Down Dog

Now I have downsized my dog. Supposedly, I am busy downsizing my collection of things; and I should be able to say here that I have such a momentum going of getting rid of so many things that the dog got swept out in the whirlwind. But that's not how it is. I have been so very slow about getting rid of anything, it's more like I owe some downsizing and so it falls to the dog. It's not really like that, either.

Husband is working out of town in El Paso and has an apartment out there. We get 2 weekends together each month, out there or at home. We decided it would be nice for my husband to have the dog out there with him. She dotes on him, crowding in to lick his feet every chance she gets. She'll lick his feet for hours. I shove my feet in her face and all I get is maybe one small lick if I'm lucky and/or have been walking in gravy.

So, daughter and I drove out there to visit and brought the dog and left her there. The dog gets a nice walk up the mountain every morning and gets to be with my husband all day at work in his office. What she doesn't get is her doggie door that opens onto our lawn...and me. I talk to her on the video phone each evening. She lifts her ears and cocks her head to each side trying to find the source of my voice. I think the worst for her is that there is very little grass in El Paso, particularly around the apartment complex and where they usually walk. My husband isn't sure that his coworkers really like having to greet the dog when she comes to jump on them every time they enter his office, but that, of course, is what this friendly dog likes the best! We're trying it out for a while.

Exterminator Finishes and Leaves; Episode Closed

After the supervisor closed the hole, the noise never did start again. After about 4 days, the exterminator visited one last time to pick up the traps and close the case. EEK! He found a rat in one of the traps! After almost 2 months and 10 visits that included 3 whole-house searches...one rat!

A few days later, no new activity; and they did take the traps and close the case. The nights are quiet, except for my mind, which jumps and waits silently for more each time I hear the tiniest noise.

We'll never know what really happened in the attic and subfloor! Such are the mysteries of life.

Nevertheless, we are minus one pest. Downsized!

Done Digitizing Old Record Albums!

I made it! All done before the mp3 encoder access expired! And with days to spare! I now have a computer full of old music and a bunch of record albums ready to give away.

But is it simple? Huh! Not me! There are 3 problems:

1) Finding a market to get paid for some of the old albums and taking the time to get the records to that market, be it a live flea market or garage sale or a Craig's list or Ebay.

2) Many of the albums have a lot of information on them, including histories of the artists, listings of songwriters, and notations of song names and length of tracks;and a few of the albums have booklets with even more information, such as lyrics and photos from performances. These seem to be worth....keeping. Ayeee

3) Windows Media Center has a feature where you can connect the batch of songs from an album to a photo of that album cover and listings of the "tags," ie, listings of names of tracks and lengths. I guess this is so that you can form playlists of albums easily. This feature is a little stodgy, in that if you name a song wrong, it gets all confused and offers you the correct name of the song. But sometimes you have a slightly different version of the album than is listed or sometimes you want to list the song with a different title. And this gets mucky.

You can create your own version of an album or a "mix" album within these Media Center listings. I spent a lot of time working with this while my albums were recording. It was doing pretty well, until all of a sudden, a whole bunch of albums I had gotten into the system all had the picture of the Sweeney Todd album. And then I worked on that and they all changed to the Oxygene cover. I dunno what happened.

Then there were shows, where the theme was played more than once during the show, eg, the Sweeney Todd theme. When I listed it for the second time, it erased the record of the first time. Oh, it got worse. The short version is that I gave up and now have not only 4 albums with the Oxygene cover showing next to them but also about 250 songs listed on the Media Player as "newly recorded" but not grouped into albums with tags. I have them in folders in my files on the computer by artist and album, but in the Media Player they are just listed individually. And so now I am saving about 30 albums so I can figure out which song goes with which album and what order they would be in, if I ever want to straighten out my Windows Media Player. Not sure I will do this. I never used this feature in the past.

Eureka!

I think I found the hole where the animal(s) is(are) getting in. At about noon, there was much noise above my head in the attic. I'm thinking squirrel, bringing in a walnut, dropping it on the sheetrock above my head, rolling it around some...just because it's round. Then twanging some wires. Then running across the floor (my ceiling) and climbing around in the fixtures over the laundry room, picking up small pieces of wood along the way and dropping them. Or maybe it was trying to drag a long stick through the attic and the stick was getting hung up among wires, boards, and detritus along the way.

