Boo-Ho-Ho!

This entry is a little out of order. Halloween was two weeks ago, of course, and we had a good one.

We've been decorating the house a little bit more each year. Nothing too major, but we enjoy hanging fake cobwebs from the front porch and putting scary stickers on the windows. Last year we made ghost heads using Styrofoam wig stands with cheesecloth draped over them. This year we updated them with shoulders, which looks better. We also made a big cutout zombie and taped him to an upstairs window to make a scary shadow. Little by little, we're scaring away the local kids.

It's not working. This year we counted 130 kids, which is more than last year. In fact, we ran out of candy. With about an hour to go, I had to dash to the gas station mini-mart to get more. Not the most economical way to stock up on candy, I can tell you. I got a bunch of jellybeans and gummi bears and whatnot, and Kathy put then into little Dixie cups and wrapped them in cellophane. It all worked out okay, but for the first time ever we had no leftover candy for ourselves. :-(

This year we put red and green bulbs in some of the outdoor lights (Kathy's idea), and it looked pretty good. Er, I mean, bad. Some of the local downtown businesses were passing out candy, too. One of the shopkeepers later told us that a lot of the kids that visited her said, "Have you seen that white house at the end of the block? It's really scary!" So I guess our little scheme is working. Bwaaa-haa-haa!!!

Water, Water, Everywhere...

"...nor any drop to drink." So goes Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. And right now, it also applies to our front yard.

It all started with a surprise in the mail: A $500 water bill. Yikes! We normally use less than $100/month in water, so this was way out of line. Okay, sure, we'd been watering the plants a bit more than usual (i.e., at all) in preparation for the Historic Home Tour, but still! A 5x jump is surely evidence of a leak or a problem somewhere. Thinking quickly, we called the local water monopoly to ask for forgiveness, and they gave us a ray of hope. If we can find a leak and document the fix, they'll refund most of the exorbitant fee. So there's your incentive: Fix the leak for under $500 and you're money ahead.

Game on. I crawled under the house looking for damp spots. Nothing there. Toilets running? Nope. Teenagers showering? Not anymore. Sprinklers leaking? Hmmmm....

We never liked the drip system the previous homeowners had installed, so here was our chance to remove it. And it did appear to be leaking. The wet spots on the ground weren't always near the sprinkler heads, so that water had to be coming from somewhere. Unfortunately, our soil contains a lot of sand (okay, it is sand) so leaks can disappear very quickly. You could be pouring, say, $500 worth of water into the ground and not know it. So out comes the old sprinkler pipe.

And in with the new. We jumped into the pickup truck and headed to Home Depot, where they're painting a reserved parking spot for us. Loaded up with PVC pipe, valves, elbows, and tees, we're all set to play underground Tinker Toys.

Here's my spiffy six-valve manifold. A thing of beauty, innit? At least I was smart enough to connect it directly to the city water and not downstream from the water softener. ("Hey, how come we're out of salt again?!")

The sandy soil is easy to dig up, but as any prison escapee will tell you, it also collapses in on itself really easily. You wind up digging each trench twice, once to mark the path and again to empty out all the dirt/sand that just fell back into it. So far, I've excavated one coffee mug, half of a broken clay pot, plenty of roots, and a whole lot of old sprinkler pipe.

The hardest part so far has been routing the new pipes to the far side of the house. There's a cement walkway around our front yard, so my best route was to tunnel under it. And then to tunnel under it again to get past the front steps. So far, I've dug three tunnels, but it's quick and therapeutic work. Somehow I wind up with bigger piles of dirt than when I started, though. I can't figure out where the extra dirt is coming from. Maybe someone is sneaking dirt into our front yard in the middle of the night. Or I've disturbed some really big gophers.

Five Hundred of Our Closest Friends

October 7th was Pacific Grove's annual Historic Homes Tour, and for the first time, we were on it. The premise is simple: you clean house for a month, leave your front door open for six hours, and let 500-600 total strangers walk through your house. Easy, right?

The event is put on by the Heritage Society of Pacific Grove, the same people who make the little green wooden plaques that go by the front door of local homes with historic significance. They charge $20/person for a ticket, so it's quite a good fundraiser for the Society. In return, Kathy and I got brunch.

We're not complaining. After all, we volunteered. We'd considered being on the tour last year, but the house just wasn't ready. There were too many holes in the floors (figuratively speaking) for it to be safe for visitors. Amazing how quickly another year came around, though, and suddenly we're up against a deadline.

Which was partly the point. We knew that if we were going to open the house to visitors on October 7, we'd better be done with our remodeling chores sometime on October 6. We got close.

The bathroom was almost done. It still needs trim around the door, and I can see a lot of small details that didn't get finished properly. It also forced us to clean up the backyard and hide the biggest piles of junk. A little paint here; a little spackle there; a lot of dusting and vacuuming everywhere, and everything's ready to go.

Each house on the tour (there are about a dozen) gets its own set of volunteer docents who guide visitors through the house, make sure nobody gets lost, and generally act polite and answer questions. That means Kathy and I had to "train" our docents a week beforehand, in that we led them through the house and told them stories that they could later relay to their guests. In all, we had 12 docents, who worked in two shifts of six, with two on each floor. That seemed like a lot of docents to us, but that's the way the Heritage Society likes to do it.

They also hinted that they'd prefer it if we weren't at home during the tour itself. That suited us fine; we didn't want to be hanging about while strangers whispered about the hideous wallpaper, odd paint colors, etc. In order to gently nudge us to a safe distance from home, the Heritage Society puts on a nice brunch for all the affected homeowners. And, ironically, provides us tickets so that we can visit everyone else's house.

Fortunately, it was a beautiful day out, and Kathy and I had fun walking all over town spying on houses or just enjoying the day out. When 4:00 PM rolled around and we were finally able to return home, we didn't notice anything out of place. Remarkably, there was almost no evidence that anyone had been there. Had it not been for the balloons out front and the article in the newspaper, I wouldn't have suspected a thing. Even so, we think we'll take the next few years off. Too much pressure getting everything ready by October 7.