Brickhouse

After a lovely evening with our friends Chuck and Doug, we bid goodnight and I walked them to the door. Thirty seconds after the door closed behind them the phone rang. It was Chuck.

"Come out here for a minute. I want to show you something."

So I joined Chuck out on my front porch. He was holding something in his hand.

"Do you know what this is?"

I did. I knew exactly what was in Chuck's hand. Mortar, he was holding bits and pieces of mortar the same color as the mortar between the bricks on our house.

"That's coming from way up there." He said as he pointed, "Somebody is going to get a brick on their head if you don't get that fixed."

Way up, all the way up, I could see blank spaces between the bricks where mortar should have been. In my mind dollar signs started filling all available space. I have a reserve fund in the bank, supposedly for things like this, and all I could think of was it crumbling along with those bricks. Despite the fact that it was a reserve fund, I kind of thought of it as my bucket list fund if nothing went wrong. So now there would be no bitching patio in the back yard. No Ford Model A car to play with. No trip to Spain. No SUV to replace the Ford Fusion. All the silly ideas I was planning to spend that money on evaporated in Chuck's hand. 

This past week I went on Yelp and looked up Masons. I picked the first three listed and made appointments. The first guy came out and looked at my bricks, climbed up on the roof, checked out my chimney, and gave me a quote.

"Your chimney is crumbling and needs to be rebuilt. You have flashing up there that is bad and needs to be repaired. Then there is that brick work on the front of the building. All together, $1,900."

Nineteen hundred dollars? I tried not to let on that I was relieved. I was seriously expecting five thousand, six thousand, or more. So I thanked the man and asked him to send me a written proposal. The second guy came over, stood out on the sidewalk in front of the building. He looked up, and said $1,400. Wow, even better. So I thanked him and asked him to send me a written proposal. The third guy also stood out on the front sidewalk, looked up, and told me, "Sure, no problem. We can do that for you."

I asked him if he had any idea how much it would cost. He told me that he wouldn't know that until he wrote up the proposal. About a week, he said, and he would know. But I persisted and asked him for a ball park figure.

"I don't really do ball park figures, but.... hmmm.... uh umm... " And after much thought and furrowed brows, he told me, "Around ten thousand dollars."

One thing I learned when getting our kitchen done, our plumbing done, and our home rewired, was to not give any hint to the bidder as to your feelings. So I told the man I would wait for his written proposal, I shook his hand, and forgot all about him. I gave the job to the first guy. Even though he was more than the second guy, at least he took the time to climb up onto the roof and figure out exactly everything that needed to be done. Now my only problem is that he wants to do it this week. Can you do brick work in sub-freezing temperatures? Won't the mortar freeze before it dries? Am I wrong to be worried?

I Assume It Will Leave When the Weather Gets Better

I caught it out of the corner of my eye weeks ago. A blur of black along the baseboards in the kitchen, disappearing under the radiator. Either a baby rat or a mouse. So I went out to the hardware store and got me some traps, and every night for a week I would lay a trap next to that radiator. Nothing. Whatever it was had decided that our kitchen was not up to snuff, and must have left for greener pastures. Probably because there was not enough crumbs on the floor to sustain it. I have two dogs who keep that floor spotless. I did put traps in the basement too, but didn't catch anything there either.

On a quiet evening a few weeks ago, I was in my office doing important work on the computer, when I heard what sounded like one of those air-raid sirens going off. So I put my card game on hold and went out into the dining room to investigate. It's hard to describe the sound coming out of Mark's mouth. It was a shrill, loud, long continuous scream. The dogs were frantic, snarling and barking.

"What the hell is going on?" I asked.

"Kitchen.... rat.... kill it... "

"Aw, crap. Really, a rat? How big is it, where'd it go?"

Mark held his fingers about an inch apart.

"That big and it was just wandering around the kitchen floor."

"Okay, it's the mouse. That's why I bought some traps that I've been putting down every night."

"What, you know about that rodent?"

"I saw it about a week ago. I didn't want to worry you."

That's what I do when I realize Mark knowing something is worse than if I shared it with him. I just don't mention it. So in the weeks since the initial sighting of that mouse, my upstairs tenant Dennis, has seen it numerous times. In fact it is very bold upstairs and casually wanders right out into the middle of the living room while Dennis watches television. Mark has also seen it twice more. Screaming like a cat on fire the first time, and actually quietly informing me of its presence the second time. I'd like to believe that the mouse Dennis sees and the mouse Mark has seen, is the same mouse. I however, have not seen it since that black blur running along the baseboards. I've put out the traps and left poison in Dennis' apartment, but I cannot catch the damn thing. I won't put poison out in our apartment because of the dogs, and the potential smell of a dead mouse behind the radiator. At this point the mouse is winning, spending the entire winter under the warmth of our radiators. And that's fine with me, as long as it does not get into my food, or has babies. Geez, please don't have babies.

A Fine Whine

Another snowy weekend and I can hear all the adults whining about the weather. Don't you remember, when you were a kid and snow was fun? Remember the snow fort you built? You and the kids on your side of the street would build one, the kids from the other side of the street would build one, and then you'd go to war. Snow balls would fly and nobody would stop until the sun went low on the horizon, and snot was running down your nose onto your muffler. There might be a stop in the action when the other side would start using ice balls instead of snow balls. This was considered bad form and would require the youngest fighter to run inside and snitch to Mom. 

