Setbacks
Metalcore. Single track, released in 2021. More info from Wikipedia.
The past week has been exceedingly busy for me, which is the first justification I'll make for not making a post in nearly a week. There's nothing of significance to note in the past week other than the aforementioned busy-ness: it's been all-hands-on-deck getting the house prepped and ready to live in at a full-time capacity. However, a late-breaking discrepancy has forced the appropriately named title of this post: setbacks.
Yesterday, Chris and I made our way over to the house to continue working on the ongoing renovations/repairs. The plan was straightforward:
- Work on the house mid-morning through lunch
- Go by my old house (it will probably never stop being weird to say/type) to pick up the gun safe and computer desk (which were items that I claimed, as agreed on)
- Return to the house with the furniture, get it in place, continue working
- Go back to the old house to spend time with the kids
- Return to the house and spend my first night in the house, such that I would be in place for the local internet service provider to arrive and do the necessary work to have internet established at the house
Naturally, things didn't go this way, otherwise I wouldn't feel the need to mention setbacks, duh.
We ended up getting a late start to working on the house. This wasn't completely far off the original plan, since said plans didn't involve time-consuming work. Most of the "big" projects for renovating and repairing the home have already been completed. The water-damaged flooring has been replaced. The door frame has been caulked and weather-proofed as best as possible to prevent water damage from reoccurring. The major plumbing concerns (water leaks) have been repaired, and the new plumbing and venting for the new location of the washer and dryer (it's an LG WashTower to help conserve space) has been roughed in. The only "major" repair still left on the docket is one that would end up being the major source of the current setbacks (more to come).
The first indicator that things were going to go awry was the fact that it was raining. However, it wasn't a heavy downpour; it was the kind of rain that isn't heavy enough to stop most outdoor activities, but persistent enough to piss someone off. Because of the light rain that fell sporadically throughout the morning, it made outdoor conditions less than favorable, which jeopardized gathering the furniture from the old house. I sent Kayla a text around noon telling her that the furniture gathering would probably be postponed on account of weather. This text was rewarded with a follow-up a few minutes later trying to get us to at least move the desk, since she told the kids that she would set the tree up in its place. Chris and I agreed that we could probably manage it, given that the rain at the time wasn't horrible and that the trip was only a few minutes down the road.
I feel that at this point of me recapitulating the events of yesterday, an important digression should take place. You can click the admonition below to read it, or you can skip it - your choice.
Important Digression
Earlier in the week, I spoke to Kayla regarding her feelings about the Christmas tree we purchased while married. A few years prior, I made the decision to get her a Balsam Hill Christmas tree (those fancy fuckers are expensive) for her birthday. In an effort to allow her to use said gift for Christmas that year, I opted to give her the gift early. This tree ended up replacing the small-ish tree we purchased the year we got married, and it had remained in its original box (now ten years old) in the attic ever since.
Since I knew the tree was sitting there (albeit after we had made arrangements on marital property; I'd forgotten about it until recently) unused, I asked if she had any objections to letting me have it. I was expecting her to put up a rebuttal, since I knew she eventually wanted to have a different tree dedicated to small ornaments made by the kids (she still has this ambition, one that was decided shortly after I bought her the bigger, "nicer" tree). However, in a surprising move, Kayla allowed me to keep the tree. She made the comment about wanting to use it for the previously mentioned reasons, but that plan was on hold for the time being.
This has two significant meanings to me. First, by allowing me to keep the tree, I don't have to go out and purchase one to set up in my house. This is a great thing, since my funding is extremely constrained at the moment, and Christmas trees these days are getting ludicrously expensive. Second (and most importantly), allowing me to keep the tree has allowed me to retain one more piece of our marriage. I don't know if this is something I should be happy about or not, but the fact that I've got one more sliver of proof that our marriage existed is a win to me.
