A photo essay

Termites ate my basement.

So we used some tools...

...to tear down walls and wood paneling.

It made Jesse tired.

This weekend, we will move this heap

to this dumpster.

The end.

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Japan photos

Remember how I went to Japan, wrote a blog post, and never mentioned it again? Yeah, me too. Oops.

I am still adding captions and I don't have the energy to get through the last seven pages tonight, but since it will take me another month to get through them, I figured I might as well throw up a link. Here it is: a link.

I've decided to try out some gallery software on my own web server, rather than uploading all my photos to Flickr. I'm not sure why, really, but it seemed important when I uploaded all of these a month ago...

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I am such a liar!

So much for writing in November. How about stomach flu and termites instead? Two things guaranteed to kill 99.9% of my creative meanderings. I did start a few stories about a man named Charlie, ostensibly for NaNoWriMo, but I haven't even updated my word count online because I'm writing it all out by hand. Anyhow, I've been enjoying the Charlie stories that come into in my head. He's an older man who got into a few scrapes in his day and is quite a likable guy. Maybe I'll introduce you some day, when I've figured out what he's really about. He's been stuck watching some horses for awhile, and I haven't figured out what they remind him of yet.

For Thanksgiving, Ransom and I decided to stay in town and set up the wood shop in our basement. This, of course, involved taking down more wood paneling. Honestly, the amount of wood paneling in this house is unparalleled. There's paneling over paneling; half of the basement is (was) paneled. To be fair, the paneling in the basement was made of real wood, and is actually very nice, if you like that sort of thing. Until you look down and see that it's all rotten at the bottom, or pry it off and see the termites happily munching away on the support post of my house. Mmm, structural soundness never tasted so good.

So our project grew exponentially. (How did I expect less from the house of The Lukich?) Instead of three hours a day for four days, we've been spending as much time as possible down there ripping out walls, wood paneling, lavender ceiling tiles, etc. I took some photos that I'm too lazy to upload, but will hopefully get around to posting them soon. So you can share in my joy.

Things I'm looking forward to:

• Having a wood shop in the basement
• Having no superfluous wood pieces in the basement that might be hiding termite activity
• Going to the dump about five times to get rid of the termite-infested and/or rotted wood (we have at least two loads piled in the driveway now, with two or three more to be pulled out of the basement)
• Buying a truck for those trips to the dump (anybody selling a full size pickup for under $3000? We're hoping for a diesel so we can run it on Biodiesel.)
• Jacking up the house and replacing the support post the termites are eating – I actually think this will be really cool
• January, at which point most of this work will hopefully be completed!

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November, writing

Today marks the first day of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I was originally going to ignore it, with the exception of meeting up with the lovely and talented Yolanda for some weekend writing time. But then I was getting a massage yesterday and a character popped into my head. So I'll write about him until I inevitably give up. I'm not going to push for 50,000 words; I'm going to work on word choice, sentence structure, and tone. I'm going to try to bring the one image I have of my new character to life and tell a few stories about him.

Incidentally, I think it was around the time I switched over from semi-frequent crossword puzzles to frequent sudoku puzzles that I stopped writing as much: sending emails, blogging, writing in my journal. I wonder if there's a correlation? Maybe the language center of my brain is shutting down. In all likelihood, that's not the case, but I'm going to try switching back to crosswords for awhile just to see what happens.

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