Valentine's Day Massacre

Last night Mrs Stevie began issuing instructions.

"Flowers are a waste of money. Don't buy me any flowers!" she said.

"Hadn't thought of doing so" I said. "Why isn't the TV working?"

"Your daughter was playing Pokemon Challenge 2010 Ultimate Edition earlier. She must have changed one of the remote control settings" said Mrs Stevie. "I don't want any gifts either. No DVDs, like The Bridges of Madison County or Like Water For Chocolate . No books either. I don't want to find you've wasted a lot of money on one of those historical novels or biographies I like".

"You won't be disappointed then" I answered as I checked the TV was plugged in.

"No cards either. They are too expensive."

"Fear not" I answered. "As it happens I forgot to go out at lunchtime and get one for you. This year you shall be conspicuously cardless". I turned the TV on and off, then on again.

"Don't buy chocolate" she admonished me. I'm on a diet and I'm not eating chocolate so don't waste your money."

"A diet?" I said absently as I tried to figure out which of the umpteen remotes would unlock the fiendish TV/Video/DVD combination The Stevieling had left for me, so I could watch Scrubs. Since there are five remotes, the chances of that were slim, there being around twenty billion different combinations of button-pushes possible, only one of which would route television signals from the reception circuitry to the viewing/transcription unit. "Really?" I walked over to the cable box and began pushing buttons speculatively in the hope that the system would spontaneously begin conducting entertainment to the house. "What on earth for?"

"I'm a little overweight." she sniffed. "I want to look good for your sister's kid's wedding in the summer. I need to lose about twenty pounds."

"Per limb" I jocularly murmured, which is when I think I sustained the concussion.

I woke up in the early hours of this morning with a splitting headache and a goose-egg on the back of my bonce. The new skillet, so delicate it had to be hand washed under pain of sanctions, was lying beside me, and it now featured the domed base that gave the old skillet so much character (and also to the food cooked in it). I guess the break-in period for this item of gourmet cookware has passed and we may now safely put it into the dishwasher. I doubt anything that the Maytag could do would cause it any further harm.

I surmise I have once again suffered one of Mrs Stevie's signature attacks. I had been lulled into a false sense of security because of the regard in which she held the new pots and pans. It was inevitable that this attitude would change with the tide of Starbux Mochaspresso Clawhammer Grandes (now available in sugar-free formulations and hence not interdicted due to calorific boycotting it seems).

The irises of my eyes are each of different sizes this morning. Not only that, I am suffering a certain degree of...personal discomfort shall we say, that, in conjunction with the mysterious disappearance of the remote control for the DVD player, leaves me with a very ugly suspicion of dastardly behaviour on Mrs Stevie's part while I was hors de combat and she overly exited due to endorphin imbalance exacerbated by coffee-induced rage.

Lesson learned: Dieting obviously reduces brain chemicals moderating the temper of women.

That Sinking Feeling

On Saturday I leapt out of bed at the crack of 10:30 am and ran up to begin painting the walls, only to discover that while I was asleep Mrs Stevie had gotten creative with the remaining paper.

The vinyl wallpaper used upstairs is of the "strippable" type, meaning that in the normal course of events you can usually just grab hold and pull it off the wall without recourse to a steamer¹ or liquid solvents².

Unfortunately, the construction of Bog includes the use of forty year-old tech like "backing paper", which used to be used to prime the wall board instead of painting it. The backing paper's singular quality is that it grips the outer paper like a pipe-wrench on steroids. Since I had already decided to leave this backing paper on³, I had actually spackled part of the new wall to the papered surface, something I would not have done if we were going to try removing it.

Mrs Stevie dealt with the situation in a no-nonsense fashion by simply ignoring it. It was breathtakingly simple. A good job too, since when I saw the damage that would need re-spackling I could have severely damaged the young and impressionable Stevieling with the vile swear words I gasped out while clutching my chest and grinding my teeth in rage at another day's labour created were I in good voice.

After a frank exchange of views, Mrs Stevie decamped to Starbux for a calming Espresso Plaque Buster while I buckled down for yet another extended bout of f***ing spackling, something I was celebrating not having to do only eight hours before.

