A Moving Experience!

 

Memoirs of a Geezer

  

Reflections and Observations -- A Bright Passage from the Fantasies of Youth to Illuminations of Advanced Maturity!

This Episode:      A Moving Experience!

    In 1995, or it may have been 1997 (I should check some documents, maybe...), we lived in a western suburban community.  We were eager to leave it behind and move eastward.  Even in GeezerHood, we, SweetHeart and I, were sentient enough to realize we didn't belong anywhere but in a city of a certain size and population, not to mention one having a political and social climate more conducive to our own

beliefs, values and attitudes.

The old House!  128 Yrs. Old!

    We landed on the east side of Milwaukee, a block from Lake Park, in a beautiful neighborhood.  Even the wild life seemed to enjoy the ambiance...  wild turkeys, coyotes, deer, strange humanoids, vultures...

    From the start, we both professed most adamantly that this -- a fine old duplex built in 1896 -- was fated to be our last place of residence.  We would never move again!  Never!  We'd be carted to the curb in green refuse carts with our feet pointed upwards in case someone needed shoes!  

    We inherited a tenant, a professor at a nearby university.  When she left us two delightful professors with their young child moved into the vacated upstairs flat.  We occupied the downstairs.  They departed after a couple of years to accept professorial positions in California.  He, the child, left a colorful kite for me!  Sweet lad that he was,

probably still is!

    Next a young couple moved in, but they wanted children and a larger home.  Then came Joan.  She remained with us for some 23 years.  We became great friends, and the friendship has endured, though she moved out a couple of years ago, having had increasing difficulty with stairs, being in her 90s!  

    The new tenant was with us for approximately two years, a kind and generous woman who has three children and a boyfriend.  He, the gentleman friend, is in residence occasionally when not plying his trade a a master electrician with a career based on the west coast.  He commutes, of course, frequently!

    The aforementioned tenant greatly admired the old house.   It, the house, in 2024 having reached 128 years in stable existence, remained a most handsome and admirable structure and place of residence.  She offered to purchase the home and we agreed to sell, abandoning our previous oath of "Never Moving Again."  

    What the hell!  Getting older, dealing with frequent breakdowns, repairs, purchases of new appliances for upstairs and down, paint, plaster, filling cracks, more paint, replacement of wood-burning fireplaces with gas fireplaces, new furnaces, installation of whole-house air conditioning, a new roof, a new porch (to replace a sinking one), concrete footings, new concrete stairways leading to the front porch and doors, interior stripping of ancient paint and wallpaper, new paint, new lighting fixtures, new sinks, re-tiling of both kitchen floors, installation of electrical breakers to replace ancient fuses...  most of the upgrades and improvements, beautifications thanks to the extraordinary Rob C.!  

    The above is a  partial listing of home-ownership duties and chores.  It tires me to enumerate, and listing more will only send me back to bed, I'm afraid!!  I'm already yawning and my eyelids are drooping...     

    We decided the time had come to move.  We explored condominiums, many of them.  Then we remembered the above, the litany of requirements of home ownership, ladders, painting, pounding things, snaking drains, mopping, cleaning sinks, toilets, Q-tips for crud that accumulated in sink overflow ports...  

    The moving project was a lengthy and arduous process!  (This is unlikely to be a revelation to those city denizens who have moved just once or many times!).  The wonderful daughter of our long-standing upstairs tenant, neighbor and friend engaged a Junk
Removal team that off-loaded and unloaded much of her mother's, along with our own

third floor (attic?) overflow, and then the subterranean (basement)  junk as well.  We all thought removal of the aforementioned stuff would never cease!!  (I believe it was quite dark when the parade of outgoing stuff finally subsided!!...  Sorta-like Aliens!) 👽

    It was certainly a purposeful start.  Extraordinary how much material (junk, unwanted stuff!) we all accumulate.  When we commenced the actual move, the big and permanent move, that is, we had already, previously, commandeered several vehicles of friends, daughters, grandsons and others to move to the new place of residence (an apartment) several thousand cartons and boxes filled with "treasures."  (Minor hyperbole!!). Our older daughter was a tremendous inspiration and help!  Her mantra:   "No one wants it; no one needs it; It's going...  Get rid of it!!"  

