08:47 – I switched over this morning from air conditioning to heating. It was under 68F (20C) in the house, and the high today is to be only 50F (10C), with lows tonight in the low 40’s (~ 5C). This cool snap is to last only a few days. We’ll soon be back to needing neither heating nor air conditioning.
Barbara was stunned when she read in the newspaper this morning that one of her co-workers died in a house fire over the weekend. She said today would be tough at work. The woman who died was well-known and well-liked throughout the firm.
Today is a federal holiday, so USPS won’t be delivering. I’ll batch up the kits ordered yesterday, today, and tomorrow morning, and ship them all tomorrow. Today, I’ll spend some time in the lab making up solutions for the biology kits. As I’ve mentioned before, my natural tendency is to use the oh-my-god-we’re-out inventory method. So yesterday I checked inventory against the chemical makeup instructions and found I was out of Eosin Y and Crystal Violet. I just ordered enough of both to make up two liters of each stain.
Fortunately, our filling method means we always have a few left over. For example, the kits include 15 mL each of the Hucker’s Crystal Violet stain and the Eosin Y stain. I make up one liter of each of those at a time, and label 60 bottles for each. We actually get about 66 bottles from a liter, so we typically have six bottles left unlabeled. After we’ve filled bottles, I print the extra labels we need and label the extra bottles. So as of now I have half a dozen bottles of each of those stains still in stock. That means I can make up half a dozen biology kits pretty quickly if we run out before the next batch of 30 is ready.
10:57 – That worked out well. As Barbara and her sister clear out their parents’ old home, Barbara is bringing home stuff her parents don’t want but that she wants or thinks I might want. Saturday, she brought me something I didn’t know existed: a 2-liter polypropylene measuring cup. I’m using that today to make up stuff I need two liters of, including Benedict’s reagent, Barfoed’s reagent, biuret reagent, and so on.
Ordinarily, I just make up stuff that I need in 2-liter quantities in 2-liter soda bottles. (I’ve established where the 2-liter index line falls on soda bottles, so they function as pretty accurate 2-liter “volumetric flasks”–easily within 1% accuracy.) But the problem with soda bottles is that they are made of PET, which some of the solutions I make up will damage. Some, like 6 M sodium hydroxide, damage PET instantly, literally. If I pour 6 M NaOH into a PET bottle, the bottle instantly turns from clear to cloudy white, as the strong base solution starts de-polymerizing the plastic. Having a reasonably accurate 2-liter PP measuring container makes things a lot easier. I’d have bought one (or several) long ago if I’d known they existed.
11:46 – Hmmm. Coyotes may soon be hanging out in your backyard
I’m not worried about Colin. At 70 or 75 pounds (32 to 34 kilos), he’d tear even a large male coyote to pieces. And coyotes are afraid of him because his ears make him look wolf-like. And between the two of us, even a pack of coyotes is going to shy away.
Nor do I worry about black bears. They’re smart, essentially super-dogs. Any bear we see around here is much more likely to run for it than attack or stand and fight.
But if I see a mountain lion roaming around this neighborhood, I’ll shoot it. I don’t care what the law says. Mountain lions, like all cats, are stupid. They don’t have enough sense to fear people and their fire-sticks. Coyotes, being Canidae, and bears, being honorary Canidae, do.
13:07 – How smart are Border Collies? Pretty damned smart. I’ve been running up and down the stairs all day today, working in my lab making up solutions for the new batch of biology kits. Colin completely ignores my trips up and down the stairs, lying on the sofa and watching me the whole time.
Until an hour or so ago, when I headed downstairs to drive over and pick up the newspaper for some friends who are out of town. There was absolutely no difference between that and the other trips I’d made downstairs, but somehow Colin knew I was going to leave the house, so he started barking like crazy. I did nothing to indicate that I was leaving the house. I didn’t check the front door to make sure it was locked (it always is during the day), rattle my car keys, or anything else. So how did he know this trip downstairs was different? I wouldn’t have known.
Crap. I just realized how he knew. I wear my glasses when I’m working on the computer and when I drive, but not when I’m working in the lab. When I headed downstairs to leave the house, I was wearing my glasses. Geez. That’s pretty subtle for a human, let alone a dog.
