tree, plumbing, and weather woes

Back before I started to make my living as an artist I had several various jobs one of which was working in a bookstore. I held that job for a year before I quit because the boss/owner wouldn't give me the raise I felt I deserved. I liked the job but the owner was a real asshole. The manager though was really nice. One day in the middle of the work day, the owner assholed me because I started straightening up one of the book racks instead of asking him what he wanted me to do and when he finished I silently walked away, got my stuff out of the back room and walked out. The manager, Sherry I think her name was, was frantic wanting to get hold of me and talk me out of quitting because she, at least, recognized my value but this was during that period of time when I didn't have a phone as I was being incommunicado with my parents. She was relieved to see me walk in the next morning hoping I still had a job because I needed that job since my then rat bastard husband was unemployed (which he was for most of our marriage).

Anyway, Sherry would drink hot coffee all day during the summer which I thought was ridiculous since it made her sweat but she claimed drinking hot coffee kept her cooler because of the sweat evaporating. I didn't believe it then and I can tell you today that it's a bunch of hogwash. Because I'm sitting here in my air conditioned house right now (well, 78˚ of air conditioning) with a small heater in the shape of a dog laying in my lap, drinking hot coffee and sweating and I do not feel cool. I feel HOT and I wish I wasn't sweating in an air conditioned house while being still.

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I finally got around to hanging the four botnica eroticas that I decided to keep for myself. Wasn't hard to decide to keep some since only one has sold in the six years since I finished this body of work so I guess, really, I'm keeping all of them, but I hung these four on the wall.

And now from the JFC Department:

We just got the last enormous branch that fell cut up and moved to the burn pile. This makes four in the last year. This one hasn't detached completely, a long not particularly stout branch that finally got too heavy at the far end.

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Rocky finally had a window open to come and replace all the cracked and shattered PVC water pipes over at the shop so that's going on today and I'll be glad to have a functioning toilet over there again. The quick job it looked like, replacing all the PVC, turned into way more work. Of course. Where the water comes into the shop on the back left corner, the pipes are galvanized and the galvanized goes all the way across above my new ceiling in my new room to where it changes to PVC to the sink in there and from there the PVC goes across the big open bay to the outdoor hose bib on the front right of the shop. So when he turned on the water to test the pipes, water started spewing out of a crack in the galvanized where it first comes into the shop. Fingers crossed that the galvanized pipe that runs across my new studio room is intact when they test the pipes again.

It's brutal over there as we've been hitting mid-90s all week. I hadn't been over there in a couple of months and the dewberry vines were out of control so I cleared them out from in front of the bay doors, well, two of them anyway before the heat and humidity made me quit.

before

after

Update: at 4 PM I told Rocky don't you want to quit for the day. No, he says, been here all day and I'm gonna finish this one section and we'll be done. Famous last words. Finally turned the water back on and it all seemed to be holding, holding, holding, and then the sound of gushing water. Turn it off turn it off!!! Apparently the pressure popped the connection to the sink off. By this time, it's 5PM and Rocky just threw up his hands. I give up. We'll finish this tomorrow. More discussion and we've decided to go ahead and just replace all the galvanized pipe that crosses above the ceiling of the studio. Of course all the galvanized pipes to the toilet and sink in the half bath over there are behind the new wall so we're hoping against hope that those are intact. No way to know until the water's been on for more than a minute.