The Guest Bathroom Rennovation, A Project in Five Acts (Act 2)

Act 2

The Law stands before a nondescript full bath.  For months, its serviceable but bland interior has tormented JLlo like Cthulhu rising from the Mountains of Madness.  Determined not to allow such horror of horrors to drag his beloved into the depths of insanity, The Law has gathered his tools and stands at the threshold of the Guest Bathroom.  He is a man on the brink.

The Law:  It is demolition day, Guest Bathroom.  I have come to tear down your perfectly functional facade and rip out your living guts!

Guest Bathroom:  (silence)

Law:  Yes, you heard me.  I am man!  I am the product of millions of years of evolution.  Time and heat and light have transformed what was once a mere speck of loose nucleotides into a living, breathing, thinking  (and most dangerous for you, Bathroom) TOOL WIELDING APEX PREDATOR!

Like this, but with a crowbar...

Bathroom:  (silence)

Law:  Then so be it, Bathroom.

 The Law heaves his crowbar and cracks his first tile.  The feeling of porcelain breaking beneath his his crowbar is invigorating.  His morale swells and he brings a sledgehammer and chisel to bear against ten more repugnant tiles.

Law:  Ha Ha, Bathroom, your tile breaks before my might.  How could I have ever been intimidated by you?  You are weak.  Watch as I crush you with my bare hands!

Take that, Tile!

Bathroom:  (silence).


The Law picks up the tempo.  He is a tornado of tools and dust and tile fragments.  After a while he begins to slow.  He has been working for hours, but has barely made a dent in the demolition.  It seems as if for every tile he smashes and removes, the Bathroom regenerates two more in its place.  All the while, the thick tile dust fills the room.  The Law continues to swing his hammer, but each stroke is slower and slower as the dust bogs down everything.

Pictured:  Two weeks worth of demolition.

Law:  Hack! Cough! Bathroom, your dust chokes me and blinds me!  I can no longer see whether my hammer blows strike true.  It this a tile or my thumb?  Swings hammer.  OUCH!  It is my thumb!  The Law sinks to his knees, barely visible in the dust cloud swirling around him.  Bathroom!  Bathroom!  You knew all along, didn't you?  You knew the traps and snares you hid just below the surface.  I curse you.  I curse your tile.  I curse your fixtures.  Most of all I curse you dated appearance, which first drew me into this maw of dust and despair

Bathroom:  (silence).

 Law:  (drawing on his last strength) No.  I will not be defeated by this mockery of good taste and modern styling.  I must fight on.  Although my spirit has been choked by the dust and gloom, the husk of my former self must rise and swing the hammer once more.  The Law shakily gets to one knee and then finally... barely... he stands!  The hammer swings again!  SMASH! SMASH! SMASH! One by one, the remaining tiles shatter and fall to the floor where The Law listlessly gathers their remnants and removes them to the dumpster.  He is no longer a man on a mission, he is merely a man going through the motions to survive. 

Survival.

 With the last tile shard removed, and the final speck of tile dust vacuumed away, The Law emerges from the Bathroom and collapses on the hallway floor, broken but victorious.

JLlo:  (from the comfort of the livingroom)  Honey?  What's taking so long?  On HGTV the demolition segment only takes a few minutes and one commercial break.  Are you sure you're working as efficiently as possible?

Bathroom:  (silence)

The Guest Bathroom Renovation, a Project in Five Acts (Act 1)

Act 1:

It is late 2010.  Our intrepid couple are relaxing on the couch in their small but comfortable home.  JLlo has done a masterful job of designing the interior of the house with her trademark modern/classy/welcoming style.  The Law has supplied the manual labor reached several tall things around the house.  What a team!

The couple are enjoying a homecooked meal, lovingly prepared, and are simply basking the mountains of free time afforded to them by their careers as a young attorney and medical resident.

JLlo (turning to her husband):  We need to start renovating the guest bathroom.

Law (continuing to eat):  Yeah, you're right.  I suppose we better start thinking about what we want to do, and then maybe we'll get started on the project someday.

JLlo:  I have already considered every possible option for the bathroom and selected the perfect combination of style and cost effectiveness.  We shall begin immediately.

Law:  Gulp! At least working on this will give us lots of time to spend together.

JLlo:  My job requires me to relocate three hours away to Asheville, NC for four months.

Law:  GULP!