PS. It’s even more subtle than I thought. I just realized that I wear my glasses when I’m going to leave the house. When I’m running up and down stairs to and from the lab, I’m wearing splash goggles. Geez.
16:06 – If my first love is organic chemistry, coordination chemistry isn’t far behind. I was just down in the lab making up two liters of biuret reagent. I started by dissolving 23.6 grams of copper(II) sulfate pentahydrate in a liter of DI water. (Well, actually, I made up 94.5 mL of 1 M copper(II) sulfate to one liter, which amounts to the same thing.) I then added 33.0 grams of potassium sodium tartrate to the copper sulfate solution with stirring. The solution immediately turned from bright blue to greenish blue and became cloudy. Oops. That was insoluble copper(II) tartrate precipitating out. No worries. I then added 7.0 grams of potassium iodide, which turned the slurry distinctly greenish, but still cloudy. That was insoluble copper(II) iodide making its appearance. What a mess. Then I dissolved 128.4 grams of sodium hydroxide in water, made it up to 600 mL, and added that solution with stirring to the pale greenish slurry. As soon as the hydroxide solution hit the copper solution, the mixture turned an intense deep blue color. When I finished stirring, the precipitate was gone and I had a clear deep blue solution. I love coordination compounds.
I love the highlight/right-click/search Google capability. I just did that with 2-liter polypropylene and found what I am sure you already found yourself.
There are moments when I literally have trouble remembering how I found things out before the web and search engines. I still have my old Whole Earth catalogs, which were a wonder in their day. And I’ve always devoured catalogs, with a particular fondness for those covering fields or hobbies I know nothing about.
$23 apiece is pretty expensive. If I’d ever thought about it, I could have ordered 2L PP beakers from one of my wholesalers for $4 or $5 each. I’ll order a few the next time I cut a PO to that vendor.
I’ve had a 2L PP measuring “cup” from Tupperware for ages. I’ll bet that
if your cullinary skills extended beyond PB&J, or whatever you eat when
Home Alone, you’d have known they existed.
We have coyotes in the Albany NY area. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a small
pack myself, though it’s hard to tell coyotes from dogs at a distance.
Some people are somewhat concerned, for their small dogs and chickens
and small children, though I have yet to find a “concerned” person who’s
taken any steps to protect themselves or their critters beyond not
letting their small dogs or children outside without adult escort. One
of my coworkers, who lives near farm country, got a rifle, but has never
fired it, has never fired any firearm, and doesn’t have any bullets. As
I said, taken no steps.
I had to switch over to heat a couple weeks ago, although daytime highs are such that I can set the thermostat down to my overnight setting of 64, once I leave the house for the day. Just need a boost in the morning to get it up to 68 while I shower and dress. The sun usually takes it up slightly over 70.
Two of my neighbors are running their heat overnight and air-conditioning during the day. I layer clothes to try to adjust, rather than go to the expense of keeping the temp within a degree or so. Back in the ’70’s the Canadians were coming out with lots of energy-saving products. One was a heat exchanger for the dryer output, which allowed warming the house with the heat that normally is vented outside. Most of those products disappeared when energy became cheap again in the ’80’s. Too bad.
In the 60s and 70s, there used to be a corner of two Farm-to-Market roads, about 8 miles West of Houston, called “Coyote Corner”, where the ranchers and farmers would hang corpses of coyotes. It’s now in the middle of a lot of residential and commercial development.
I saw a fox running along a major road in the middle of Houston one evening a couple of years ago. (It was on Greenbriar, near Holcombe for any locals.) There have also been many stories about how deer were invading suburbs in Texas and elsewhere in pursuit of food due to drought. Predators follow food, so coyotes and wolves showing up is no surprise. Deer are also killing trees in search of food and there have been requests by farmers and ranchers to allow commercial harvesting of deer, and strong opposition by hunters.
“One was a heat exchanger for the dryer output, which allowed warming the house with the heat that normally is vented outside.”
Yeah, dryers are a big waste. At one point I tried just venting the whole thing into the house; theoretically, one needs the humidity in the Winter anyway. But it was just too much humidity at once, and I had condensation problems. It does seem like a no-brainer to build in some kind of heat exchanger, right into the dryer unit. A small additional small fan and a bypass for summertime; perhaps a second lint filter.
