Miscellany and Progress Report

I was doing great on my diet and exercise regimen until I had to go to Montana for two weeks. The gym in the hotel sucked, and I contracted the Norwalk virus and just didn’t feel like working out. On the positive side, I didn’t feel like eating either, so I didn’t gain any weight. I actually lost three pounds and found myself at 232 when I got home. I worked out for a week then contracted a lingering case of bronchitis and missed another week and a half of working out. Because I was down about being sick, I ate too much comfort food and gained back the three pounds I lost in Montana. Now I’m better and have been to the gym three times this week and am getting back in the swing of things.

The bathroom remodel has been something of a nightmare. The downstairs bathroom is almost done and is usable. The steam generator is great, especially if you are stuffed up. All that is left is to install the shower door (we are using a curtain for the nonce) and to put up two square inch finishing tiles in a couple of places. We painted last weekend, but Mrs Vache Folle is going to want to put on another coat. She always does. Of course, all this took a month to accomplish and went way over budget.

The upstairs bathroom has been gutted. The contractors came over late last week, gutted the room, and disappeared for several days. As of last night, we had a whirlpool tub sitting on the living room floor and a lot of questions about just how the contractors are going to get that behemoth up our narrow stairway and into the bathroom. I’m betting they will have to remove an exterior wall and bring it in from outside as the contractor suggested might be the case. They had to saw the old hot tub into pieces to get it out of the room.

We are very happy with how the downstairs turned out and are keen to see the upstairs completed. All the dust that is getting kicked up is killing my lungs and contributed, I suspect, to my bout of bronchitis. I have been sneezing and dripping nonstop for weeks.

In the “it’s always something” department, the new shower drain has started giving off the odor of sulfur. Either we have inadvertently tapped into a wormhole straight to hell, or there are some sulfate reducing bacteria somewhere in the system. I poured bleach down the drain to some good effect, but we are having the Culligan people, the contractor, and the boiler maintenance folks take a look at various parts of the system to try to find out where the bacteria dwell. The problem seems limited to the shower drain so far. The water tank may be the culprit, or even the water softener. It might even be the well, in which case we’ll want to shock it with some chlorine.

The most recent storm buried the pond deicer under two feet of ice, so I unplugged it. I hope the fish make it.

We actually socialized with other human beings this last weekend. On Saturday, we met some other couples at a bar and listened to a pretty good jazz trio. On Sunday, we had a couple Mrs VF knows from the train over for dinner and cards, and a good time was had by all.