I interspersed the spackling with painting the greenboard walls, and here I found some calm as I uncovered a lode of painting tools I had forgotten I owned. A wonderful little roller, standard width but only about a quarter the usual diameter, which makes getting into corners so much easier. An edging roller with an ingenious but useless shield that flips down at the touch of a switch to guard mouldings, skirting boards and so on allowing a fine edge to be painted with a roller. If only it worked.⁴. Maybe I was just using it wrong the last time. Today I would have another opportunity to refine my technique with it and tell once and for all if it was just another piece of crap or a genuinely useful tool. A beautiful slant-cut Purdy brush, great for cutting-in. A box of paint pads, forgotten in a box that was damaged during the flood. The special roller paint tray for the paint pads. A veritable cornucopia of tooly delight.

I spread a drop cloth on the floor, which was a bit of a challenge since the floor was 5x4 feet and the drop cloth, a spun olefin affair, was about the size of a standard, three masted galleon mains'l. It ruffed up in places, and formed folds that would later be the cause of much swearing. Then I lined the floor adjacent to the walls with two inches of masking tape and it was game on!

I alternated between painting the walls and poking the spackle to check if it was dry yet. It wasn't, mostly. When I ran out of unspackled wall to paint, I went downstairs and sat in front of a fan drinking iced tea, which was where Mrs Stevie found me of course, prompting an immediate second front to be opened. I was firm. I was resolute. I went outside to clean the pool filter.

Eventually it was all done and night fell. I tiredly began picking up all the tools for cleaning when from under my left foot came the horrible sound of something being smashed to plastic flinders. I madly searched through the folds of the drop cloth and eventually uncovered the edging roller, or what was left of it. The Edging Shield Of Uselessness was now smashed to pieces, leaving me with a small roller with a puzzling little swinging rod. I howled out some potent words of power to drive off the anti-handyman evil spirits that were obviously beginning to infest New Bog and decamped for a shower and bed, pausing only to tell Mrs Stevie that if she would wallpaper the corner for the sink first, I would be able to fit the vanity while she was at church.

I should explain. I'll tackle most jobs, but I won't even try doing wallpaper. It had been our agreement since work on New Bog commenced that Mrs Stevie would wallpaper it. She seemed enthusiastic at the time.

I woke on Sunday to find that Mrs Stevie had done the required papering, and done a damnfine jobofit too. I straightway set about installing the vanity. The first job was a trip to Blowes to get parts and silicone sealant, required for securing the plug/wastepipe fitting and to anchor the sink to the vanity itself. Next up was cleaning the vinyl floor, already dirty even though the bathroom wasn't actually abathroom yet. Then I took off the door⁵ and wrestled the vanity into place. Then I screwed it to the wall, managing to miss every single stud I was aiming for.

I put the taps on the sink with the sink dismounted. It is much easier to do this with the sink off, so much so that I'm thinking now if I can't arrange to make the sink easily removable should the need to work on the taps arise. That was when I realised I had neglected to purchase the riser coupling hoses, so it was off to Home Despot where I discovered a set of hoses with an interesting property: They would shut off the water if the hoses burst. Muttering a curse on the inventor for not getting these things to market two years ago and thus preventing Domestic Flood Yolanda, I returned home and attached them to the taps.

At this point I decided a test was in order. It would simply not do for me to discover that the "safety" pipes shut off the water in normal use or leaked or whtever else they could come up with after the sink was installed so I dropped the sink onto the vanity and connected the water, allowing Mrs Stevie the honour of turning on the water (catching it in a little spackle bucket) to check it all out. Wonder of wonders, it all worked properly with no leaks⁶.

The instructions called for the (plastic) wastepipe flange (the chrome ring the plug goes into) to be sealed with silicon before it was all screwed up tight, so that's what I did, only to discover that the wastepipe was about a half inch too short. Many and loud were the imprecations unleashed at that time against the evil anti-handyman demons, and great was the risk that the new wallpaper would singe as a result. I dashed off to Home Despot and bought an extension pipe. Which turned out to be the wrong size for the wastepipe, so I dashed off to Home Despot and bought one that would fit. Unfortunately, this was a "weld" type fitting rather than a screw-ring and plastic ring seal type used all over the piping elsewhere. I would use more silicone. Then it transpired that the wastepipe was at too sharp an angle for the U-bend to mate properly with the wastepipe⁷. I deployed Mr Heat Gun on "low" and worked the pipe into shape, then ran a sink of water and let it drain. Perfect!

