Scattered Thoughts . . .

I spent about 24 hours sick with a stomach virus.  It wasn't horrible but it was pretty lousy.  I'm typically not a puker but I had a very difficult time keeping everything down especially when I was lying in bed.   This virus started shortly after going to bed on Mother's Day so I must have picked it up on Saturday when I went to the Post Office to send a package.  I suppose it is possible that I picked it up on Mother's Day from Whitney or Ellie but it is more likely that I picked it up the previous day at the Post Office.   I spent almost all of Sunday night going to and from the bathroom.  Even when I was not in the bathroom, lying down to sleep was not much of an option.  Lying down just allowed the puke to move upward more easily so I spent my little bit of time in bed in a sitting position.  I think I may have gotten only one to two hours of sleep Sunday night before being awoken with a mouth full of puke.  I didn't actually get any restful hours of sleep un

First thing this morning, I noticed that the bathroom sink was not draining.  I don't mean it was slow or sluggish.  I mean it was not draining.   We had to run to the Post Office as early as possible this morning to ship a couple of packages but I knew I would now have a frustrating morning ahead of me once we arrived back home. I had a pretty good idea that the rather long drain pipe running to the side wall was probably clogged with hair, gunk, soap and I don't want to know what else.  This would mean that I would need to disassemble the drain.  I decided to just check the trap under the sink first though just in case this could be a relatively simple problem to resolve. I emptied out the long vanity cabinet and then went looking for a bucket.  I placed the bucket under the trap and disassembled the trap...  nasty, foul water spilled out...  but the trap didn't have as much gunk in it as I thought it would or should considering the sink wasn't draining at all.  "

I somehow managed to have a couple of productive days... yesterday and today... which allowed me to install the new temporary flooring in our master bathroom and our new toilet! We've been without our master bathroom since mid-January so it was nice to finally feel well enough to be productive and get it up and running again.  We had a problem with our toilet way back in January. The toilet was falling through a rotting floor. We have bigger plans for this bathroom but, at this point, we're not ready to completely renovate this room so it needed a relatively easy and quick fix. A toilet falling through a collapsing floor moved this project ahead of all of our other projects. Emergencies like this really screw up a schedule! Being forced into this repair project meant making another 'clean spot' with some temporary upgrades and repairs.  I re-framed the floor... re-framed toilet support... added reinforced subflooring... painted the wall behind the toilet whil

I'm still trying to get the master bathroom put back together but other things keep getting in the way. My health has been an issue (surprise, surprise) so that delayed things a bit... The weather has been an issue on many days causing delays... snow and rain have kept all my tools under cover in the shed... We had the grandchildren staying with us all weekend... And, then we had a surprise electrical problem which demanded instant attention because we lost power to the furnace and we are currently in the middle of winter! I was in the bathroom, getting the room prepared to start working on the new flooring (new, but temporary, until we can completely renovate this bathroom).  The furnace had just kicked on and about 30 seconds later the room went dark and the furnace shut down. "Uh-oh..." I immediately looked toward the hallway to see if the entire house lost power...  no, the hallway was still illuminated. I went to the circuit breaker panel to see if a brea

I was feeling halfway decent this morning so I spent the morning working on the master bathroom. (Having only one toilet in the house this past week is getting old already! I'm definitely looking forward to having a nice new second toilet in the house!) I had previously removed the old finish flooring to reveal a lot of rotten wood subflooring and about three layers of old, nasty vinyl flooring. Today I needed to figure out how much of the floor was rotten and remove it all. I started pulling up the subflooring with my hands... it would just crumble as I grabbed it so it pulled apart quite easily but made a huge mess. It wasn't long before I decided to just cut back enough to make a 24"x24" hole. First I marked off a 24" square... then out came the circular saw... and I started cutting... first, at only a 1/2" deep... I pulled up more subflooring...  then I cut a bit deeper... pulled out more subflooring... I changed the depth of the cut four times

I had some relatively minor health issues over the weekend while we were with the grandkids but didn't think much of it. I threw some extra medications at my health and pushed on forward.  The past few days, however, have been rather lousy.  In hindsight, I know that the relatively minor health issues I experienced in the preceding days were clues that my health required immediate attention. I should have stopped all activity... I should have taken some emergency medications rather than just some extra medications... and I should have tried to rest and recover. Instead, my health progressively worsened as I tried to ignore the warnings and push on through our activities with the grandkids. I haven't been able to wander far from a bathroom. Sheila and I ran into town last night to pick up some groceries and even that very short trip was a problem. My current gastro-intestinal problems are fairly bad (it has been worse though)... I've been having some difficulty brea

I had thought it was a pretty lousy night last night with all that nausea... tonight has been far worse being sick as a dog in the bathroom. I had some sudden anaphylactic-type symptoms as well as nausea and stomach cramps... then all the even worse miserable symptoms hit and I spent far too much time and energy being sick. I've now taken my nighttime medications, extra medications and emergency medications... and, right now, I feel rather poorly which is a significant improvement from my time in the bathroom... but, I feel as though I'll probably be back in the bathroom before long... I'd just like to sleep peacefully.... UPDATE:  It is the following morning and my biggest issue this morning is that I am worn out, generally feeling lousy and I am groggy from the emergency medications. Oh... and these emergency medications make me very hungry!  