The greens have caused temporary insanity in some of the government ministers here, who are currently calling for a 35% reduction in per-capita energy use. Of course, they have with zero realistic plans how to do this, but the people who cook these ideas up apparently think reality is optional.
It’s like the idea of insulating an older house: how many years of energy do you need to save, before the investment justifies itself? Whether you calculate in joules or dollars, there still needs to be a calculation. Personally, I draw the line at 20:1. I can imagine that a government might take a longer term perspective, at perhaps 50:1. But at some point is simply doesn’t make sense, and you are better off either rebuilding from scratch, or just letting it be. Somehow, these calculations are never done…
I had about 10 deer on my 14 acre property that other night when I left the office about 8pm. I am off 59 behind Greatwood. The idiots all ran in front of me and jumped the barb wire fence to my neighbors heavily wooded property. I do not have any road lights so one really needs to be very careful at night time.
None of these varmints bother me except the rats. I’ve got a roof rat in the basement of my fridge again. I am very close to just sticking a 12 gauge down there and shooting until rat body parts covered in refrigerant oil come out the other side. The wife is a little worried that I am serious.
So your dog has better pattern recognition skills, or at least better
observational skills, than many of the humans I deal with. Honestly,
though, that almost descends to damning with faint praise.
My observational skills are pretty decent, if I do say so myself. I remember when I was in elementary school, my dad and I were talking about that bit in Sherlock Holmes where Holmes tells Watson that he (Watson) sees but does not observe.
My dad asked me how many stairs there were going down to the basement. I thought it was a trick question, but I told him three to the landing and then eight more to the basement floor, or twelve total counting the landing. He suggested we go and count them. We did, and I was correct.
I was surprised when he said that very, very few people would be able to do any more than guess at the number of steps down to their basements. Of course, I was borderline Aspie, and I tended to count things without thinking about. Still do, come to that.
We see deer here frequently. Of course, our house is about a quarter mile from a working farm.
I love the highlight/right-click/search Google capability. I just did that with 2-liter polypropylene and found what I am sure you already found yourself.
Soon everyone won’t need anyplace else to shop… http://www.amazon.com/Scienceware-Graduated-Pitcher-Polypropylene-F28992-0000/dp/B000FF9MDQ
We have deer around but they tend to come closer around dawn and dusk and otherwise stay clear, as we have our idiot dog who barks if it ain’t us around the house. Plus his scent is all over the place. Rats? We find their corpses put on display for us by our feline predators who do a real nice job keeping the place clear of all rodents. They consume about a third to a half of the ones they apprehend.
We see loner coyotes from time to time in the area, nearly as big as the wolves they consorted with elsewhere but they stay away from us and the dogs but are rather insolent about it, if one can interpret their body language.
I do not kill any of the critters who come round, including our friendly little woodchucks, until they become some kind of problem, but to date, none has. I am more concerned with two-legged primates who may have bad intentions at whatever hour, and around here they’d be the low-level druggies, B&E punks, the occasional pervert or biker dude, and other such riff-raff, who generally select easy targets of opportunity, like an obviously empty house or the elderly.
We got a dog who barks and we come and go at all hours, and between my 1996 Dodge Ram 2500, kinda beat up a little, and my current appearance, also beat up a little, anyone casing the joint would likely pick someplace easier. But if someone someday feels froggy enough to jump, we got somethin’ fo’ dey ass.
(also, let me here recommend timers on lights and radios, running randomly, and a barking dog, for folks who leave the house for any length of time. 90% of the muffs will walk on by, as the song goes.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ63MCd7jPE
I love ya, Dionne!
Heating, air conditioning? In hot weathuh we have a breeze off the Lake, and now, with temps at night in the 30s, it is warm and cozy inside, without turning on the heat or the pellet stove. Brick! Originally the bricks used in ballast for maritime shipping on the Lake here two-hundred years ago; there are another half-dozen houses close by built with the same bricks.
My sister has a picture taken through her front door window at a mountain lion sitting on her porch and looking up at her, but she lives ten miles out of the closet town to her (pop. 8000). She long ago stopped taking pictures of the many coyotes and bears that come through her yard.