I couldn't just sit there and not try to do something. So I went into the attics...again. The guys I pay don't seem to be getting the job done. But it's my house and someone has to do it! I wore neoprene gloves this time so I wouldn't quail at going where I knew I needed to go - among the insulation. I went as far toward the slanted-roof edges inside the 2 attics as I could.

I found a tiny hole that has been gnawed in the tippy tip of a bay-window angle way up high in the top attic, but it's very small. Then, in the lower attic, closer to where I have been hearing the activity, I found shavings that look like a nest. This is next to an edge where the slanted roof meets the gutter. When you look from inside the attic, you can't see the whole nest; because the floor of the attic is double, and you can't see the lower part. All I could see of the nest was a few inches of what looks like shavings, but it was enough. I could see a place directly above it on the particle-board ceiling where the gnawing had occurred.

This wouldn't explain all the gnawing sounds like a huge saw that I have been hearing above my office, but it is a start. Because outside, from a ladder, I found a big area right near that attic space where the shingles are easy to lift and the wood is either rotted or gnawed out. I think that's at least one place where animals are passing. The exterminator will be here tomorrow.

Ma'am, There is Not an Animal in Your Attic

Today I was exonerated! I know they talked about me; thought I was crazy. But no more. Now we are working together, again, to downsize: we're ready to rid the house of whatever animal is setting up a workshop in the attic.

The exterminator came in to check and remove traps he had placed a few days ago. These traps had been placed 3 times already in the past few weeks, with no evidence of success. This morning, the exterminator left, saying very politely, "You might be hearing something late at night in your walls, but I don't think it's an animal!" I told him I would not ask for more traps; I'd watch and listen and let them know if any new evidence became available that might help them.

It wasn't that I was letting them out of their contract easily; they have been to my house 5 times already during January. The first time, I complained of animal noise in the attic, and they found a hole through the wall in the gutter. They patched the hole and left 5 traps. The second time, they came to check the traps. Three traps had sprung, but no bait had been taken and no animal had been caught. The exterminators came back several times and placed traps in different parts of different attics (we have 3). A supervisor even rechecked the entire roofline from a ladder.

The logical situation would be that with a hole patched, an animal would be trapped in the attic and would either go for the bait or would die of starvation somewhere within the walls and would stink. Nothing happened. But nights, sometimes 11:30, sometimes 1:00, and once at 4:30 AM, my husband, I, or both of us would hear noises and would listen and try to locate the noise. I went outside, shined flashlights, listened with my ear to walls, sat quietly staring at ceilings...and heard animal activity. I think Santa's workshop might be relocating to my attic! There is scratching, scraping, banging around, twanging, pitter-patter, sawing, and gnawing.

Then, this morning, after the exterminator left with his traps and his opinions, I heard scraping and gnawing above my head, during business hours for the first time. I phoned the exterminator and he came back...and heard it! He set more traps. He believes me now. I hope we get the animal(s) out before they have a problem or cause a problem.

Digitizing Old Record Albums Has to Be Done in Real-Time

Digitizing Old Record Albums Has to Be Done in Real-Time

Listening to the old albums while playing them on the USB turntable has, of course, been somewhat of a distraction. Today the big draw was “Camp Mataponi in Prayer and Song.” This album was recorded in 1964, two days before parents’ visiting day. On the prayer side, there is a service, with several very sweet solos. The camp owner, Sam, actually announces the soloists’ names; but I don’t remember any of the girls. Their clear tuned voices remind me of my daughter when she was that age.

So far I have come along the completion line! I have been watching completion lines of various ilk all day: the bright green box that moves me along the song’s wave, so I can divide the recording into tracks, and which can be elongated or squeezed, thus squeezing the wave. I don’t dare elongate or squeeze on purpose, as I fear it will cause me to have to rerecord the record, which I have had to do about 5 times and haven’t yet figured out why for any of them. Then there is the completion line as each track is being saved as an mp3. So, it’s natural I would see life as a program completion gauge today!

Right now it’s the Radha Krsna Temple album of Krishna Consciousness. I have always loved this album! The cover is kind of creepy, with a picture of two of what I think are dolls but just might be real women, dressed in full dresses with pinafores over the dresses and beads and flowers, and jewels. I won’t further try to guess whether they are women or dolls. The album was produced by George Harrison, who was very musical and chose great tunes to put on this album.