I haven't written anything in about a week and a half because I've had some exceptionally lousy health and, more recently, I've been busy working on the house and out in the yard during my good health. Working on the house only happened after taking a few weeks off because of spinal problems. I managed to have a productive and busy weekend but I didn't get to touch a single thing that has been on my long 'to-do list'.   On Saturday afternoon, we had a broken water supply pipe due to repeated stress. The pipe just broke completely in two! The water was shooting out of the broken pipe like a garden hose with a nozzle on it! Water was everywhere! Our vanity was filled with water, soaking everything in the vanity. The flooring was soaked. On the positive side, the adjoining bedroom is a construction zone so no finished materials were damaged. The problem was gaining quick and easy access at a time when we needed to move quickly to minimize damage. The wate

Last night was... brutal.  The lousy health started to hit me while I was cooking dinner... country fried steak, pan roasted potatoes, country gravy and a big pan of fried okra. With four burners on the stove going at once, it was far too hot for me.  Heat is a major trigger for me. Warmer environments for anything longer than a few minutes will trigger my Systemic Mastocytosis episodes. These episodes can simply be painfully debilitating with only a few symptoms and/or they can include life threatening symptoms such as anaphylaxis. After cooking dinner, I couldn't even eat... I was nauseated beyond belief... and, generally, felt quite lousy. I knew my body was crashing but, apparently, I was not thinking clearly which is another symptom... diminished cognitive reasoning. I should have taken some emergency medications at this point but didn't think of it at the time. By the time we finished dinner, my nausea was still constant but I was experiencing worsening waves of n

I am back into recovery mode.  It is funny...  well... maybe "funny" isn't really the most accurate adjective... but, even after having Systemic Mastocytosis for more than 10 years, I still forget how much down time my body and health requires. It isn't until I have tasks and projects stacked up like aircraft in a holding pattern waiting to land at a crippled airfield that I clearly hear that voice... "Hey... hey you, there... you are sick! What makes you think you could make plans to get things accomplished like a healthy person? Do you need another reminder of just how sick you are?"  Then I suddenly get whacked with crappy health. Last night we trekked up to Lowes to pick up a few more patio blocks (I learned long ago that I need to break all projects down into small tasks... we need more than a "few" patio blocks but I can only handle a few at a time) for our kitchen grilling area project in the backyard. We had no problems with that other

A panoramic photo consisting of four images.  This was the only way to get the entire vanity wall into the shot!  I refinished the shelves, painted the walls, refinished the vanity,  installed a new sink andfaucet, installed a tile backsplash and refinished the countertop. Sheila recently asked me what had happened to the photos of the first phase of our master bathroom renovation. She thought I had written about it in my blog but couldn't find it anywhere on this site. Later that evening, she explained that she was talking about our home renovations with her carpool friends and they wanted to see one aspect of our first phase of renovations in our master bathroom. So... here is a quick explanation of what we did in Phase 1 of the master bathroom renovations... Basically, our main goal of this first phase of renovations was just to clean up the bathroom a little and to move in a direction toward our design style for the entire house. Here is a short list of the problems...

Spackling finished... wainscoting will come up to a height of 42 inches so the bottom will be covered rather than painted. The weather is lousy enough today that I don't feel comfortable pulling all my expensive shop power tools out of the shed to start on finish carpentry for our half bath project. Instead, I decided to document where we are at in the project as of today. Waste plumbing is finished... flooring tile is finished... supply plumbing is roughed-in but still need to add three valves after the wainscoting is installed... electrical is finished... drywall is finished...  and now spackling is finished. My health has been poor over the past few days so I accomplished very little this week. I did, however, manage to get a coat of joint compound on the drywall each day. Since it is a very small room, that only required about 15 minutes of work each day. So, at least that has been accomplished this week.  Note:  I'm out of practice with my spackling...  What norm

First thing this morning, Sheila and I set out to buy more supplies for our half bathroom. The priority was two sheets of drywall and lumber to custom build a door for the bathroom. We made it to Lowes easily, but... Once we arrived at Lowes, we had all sorts of crazy and frustrating problems. Prices were absurd and about 30% higher than all the other local building suppliers. Some items we needed were out of stock. The quality of lumber was not only rather lousy but the quality we were seeing was not matching the claimed ratings. Things would get worse though. I needed just two sheets of drywall to finish the bathroom so we loaded that onto our cart first. I was really looking forward to getting this part of the job finished. I also needed a good quality sheet of 1/2" plywood for door panels. I wanted cabinet grade A-A rated plywood (each side graded A) but would settle for A-B. They had A-C in stock... okay, I would settle for that if I placed a decent C graded side on the i

All the electrical works! Dimmer switch at left, fan delay timer at center, and GFCI outlet at right. I managed to get a little bit more accomplished on the half bath yesterday. That wore me out and I had some health issues later that night so I took another day off today for rest and recovery. Actually, I slept the entire day! I installed the subfloor as well as the underlayment. That was a fairly easy job. We now have another clean and level spot in the old house! Oh, and a solid spot!  Once I get a primer for the self-adhesive tiles, I can finish the flooring. I have a couple of extra boxes of the tile flooring that we had installed in the hallway that we plan to continue on into this new half bath.  A week or so ago, I had written that I installed all the wiring and tested all the fixtures and everything was fine... While everything worked fine (meaning I had wired everything correctly), I had a problem fitting these bulky electronic switches/timers/outlets into the parti