosis and fix it for her for two, three hundred... my bro is way to honest, explains a lot of his poverty), and then? Then there will room for me to build a mighty mouse of a little Porshe pancake to go back in the old VW bus. All old hippies are supposed to have a VW bus, it's just part of the uniform, you know?
And yea, I'm hiding from the room I'm sort of scared of, the room I used to live in before Barb got sick and I had to move into another room... you couldn't sleep in the same bed with her, the arthrites was just to bad to tolerate motion and stay asleep. I'm dreading going into that room to clean it. I'm scared of what I might find. I always thought I had decent armor for my heart, that I could sheild it at need, but no, she knew me to well, I've found things just out in the house that feel like battery acid on a sunburn. No telling what I'll find when I get into her secret places. I'm having to psyche myself up for that one.
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