Tis the season for doing stuff around the house.  We will see if I can come up with the cash/time to do these projects I so desire to do.  My new job (I will use getting a new job as an excuse for not updating or actually doing anything with this site) has me off on Thursday and Friday.  I think this will actually make me do more around the house as pretty much everyone else in the world is working on these two days and I have no one to encourage my goofing off.  (as if I need ANY excuse or help to goof off.)

So anyway, I will certainly try to update this thing a bit more often…or at all.

Cheers!

Have a nice day, and die.

Thank you.

Lets just say that the tree won.

On that note, I would highly recommend the Black and Decker Grass Hog for your light weed-eating needs.  I wanted an electric trimmer for several reasons, but I was afraid that this thing would be too wimpy.  It workes great and made short work of my…um…neglected yard.  Just watch for low hanging branches when you are on your second or so hour of trimming.

This freaking thing runs through the center of my house from basement to roof.

I am going to have to tear out some walls to get to the thing.

I am going to have to learn to sheetrock.

It is going to be MESSY.

Can you say, “Hole in the roof?”

I wonder if there is GOLD in there somewhere…

I wonder if there is a dead (insert something dead and ooky here) in there somewhere…

Anyway, I am having AM (My roommates dad and the master of all things fixy come take a look at it this weekend to see if I am crazy for attempting this.  He and a fellow I used to work with seem to think that this will be a hard job, but not a difficult job.  Gobot seems to think otherwise.  Of course, I think he is just mad he can’t stab the thing down.

 As some of you may know, it seems the little snow we had drove in a few “visitors.”  These visitors (that from here on out we will call “Rats”) took up residence above Gobot’s room and would play soccer, practice judo, and do all other kinds of ratty loud things at 3 in the morning.  As I understand it, Gobot would stand wide eyed in the dark, knife in his teeth, waiting in sweaty frustration, longing for the sweet sweet kill that was just out of reach in the ceiling.  The only aberration from his normal nightly activities, of course, is that he was standing.  The next day he and I girded our loins in preparation of a cleansing so complete, that years from now on this night, rodent kind will smear lambs blood on their doors and huddle in the dark terrified that the angel of death won’t pass over this time.  When rats pondered mortality, they would see our faces.
 
Standing in Home Depot, we considered our weapons carefully.  “Traps?”  SNAP! Squirt! Ewww! no, probably not, besides, there is no room for them up there.  “Sticky sheets?”  “What if it is some kind of mega-rat?  I can see it dragging the sticky sheet all over the house turning it into some kind of disease ridden katamari.  So no.”  “Okay then, poison.”  Recalling a conversation I had with Ancient Mariner about how the poison drives the little buggers out of their tiny heads with thirst, causing them to leave the house looking for water, we decided that was the way to go.  I put the thought of a terrier sized corpse in my wall out of my head.  Note that at this point we utilize a property of my (I’m using the technical term here) old-ass house wherein if you poke your head up in the water heater room, you can see down the floor joists across the whole house.
 
Standing in Gobot’s room, we strategize, “2 blocks here…one box here…footprints over here so they get a box…we need a poison pushing stick…got one…okay, done!
 
I think Megumi slept through the whole thing.
 
Fast forward to Monday.  I arrive home from work and Megumi is out.  Thinking I will take a nap or something, I head down to my room.  In the main area, I catch a whiff of it.  Corpse thoughts come flooding back to me.  At this point it is not too bad.  I know that it will get much MUCH worse if not taken care of.  Gobot arrives home and the search begins.  First place to check is in the ceiling.  Gobot pokes his head up in the floor joists and starts sweeping with the flashlight.  Poke, sweep, nothing.   Poke, sweep, nothing.  Poke, sweep…Hey!  What is this?  Gobot reaches in and fishes around for a moment, then pulls out a small manila envelope.  He walks over to the ironing board that is near and tips it over.  Out pours GOLD!  Yes, you read that right, GOLD!  GAR!  Suddenly all rotting body thoughts are banished.  We are on a pristine Caribbean beach pawing though our ill-gotten booty; a parrot on my shoulder sings a bawdy tune.  “I’m gonna check to see if there is anything else up there,” Gobot says as he almost dances back over to the storage room.  (Honestly, if one of us is going to find booty, it would HAVE to be Gobot.  How funny is that?)  I examine the swag a bit.  It contains several gold necklaces, a couple gold nugget things, and some small zip-lock bags that have a smaller nugget and some loose diamonds.  “Anything else?”  Sure enough a few seconds later he pulls out a long velvet necklace case that plainly says Mervyns.  Now as far as swanky jewelry stores are concerned, I don’t think Mervyns counts up there among the heavy hitters.  I am starting to be a bit dubious of the quality of our find.  Nonetheless the box is opened and we find more chains, two wedding bands, and three cuff-links.  Nice.  A trip to the jeweler may be in order.
 
We get back to the task of finding our deceased friend.  No jeweler is going to be open this late on a Monday night anyway.  We pull down one of the boards overhead with no luck.  We pull another with no luck.  We finally figure out that it is coming from behind the washer in the wall that the shower is on.  At this point Megumi walks in and sees the diamonds.  Three tranquilizer darts later she is sleepily murmuring about candy or diamonds or candy diamonds.
 
I won’t go into the details about pulling that wall off.  Let’s just say that if you gave Escher and HR Gieger an acid tab, they may have designed something similar to the walls in my basement.  I doubt there is a straight line anywhere, and while D is a passing score for a pop quiz, it sucks when it is used to describe the plywood used in your walls.
 
To the jeweler!  The next day, Megumi and I get up around the crack of noon (yay Christmas days off!) and head up to Fed Way to the jewelry store where all the employees are packing the heat.  The guy looks at me dubiously when I describe that I found all this in the walls of my house but starts to look it over.  The first chain he picks up, he examines for a while with a little monocle.  “Fourteen carat,” he finally says and puts it to the side.  “Junk,” is the next one, “Real,” on the next, and so on till he goes through the whole mess.
 
The final tally is around four hundred bucks worth of slagable gold.  None of the gems were real except the chips in one of the wedding bands.  No more  
 
There is no point or snappy ending really.  I guess the only lesson is: Tear out your walls and see if there is treasure.  That’s kind of a lame lesson though.  How bout:  When trying to dispose of bodies, great rewards often follow?