And so The Law arises from the couch and stared into the Guest Bathroom... and saw a perfectly servicable, but dated bathroom.  Knowing that such an abomination could not be perimitted to stand, he gathers his tools.

Law (courageously to his wife):  By your love and for the protection of our family, I will demolish this affront to Truth and Beauty and rip it asunder with my own hands.

When you stare too long into the abyss, it stares back into you.

A Shop Also Rises, Part II.

Wow, this blog hasn't done anything in a long time.  I would like to say that Durham Salad Days has been so dormant because we have been living such full and exciting lives, and that there was simply no time for blogging ... so I will say that, even if it is not exactly 100% accurate.

Loyal readers (i.e. those who have been refreshing durhamsaladdays.blogspot.com every five minutes for the last 405 days), will remember that I knocked together a few workbenches in the basement in the effort to create a moderately productive shop.  The benches have been working great, and have become the center of productivity in the basement.  Although to be fair, there is about as much productivity coming out of the basement as the average day care nap time.

Working on some small electronics project... at the perfect height for me!

Anyway, the previous post promised a big tool acquisition in part II, so hold on to your hats because here it is:

TABLE SAW!!!

I managed to score a great Craftsman belt driven table saw on Craigslist for about $140 (about 1.3 years ago...now).  It was a bit of a struggle to get it home, because I had to disassemble the saw and pack it into the back of my little GTI, but it just fit.  Needless to say, a table saw took the capabilities of my basement shop from somewhat above my needs, to way way waaaaaay beyond my abilities.  THAT IS THE BEST.

The table saw is going to make so many projects easier, including but not limited to, a daring bathroom remodel!

Boys will be...disgusting

As part of my Urology residency, I am spending 4 months in Asheville, NC working at the Asheville VA hospital.

Fortunately for me, the VA puts all visiting residents up in housing across the street from the hospital.  My apartment can be described as quite dilapidated serviceable.

While the accommodations are on the verge of being condemned leave something to be desired, I was quite happy to see that there was a washer and dryer in the unit.

Now, the last three successive occupants prior to me were all men.  And, I'm coming to realize, NOT laundry experts.

I washed my first load this weekend and then put it in the dryer, happily utilizing one of the dryer sheets from the box left behind by the resident who lived here before me.  Who doesn't love free dryer sheets?  It seemed like an auspicious start.

The machine rattled and hummed, in the standard fashion.  However, when the buzzer sounded, my clothes were a hot, humid, damp mess.

I put them in for more time.

Again, the buzzer sounded -- still wet.

At this point, I realized I hadn't checked the lint trap.  And based on what I found, neither had the last three people who used the dryer over the past year...

It's hard to tell from the photo, but this thing was a good 9" long and 3" high.

I was appalled.

Bike vs Car

Our friend Mark has a cool blog called Bike v Car.  Mark got a new car and a new bike on the same day and he has challenged himself to put more miles on the bike than on the car over the coming year.  So far the demands of modern life have allowed the car to jump off the line to a comfortable lead, but the challenge year is still young and, no matter what, the blog is full of Mark's great shots of the English countryside that serve as the backdrop for many of his bike rides.

Obviously, every time I check out Bike v Car I am overcome with jealously that Durham Salad Days does not have its own Bike v Car challenge.  Don't worry, I'm not going to start doing anything crazy like actually riding a bike, but I will present you, my gentle readers, with two of my favorite videos of supreme vehicle control and general derring-do in the hopes of settling the question of superiority between bikes and cars.

First, Danny Macaskill has a pleasant bike ride through an old train station:

Second, Ken Block goes motoring outside Paris:

One video has the best stunts, and one has the best soundtrack.  I suppose it's a tie.

Men are from Mars

While Matt was busy constructing an amazing work bench, I was cruising the Internet and encountered the following quip in this random blog post:

We have married friends who told us a story about when they were in college and had gone out on their first date together. The next morning, each one went down to get breakfast in the dining hall of their respective dorms. She sat down with her cereal and thought about all of the details of last night’s date: Did she like him?  Did he like her? What might happen next?  What would her friends think of him?  When should the meet?  Where would the go next?

But what did he think about when he sat down to eat his bowl of cereal? In his words,  “I was just thinking about the cereal.

I just had to laugh.