    We are now firmly ensconced in the new place of residence, a rental, that is, a rented apartment.  It's quite nice.  Two bedrooms, two full baths, a storage locker, an open

balconied porch that overlooks a very attractive courtyard...  flowers, trees, a seating area, a gas grill...  One can almost feel the presence of Frederick (Freddy, I like to call him!) Law Olmstead, ("Father of Landscape Architecture," I believe!?).  Everything is so darn "Becoming."  Freddy's descriptor, not the author's / perpetrator's of this writing!

    Quite an adventure.  We'll never move again until we're dead...  We've sworn a new oath of allegiance to "ultimate and immovable stability"!!  Not going anywhere!  Never!  If you see us many years hence walking along the nearby parkway, and we're still among the living, in or near our new place of residence, give us an acknowledging wave!!!

[Special Note of Dedication:    To SweetHeart and to our dearest and best-loved non-relative friends, Rob and his muse, Susie (if one may call her such!) and our Sweet Wonderful Alie, the master decorator / hanger of art -- to  all of them, for their unwavering love, friendship and companionship!  Thank you!]

 

    

"DIY" and the Single-Minded, Slightly but Not Always Competent Geezer!

Memoirs of a Geezer!

Reflections and Observations -- A Bright Passage from the Fantasies of Youth 

to Illuminations of Advanced Maturity!

This Episode:    "DIY" and the Single-Minded, Slightly but Not Always Competent Geezer!

Pictured above is an image
of a menacing bird that
stared at me while I patched
a hole in a soffit...  Musta
been its nest??!!

Periodically -- and I suppose many are so afflicted! -- I tour our "estate" to determine possibly urgent maintenance needs!  (Drat the confounded curse of responsibility...  it's like a "plague of conscience"??!!)  And then what happens??!!...  

...Suddenly, last summer...  I decided both the upper front porch railing and the upper rear deck and railing system demanded attention, that is, scraping and removing old material and applying new primer and a finished coat of paint.  I also heeded the advice of my wife and attempted to repair a gaping hole in a soffit (fascia, too!) above the upper front porch.  "Must'a been those darn birds!" I opined upon acknowledging the great, gaping mess in the upper regions of the structure.  (A gaggle of birds kept staring at me menacingly as I worked!)    

Aging geezer that I am, I nearly fell off the ladder four or five times.  "We should move to a condo that hires people to do that kind of work," my wise and protective wife almost demanded.  

"We'll look into that," I replied.  "I agree it's an excellent thought.  I'm too old to be working on a ladder for several hours on end...  I could get dizzy and plummet to the earth!  Worse...  the concrete!"  As of this writing, we haven't changed lodgings!  But we're looking into it...

Idiotic though it may seem for a barely competent DO-IT-YOURSELF'er, I have long felt I could accomplish many different tasks best left to professionals.  In one instance in the mid-1990's, I attempted to repair an aging Chevrolet.  After my "repairs," and the removal of

I didn't actually fall off
the ladder, this time...
But I teetered and
wobbled a lot!  Whew!!...

several pieces of "extraneous" hardware, some silly "needless" wires too, the air conditioning never worked again, the windscreen wipers bumped into one another and mechanical difficulties appeared one after another until finally the automobile expired.  When I attempted to change the "glow plugs" on a Volkswagen "Rabbit," we eventually had to "shoot the thing and put it out of its misery," as one of our wiser acquaintances observed.  (She was fond of metaphors!...  or is it  anthropomorphism??)

I have had some successes, however!  I replaced a faucet system for my dear friend, Steve, and his family.  Although I had to use several innovative fastening devices to anchor the thing to the sink.  The faucet sat a bit higher than Missus would have liked!  I rebuilt the threshold at our back door.  Didn't do too bad a job, either.  It just wobbles a little...  And, I've done concrete repairs around the periphery of our 118-year-old homestead.  It may not be pretty, but it seems functional.  I think!...  

