Curse of the Blowfly

I hate flies. Most don't bite and they don't sting, but I still hate them. They are the personification of filth and putrescence, Beelzebub's vile minions. Blowflies are particularly odious since their favorite foods are shit and decomposing bodies. Rotting meat and foodstuff will suffice though.


About four weeks ago, the Devil Queen started filling up with blowflies. In the few years that Devil Queen has defiled our life, she has experienced a number of infestations and invaders: wasps, king snakes, bats, scorpions, mice, more wasps, moths and even more wasps. Sure, an occasional fly has made it in from time to time, but we've never been overrun with them. What makes it even stranger is that the Devil Queen is sealed up better than she ever has been since we've had her.

It started with a couple of blowflies in the laundry room which I promptly killed. The next day there were a few more which I also killed. This pattern continued for a couple of days. After another orgy of fly crushing, I remember thinking, "wow, this has got to be a bad omen."

The day after that, I came home from work to find all the clocks flashing since the power had briefly gone out. For Russellville, Arkansas, this is not an odd occurrence. I've lived all over the US and traveled around the world, but Russellville (Pope County in general) is the only place I've been where the electrical service was intermittent. No thunderstorms, acts of God, or accidents are required. The power will randomly go off for a few seconds and surge back on with no preamble. This happens at least once every couple of weeks, and it has done so for years. Entergy Arkansas, thank you for the rate hikes and the poor service; you have made my dream of living in a third world county a reality.

One of the great things about these outages, is the power surge that follows when the current returns. Light bulbs, appliances, and other electronics have fallen victim over the years.

I think you probably see where I'm going with this. Later that night, I went to wash some clothes for work, and the washer wouldn't power up. You could hit the power button all you wanted, but nothing happened. That is what everyone wants out of a $650, two-year old machine, right? Yes, the warrantee has expired. We checked.

I also checked the breaker box and the outlet. It was definitely the machine.

After that, the blowflies kept coming and things got worse. The bay window room was randomly swarmed by wasps after a few freakishly warm days. Then the house was broken into and we were robbed.

The flies got even worse after this, but I suspect this was because our front door was standing wide open for at least a few hours. Really, I was probably lucky that pack of coyotes or a mound of hibernating rattle snakes hadn't moved in by the time I got home. Even so, I was getting very tired of killing 10, 15, or 20 blowflies every day. What is even weirder is that they didn't go for any of the stuff you'd think they would. I never saw one anywhere near the cat's liter box or the kitchen trash can. They seem to like the windows in the laundry room, the living room, and the bedrooms.

And now, just over two weeks later, I'm still finding the occasional blowfly, one here, one there.

I'm hoping the curse may be lifting though. Sunday, just for the hell of it, I went and hit the power button on the washing machine. It turned on. I was too suspicious to try it out though. I have visions of it shutting down mid-load with a drum full of water and the door lock, which I suspect is 100% electric, jammed shut. Forever.

I asked Jack, our electronics guru, about it. He said that a lot of new appliances have thermal switches which automatically turn the machine off when they get too hot. His theory is the power surge tripped the switch and it hadn't reset by the time I came home. So far, that sounds good to me. I certainly don't have any answers.

Maybe if the blowflies are all gone by the weekend I'll try running a load.

Or maybe not. I'm not feeling lucky.

Omens of Things to Come

Or, a rare example of the Persian Cat Dust-Bunny Tumbleweed in its natural environment. Notice this fine specimens enourmous size.

More to come, cheers!

Digging For Fire

In an attempt to make my projects at the Devil Queen a little more interesting, I've decided to make them into competitive sports. Due to the peculiarities of my situation, most of what I do is solitary by nature. As such, I've found competing against extreme natural phenomenon quite invigoration. I highly recommend severe thunderstorms, they are very motivational.

This week's game was re-trenching the front patio drainage system. Actually, it's not a patio yet, but it will be soon. Hopefully.

When we had the site cleared with a bulldozer, they graded the ground in such a way that water drained away from the Devil Queen towards the retaining wall (or where the retaining wall will go). Then, the water would flow along the wall's base and into the woods away from the house. After last weekend's torrential rain, our rudimentary drainage system had silted up. Since they are forecasting another 2-3 inches of rain for the rest of the week, I thought it would be a good idea to clear out the silt.

The equipment for this game was pretty basic: shovel, work gloves, and a large, plastic trash-bag with holes poked in it for your arms and head. A hat is nice too. I know, quite the stylish ensemble, and cheap too! Now anyone can look crazy and homeless in their front yard for just dollars!

