OK so today we had a HUGE EMERGENCY, involving water moistening the ceiling over my Spouse's office and said Spouse running frantically all over the place freaking out, and the attic was briefly investigated (from a safe distance through the hole leading up to it) and the leak was pronounced to be near the chimney where there was no flashing but since the chimney cap had been removed it now leaked more with the wind coming from the Northeast and a heavy rain all morning, and OMG we need to rent a boom lift so off we go, and now we arrive back with a rental Condor in the driveway, and OH Dear it doesn't reach to the chimney and now we have to bring it back, and the hardware store didn't have patching compound and it's still raining cats and dogs and no I am not controlling my emotions I am getting something DONE ABOUT IT BECAUSE IT'S OUR HOUSE.




( Click here for a more calm and sedate continuation.... )

As reported in a previous post, I had nearly given up on my Shiitake Mushroom Log I bought on Amazon.com, after 2 months of non performance upon arrival. However after trying the techniques I described in that post, 2 actual mushrooms began to get extruded from a drill hole at the bottom and a break in the bark next to that. Orange arrow indicates the items in question below:



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I was so thrilled about how nice the windows looked in the downstairs stairwell after I cleaned the paint stripper off them, I decided to do the same in my office today. Imagine my dismay when one particular pane did not clean up, and instead even got worse! I was completely baffled. It was as if the goo smeared all over it had mysteriously become hard as diamond when all the other panes cleaned up just as easy as that other window had. WTF??



Well, I showed this to my Spouse and he took one look at it and said, "it's not glass, it's Lucite". Ehhhhhhh? I tapped my finger on each pane and they sounded exactly the same. They even looked the same, in the middles anyway. I'd been looking at these windows for 2.5 solid years and never saw the one as different than the others. Then, to prove it, he took his keys out and tapped on each pane with the metal keys. The dirty one made a conspicuously dull "thud" compared to the other two. D'OH!!! You can't slip one past an engineer! LOL. It will remain like that for now, but ultimately I will have to replace that piece... preferably with a nice piece of glass.



Speaking of the stairwell I have the new door nearly completely stripped now. It matches the trim woodwork perfectly, as if it was always there! Oddly enough it has a powerful scent of pine unlike any of the other wood I stripped. I don't know if it's just a slightly different species, or if the wood is newer, or was preserved differently, or what. When the doors have all been shut up and you first walk in there, the alcoholy piney scent is about enough to knock ya out. Whew!