Happy As A Pig In Mud

Tags

mountain biking

Chicagoland has seen a little over 17 inches of snow this month.  What that means to trail riders such as myself is no riding trails, unless you are blessed with a fat bike that has studded tires.  That’s not me.

BUT it has been dry since Sunday.  Saturday night the temperatures shot into the high forties, causing us to wake up Sunday morning to a green Christmas.  I went to bed looking at a white landscape, woke up to a clear yard.  Monday was in the fifties.  It has been colder since then, but not outrageously cold (at least for we people who are used to cold weather).

I waited until today.  Waited until I thought it was safe to ride the trails.  BLAM!  I rode this afternoon and it was GREAT.  Mostly clear trails, about half of them completely dry, the others damp enough to cover my back side with mud, as well as a spatter or two on my glasses.  I don’t care.  I got to ride.

Riding was fun, although after three weeks and the holidays had me a bit bleah on the trails.  It was not a fast ride, but it didn’t need to be.

Yay me!

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Break

Tags

family, personal

Here I sit, greasy and unshaven, pondering what to do with my free time while on holiday break.  My office is open today through Thursday of this week, my boss graciously holding down the fort today and Thursday.  I am thoroughly rested, accomplished Saturday while nurturing the affects of too much Christmas cheer on Friday.  While I didn’t really overdo it to the point of it being dangerous, I let my boss buy four rounds at lunch on Friday — which for me is too much.  I arrived home Friday evening, proceeded to pass out on the couch, roused at midnight by my wife.  She wanted to go to sleep and the couch is her bed when our daughter is home from college.

Christmas was actually a nice time.  We went to Christmas eve church services together as a family, celebrated Christmas day at home in our usual fashion.  Of course, this holiday was different than any other in our family, something that I know we all were thinking about even though no one said it.  We consumed our traditional cinnamon roll breakfast, exchanged gifts (nice gifts — my son wanted to give his mother tickets to a James Taylor concert at Wrigley field this summer, so I bought them and he gave them to her).  Don’t go see ‘Fences’, the movie we chose to see at the theater.  It’s real bad.  My guess is that it was far more powerful on the stage, power that did not transfer to the screen.

I am trying to be productive this week.  Finding someone who will replace the two nasty windows in the master bedroom has been a challenge.  No one wants to do just two windows, so they quote high.  Our plan is to replace those two windows, then negotiate a credit for the rest of the windows in the house when we sell the house.  Yesterday, I spent part of the day trying to get quotes for windows, did small projects around the house.  It was a decent day outside, so I washed the siding and shutters on the front of the house, scrubbed the garage door, reattached all the downspouts.  I also attempted to recaulk a window — and may give up on that.  It looks VERY amateur.

Painting starts next week around the house.  Out of respect for my daughter, I am trying to do very little to the house while she is home from college.  It’s a delicate situation — I need to do things, but I don’t want to add to the angst.

Next week also starts indoor riding season.  I need to get serious again after taking a few weeks off.  Last night I dreamed that I had entered an indoor time trial race, finished in second place despite not riding a road bike for months.  My mind is trying to tell me something.

Hope all is well with everyone.  Thanks for reading and living a little of my life with me during 2016.  Next year should prove to be quite an adventure, so stay tuned.

Not As Dark As I Suspected It Would Be

Tags

divorce, family, mariage, personal

I thought I would be numb right now.  I thought that I would be in the throes of misery.  Tonight should have been one of the most terrible experiences of my life.  Why, oh why, do I feel calm and peaceful, serene?

Tonight we had a family meeting.  We told our kids what is about to happen.

I made a decision earlier this week, after listening to my wife waffle, after trying to find a solution to our family Christmas holiday that would be fair to not only my children, but to my family.  After all, my wife had called my mother a few weeks ago and initiated a conversation that pretty much ensured that she would not be welcome at my family’s Christmas celebration.  The result of that phone call made it nearly impossible for us to wait to tell our children about our divorce until after Christmas.  With that in mind, I texted my daughter, found out when her last college final exam would be (Wednesday of this week), asked when she would be home (this afternoon).  My decision was a tough one, one that could not be shared with my wife because she would not go along with it.  I doubted the wisdom also, but my gut told me to do it.  Wednesday night, I talked to my daughter, told her that her mother would not be going with us this Saturday to celebrate Christmas with my family.  Her mother had a falling out with my parents.