A Shop Also Rises, Part I: Workbenches

There is no denying that the inside of our home is extremely comely.  Our cute one story brick house has been done up to the eight and a halves (would be "the nines" if only I would finish our bathroom renovation...), but it's low slung brick facade hides a secret.

A menacing secret.

Below our small house hides a HUGE unfinished basement.  Frequent readers of this blog already know that our basement exists, its walls are an ugly green, and it is primarily used for the storage of a mountain of cardboard boxes.  From the very beginning, I knew that the basement had the potential to be more than just a room full of junk, and growing up helping my Dad with "Appalachian" wood projects taught me that a true man needs to have a shop of some kind.  I figured that I owed it to myself to create a shop down in the basement.

Pictured:  Manliness

When I started putting the "shop" together, it mainly consisted of my excellent Ridgid compound miter saw (a wedding gift from college roommates) sitting atop an old desk, so my first order of business was to knock together a couple of workbenches from 2X4s and 1/2 inch plywood.  I built a matching pair to a comfortable height for me with the table top of each just below my elbow. I also added locking casters to the bench on the right so that bench is free to roll across the concrete basement floor.

Mobility = Versatility

 Next, I added pegboard and pegs to the rear of the stationary workbench for storing frequently used hand tools.  I also organized most of my small parts and fasteners that were scattered throughout the basement and placed them in a red small parts bin and set it on the stationary workbench.  I drove nails into the stationary workbench to hang additional tools and accessories.  Finally, I placed the miter saw on the mobile workbench for cutting wherever the project demands!

 With the workbenches done and against the wall, I moved the old desk in behind to use as an auxiliary service and staging area.  Despite what the pictures show, I'm trying to prevent the old desk from becoming simply a place for stashing junk... we'll see how that goes.

There's a shop somewhere under all that mess.

That's it for Part I.  Stay tuned for an exciting sequel in which the shop obtains a new tool!

Facebook serves a purpose other than procrastinating...?

Take a look at this interesting article, about how Facebook helped a woman get the right diagnosis for her sick child.

Maybe all those online over-sharers are on to something?  

Friday Feature -- This Will Never Get Old

Can I profess my undying love to Pandora?

#1.  Who isn't in love with the opportunity to handcraft his/her own personal radio stations?  Mine are obviously filled to the BRIM with Katy Perry and every wailing pop hit produced in the 1980s.

#2.  Pandora will clue you in on jams you would have otherwise missed.  Like, I had no idea that my own heart was beating to the power ballads of the sister-duo Heart (uh, All I Want to Do is Make Love to You?  Epic.)

#3.  You can play it ANYWHERE.  Home, work, on your phone....  Score!  I mean, the opportunity to display my adoration of both Rhianna and Journey in the doctors' workroom and then in the OR minutes later with just the click of a button is a modern miracle.  (As a sidenote, I have no pride.)

Pandora -- that will never get old!

The Rapture

Everyone make it through the Rapture last Saturday intact?

***warning:  things are about to get really sappy.  stop reading now if you are weak of stomach***

Matt and I were discussing the upcoming end of days on Friday night (one day prior to the impending event) and he said the following, which immediately catapulted onto the list of 'top 10' most loving things said in our relationship:

"I don't really care if anything does happen, because I'm pretty sure that where ever I end up, you'll be there with me."

Then--ever the romantic--I said, "Yeah, but are you going to do the laundry?"  (**just kidding...sort of)

If this is an emergency...

This month, I've been working at a smaller, community hospital affiliated with the large academic center where I mainly spend my time as a Urology resident.

It's really different here -- everyone knows everyone, the ancillary staff takes a ton of initiative to solve problems before running them up the chain, there is less paperwork, the nurses take verbal orders, the patients are less sick...it's a pretty sweet deal all around.

I discovered one of my favorite aspects of this smaller hospital late one night when I was on call.  I had a medication question and I asked the switchboard to connect me with the pharmacy.

The phone greeting went like this:  "You have reached the overnight Pharmacy line.  Please listen to the following list of telephone options; however, if this is an emergency or you are a physician, please dial 1 now to speak with a pharmacist immediately."

I have never felt more important in my life.

Check it out!

Remember a couple of months ago, when I mentioned coveting this sofa to replace our old, black dinosaur couch?

Old couch -- Not Dreamy

Well, when Macy's offered a big markdown on the price recently, it was too good to resist.

Matt can't resist

She looks pretty good in the living room, doesn't she?