Illustration above is how
one feels one appears
trying to schlep a 3-ton
refrigerator (beer usage only)!

My brother, by contrast, is a DIY genius -- builder, electrician, engineer, designer, plumber...  He can do, build and fix anything...  Big jerk!!  When he married and left home for good, that is, left the old nuclear family home of our youth, my father began to telephone me every second day or so to fix things.  He must have thought my brother and me interchangeable parts!  What a disappointment for the old fellow.  I have a great friend, Tom G., who is also a DIY expert.  He can do all that stuff, too.  Why is that?  Is it in the genes?  (Ach!)  Can't be!  My father only picked up a hammer to chase vermin out of mother's tomatoes!  

I seriously lacked the manual arts competence of my older brother.  I allowed an ancient, seemingly 3-ton refrigerator to crash through a basement wall, for example.  "Boy genius," my father labeled me, sarcasm dripping acidly from his words...  But that's a story for another time...  (Well...  maybe just a taste -- a friend and I tried to "hoik" it into the back of an open convertible.  We eventually tied the dolly holding the accursed "ice box" to the back of the automobile and hauled it like a trailer for five or six miles...)

Although I almost always did my parents' bidding, and tried to do my best even when the task was utterly ridiculous, even into my own advancing age.  I stuffed steel wool into imaginary holes in the eaves, for example, where my father was certain squirrels were gaining access to his attic.  We used live traps to capture the invading "tree rodents" and then drove them -- at his command -- from Wauwatosa to Mequon for release "into the wilds," as he'd say.  When another squirrel invaded his attic, he'd pull a face, contortedly quizzical, and ask, "How the hell did that damn beast find its way back here from Mequon?"  I'm sure he was joking...  Wasn't he??  Eventually, we engaged a kind of exterminator who discovered the actual point of entry.  The squirrel invasion ceased.

"Hey Pops!  You look a bit thick!
You got squirrels in your attic,
maybe?...  Tee Hee...  Snicker!..."

I suppose it's a kind of conditioning.  Pavlovian stuff!  My mother insisted I could fix anything she asked me to repair, build anything...  I put up a Christmas tree on one occasion and somehow managed to cause a power saw to gnaw its way into a paint-striped, newly replaced base board!  (The thing is, I fashioned a make-shift stand, but failed to consider placing the stand in water!!  I tried sawing the stand to accommodate the size of the water bucket; vibrations sent ornaments sailing, crashing...  Such a fuss; maybe they were heirlooms!)  My mother returned to the scene from shopping.  "Is the tree up?" she asked, walking into the living room.  "Oh," she exclaimed, in shock but outwardly calm.  "Can you fix that?"  Never quite a perfect repair, she placed a large chair nearby to conceal the scar!

For Maintenance,  Don't
Call This Guy!!  

As a probably deleterious result of all that "encouragement," I can't help myself.  I keep trying to fix things I shouldn't go near!  It's a curse, I suppose.  Just this past week, I snaked out a "choking" bathroom sink drain.  I discovered the "head" of the snake peeking out of the sink in an adjacent bathroom.  "How the hell did that happen?" I exclaimed.  (Sigh!)  The clogged sink eventually drained.  Divine intervention, maybe!!??

I can't imagine a major shift in my foolish DIY compulsion.  Call it cheapness, maybe it's quixotic, perhaps just the absurd notion that eventually I'll miraculously acquire a level of expertise from all those previous attempts!?  Ridiculous!...  And then there's the specter of aging limbs and their eventual worsening condition that'll force the end of my DIY fervor!  I'll post my medical and surgical history, charts, X-Rays...  just FYI!!  If you need me, I'll be upstairs plunging something...  or hammering...!  (Keep emergency numbers handy at all times!!)  

Humbly posted 02-16-15 -- Joel K.