I've almost finished my latest painting. Henry tells me it's pretty good.

And that's why dogs are a man's best friend.

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Back in May, Google drove through my neighborhood to update their Street View (for the first time since March 2022). Right now this is what you get if you Google my house:

The good news is that Google is very concerned about my privacy. Per their Google-Contributed Street View Imagery Policy (google.com/streetview/policy/):

We have developed cutting-edge face and license plate blurring technology that is designed to blur identifiable faces and license plates within Google-contributed imagery in Street View.

That's nice. But sometimes it isn't enough to blur just a face.

"I see you've noticed the ears. They're actually easy to explain...."

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I did not paint that. It came with the house when Mom bought it, along with carpet that smelled of cat piss and ceilings painted brown to match the walls. We got rid of the cat piss carpets and brown ceilings years ago, but the coconut trees have been here the whole time. Until now.

For reasons that are completely unrelated to the fact that we're having house guests next weekend, we've decided to finally paint the solid green laundry room in tasteful Icebreaker Blue, Dutch White, and Purple Prince to accompany the Weeping Wisteria in the adjacent mud room. (You can probably imagine what blue, white, and purple look like, but do you know what color wisteria is? Hint, hint.)

Anyway, when our house guests arrive and wonder why the house smells like fresh paint, well, that's just me hiding the nuts in the laundry room.

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My toilet wasn't filling well, so I bought a new fill valve. Then I pulled the old one out and put the new one in. It all went smoothly. I didn't break anything or hurt myself. That's it. Sorry, there's no entertaining story when everything goes right.

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When I started this painting, I was trying to have it done by May Fourth. But, as a wise puppet once said, "Do or do not. There is no try." And I did not.

However, in honor of Star Wars Day, I'll make my apologies with this here recent-ish picture of the work in progress.

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Look, I know I have in the past said that there's nothing much more to a plumber's job than a willingness to enter uncomfortable small spaces and get dirty, but I'll at least admit that the secret to their job is knowing enough to enter any uncomfortably small space only once.

I, on the other hand, seem to be incapable of working on pipes without breaking something in addition to what I was trying to fix. For example, the last time I repaired the rotted drain pipes under the kitchen sink (in November 2018), I ended up needing to cut the still-serviceable sink tailpiece to get it to fit with the new pieces. But I cut it a little too short; it ended up just long enough to barely hold a washer with no room to spare. We got away with that for a while, but gravity won out eventually. So this week, when I spotted a leak for the second time in a month, I went to Home Depot, bought a replacement, brought it home, cut it to an appropriate length, went to screw it tight... and promptly broke the sink strainer basket.

Ok, technically I didn't break the strainer. I just torqued it hard enough to dislodge the old plumbers putty that was sealing it in place. Without the seal, it leaked much worse than the problem I was fixing. Too bad I didn't have any fresh plumber's putty. So another trip to Home Depot was in order.

The one smart thing I did was clean the old putty out out of the sink before getting in my car, and while doing that, I discovered that the nut holding the old strainer in place was also stripped and the whole strainer would need to be replaced. (How could that have happened? See November 2018 again.) Whew. I would have hated to have discovered that only after I came back with fresh plumber's putty. I draw the line at going to Home Depot three times in a day.

Of course, clearing out the old plumber's putty made my hands dirty, so I did what the pandemic conditioned me to do and promptly washed my hands... in the sink that was now missing both a tailpipe and a strainer basket. D'oh. No professional plumber would have made that mistake, either.

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Can you guess what my next painting is going to be?

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Someone lost their tiger in my front yard.

If someone wouldn't drag that tiger everywhere, things like this wouldn't happen.

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At long last, in the friscalating dusklight, here's SpongeBob sitting out in front of my house.

Little guy looks thrilled to be there.

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Hour three of trying to replace a dishwasher (hour one of guy grinding stumps just outside the kitchen door), and the latest problem is the new dishwasher is too short to reach the countertop so I have to find some wood to put under the feet to raise it up and to do that I need to pull it back out of the recess but first I have to turn off the water at the street again because the under-cabinet waterline spigot won't fully close but only after I start turning off the master water line at the street do I realize that since yesterday a colony of fire ants has taken residence and because of mud in the hole the master water line won't fully turn off...

So now I'm sitting on the floor in the kitchen struggling not to scratch the ant bites and poison ivy (courtesy of my dogs) on my arms as I contemplate burning the house down.

Does this shit happen to other people?

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