While I’ve seen both coyote and black bear in my backyard, though not at the same time, I would be surprised to see a big cat in my back yard. Surprised, but not completely shocked. I may live in a city of 120,000, but I live right on the outside edge of suburban Kelowna, and there is not much between me and “the bush”, except for a few orchards.
Deer are not annoying for gardeners and orchardists, but a very serious road hazard, as are the coyotes. It is rare to drive the highways out of town without seeing evidence of a deer or coyote killed. Most are killed by semi trucks late at night or in the very early AM, and the drivers barely slow down. A car hitting a full grown mule deer is another matter. A big male could be 300+ lbs, and a female 150-200 lbs. Since they stand so tall, the body tends to go through the windshield, and these accidents can be fatal for all concerned.
I have seen coyotes on our street and we live inside the city limits of Portland, Oregon, about ten minutes from downtown. I saw one walking across a parking lot less than 10 feet in front of my car a while back.
We keep our cats indoors.
Why? Don’t they eat cats?
My son is working on a dual Chemistry and Physics degree at the University of Houston using his GI Bill. He is taking a chemistry course, a physics course and 3 labs this semester. Of his lab TAs, one is just happy to look at his log book. The other two want full magazine-quality lab write-ups in PDF. Guess which TA he loves?
“…A car hitting a full grown mule deer is another matter. A big male could be 300+ lbs, and a female 150-200 lbs. Since they stand so tall, the body tends to go through the windshield, and these accidents can be fatal for all concerned.”
Also, one hitting a full-grown male moose is a serious problem up here. They are humongous and also stand tall, so people in their little buzz mobiles at night don’t see anything until the bugger lands on their windshield and roof and squashes them and their little rice-burner. The DMV in the state capital has a map on the wall of all the moose-vehicle collisions, with most of them by far concentrated to the northeast of I-89, i.e. the Northeast Kingdom, bordering NH and Quebec.
A bull moose can go past 1,500 pounds, is around seven feet high at the shoulders and around ten feet long. We don’t see them much around here as most of the wetlands and bogs they like are surrounded by active farmlands with machinery buzzing around.
Coyotes will eat cats but don’t actively go after them; fishers, on the other hand, will sit outside a house and wait for the cat to come out. They are the fastest tree-climbing mammals in North America and of a cat leave only the teeth and claws. They are also one of the very few predators of porcupines.
“While fishers are usually shy and elusive, humans are encroaching into their forest habitat. There are anecdotal reports of fishers attacking pets and, in a 2009 case in Rhode Island, a 6-year-old boy.[2] (from Wiki)
I would hope the latter two.
Lots of deer around here. I have got 2 of those deer whistles on the car—put there by the prior owner, who spent a lot of time in Michigan, and said he puts them on all of his cars and never had a deer incident. I probably mentioned that I saw a big buck get hit by a huge Volvo semi tractor trailer last year on my way back from the radio project transmitter. That buck was like a circus acrobat turning somersaults and when he finally got up, his right rear leg was—well, let’s say useless. If he were a horse, they would have shot him. He loped off into the woods, but I doubt he lasted long. The Volvo semi tractor did not have even a scratch on it.
I am in favor of culling deer and Canadian geese—both something I never saw around here as a kid. When I lived in Melrose, Mass., they had a project there to house some Cambodian immigrants. A bunch of Cambodian teens used the swimming pool daily, which was a block away from our house. A couple times a week, they would disappear into the marsh around the pond next to the pool. After about a month of this, all Canadian geese on that pond disappeared. Apparently, they were smart enough to see that those kids were taking one of their numbers home for mom to fix for supper. I am in favor of more of that. People hitting deer in cars around here is a very regular occurrence. I have the deer horns, good brakes, and wide tires with a lotta rubber meeting the road. Also have a 5,800 pound curb weight car. Hopefully, that is enough.
Walk On By—I liked Dionne, but my wife saw her in person when we were at Indiana Uni, and—having seen Peter, Paul, and Mary a few weeks before Dionne,—she said Dionne was as cold and disinterested as any performer she had ever seen.