Back in my time side streets were only minimally plowed and there was no such thing as salting the road. So the snow would get packed down hard and form a nice icy glaze. This allowed for the hugely popular pastime of skitching a ride. When a slow moving car came down the street the bravest kids would run out and grab onto the rear bumper and "skitch" a ride. Even better than a car were the school buses. They had a higher bumper and allowed you to almost stand up straight as the bus took off down the street. Yes, skitching was pure fun, unless you hit a patch of bare pavement.

Our sledding hill was down in the woods near our house. It was almost straight up and down, about fifty feet high, and was lined on either side with trees that only the most unlucky would slam into....  Okay, maybe it wasn't fifty feet high, wasn't straight up and down, but the trees were there and once in awhile some poor sap would hit one.

So adults, quit the whining about winter and the snow. And stop watching the television weather people. Watching them only makes you think about the snow, the cold, and the long winter. I don't once remember thinking about any of those things when I was a kid. It was just winter and we did winter things. So go outside and do some winter things. Besides, before you know it you'll be retired from work and won't have to go out in that weather. You can just sit inside watching Fox News and playing cards on the computer, or whatever it is old people do. 

Canker Sores

When I moved to Florida in 1989, I knew I needed two things in my backyard. Orange trees and a swimming pool. So when I bought my property in 1993, that's what I got. Outside one door, just a few feet from my living room, was a lovely blue swimming pool. Outside the kitchen door were two orange trees, which meant fresh orange juice every morning. Funny thing, I got sick of both the pool and the trees around the same time. I was pretty much over the swimming pool when I looked out the window one day and saw that the shallow end had collapsed into a sink hole. As for the orange trees, they gave the sweetest, most delicious orange juice. Better than Tropicana. I would let the dog out in the morning and grab a couple of oranges while I was out there. By the time the dog wanted back in, I had squeezed and drank my juice. It was like I was living in one of those Florida travel ads. And then one day I stepped out the back door and reached up for one of those big, juicy oranges. Something was wrong. The orange didn't feel right, so I turned it around on the branch and saw a quarter sized hole in the back of it. All of its guts had been eaten out and sucked dry. Over the next few days I found more and more like that. Then one evening, I flipped the porch light on and saw that my beloved orange tree was swarming with rats. Grove rats stealing my juice. Worst of all, they were setting up camp in my attic. I could hear them up there at night, scurrying around and having a grand old time.

At that time there was a problem with citrus in Florida. We had something called citrus canker. Commercial growers were in a panic. Citrus canker didn't kill the trees. It didn't kill the oranges. It didn't harm them at all other than leaving little spots on the orange, and Americans did not want spots on their oranges. So the cure was to cut down and destroy every single citrus tree, in every yard in South Florida. Because my trees were behind a locked six foot fence they could not cut my trees down. But now I had this rat problem and I was not getting any benefit from these trees. So I called the state and told them to come and check them for canker. Sure enough, we had canker and the state destroyed my two orange trees. Not only did they get rid of them for me, they paid me one hundred dollars to replace them with non-citrus trees.

Now it is like ten years later and I had forgotten all about those trees. I live in Chicago now. Orange trees are the farthest thing from my mind along with swimming pools. Well, it seems that some lawyer with nothing better to do, decided that the State of Florida had overstepped its authority in destroying trees on private property, so the lawyer sued and won. Not only that, but the lawyer somehow tracked me down in Chicago and sent me my cut of the lawsuit. $111.57 on a check that was sent to my mom's house in Tinley Park. That's what I call a win-win-win situation.

The Ice Melt Cometh

Monday night, before I went to bed, I took the dogs out for the last pee of the night. That's when I realized we were having an ice storm. I stepped out into the back yard and it was slippery. Overhead the wires were iced up and drooping. From the fence and the eaves of the garage, icicles dripped from every surface. So in an attempt to get ahead of the ice I went out front and spread ice melting pellets on all the sidewalks. Then I went to bed. In the morning I looked out the front windows expecting to see my sidewalks all free of ice. They weren't. At least half an inch of grainy ice was covering everything. So I went out there and scraped the top layer off with a snow shovel, then spread more of those ice melting pellets. This was not the cheap Morton Salt, ice melt. I used the more expensive stuff that was guaranteed down to zero degrees. Feeling that I had done my civic duty, I went back inside the house and had my morning cup of coffee. About an hour later I looked out the windows, once again expecting to see sidewalks free of ice. They were not free of ice, but were covered with ice that had little holes where the expensive ice melting pellets had melted their way down to the pavement. Obviously that crap does not work on Chicago ice. Maybe it works on Atlanta ice, or Tallahassee ice, but not on tough Chicago ice. So I took my other bag of ice melt, the cheap Morton Salt stuff, and spread that shit all over my sidewalks. Immediately I saw results. Hours later I looked out the windows again and the ice was still melted away. Maybe that was because I had put enough salt out there to preserve a whale carcass, but I didn't care. My only worry is that in two months I'll have to plant new grass after all that brine has washed into the lawn.