For some reason, probably the distraction factor, I seem to be averaging about 5 albums/day. This might be fine if I were recording after dinner…only. But it’s all day! Each album plays on the turntable and gets recorded. Then it takes a few minutes for me to go into the sound wave graph and place markers where each track starts and list the name of each song. Then there is a processing phase where the computer does the processing that changes the track from a sound wave (not a wav file) into an mp3 file. I could choose a wav format, but I have chosen to use mp3. The digitizing step takes a while, and I have to click on “OK” before each track. So, if I leave the computer and come back, I might have to click “OK,” meaning that all the time I was gone there was little processing being done. Or, if I am in the middle of an email message or checking a website or 3 and I don’t stop to click on “OK,” then no processing is done while I’m doing the other things. Thus, the distraction factor is dragging out the process of getting these albums done. Sometimes I just have to stop all else and listen…or sing along! Sometimes I have the volume on very low, so I miss the music; some of these times I end up playing back the sound track recording because I just have to hear it!

Chasing the Goose, Flapping All the While

Looks like my distracted divergence over the gutters just continued and continued until I had wasted way lots of time and effort. What brain power I burned, trying to find the ideal solution to gutter maintenance for my house that is surrounded by the most beautiful few trees one could ever expect to find within miles in this treeless land. I have trees right near the house. They are living with us. They drink water, get nutrients from the soil and the air, grow, spread, have parasites, get scabs and bugs and have lots of leaves. They shed their old and dried parts. They drop twigs. Their limbs spread over the house, over the gutters. They fill the gutters at least twice a year.

So why did I spend the last (I don't even dare look to see how many) weeks and days trying to find an ideal product to keep us from having to clean our gutters? I found products from $1 per foot to about $25 per foot. The most expensive ones do look good. They look good on paper and they look good on my neighbor's house. But there are still complaints about them. They get stuff in them and they are warranteed against full clogs only. But, really, in spite of all the complaints about them, I am fairly sure that they do offer an ideal solution. I am fairly sure that the top of the line (Leaf Guard) would achieve near perfection; and that even if stuff got in, the local company that deals in Leaf Guard would answer a call if I felt that clogging was starting. But I also don't quite believe their claim that rain won't drip past these gutters even during a heavy rain. I think at least some of it would during the heaviest downpours around here. They claim they can handle rains of 22 inches per hour. Well, it doesn't rain that hard...but, were you to measure the rain gathering on a big roof and falling into these gutters, I suspect you do come close to or go over that 22 inches. I think the reason there are complaints about these gutters is that they cost so much that any tiny thing that goes wrong incenses the buyer. At those prices, the gutters can't afford to get any leaves in them or to let any water drip during even the heaviest storms. And I can't afford that kind of money for gutters right now.

So, going down from the top of the line, I worked over about 10 different plans and combination scenarios for our house. After 3 salesmen visited and I called one back a second time, and after oh too much time trying to choose a solution, my favorite husband says to me during a bicycle ride through the neighborhood, "Gutters were developed in the midwest and north for houses with basements that were getting flooded. Look, lots of houses around here don't have gutters!" So, we talked about it for the whole ride, much to my excitement and his disgruntlement, and we looked at houses all around within 5 miles, and we found that many houses of all sizes have no gutters at all. I even stopped at a house where a man was outside, and I politely asked him how he was doing without gutters. He got chatty and told me he had grown up with gutters, and here he was pretty happy with his new home without gutters, but he has been thinking of getting just a few gutters installed, over the front entry and along the sides of his free-standing garage, which drips onto the grass, forming divots.

So, I looked at our house hard to find a no-gutter solution or a way to take down some of the gutters to reduce the maintenance requirements. I worked out some ideas but then realized that if we take off gutters, we have to putty and seal and paint the fascia left exposed. We haven't prioritized this, and the benefit wouldn't merit the cost.

Now, if I knew how long we planned to stay at this house, I might have a better idea as to whether I would feel it would be worthwhile to get rid of some gutters. We need to paint eventually, so we could get gutters removed when we paint. If we were planning to stay here long, it might even be the time now to remove some gutters and get the painting done. But if we are leaving soon, there's no point in customizing our gutter system, even if we would enjoy it for a year or two. The cost wouldn't pay off. No one new would care.