OFD is not old enough, but here is a clip of Leroy Van Dyke on Porter Wagoner’s show when Porter looked like a teenager and I was only 12. A different Walk On By:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH5XonO7ly8
or the produced version, which sounds much better to me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1J3sBFCoPc
No insulation whatever in Tiny House. From the attic, you can see outside between the cracks of the siding. I insulated one house and do not intend to do another, except for the one I am hoping to build within the next couple of years. Meanwhile, I just figured out how to get a washer/dryer on the main level of Tiny House. Going to move the kitchen stove out of its corner and put an island with a cooktop in the middle of the kitchen. Been fighting in my mind where to put that washer/dryer, and it has taken over a year to get the insight for that solution.
Had a leak at the basement connections for the washer/dryer (unused). Actually, I think it has been leaking for years, and I did not know it—and increasingly so. The guys were here to fix it a couple weeks ago, and also found a leak at the drain spigot of the hot water tank. I have been regularly using 3 to 4 units of water per month, and since they fixed the leaks, the meter has not yet budged to the next unit. In reality, I may be using more like 1 unit a month. Does not really matter, because the water rates have changed so that the charge is the same up to 3 units. But at least I will not be getting billed for 4 units anymore.
And speaking of my Uni, I was down in Bloomington last weekend (not to see the loser of a football game), and ate at a Korean restaurant that was a lot of fun. They serve Korean barbeque that you cook yourself at the table. There are 6 tables with a fitting in the middle where they drop a pan of hot charcoals, then put a grate over that and you put the meat on the grill yourself and cook it at the table. We had pork bellies (sliced very thinly) and squid (known to some as calamari). Enjoyed that a lot. IU has always had a large foreign student population, and thus has attracted some really good foreign restaurants (long after I left, as there were only 2 bars and 1 good pizza place back then). Good Indian, good Burmese, and now good Korean. The barbeque tables have commercial kitchen hoods over each of them, but they are high enough that even our host would not bump his head, and the fans are noiseless. There is an whole other section of the restaurant for their regular fare, but most people opt for the barbeque. For Dave B. the place is called Mama and is just off the old bypass, not far from the massive US Navy servers (including Tick and Tock) that sit, supposedly secretly, behind the main UITS building. Bloomington is reputed by the IT pro’s there, to have more bandwidth than any other city in the US.
Perhaps you don’t normally carry your keys around in your pocket. He hears you pick them up and put them in your pocket.
Anyway, BCs are nothing special. Our boxer could do that, even back the car out of the driveway if we asked her nicely.
Is that Greenbrier Farm?
It’s amazing what the dogs pick up on. My wife runs a business (we live above the business, in good European tradition), and hence works “at home” most of the time. If she’s just getting up to do something elsewhere in the house/business, the dogs just stay asleep. If she needs some fresh air, and is getting up to take the dogs for a walk, they bounce off of the ceiling and run after her. She has absolutely no idea what she does differently, but the dogs always seem to know.
Renovating a house is kind of fun, as long as you have plenty of time. And money. It may be cheaper than hiring the work done, but good materials are still expensive. Skimping on material isn’t worth it: it’s frustrating to have to repeat work, just because you thought you’d save a buck and by some no-name crap on sale.
I totally understand Chuck not insulating tiny-house – if you’re not going to stay there long enough for the saving to pay for the work, and it doesn’t substantially increase the resale value, then there’s just no point. I have two rooms left to insulate in our huge basement: I do one each winter, when it’s gray and raining for weeks on end. I’ve been saving the hardest for last, where I also have some water seepage. It’s the conflict about doing it right: I *ought* to dig around the house down to the foundation and waterproof the outer wall. I *will* regret it, if I don’t do that. But I probably won’t, because it would involve digging up paths, flower beds, the lawn and a stone stairway along a total length of more than 60 feet – and no real way to get machinery in there either. So likely I’ll be stupid and try to waterproof from the inside.
The symbiosis of dogs and humans is amazing, and it’s the result of 35,000 years of co-evolution. They watch our every move and take actions accordingly. I’m not entirely convinced they don’t sense our thoughts. There is certainly bi-directional communication on a very high level, immensely greater than we share with any other species.
Dogs realise that there are benefits to cooperation. Cats just go it alone regardless. Their loss.
I wouldn’t call trying to waterproof from the inside stupid. Doing it and assuming it will work without testing it might well be stupid. Let’s say you try it and it doesn’t work. What are you out? Some waterproofing paint and a little time. If it does work, you’ve saved a ton of effort.
