Perfume

My wife came home and stuck her wrist in my face as I crawled off the bicycle and ordered, "Sniff this."  A weird thing to do when you're dripping sweat all over the place.  But I did and it was fine.  Then she grabbed her shirt off the table - the outer layer, she wasn't shirtless this whole time - and told me to smell the sleeve.  I pondered it and replied, "Smells like you spilled beer on yourself."  She looked confused and then sniffed it herself and said, "I get that, it does now."  I told her if she was trying to arouse me, a perfume that smelled like old IPA was probably a solid move, but it was going to arouse our neighbor as well.

Whiskers

There's some ongoing debate about who has found the nastiest crud at their rental property.  This won't make any best of lists if I were to start canvasing the internet, but I felt it might win a local award within my sphere of friends.

I fixed the vanity on the first floor at the rental and it required a whole lot of Ka-boom while I was McGuyver-ing the drawers to make sure they stayed on their rollers.  A lot because in the drawers and all over the bottom of the vanity was this.  While I may be wrong, given what was mixed with it, this seems to be whiskers that are biodegrading.  A lot of whiskers biodegrading.  There was shaving creme in the drawers to back up that supposition.  As well as whiskers mixed in various states of breaking down.  If I had thought of it sooner, I would have taken a more balanced picture that caught the passage of time.  But I was sort of grossed out and this represents a lot of end-state whiskers from the bottom of the vanity.

The cleanup smelled awful!  My brother, who seems not to have the best sense of smell walked in while I was cleaning drawers, pre-warned that it didn't smell so good, and said, "That smells bad!"  I worry that I was subjecting my lungs and immune system to aerosolized whiskers and nasties all to save $300 on a vanity.

Here's the back of the vanity.  Looks like mouse poop, but it's primarily clumped up bits of hair.  The back of the vanity is still sealed with caulk, so I'm not exactly sure how they got all this to the back (it was clean when we switched renters last).  The drawers don't even go all the way back on the sliders.  they stop about three to four inches short.  So there shouldn't be anything back that far.

It's all clean now.  Beautifully so.  Bars are fixed.  And lining paper put in just to ensure that I don't have to worry that enough cleaner to pickle my hands still wasn't enough to kill every whisker-eating microbe who called the vanity home.

In which Home Depot plays an April Fool's joke on me in December

I was swapping out outlets and covers at the rental property today, among many other messy things (maybe I'll post that next...).  I got to this plate cover and, in because I was in screwing auto pilot, just putting screwdriver to screw without really thinking about it, was momentarily incredibly confused.  I'm glad one of the outlets was wired wrong initially so I could over it with a flat plate and had an extra outlet cover available.

Home Improvement

I'm on page eighty of writing a book.  A large part of the reason I'm not blogging so much.  And then I get a scifi book that was released yesterday on my Kindle that I'd preordered, which surprised me because I thought someone was misusing my account.  I entirely forgot I'd ordered it.  But I was excited.  So I'm almost done reading it two days later, despite some killer work hours.  And what do I find in this scifi book - one of my own scenes.  Not like sort of close...really close...DAMN close.  So close I find it hard to believe.  Now, to be fair, my scene differs in the King Kong movie referenced - I use the '76 Jeff Bridges version, not the Empire State Building version - but where they intersect after that, crazy.  I'm glad I have a dated copy, just so when a friend reads both, I can prove I wrote my blurb prior to the March 5th release date of the other book.  Maybe I should just be pleased my brain works so much like an author I really like.

On to the title story.  We had an appraiser come by to assess our home value.  I'm taking our loan from 30 years to 15 year at 3.25%.  It should shave over $100,000 off the total payout.  I don't think there's much else I can do that saves me almost $7K a year, even if I have to pay a bit more each month.  Ming asked if I was nervous my wife wouldn't be able to afford it on her salary if I lost my job.  I pointed out she couldn't afford it on the 30 year mortgage, so that was just bad logic for making a decision.  The appraiser showed up, took his outside pictures, and then looked around the house and took pictures.  This was our discussion:

(In the dining room)

Appraiser: Did you update this room since you bought the house?

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

(In the kitchen)

Appraiser: Did you update this room since you bought the house?

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

(On the semi-four season porch)

Appraiser: Did you update this room since you bought the house?

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

(In the living room)

Appraiser: Did you update this room since you bought the house?

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

(In the downstairs bathroom)

Appraiser: Did you update this room since you bought the house?

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

(In the computer room)

Appraiser: You updated this room since you bought the house.

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

(In the red room/bed room)

Appraiser: Ah, this room has been updated since you bought the house.

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

Appraiser: It looks like it's been updated.

Me: No, we're just very easy on our house.  But as you can see (I point at the stairs we just came down), we are redoing this hallway.

Appraiser: oh...sure.

(In the upstairs bathroom)

Appraiser: Did you update this room since you bought the house?

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.

(In our bedroom)

Appraiser (less certain): Did you update this room since you bought the house?

Me: No, it's just like it was when we bought the house.  (Point to the very last room he hasn't visited).  But that bathroom, we updated that - the tile on the walls and the paint is new.  But the floor of the shower is the same.  We reused it.

Appraiser: Excellent!

I almost felt bad he was so desperate to find a room that I'd redone just to redo it.  Do people really just redo rooms all the time for no reason whatsoever?  I can see having to redo the parquet floors in the kitchen at some point - there are scratches and the finish is going.  But I'm not going to do it as long as the dog is running around on it and I still have nephews and nieces that like to drag things all over it and ride cars across it and a daughter who likes to roller skate from side to side.  The appraisal came in at about 20% over what I owe, so I'm doing better than the general market which is good news - we've only lost about 10% of what we paid - and that means my loan should go through.  Now I just have to stick around until Eryn is out of college to pay it off.

Siding

We're having our house resided. We put it off as long as we could, but bits and pieces were starting to fall off and it was looking a bit low rent. So when we received a check to fix one wall because of the hail damage we had, we opted to fix all four for twice the price (the easiest sort of math), and to use prepainted cement hardie board rather than dentable aluminum siding. They've been working on it for a week with a break when they ran out of the maroon edging, but it's coming along.

Front of the house. You can't see the garage where Pooteewheet scribbled "health care for everyone" on the wrapping. She's in the process of painting those wooden posts a matching maroon. The area around the bird bath is where we're going to put in a drop and some edging and wood chips and extend the cover a bit further out to eliminate a bit of mowing. The bird bath was Steve's before and he was nice enough to give it to us for yard decoration.


Back of the house. Unfortunately, the storm windows back here are pretty rotted out, so I have to order new ones.


Edge of the "Minnesota Room" where you can see some of the siding and trim. The color of the siding isn't that much different from what our house looked like before, but the maroon edging really adds a nice bit of color.