And we went out for dinner after that because we were all sick to the back teeth of the smell of paint, wallpaper paste and vinegar⁸.

When I returned I decided to run another test of the sink "just in case". My instincts were good, because while we were at dinner, the insidious anti-handyman spirits had sprung a leak in the watepipe seal. With a merry curse or six I removed the pipe and flange, only to find the silicone had not even begun to cure. It was supposed to be touch dry by now. Odd. I cleaned up the sink wastepipe hole and seperated the wastepipe from the extension, cleaning off the silicone here too. Then I used the PVC glueing kit, last seen during construction of the Christmas Arch, to weld the bloody things together, reapplied the silicone and reset the wastepipe.

I'll wait 24 hours and see if it cures properly, then figure out where to go from there.

Pictures of this fiasco in progress will be here when I get round to putting them up, as usual

1. Which we have ↑
2. Which we also have ↑
3. Removing it can severely damage the underlying wallboard↑
4. Even the box-lid illustration shows the problem with the design, it just minimises it. Paint builds up on the shield until it overflows on the adjacent (supposedly shielded) areas anyway ↑
5. The vanity won't go through the doorway with the door on its hinges ↑
6. In retrosepct, this should have been a clear warning that something was waiting in the wings to banjax the job in the eleventh hour ↑
7. I had deliberately done this, and tested it to ensure that it didn't cause the U-bend water trap to suck dry, because I wanted the water velocity to be enough to keep the pipe cleaner than the bloody downstairs sink was last January when Mrs Stevie burst the U-Bend on Super Bowl Sunday ↑
8. Acetic acid used to keep the silicone liquid in the tube and it is is given off as vapour as the silicon cures ↑

New Pots For Mrs Stevie

Mrs Stevie went out on Saturday looking thin-lipped, and returned several hours later with about a ton and a half of new metal cookware. She unpacked the various tureens, cauldrons, double-steamers and what-have-you, purring over the balance and heft of one or two select items, then made an announcement.

Standing in the middle of a devastation of packing materials with her hands on her hips to indicate she meant business, she announced that the brand-new cookware was under no circumstances to be placed in the dishwasher, since it's space-age, non-stick coating derived from NASA heat shield technology was apparently not up to the job of withstanding hot water with a bit of detergent and some phosporus in it¹. She went on to list a number of things that these works of art should not be exposed to, on pain of voiding the warranty.

Well, I had to laugh. The old pots had to be slung out because there were so many dents and dings in them they were unfit to be used for cullinary applications of any kind. The frying pan had such a large dent in the base² that eggs come out an inch wide and five inches long when fried in it 'cos they snuggle up round the rim so tightly.

"I take it this signals a new era of tolerance and strategic limitations in the percussive use of said cookware with especial reference to La Téte De Stevie then?" I wheezed between guffaws.

A sad mistake

I came to some hours later sporting a large goose-egg on my right temple and a pounding headache. I couldn't clearly remember the events that led up to my receiving this wound, other than a memory of the signature battle-shriek of Mrs Stevie followed by a bright burst of light, but a search through the garbage the next day allowed me to reconstruct matters in the fashion of those chaps on "CSI". I had evidently been the victim of yet another cowardly assault, launched by that vile harridan while I was disadvantaged by laughter. The weapon, a rather worn saucepan, was easily identifiable from the dent³.

My false sense of security had arisen because I had forgotten that she still had the old pans to hand at the time.

1. Bet you didn't know they put phosphorus into dishwasher detergent to shift the remains of your Chicken Marsala, did you? ↑
2. This dent matches quite closely the contours of the crown of my head, and dates from the time I ran my small steam engine on her antique dining table. Mrs Stevie, it turns out, disapproves of steam engines, but I feel she over-reacted since I had the fire under control and had explained that the scorch-marks could easily be covered with Formica. Sometimes I think the woman is quite mad. I blame it on her consumption of coffee ↑
3. Slightly damaged last week when I used it to catch the water pouring out of the busted u-bend and I forgot to move it when I was fitting the new one. Pipe-dope had dripped on it and hardened on the bottom, rendering it useless from a culinary standpoint. I didn't bother Mrs Stevie with this trifle at the time. She had a lot on her mind ↑

On The Warpath

As many of you readers¹ will know, yesterday was Martin Luther King Day, a holiday in New York. That meant that everyone had the day off. Everyone except Mrs Stevie that is.