However, I don't know how long we want to stay, and I had decided to not do that thing of fixing up for the next people and missing out on enjoying the fixes ourselves. Now I feel like I'm right back at the beginning of the whole downsizing exercise, and I haven't done any downsizing. It's kind of a low and frustrated feeling; an out-of-control, indecisive, undirected feeling. You can't make progress if you don't have a goal.

We are so not decided about this house. I seem to want to do home improvements more than to downsize. The man of the house wants me to "lighten the load," so that we have more choices open to us. Could he possibly remember when we moved here with 2 large moving vans full? Could he ever forget? I think the truck to our house was filled with our stuff except for one fairly regular-sized dining room table that belonged to someone else! Most moving vans carry about 3 households of furniture. And DH might not remember but I do, when we were looking at houses here and we looked at those beautiful homes in the hills near the best schools, with the forested hills behind them, the beautifully set and affordable but a little bit small homes...that we knew we couldn't fit our stuff into. We would not have been able to unload our moving van into those houses without leaving stuff outside!

I think maybe DH remembers, as I do, that I vowed to lighten our load as soon as possible. For the first few years, I kept thinking about it but not making any progress. I was busy busy. And I did have the 2 part-time jobs instead of just the one. Then we took on all our parents' stuff, and I put it off for a while. We did get rid of a lot, especially 2 years after inheriting, when I had a big BIG garage sale. But then I stopped progressing on it and didn't think of it much. I focused on moving in and working with this house, instead of lightening the load to increase our options. And then, the kids were an excuse, and neither of us wanted the hassle of moving. And Mr. Man got complacent here too and didn't want the hassle of moving. And now the kids don't need this house and it almost seems reasonable to stay here, but not quite. There are things about it that I sometimes would be glad to leave behind. Too much lawn, too much yard. I can't take care of it as well as it needs. I can't do all the mulching and soil amendment any season requires. I can't keep up with the weeds all season. I can't add the extra touches that I know would be nice: the flowers around the tree trunks, the new plantings, or even the cleaning up of all the beds every spring. I just don't seem to be able to do it, even though I come close. I get a lot done, but it's not really enough. Not really.

The house has a nice moat of privacy, and yet, it has more neighbors than a squeezed in box of a house! With no fence in the back, and back-to-back cul-de-sacs, we have neighbors on each side, one right across the street, and 3 more in the back that all touch our yard! And yet, and yet, it is quiet and peaceful and has lots of nature around. The golf course is great to look at...but there are golfers, sometimes even into the yard. And with no fence, there are joggers and dog-walkers and bicycle-riders and walkers and runners. So it's really not private at all, and there are ever so many nicer places out there, with less upkeep and more privacy and fewer restrictions, and less wasted space, heat, and air-conditioning, and lower taxes. But they aren't ours. If I were handed one, I would take it, if it were nice. I have become fonder of this house as time and effort have proven it to work for us. But I think it's mostly laziness and complacency that are keeping us from being bent on leaving this house behind.

Conflicted!

We need a plan. Of course, that brings me back to downsizing our load so that we have more options. We agree on smaller rather than bigger. Two of my favorite friends have recently bought bigger homes to move to. Both have found what sounds like a great place, not really too much bigger, and I don't think bigger was the main event. I am happy for them; but I guess their moves are relevant here because one of my fears is that there isn't something out there that isn't excessively high-dollar that we would prefer to this place. I would like to go to a place I like better than this, one with fewer of the problems of this house, but still a safe neighborhood with a private and quiet and natural setting. And I guess I'm afraid I won't be able to find it for a reasonable price. I want to be happy and excited about moving, not depressed. I was not happy about moving here. It is not as nice here as our previous house but that was a whole different world; a 2-family house with my parents. Maybe that's another part of these feelings. We think we can continue to afford to live here. But I'd rather find a nicer place for less. And I guess that's what I want and I don't know that it's out there, so my incentive is blunted, stunted, confronted.

So I need to get some downsizing done. Than my options will open. Why can't I get to it? I seem to think some other things are more important. Got organized a little, got a todo list going...and got lost in it. How am I going to do this? By blogging?