Seriously, what have we been doing...?

So, what have we been doing, really, during these long two weeks of non-posting?

Short answer:  Nothing exciting

Long answer:  Lots of stuff. 

1.  Cutting down a cedar tree in our front yard.

We are TERRIBLE at documenting 'before' pictures

 

Amputated Stump

2.  Taking out two big, dead branches from another front yard tree.  (this actually brought the neighbors out onto their front stoops...which is good, because we needed someone around to call 911 if things didn't go according to plan)

Carnage

3.  Clearing some brush and vines from the back driveway and pruning our front yard shrubs.

Note that these plants now look vaguely bush-shaped.  They didn't before...

4.  Nursing terrible cases of poison ivy (we had to take prescription medicines to keep from scratching ourselves into oblivion).

Ouch.  Also, Yuck.

 5.  Putting up a pull-up bar in the basement.
6.  Washing Mitchell with his new, fancy kelp and tea tree oil shampoo.

7.  Taking the last step of the US Medical Licensing Exam.
8.  Watching Thor at the movie theatre.
9.  Painting three frames for the office.

10.  Hanging various diplomas and school accolades in the office.

11.  Potting geraniums for the front stoop.

These looked better before they were battered by a tornado-esque storm last night

12.  Going to a Kentucky Derby viewing party.
13.  Repainting a plant stand for the living room.
14.  Trying a last-ditch relocation effort to revive the dying plant that lives on the plant stand.

This guy still looks awful.  Black thumb strikes again.

15.  Scheduling dentist and optometrist appointments. 
16.  Buying a weedeater, lawnmower, and wheelbarrow.
17.  Buying new shoes for summer.

Look at this STAT

Have you noticed that there haven't been many posts on this blog lately?

Well, it's probably because I've been watching this video again and again and again.

Check it out immediately (or sooner).

PS.  If you have a sensitive stomach, maybe don't watch it while you are eating...

To Box or Not to Box

There are two types of people in the world:
those who obsessively hoard cardboard boxes for some unknown packing apocalypse and those who mercilessly throw them away.

Obviously, I've been a compulsive box-hoarder since conception.  I mean, duh, right?  You never know when you might need to instantaneously move your entire household under the cover of darkness with only a few hours notice -- and when that day comes, I'll be ready.  No Hefty bag packing job for me!

In contrast, Matt utterly fails to see the utility of saving EVERY BOX that ENTERS OUR HOUSE.  He says things like, "they clutter up the basement," "we can buy boxes someday if we move," and "given the general lack of civil unrest in Durham, North Carolina, the chance that we'll have to pack up and leave immediately under the cover of darkness is very low."   A personal favorite of mine was the following:  "there are spiders living in there."

However, we're at a great impasse, because the one thing Matt hates more than my box pile in the basement is cleaning up the basement.  So, looks like this cardboard box Machu Piccu is going to stay put for awhile.

Curiosities at the Hospital

I am continually fascinated by just how fat Americans are able to become.

Like, people can get so fat, that Medicine had to come up with a word for the extra gut that hangs down and makes a fold over your lower torso--that 'body part' is called a pannus.  I'm pretty sure that word didn't exist 100 years ago, because No One Was That Fat.

I recently discovered that our equipment room on the Urology floor has a bin full of "retracted penis pouches".  Now, I am a doctor, training in Urology, but even I had to read the package insert to figure out what the heck these were.

I'll spare you the gory details, but it's basically a urine collection device that can be used on a man who is so fat, that his fat has actually mounded up and completely obscured his man-parts.  (This problem is so common that someone actually had to invent a device to address it...?!?!?!)

All I'm saying is, if you are So Fat that your fat starts engulfing other parts of your body--such that they cannot be seen or recognized any longer--you need to put down the chicken strips, the french fries dipped in mayonnaise, and your bucket of Mountain Dew and go for a walk.

PS.  Yes, the 'retracted penis pouches' are next to the 'large scrotal supports'.  Let me just say that being a Urologist is a very *interesting* job, and there is really no limit to how large a scrotum can become.

A Threat to All

I don't like jellyfish.  They sting, they are disgusting, and they can make one of my favorite activities (playing in the ocean) a total drag.  Once, one almost ate my sister, so it's kind of personal.  Needless to say, I HATE the lion's mane jellyfish:

Why are you swimming towards it?