The Stevieling and I planned a raucous day of celebration, begining with breakfast, followed by some craft projects, TV viewing and later I was hoping to persuade her into a videoing project at the beach to show her the power of the little videocam we bought her for Xmas and toward which she has shown almost complete indifference despite being fascinated with filmmaking.

All was going well, properly behind schedule by about three hours by the time we returned from breakfast at IHOP², when Mrs Stevie stormed into the house yowling about how it was no good everyone having cell phones if we were never going to use 'em, and why she bothered calling everyone to tell them she was getting a half day off was beyond her and why didn't we at least look at the answering machine for crying out loud³?

I pointed out that there was no need for such chagrin. I explained that we had each forgotten to take our cellphones with us. I told her that it was pointless to yell about what had happened since we were enjoying ourselves at breakfast a mere fifteen minutes ago and didn't want our peacefull meal disrupted by hysterical women yelling about cellphones so wouldn't have answered anyway. I pointed out that she was here now, and so were we, and therefore nothing was lost.

She threw her cellphone at me.

She finally calmed down enough to suggest going out to a movie. Unfortunately, all the shouting, carrying on and ballicstic portable communications device activity had upset my delicate constitution⁴, so I remained at home and had a medicinal snooze on the sofa while the Women of Chateau Stevie went to see "Happily Never After", a movie that would have upset my stomach anyway.

Thus the arts were patronised, Mrs Stevie was mollified and I didn't throw up after all.

1. At the last count there were three of you ↑
2. International House Of Pancakes. You find 'em in buildings with blue roofs. If you find a good one, the food can be superb ↑
3. The obvious reason, that we didn't care what was on the answering machine never occured to her it seems ↑
4. Mrs Stevie sniffed and said it was probably all the greasy crap I had eaten for breakfast ↑

The World Is Alive With The Sound Of Everything

Yesterday (Thursday) I managed to get an appointment with an Ear Nose and Throat specialist in order to deploy expert measures in the quest for renewed hearing.

As I may have mentioned once or twice, I have had loss of hearing and tinitus in my left ear since the end of July, when I was laid low by an infection. Doc Rubberglove, my GP, is labouring under some demented fantasy that the whole thing is caused by an infection in my nose, and postulates some sort of tube connecting each ear with the troublesome organ. Obvious claptrap.

The ENT doctor, who bore a striking resemblance to the host of "The Daily Show" was very efficient. Eschewing the hoses, syringes, Rocket Fuel and hot water so beloved by Doc Rubberglove, he grabbed what looked like a teaspoon and simply gouged away for ten or twenty minutes while a burly technician held me down. He dug out a truly disgusting amount of wax from each ear, and remarked that it was of a peculiar red colour he'd never seen before.

I had.

We used to have four candles of that same colour, but Mrs Stevie claimed that one of them broke and had to be "disposed of" sometime around the beginning of August.

Then it was off to the sound booth to have my eardrums sonared (in order to detect fluid build-up¹) and tested for hearing range. A variety of beeps and clangs were played into each ear at varying volumes, and I was asked to signal if I could hear them. I closed my eyes to prevent any visual cues being given, and the whole thing became very relaxing. I gradually entered a zen-like trance as I listened for the sounds.

Unfortunately one of the sounds was identical to the sound made by a skillet being surreptitiously withdrawn from a stack of pots and my signal that I had heard it was a loud shriek as I leapt from the chair and span into a defensive foetal huddle in one corner of the booth. It frightened the heck out of the technician who wasn't to know about certain reflexes I have developed over my 18 years of marriage.

Then back to Doc Teaspoon for the after test chat where he spoke warmly of several remote possibilities that he assured me I couldn't have, such as tumours, cankers and Benghazi Ear Rot. It was very reassuring, but I found myself reflecting wistfully on the time I couldn't hear anything during some of the more descriptive passages.

Then it was down the corridor to get Mr Elbow deathrayed. The elbow stopped working about three weeks after I began attempting to subjugate the guitar to my unique musical technique (shortly after the ear nonsense started, but I cannot conceive of a way that vile harridan Mrs Stevie could be the root cause of this ailment.

On the other hand, she did buy the guitar.

1. Nothing was detected. I suppose I should thank heavens that Mrs Stevie would rather drink her coffee than find nefarious uses for it around a sleeping husband ↑