Anyhow, once you are fully equipped, start digging. And, since the dark, low clouds are already rolling in and the thunder is rumbling it the west, dig fast. Remember, you get bonus points for not being struck by lightning.

The ground was still sodden after last weeks deluge. This was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it was much easier to get all the rocks out. On the other, the clay tended to stick to the shovel like a peanut butter sandwich does to the top of your mouth.

By the time the wind was picking up and the rain was streaming down over an hour later, I'd basically finished. At the shallow end, the trench was only a couple of inches deep, but, at the far end, it was at least a foot deep and nearly as wide. And, since it was roughly 80 feet long, I felt pretty good about my progress.

I finished just in time. The rain started coming in sideways and the sky glowed with a hint of tornadic green to the north. For some reason, I wondered what sailing an ocean-going sailboat through a storm like this would be like as I watched it from the front porch. This probably is a sure sign of a serious, degenerative mental illness. It's thoughts like these that make people cut a house in half and move them sixteen miles away to a mountain top.

Breeze In My Bedroom

Here is the corner in question from the previous post. You can't tell in the picture, but the spider webs were flapping.

Funky

A couple of weeks ago, we had a very windy night. I was getting ready for bed when I noticed a spider web fluttering in the wind high up in the corner of the bedroom. That is right, the wind was fluttering something inside the house.

I'd originally planned to caulk, spray foam, et cetera the corners of the room before the appraisal, but we ran out of time. As always. And, even though we had insulation blown into the walls, this corner apparently did not receive the treatment. My guess is that the void between the wall studs is less than 16 inches wide, maybe as little 10 inches or so, and the insulation guy missed it. There are no exterior cracks in the corner. So, this probably means that even though Kenny blocked off the bottom of the wall voids before the insulation blowing, it probably isn't air-tight, and, when the wind blows hard enough, it funnels up from the crawlspace, up the wall, and out through the crack (If you want an explanation of Devil Queen air-flow, see this post). That would also explain why this room and only this room smells a little musty and funky when the weather warms up. Nothing says home like warm crawlspace funk with a touch of musty-in-the-walls.

Here is a half-ass diagram of the funky wind-chimney in the corner.

As you might imagine, plugging these cracks has moved near the top of my priority list.

Decrapification Continues

I won't bore you with the details. Another night of excavating, another five bags of trash hauled to the curb. For those of you who don't live to tally the amount of trash generated by the Devil Queen and her occupants, that is nine bags of trash in two weeks.

Aside from reclaiming all of this long submerged square footage as actual living space, this has been a profitable endeavor. Literally. Last night while sorting through a stack of old papers, Christmas and birthday cards from years past, and whatever else it is crazy people collect, I found a crisp, clean fifty dollar bill. I'm guessing this was a gift that we lost track of one year. Nice.

If you calculate out how many hours it took me to find this, I'm still not making minimum wage but what the hell. It's enough to buy Christmas dinner for everyone which is good enough for me.

At some point, I just had to wonder what year it was that I went shit-bat-crazy and decided to keep this stuff. The construction material is the worst at this point: tin cans full of bent, rusty nails; broken light fixtures; four inch bits of PVC plumbing; and, my current favorite, little coils of old, filthy wires. I mean you never know when you might want to wire a whole electrical circuit with thirty or forty 12-to-18 inch bits spliced together. Bring on the roaches, the nukes, and the whole Jesus-in-sky apocalypse! We are ready! We'll save Western Civilization in all its glory with a box of old wiring and tin of rusty nails. Don't mess with us, we're obviously ready for anything. Except refinishing the floors.

Trash Fairy

A couple of weekends ago we came home late from a day in town. As we pulled down the driveway, Scarlet asked, "is the old air conditioner gone?" It was dark and I hadn't noticed, so I just shrugged. Neither of us was interested enough to go wandering back to the old air conditioner's final resting place in the weeds and the dark, so we went in and didn't think about it again until the next morning.

By the light of day, we could see that the whole unit, a four ton air conditioner, had vanished from our property. Nothing else had been touched. No, we were not upset in the least. We'd been calling people for years to come and haul it off, but we couldn't get anyone to come and get it. We were baffled. Bewildered yet pleased, we decided that the Good Trash Fairy had hauled it off in the middle of the night. We could accept that.

A couple of days later, my mother-in-law mentioned that a friend of the family's eighteen year old son was looking for some extra money and had hauled it off to sell for scrap. Not as an exotic of an explanation as a Trash Fairy (I don't think Madison would appreciate being called that either), but we're not complaining. Gone is gone.

Aside from an arduous testing schedule for the hot tub, not much home improvement action has been going on at the Devil Queen. My bout of flu pretty well derailed me. Suffering through my first bonafide migraine headache today hasn't helped any either. I'm just looking forward to a long Thanksgiving weekend and maybe a some refinished floors before Christmas.