My mom was in the hospital for three days last week. They tried the easiest solution to her problem. It may just work temporarily. But temporarily may solve her problem long enough for it to heal on its own. If it doesn’t work, I’m sure the next thing to try is much more expensive, and probably has more risks. The problem is that with Obamacare, if she’s readmitted to the hospital for the same problem within 30 days, the hospital gets penalized.
“So likely I’ll be stupid and try to waterproof from the inside.”
“I wouldn’t call trying to waterproof from the inside stupid. Doing it and assuming it will work without testing it might well be stupid. Let’s say you try it and it doesn’t work. What are you out? Some waterproofing paint and a little time. If it does work, you’ve saved a ton of effort.”
You’re right, of course. It’s a bit more work than that, though, because I’ll need to strip off the (half-rotten) plaster and paint, which will be a huge mess. The bigger problem is that I just don’t trust the waterproofing treatment to hold up for the long-term. If it doesn’t seep for 1 or 2 rainstorms, does that mean it will hold up over the long-term, or will it peel off after the 3rd or 4th? But why am I fussing? There’s no other choice; the alternative is just completely out of scope.
This is a weird room: It was clearly part of the original construction, but added as a last-minute afterthought. It doesn’t show up in any plans, and the wall towards the inside was clearly meant to be the exterior wall of the basement. This last minute change is probably why the drainage doesn’t work right. Anyway, it’s a huge room, the full length of the house, and isn’t even *under* the house, but to the side. It will be a lovely work/play space, once it’s dry and warm. Right now, it’s mostly a great breeding ground for mold and mildew…
It’s worse than that. I’d suggest the first step is to look at the half rotten plaster and paint, and figure out where the rot is worst. After you’re done, that’s the spot you soak with the garden hose to test it. Of course you really shouldn’t take advice from me, I’ve been looking at the concrete walls of our unfinished basement which have no signs of water leaking for the last three years.
I guess I’m not awake enough yet. I should have clarified. The garden hose is used on the outside of the wall where the rot was the worst inside.
I’m convinced that dogs and cats can parse our thoughts, and there is even some back and forth. Especially with dogs. My dog asks to go outside by walking to the door and grunting softly “ugh”. Just last night she walked to the door, and didn’t grunt, and I STILL got up to let her out, and that was from another room. The Force is strong in that one! The cat less so. I’m pretty sure she hates me other than I feed her, but I only keep her around to make sure there’s no mice in the house, so it works out evenly.
I think that even women can do it. Why, I’ve had women I’ve never even met give me dirty looks from across the room, for no reason other than my impure thoughts.
Brad, the only problem with sealing it from the inside is you aren’t dealing with the problem itself. Where is the water coming from? Is there a badly placed downspout that is dumping water on the leaky spot? Is it the natural drainage for run off during rainstorms?
I had a spot on my basement that wasn’t leaking, but it was almost always damp. Then I realized that the downspout was just pouring the water onto the foundation. I added a length of downspout and directed the water away from the house. Voila, no more water!
The problem is that we are on a hillside with a forest above us. I’ve diverted as much surface water as I can, but can’t really do much about the groundwater. The worst seepage is about 5-6 feet under the surface.
The rest of the basement is dry, because they put in lots of rock and gravel. I expect that the groundwater just flows under the house; heck, there could even be a drainage system, though I can’t imagine where it would drain to. However, this room, added as an afterthought, is just buried in the dirt. The only way to get at the seepage would be some serious excavation to put in proper drainage.
So, yeah. And you see why I’ve put this room off until last…
Yo, Chuck, I is gonna be 60 next year. But thanks for posting those clips.
Catz rule and dogz drool. There it is.
Mold and mildew seems more of a problem in European buildings than in the US. Probably a matter of building materials, but my British family and friends were always battling “rising damp”.
Not sure what the norm is where you are in Swissland, but around Berlin, everyone seemed to renew the outside water barrier about every 15 years. That meant digging down around the outside foundation and putting some kind of cloth-like thing against the stone, then spraying some kind of black gunk all over it, which somehow made it stick to the wall and further waterproofed the foundation,—and you were set for another 15 years. Just as I was leaving, we were getting serious water coming in to our bedrooms, causing rising damp. The plan was to have the waterproofing done the following summer, but I was gone by then. I assume it was done, because the Germans are methodical. We discovered that the last time the waterproofing had been done was more than 20 years earlier, so no surprise we were having problems.