As such, while Chris and I were picking up the desk to bring back to my house, I asked about the tree in the attic, to which Kayla said I could climb up there and grab it. While climbing up into the attic, my daughter decided to come down the hall and inquire. Seeing me on the ladder, halfway between the living space and attic, I can only imagine she had a bit of confusion about what was going on. Whatever she was feeling was rapidly replaced with fear as I ascended higher up the ladder and into the attic. Her happy-ish cries for Daddy were replaced with a panicked tone, and it was clear that she abhorred the idea of me going any further. Of course, Kayla came to the rescue and comforted her the entire time. I never had to fully enter the attic either, but the process definitely left her scared. Climbing down after retrieving the tree, relief washed over her.
This was significant to me for a very important reason: at the very beginning of this ordeal, my daughter was far too young to understand what was going on, and most of her earliest years took place without me in them on a daily basis. Now that she's walking and mostly talking (which is scary as shit - my kids are getting big), she recognizes who I am and has developed a bond with me that was clearly not present at the initial onset of this process. And of course, I don't want my daughter to be panicked about anything, but the fact that she genuinely showed concern about something as mundane as me climbing the attic ladder shows that our bond has been growing. This tiny insight is enough to take some of the sting away from this entire situation, and that's a small win for me.
Now, on to the rest of my post.
We opted to return back to the house without grabbing the safe, since we both agreed that it was far too slippery to be moving a heavy steel container, and fortunately, Kayla agreed. The good news is that the safe is in the garage and already out of the way, so there's no real need to get it right away. It's still on the to-do list though, since that's one of a very small list of things that I get to take from the house (personal effects aside, since we both agreed that personal items and gifts were exactly that and exempt from division), but I digress.
When we got back to the house, the true nature of the setbacks started setting in. One of the things I wanted to accomplish was getting my TV hung on the wall using a wall mount. This would have the effect of saving space and keeping the TV out of harm's way from the kids running around in a smaller space than they're accustomed to. However, we discovered that the mounting screws used to mount the brackets to the TV are too short and don't even reach the threads embedded into the back of my TV. Therefore, hanging the TV up was out of the question, since the hardware store in town was closed (Matt, the guy who owns the store - and the same guy that drove me back from Marion to Bethune the day I got married, if you've read earlier posts - closes his store on Sundays) and neither one of us wanted to travel 30 minutes away to either Hartsville or Camden to get the screws we needed from Lowes.
We shifted into a new mindset of finishing up the roughing-in of the washer and dryer connections - specifically, the plumbing and venting; electrical will need to wait to be performed by a licensed electrician since it involves placement of new receptacles and running the electric to a new circuit on the breaker panel. It was this point where we encountered the most significant setback, one that would have impacts on the remainder of my plans.
While we were traversing through the house doing work, Chris and I discovered that on some occasions, the lights would flicker for a brief moment or two, then return to normal. The first occurrence of this, we simply shrugged off to being an old house. However, it continued to occur sporadically, and started to irritate us. We started to try and diagnose the problem, using heavier steps and "softly" stomping around the living and dining rooms. When we discovered that it was in fact due to our movement, we chose to investigate the electrical panel.
Upon inspection, we found that the main breaker - the circuit that feeds the entirety of the interior had a loose connection on one of its 100-amp wires. What's more is that apparently, the previous owners knew about this, and "solved" the problem by placing a fuckin' piece of cardboard between the loose connection and surrounding metal to prevent arcing. Seeing this problem, I immediately killed the main breakers inside and all six breakers outside (only one of which feeds into the house, but I wasn't taking any chances). Chris tried to fix the issue, which upon initial inspection, didn't appear to be a major concern; we thought that the connection was simply loose. However, when his efforts to tighten the connection were unsuccessful at rectifying the problem, he discovered that the entire breaker would likely need to be replaced.
This discovery infuriated me. Not so much that the breaker needed to be replaced, but the fact that this condition was present and could have literally burned the house down. What's more is that the electrical inspection (which I paid $350 for) didn't discover this. Had I known this issue was present, I would have certainly made an amendment to the contract to have either the seller repair the issue at their expense (which I felt was most likely not going to happen, given the information my agent gave me when I first inquired about the house), or negotiate a lower purchase price to offset the necessary repairs. And now that the purchase is complete and I officially own the house, it's my expense I have to deal with. Yeah, I'm pretty pissed off.