More after the holiday. Cheers.

Spank Me

That's right. Whip me, flog me, flay me. I have been an odious homeowner. While Julian Electric was inspecting our heating and cooling system, he brought this to my attention.

That's right, this is the homeowner's version of your brain on drugs. To clarify, you do not want your air filter to look like this. Ever. First, it's gross. Second, if you leave it long enough, it will dramatically reduce the life expectancy of you heating and air unit. You know, like heroin addiction. Third, it's extremely gross.

That's right, that is a close-up of a dead bug in the air filter. The strata of filth makes a positive ID difficult. June Bug? Beetle? Hell, maybe it's an atrophied squirrel mummy?!

Life, stranger than fiction.

Ventilating One Window at a Time

I've been spending more time on my art lately than the house. I think the balance is getting ready to swing back the other way though.

The electrician still has not made it out to the Devil Queen to check on the AC so no official word on what went wrong.

While the weather has been gorgeous (minus that veiled threat of winter's imminent approach), the house stays much cooler if you can open more than one window and a screen door. Technically, you could open more but since they don't have screens this isn't too attractive of an option. Think Hitchcock's "The Birds" except with moths, wasps, mosquitoes, and feral cats. Sure, it would be pretty exciting, but I don't know that I'd call that fun.

You'd think that installing a storm window would be a quick, simple procedure. Simple, yes. Quick, no.

The storm windows we have came with the Devil Queen and they were probably installed in the 1980's. They are metal, aluminum I'd guess. They are coated or painted in a dark brown-gray which isn't terribly attractive, but I've seen much worse.

We call them storm windows, but they are a screen/storm combination. The top panel is a fixed window while the bottom glass panel can be raised or lowered over a screen. This setup negates any benefit you'd get from using the top double-hung window. And, unlike traditional storm windows which hang on brackets and are fastened to the frame with a hook or similar device, these screw directly into the exterior window frame. This is more invasive than I'd like, but they do seal well. Come January, the season of infernal drafts (remember your Dante, Hell is cold), this will be very important. I'd personally like to be able to sit in my living room without my clothes whipping about me in a stiff wind.

And, another important consideration is we can't afford to replace these, so they will have to do for the foreseeable future.

Now, there are several reasons why it's taking so long to get these buggers back in the full-coverage position.

1) They have been stored under the back porch for roughly a year and a half. The windows were custom made for the house, so you have to sort through the stack with a tape measure to find one that will fit the particular window you are covering. The widths vary between 22 inches (the three windows that make the front bay window), random 27 inches and the standard 28 inch ones.
2) Since they have been in outdoor storage, they are filthy. Mostly dirt, saw dust, and general filth but there are some suspicious stains probably left by rodents, dead bugs, living, bugs, spider webs, et cetera.
3) To clean the windows, you have to remove the lower, sliding window pane.
4) Once you've cleaned the storm, you have to clean the exterior of the window itself. This includes scraping paint over-spray off too. Here is one tip, it comes off much easier if you spray the window down with Windex first and then scrape it clean with a razor. I don't know if it is the solvent action or if it lubricates the surface like shaving cream or what. In any case, the paint just glides off.
5) Since our genius Zombie Painter #2 did such a fabulous job of painting the windows shut, I have to cut and pry the windows open.

After performing all of the steps above, I can finally install the window. If I'm lucky, there is just a little bit of daylight left when I finish.

With the exception of the storm that fits over the transom of the original back door, I have installed all the storm windows accessible from the back porch. Now, to install the remaining storm windows, the process will become even more complicated. I'll have to add the following steps:

1) Re-glaze the window panes.
2) Touch-up, paint, or re-paint the window before proceeding with the list above.

Again, none of this is rocket science, but it is time consuming and boring. I'm not a fan of either. I'll probably do Gideon's windows next and then the living room and dining room windows. These are the draftiest ones in the house, so I'd like to get them finished first.

One additional benefit to getting the storms up is that it has really cut down on the number of bugs in the house. Gotta love that.

Tight Spots

Why do I like petite brunettes so much? Because they can go places that most people can't . . .

like the top of living room built-ins without tearing off all the crown molding.

A special thanks to Ms. Scarlet for doing all the dirty work in the living room last weekend.

Why Wash the Walls?

Just in case anyone was wondering why we scrub all of our walls before we paint them, here is a picture for you. This is the wash water after my wife scrubbed half of one wall in the living room. I don't know what people have been doing in the Devil Queen for the last 100+ years, but every bit of it was nasty.