I hope they’re still in business when I next pass through Union Station.
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After two months if trying, I finally got my flushometer. A Sloan Royal 120, 1.6 GPF.
You would think they would be easy to find, but they aren’t.
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I’m a tired rock star.
My three-week bathroom replacement wrapped-up today after five weeks. It has been an unpleasant period of time filled with weird, unnecessary drama from the contractor, but it is finally over. I have a bathroom that works.
I have changed the lock on the door. Now comes a period of cleaning and reclaiming the apartment as my own.
This has been the climax of two years of planning and buying bathroom items.
Problems with the original bathroom:
- Toilet would not flush
- Light in center of ceiling. Thus face in shadow when looking in mirror
- Large, bulky mirror not actually a medicine cabinet. Thus it did not have a practical reason to be so large and bulky. It also had a stained wooden frame that was decaying because of bathroom humidity.
- Faucets pretending to be oil-rubbed bronze were actually brass with something brown applied to them. This brown paint would rub off with time. And in some cases, they were just brown plastic.
- Towel bar behind door. Door would hit said towel bar.
- Toilet paper holder a far reach on the opposite wall.
- Sink in wooden fixture. This was also rotting due to bathroom humidity.
- Shower head could not reach the far end of the bathtub.
It all had the look of Home Depot circa 2010. So I did not destroy anything classical.
I should add, despite all the problems detailed above, this bathroom was still better than in any place I rented. Landlords hate you.
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Were you able to get an exhaust fan put in?
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No, but I still have my window.
Installing an exhaust fan is not too easy when sealing with masonry load-bearing exterior walls.
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Maybe get one of those window fans facing outward? Won’t work in winter, depending on your winters, and I hope you’re not at the ground level (burglary), but otherwise it’s easy to remember to turn on after a shower because it’s already set up for you.
Electrical outlets being the one issue.
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Those never age well.
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Well.
I found an online therapist that I’m hoping will be able to help me be more okay with myself. I have an appointment on 9/12 for my first session.
I’m very hopeful, and a bit anxious. The latter is due to the fact that my reman’d lappie that my son bought for me w/some of his pandemic $$ shuts off by itself for no reason that I know of; so I am of course imagining this happening during a session. SIGH.
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Good luck!
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Who is this Beck person and why are they the arbiter of anxiety and depression? His inventories seem to be a bit out-of-date, and there needs to be a few more in-between answers.
I mean, I’ve taken enough tests and enough surveys in my time to know when the choices given don’t contain the answer the subject really has to the question. Like about sex; I’m not interested in having sex, but I still have some interested in having my own pleasure.
But I suppose I’ll have to discuss the nuances of my answers when I’m being “therapized”, lol.
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Is he the person who you’ve been assigned for the therapy session?
I guess he probably uses the inventories to get some kind of baseline and then will explore more when you talk? At least, I hope so!
Noo, Aaron T. Beck, the guy who came up with the inventory (I looked him up):
Like Maslow only different.
My therapist is a woman in Lansing. 
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Oh! Gotcha! Thanks!
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'welcome! 
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After months, two major sources of dust and grit in my apartment are coming to an end.
Since September, ever since my bathroom remodeling was done, I have been in the process of smoothing two living room walls. This occupied every weekend with an unending cycle of sanding, vinyl spackle and cleaning. At some points it seemed like this project would never be finished.
After every two hours spent on the walls, there would need to be at least two hours spent cleaning up the dust. And that was just for the major surfaces. All the dust produced is very fine and hangs in the air for a long time. It gets everywhere. Therefore, whether my work was drastic or minimal there would be the same amount of cleaning needed afterward.
Spackle dust is very abrasive, like Mood dust, it can damage anything. Dust from old latex paint is not abrasive, but clumps together making it hard to remove from flooring. Worse than latex paint dust is latex primer dust. The primer dust does nothing but stick to itself. It can drive you crazy.
Since November the outside of my building has been having brick work done. A small group of people have been grinding, removing and repairing bricks. They have been fixing cracks and completely re-building the parapet. Even if a window is open only a crack, grit can be blown in. Even if your window is completely closed, grit can work its way in through the frame and accumulate on the window sill, it will also cover the bug screen and the exterior glass.
Now they are starting to wrap this up. They are taking down their rigging, and only working on the last side of the building.
The time has come to clean the non-critical areas. Areas like window frames and the top of cabinets for example.
Last Sunday I cleaned the first window: The curtain, the venetian blinds, the woodwork and the glass. It is so obviously clean now.
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This isn’t really a victory, but it’s interesting on a personal level.
Back in college I had to take a class on typography. I was really bad at it, but I learned lessons I found I could use once I knew more. This was in Minneapolis in the early 90s, by the way.
We had a standard set of text we worked with in that class. It was like a galley proof. We would run the paper through a wax coating machine, cut it up with X-Acto knives and paste the lines of text up manually onto Bristol board. Yes, the school had rooms full of Macintosh IIcis, but this was useful to know too.
The text we worked with was a page full of pithy phrases. One time the instructor referred to it as the “(inset artist’s name here) text,” but it wasn’t a name I knew, and I soon forgot it. But, although I forgot the name, I remembered it was someone’s deliberate work. It wasn’t just the ramblings of a friend of the instructor who was a disgruntled writer.
Over the years I always wondered who’s work it was. I remembered some of the lines and would type them into Google from time to time. But nothing came up.
Fast forward ahead to today. The Tate posted information about an exhibit on Instagroin. It was work by someone named Jenny Holzer, and she is a word artist. Although the lines were different, I knew this was the work of the same person.
So, now I did a search for Jenny Holzer’s work and found this poster:
This is the text. We had it re-typed in Franklin Gothic. But this is it, live-for-line.
Notice it’s for a show at the Walker Art Center in 1989. That would have been just down the road from my school a few years earlier. The instructor must have had this poster on his wall.
One of life’s mysteries, solved.
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I like when a puzzle from long ago finally gets solved.
Interesting list, though I violently disagree with some of them. I guess most people would, but different subsets.
I remember old-school publishing from college too, but only from putting together the campus humor magazine. The printer we used let us use the composing room overnight. I only did it once, but I remember cutting out pieces of text and artwork, coating them with wax, and putting the pages together manually. For some reason, I remember the crosshatch pattern on the wax coating vividly.
We didn’t have Macintoshes then. All we had was an IBM 370 (named Godot) that crashed on a regular basis.
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Wow, that’s fantastic.
Also, that activity - my dad taught printing as an extracurricular at the high school where I grew up. This was pre-Macintosh. This text and that kind of thing is EXACTLY what he would do. I can smell the printing ink and all the associated chemicals.
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