As one would expect, living in the house with such an egregious safety concern is a no-brainer. I'm not going to jeopardize my investment - let alone my life - by living in a house with such an atrociously unstable power connection. However, I didn't let the lack of power deter me from staying the night. I felt that returning to my sister's house knowing that I'd have to return to my own first thing this morning for the internet installation would be a colossal waste of gas in whatever vehicle I chose to drive, so I opted to stay in my house as originally planned, except without power. I still had (and have) running water, since my water supply isn't from a well, so I could still use the bathroom and take a shower (albeit being cold), so I made decision to navigate through a cold-ish house via flashlights. This wasn't a major concern, since I still went to go see my kids early in the evening as planned. However, after leaving the house, I set out for Hartsville to exchange some of the plumbing components I bought earlier in the day (mainly the drainage plumbing for the washer) for the correct sized piping, and picked up some dinner while I was out.
When I returned back to the house, it was almost 9 PM, so I didn't have to spend too much time "winding down" before going to bed. I used my phone as little as possible so that I could wake up in the morning, and used a DeWalt flashlight that I grabbed on my way out from the old house as my source of lighting. I accomplished a couple of small tasks (like hanging my shower curtain and curtain liner) before I decided to finally go to sleep. Of course, I slept like absolute ass, as one would expect when staying in a new place for the first time ever. I woke up numerous times, couldn't get comfortable, and had trouble falling asleep each waking period because it was so quiet, you could hear a mouse fart on the other side of the house.
All of this leads us to today. Fortunately, today ended up much better. Despite not planning on going into the office today (my original plans were to work from home after internet was installed), things seemed to go okay.
Internet was installed as planned, despite not having power. Fortunately, the technicians used inverter equipment in their trucks to completely configure the internet to the point where all I have to do is plug everything in once I have power back on at the house. Because I live in such a remote area, the local ISP qualifies for federal funding, and this funding has enabled us (I say "us" as a collective term for everyone that lives in my area, Kayla and her immediate family included) to have fiber optic internet at competitive prices. As a result, I have 250 Mbps up/down speeds waiting for me when the power issues are resolved, which is accomplished through a patch of single-mode fiber. The modem for the fiber itself feeds into a mesh network router, of which I was given two of so that I had stable Wi-Fi throughout my home. Laughable, I know, given the size of my home; a centrally located Wi-Fi router would provide far more than ample coverage.
Work also went relatively well today. I arrived in my office around 10:30 and managed to get a fair bit of work accomplished with minimal distractions or interruptions. This is good, because I've still got a handful of things to complete and only two working days to get them done. The Digital Process Systems manager (or DPS, as it's commonly referred to, despite that term being "retired" in favor of the new term: Operational Support Engineering - Electrical, or OSE-E; everyone (even those that work in the group) still calls it DPS) is a chatty-ish guy that has a more-than-minor interest in his direct reports, and even me to a degree, since I work somewhat close with his group despite not being in it; this interest in his direct employees is a boon to him as a manager. Ignoring the fact that it's been my ambition to be in the DPS group for the last 10 years, the DPS manager asked me about the house situation and whether I moved in yet, to which I explained the situation to him, albeit in a bit less detail than what's described here. He seemed upset (in a friendly manner) that I have fiber internet in such a remote location when he lives in one of the "major" cities in the state (it's not really major like Columbia, Greenville, or Charleston is, but it's one of the larger ones that falls outside just outside the larger magnitude) and doesn't have it.
I'm at the point where I feel like I've been typing enough, so it's time to wind down. Which comes at a fortuitous time: it's starting to get a bit late and I have to get up fairly early so I can drive to the office. I think it's time to climb into bed and sleep. It's been a long 24 hours...