The procedure is so common there, that practically every month, you would see somebody in our part of town having their foundation dug out, and the waterproofing applied. Our house was built about the same time as Tiny House, actually—1923. The Strausberg house was built for a Prussian general and included servants’ quarters in the basement (where we lived). The house was built on sloping land so our bedrooms (at street level) were about waist deep underground, and our front door (which faced the back of the property) opened out onto ground level land. The property kept descending down to the little river that once powered the mill down the street. For all their ingeniousness, the Germans do some stupid things, and they dammed up that stream so it is now stagnant and a breeding ground for all kinds of undesirable stuff. Although everyone in the neighborhood wants the stream opened up and flowing again, there is not a chance of that happening with the current city planners. So, in the summer, they have trucks going by at least once a week, fogging in our direction for the masses and masses of mosquitoes that breed back there.
Tiny House was built originally with no basement. This was common back in that day. It sits on concrete blocks that do not descend below ground level. After the house was built, my grandfather—like many others in this neighborhood—dug out a basement, a bucket at a time, leaving a “shelf” of about 4 feet around the perimeter. The shelf was ultimately covered with a layer of concrete, but over the years, it has developed cracks, and water flows in there, well below ground level. When my parents retired to this house, they had a concrete floor put in the basement; formerly it was just dirt. There is always water running from the back of the house to the front along the basement floor when it rains hard; that is the same direction the water flows in the alley beside the house when it rains torrents. Strangely, the water seepage does not come from that alley—which has no drainage system,—it comes from the back yard, which seems entirely level to me. I imagine that in heavy rains, just a slight slope can make a difference, and my guess is that the ground in back slopes ever so slightly towards the house. No way to waterproof it though—short of putting in a foundation. It would probably be cheaper to demolish the house and build another one, than to do that.
Cats are evil. Period.
Did you know that a cat priestess told Julius Caesar in a dream to sacrifice 1000 puppies? So that’s what the scumbag did.
Plus, there’s this:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2190086/Cat-parasite-worms-humans-brains-drive-victims-suicide.html
Hey Bill, I’m sure the women’s trade union notices everything we do and circulates that information to all nearby women. I used to check out a woman at work, and one of the other women said one day “I’ve seen the way you look at her!” True enough, but I’m sure she wanted me to stare at her… 🙂
Nowadays, I can’t even have a furtive glance at a woman without her giving me a “I know what you’re thinking” smile.
Greg, is that why they’re always going off to the bathroom together?
If they’re smiling, it’s still okay. It when they give you the “I know what you’re thinking and you are going to die for it, scumbag” look that you’re in trouble.
Ahhh, women in the bathroom. I’ve never ceased to be amazed at how long they take in there. I try to avoid talking to guys there, whether I know them or not, but it seems to be the centre of female social life. Reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel.
@Chuck: I’ve never heard of that sort of periodic waterproofing. The black stuff they use really ought to last for decades. Our building certainly has never needed anything like that, except for this one improperly built room.
The UK, of course, is a very different story. I lived there for a few years, and let me tell you: the typical construction standards are pathetic. Anyone can hang out a shingle “I am a builder”, and too many of them are completely untrained and completely clueless. Plus, the idea of actually finishing a job is just about unknown.
My favorite example of this: The building we lived in was built before the days of plumbing, so pipes were run on the outside of the walls. The water main into our apartment came up out of the floor in the outside hallway and entered our apartment above the front door. This pipe had been lovingly hidden behind a hand-built wooden shaft – it looked quite nice. Until about 4-5 feet in front of our door, where the wooden covering stopped and the naked pipe came out. Above our door, they just bashed a hole in the wall, ran the pipe through, and left it.
Windows that are installed, but don’t close properly, sinks with the drain hooked up, but not the overflow, wallpaper mounted upside-down. In a commercial kitchen I know, they spent good money getting a waterproof floor put in so that they could properly wash the place down; then the cabinet installer came and drilled holes everywhere – through the waterproofing – to screw the cabinets down.
You can either laugh about it, or cry – either way, UK workmanship is a wonder…