According to Wikipedia, these foul behemoths can be up to 120 feet long (longer than a blue whale) and trail over 800 stinging tentacles.  I don't think I'll ever have another night's rest knowing that these gelatinous abominations roam free in our blue oceans.  They hover soundlessly just beyond the breakers.  Their neutrally buoyant tentacles softly probing the shallows for the taste of the coveted flesh of man.  With primordial patience they wait, counting on the inevitable evolutionary mutation that will allow them to leave the confines of the ocean and lay waste to mankind.  There is only one way to meet this threat.

Get On It

Remember when the "Do Not Call" registry came out, and you were able to submit your phone number, such that it would become *illegal* for telemarketers to contact you?

Well, there is now something similar for catalogues.

https://www.catalogchoice.org/

Register at the website (you do have to give them some personal info, but it all seems very official) and then you can specify all of your various catalogue preferences, telling companies which ones to keep sending you, which ones to send less frequently, and which ones to Never Send Again.

Awesome!

Managing Expectations

A lot of being a successful doctor is managing the expectations of your patients.

It is important to say things like:
"after your surgery, you will have pain."
"after your surgery, you will have to get out of bed and work with Physical Therapy."
"after your surgery, you will not be allowed to eat Bojangles Atomic Chicken strips on post-op day 1."

Despite our best efforts at expectation management, patients all too often seem to arrive to the hospital thinking they are about to go on the health-care equivalent of a 7 day cruise.

We hear a lot of things like:
"Can I have another drink?  A Sprite?  No, a Ginger Ale.  Wait, definitely a Ginger Ale, but if it isn't Canada Dry, then actually I want a Diet Coke."
"Do you guys have a long-distance code in here?  I have to call my cousin in Albuquerque.  I haven't talked to that guy in months."
"Would you trim my toenails.  They are nasty."

Given this apparent confusion, all I'm saying is, Do We Really Need TOWEL ANIMALS!?????!?!??!

Sometimes Patients Make You Feel Bad

At the hospital, I meet many new patients every day.  Sometimes, I introduce myself as "J" and other times, I'm "Dr. Llo."  There's not clear rhyme or reason to when I pick which title, but I tend to use "J" with the very young, the very old, people who look like they might be fun to get a drink with were we meeting under different circumstances, and always with patients who are themselves physicians.  In contrast, I make sure to use "Dr. Llo" with patients who are angry, unruly, or have already called me "Nurse" (these patients are usually talking loudly about inane stuff into their cellphones and say things like 'hey, hang on, my nurse just walked in'...um, yeah, I didn't go to 4 years of medical school, pass three national licensing exams, and give up my twenties to be called "nurse"). 

Tonight, a patient came up from the Emergency Department after breaking his tibia falling off of a ladder.  He was a relatively healthy, middle-aged guy who had been painting his house prior to putting it up for sale.

So, after putting in a few orders for pain medicine and a meal tray, I went to the patient's room.  All new arrivals to the service need to be checked out by a doctor following admission, plus I figured a little TLC would smooth over what I'd heard was a long wait in the ED.

As it so happens, this patient did something sort of boldly obnoxious that had not yet happened to me in my almost-10 months of being a doctor.  And he really, really irritated me in doing it.

You see, I walked in and--based on my split-second assessment of his posture, his age, his mood, etc--decided that I would be "Dr. Llo" in my interactions with him, because he just looked a little bit surly. 

"Hi Mr. SoandSo.  My name is Dr. Llo.  I'm one of the night doctors on Orthopedics" [aside:  I'm covering Ortho this month].

"Who are you?"  he asks.

"I'm Dr. Llo.  I'm one of the night doctors on Orthopedics."

"And what is your first name?"

Obviously, I don't love this question since I'd already decided that I wanted him to call me Dr. Llo, but I answered, hoping my ever-so-slightly reluctant tone of voice would clue him in to the fact that I've not invited him to refer to me by my first name--especially since I was referring to him as 'Mr. SoandSo'.  "My first name is J," I told him.

And then we talk...about his long wait in the ED, the 10 feet of his house he has left to paint, the plan for his operative tibial repair.  And the whole time, he's calling me J, in a way that feels simultaneously aggressive and dismissive.  I was so mad...and what kills me is, if he was just a little less threatening to begin with, I probably would have introduced myself as J in the first place!