Back on board

Well damn me, I am BEAT.

      Had a hell of a night. My employer changed hotels that put us up for the night before crew change, and the new hotel is further away, in a far worse neighborhood, and incredibly LOUD. Plus, instead of Somalian refugees in the other rooms, like our old hotel, it's gang members, whores and assorted other lowlifes who like to party all night. So that was fun.

        I had a super domestic two weeks, moving  and all, but my new house is liveable, and comfortable. Not finished. I never had time to hang curtain rods, shit like that (we have blinds too, which help), and the guest bedroom and my office are pretty much storage, the usual sort of things that happen in a move. My garage is a disaster, as my tools are scattered, which sucked becuause of the roof situation, not to mention the most satanic bullying woodpecker ever.


        I bought the house as-is, and the only real beef was that the decorative fascia under the roof was rotted in a couple of spots. My brother set aside a Saturday to help me cut and scarf in a new fascia board, which should have been a matter of removing the gutter, cutting out the old board and scarfing in a new one. Instead, we ended up on a 2 1/2 day nightmare of working 25 feet in the air on a ladder, reaching over our heads, in 90 degree sun, high humidity and occasional severe thunderstorms.
 It sucked, we got it done, 2 1/2 days for replacing a 6' section of decorative board and repairing and rehanging a section of gutter. It was so bad that we'll surely have some laughs about it in the future. My brother being an experienced builder, it wasn't like we were slowed by ignorance, but rather by a series of nothing going right. Twice we got chased off the ladder from lightning strikes nearby too.


         So that was annoying. The woodpecker was comical, if infuriating.

 Along with decorative fascia, my house also has decorative trim- it's southern Florida, so the house is stucco over concrete. The decorative trim is also stucco... sprayed over, it turns out, styrofoam.
   Seriously, the builder made styrofoam trim molds, put them up, filled them with liquid polystyrene, and then after pulling the molds, the stucco guys got in there.

 Some asshole woodpeckers figured out that if they can peck through the stucco layer, they can carve out a nice nest in the trim, which is about 8" thick. So they do. EVERY single house on my street has 4-5 woodpecker holes put in it each spring, then, in May, they fill the holes with grout or plaster, or in my case, hydraulic cement.

 My brother filled in three holes before I even got home last time. I spent one day chasing the woodpeckers all over the place. The little bastards are protected, and I don't know the neighbors much yet, so I didn't dare shoot the fuckers. I just swept up the rain of styrofoam particles and then patched holes at sunset, painted them the next morning. I did hang little mirror pieces on some fishing lines at the corners of my house, which scared them off. I guess they don't like the motion and reflection. Two of them spent a morning bitching at me from one of my trees, which made me feel good. I plan on cultivating a shit reputation among the neighborhood pests.
    Still, I wrote about lots of negatives, and there were mostly positives. We had a good time, there was mother's day, and I turned 45 yesterday, so we celebrated that before I left home. All in all, damn good.