Personal Statement

Personal Statement

Monday, May 7, 2012

Still Alive . . . And Not Yet Incarcerated

Yes, I know that I fell off of the face of the Earth for a little while there.  Sorry about that.  I have been somewhat consumed with trying to move back into my house.  Emphasis on "trying."

Feel like I'm trapped in that Paula Adbul video with the cartoon cat.  "Two steps forward, two steps back."  Example:  Cannot get final electrical inspection until someone does something about the wire protruding from the middle of my kitchen floor.  The wire that was supposed to bring power to a plug in my island.  Except that the contractors didn't bother to ask where my island was, eventually, going to be located when they were tiling the kitchen floor - instead, they just randomly drilled a hole in a tile and pulled a wire through it.  Needless to say, the wire did not correspond to a point actually ON, or even remotely NEAR, the surface of the island.  No, it came up through the floor in the space where the island is open for stools.  Okay, I said, we'll roll with it:  we'll just put a plug in the floor.  Why do I need a plug in the floor?  I DON'T.  But it seemed easier than capping off the wire and replacing one floor tile.  So off to Lowe's I went.  One floor plug purchased (for the ridiculous price of $46 - suffice it to say that floor plugs are quite space-age).  Electricians cut a larger hole in the tile to make room for the plug - and discovered that the wire stub protruding through the floor was a dead wire stub, on account of how someone had severed the electrical under the floor.  How?  When?  We may never know.  The irony:  all of this time that I have been semi-worried about the (capped-off) live wire in the middle of my kitchen floor, the actual live wire was under my floor. . . . where it could have started a fire.

Lovely.  Just lovely.  Didn't I just pay a lot of money to have the wires removed from the crawlspace and pulled into the walls to avoid an arcing wire under my feet?  One wire remained under the floors.  JUST ONE.  And they managed to screw that one up.

So the electricians turned off that circuit and went under the house to fix the problem . . . except that another contractor (probably the same one who managed to cut the wire) failed to dig a sufficient trench to permit passage to the center of the kitchen.  Meaning that someone is going to have to go in from under our new range, run some sort of tool across the kitchen, catch the severed wire, pull it to where they can cap it . . . and then I am having the damned thing stuffed back under the floor, and the cut tile cut out and removed, and the $46 floor plug is going back to the store (if it's returnable), because, seriously, put a fork in me, I'm done.

Can't get inspected until the electrical work is finished - and, also, the plumbing.  Plumbing, like electric, is almost complete - ALMOST, except for stupid stuff, like the sink that is only half installed, because the top of the pedestal couldn't go in, because another contractor had put up new drywall that wasn't dry yet.  Isn't that ironic?  Wet drywall.  Adjacent to a sink.  Plumber can't - or won't - guarantee that he'll be back tomorrow. 

Meantime, I have cut drawer liner - yards and yards of drawer liner - that it would be stupid to install until they do the final cleaning.  I have the contents of my new craft closet packed and ready to go - but they just did touch-up paint in the craft closet, so it's still sticky.  And on and on and on . . . .

I have packed the apartment - to a point.  Doesn't make sense to go much further, given that I don't have a place for the boxes to go yet.

What to do?  Aha - Tuesday is trash day at the apartment complex and recycling day at the house.  So I spent my evening cleaning out the freezer, fridge and pantry at the apartment.  Pared things down significantly, filling two boxes of recycling and four bags of trash in the process.

And then I watched "The Voice."  And "Smash."  And now I'm blogging, and watching "Battle of the Network Stars,"  at 1:21 am in the morning.  Because, damn her, my friend Beth tipped me off that BotNS is being rebroadcast on ESPN Classic.  I'm not going to lie, seeing Ed Asner in a Speedo take a bath in the dunk tank, buoyed my mood.  (Get it?  Buoyed?  Because he's in water?  Anyway.)

This promises to be an interesting week. 

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