You and I both know that would not fly with my daughter, especially if you know my daughter.  I called her from my car, on the way home from a meeting.  Before I arrived home, she had already texted her mother and asked what was going on.  My wife was not happy with me, not just because I had put her in a bad position, but because she claimed I had lied when I said she had a falling out with my parents.  I didn’t fight with her, simply reminded her of the phone call that she had made and the circumstances that were created as a result.  It was true that earlier this week she had offered to go to my family Christmas, my mother advising her against it.  That was why she was claiming that I had lied to our daughter.

A portion of my decision rested on the fact that I knew my daughter would have a day to think about things.  She would have the support of her friends.  She would be able to meet with a counselor she has been seeing at her college.  My girl is strong.  She does not avoid.  When she got home, she talked with her mother for a while, then requested a family meeting to find out what was going on.

I am very glad that she did.  We sat down as a family, calmly, and my wife and I gave our children the news.

“This is something that should have happened a long time ago, for the sake of all of us.”  My daughter delivered that statement with resolve.  And she is right.

As suspected, she was not surprised.  My son feigned surprise, tried to act angry, but it was weak, something I think he may have already rehearsed and realized that it wasn’t the best.  He retreated, went up to his room.  Nate is going to require some space, but he is also going to require the most care, I think.

At the moment, tonight seems to have needed to happen when it did.  Now the gorilla has been dismissed.  We can celebrate Christmas together in a week, knowing that we still have some time together in the home that we have shared.

Waddayathink?

Getting ready for D-day is a lot of work.  There is a house that needs to be readied for sale.  Even though I am fairly diligent with house maintenance, I still have things that need to be done before our place is presentable.  My goal in the past few years is to do one major thing to the house a year — new furnace one year, new air conditioner and coil, new asphalt driveway, and a new roof this past summer.  Windows were the next thing, a necessity for a 30 year old house, but they have been moved up in priority.  Carpet on the stairs and hallway also is being done in the next few weeks.

So far, I have managed to hang three new doors, replace two faucets and a bathtub drain, repair and refinish floor cracks/divots, install a new shelf under the kitchen sink, scrub the siding on the back of the house, rehang a loose shutter, scrub the wood deck, replace the door closer on the front door, put a new light in the laundry room, fix a spot in the master bedroom wall where my son punched a hole, repair a cracked door threshold on my daughter’s bedroom door and replace the strike plate (another son inflicted blemish), move a treadmill from the upstairs bedroom to the garage (and sell it on Craigslist), clear the books off of a bookshelf.  Whew!  If it looks like a lot, it is.  That has all happened in a three week period.  That doesn’t include finding a realtor to sell the house, or meeting estimators to replace the carpet and windows.

My favorite project so far has been rehabbing the kitchen cabinets.  Until I started working on them, I didn’t realize how nasty they really were.  They hadn’t been cleaned for years, plus many of the hinges would no longer close.  I removed all of the cabinet doors and hinges, scrubbed them with Murphy’s Oil Soap, and applied a finish restoring stain to them (the stuff is reallllllly good).  The ends of the cabinets that face windows were badly faded, so I got some oak end pieces and covered them, then stained them.  Finding the right replacement hinges was a trick, enough that I only replaced a few, fixed the ones that were totally bad.  It took me a few days, but after the doors were put back in place and the finish rehabbed, I am pretty stinking proud of myself.

The realtor also has shown some affordable condos to me, only a mile from my house.  They are fairly old, built in 1977. but in a nice area and in good shape.  Each condo has an attached garage.  Buying, if I buy one of those condos, will be approximately $600 less than monthly rent for an apartment (an expensive venture around here).

There is a lot to do.  We haven’t had the time to start on the actual divorce, mostly because I have been too busy with the house.  Once the house is ready and the holidays over, I will be more motivated to get to work on the real difficult task.

I don’t like the thought of what is looming ahead.  The holidays will not likely be pleasant.  Our kids will probably find out about the pending divorce, my popularity most likely will take a hit.  Christmas could be real lonely for me.  Maybe I am wrong, but I am probably not.  I guess maybe it will be a good idea to keep my nose to the grindstone, keep busy.

Any way.. about the kitchen cabinets.. waddayathink?