Family

My cousin AinA and her family visited last weekend, and it was delightful. I am at a disadvantage with young houseguests, as I have neither kids, nor toys, nor video games to entertain them. Luckily, I have my ace in the hole- extremely tolerant pets. During the first morning, her girls fell in love with the animals and covered my refrigerator with drawings and notes professing their love. The preschooler, N, decided she was in fact Molly the cat, and meowed her way through the next four days, although  her attempts to drink water out of a bowl on the floor were less than successful. Both Ada and Molly put up with a large number of pats and only rarely retreated to a corner of my bedroom to recover.

My cousin and I are surprisingly close for people who only see each other every three to four years. We make up for our lack of visit by reading and commenting on each other's blogs. I am fond of her in spite of her excessive love of cabbage and likewise, she tolerates my new-found love of The Archers. And we all like desserts: she made butterscotch ice cream to go with my chocolate cake, her husband R did all the dishes, and we all feasted. I'm looking forward to my visit to see them at the end of the year, although I worry her children will like me a lot less without my pets.

Two-wheelers

Alas, my trusty three-speed bicycle's gear hub has been making ever-more-worrying noises, and it now sounds like a small airplane is following me when I pedal. They don't make parts for that bike anymore, so I needed a replacement.

Craigslist to the rescue. I was quite delighted that buying something used was even a possibility. Because of my size, I ride a kid's bike. There was only one bike for sale that was the right size in the entire DC metro area, but a two-hour roundtrip drive to Virginia and a bit of cash made it mine.

Then I spent all weekend doing bike DIY, resulting in this:

Anyone who had seen my old bike might recognize parts of it, because I basically took off anything that I liked from my old bike and put in on the new one. The old bike is truly destined for the scrap heap, as it now looks like this:

I am pretty darn proud for doing this all by myself. Sure, it took a lot of explanatory YouTube videos and hours in the hot sun, but I'm hopeful that it will all work. The new bike is German, as in "actually from Germany" because all the instructional labels are in German, and I can only guess that someone in DC's oh-so-transient population brought this over with them for their kid long ago.

New Bathroom, Part 6

And another weekend of bathroom fun has come and gone. Once again, my father planned, my friends and I worked, and my mother cooked. A lot of progress has been made, but that will be saved for another day, because I'm not taking pictures of the inside of the house until I've had time to clean up the tremendous mess we've made.

There was a lot of work that needed to be done outside this time. Bathrooms have a surprisingly large number of connections to the outdoors: fans need to vent the humid air and the plumbing has to vent to the outside so you don't get sewer gases inside. It is the "v" part of the DWV system here if you really want to learn more, otherwise I'll spare the rest of the readers.) It was unfortunate timing, as the weather was in the high 90s (35C) and pretty much as humid as it gets.

My roof is also quite steep, 40 degrees. This steepness in great in one regard - it's probably the reason my 20-year-old roof is leak-free - but it's scary when you are thinking about climbing on it. Luckily, my father was unfazed. He built braces and scaffolds and we got it all done without a single broken bone.

My friend S installs a vent. The scaffold was screwed into the roof, and my job was to steady the ladder. 

My father installs another vent. We built a wooden ladder, then hauled it up to the roof and screwed it down. It was so steep that tools kept falling into the gutter.

My mother did the catering for the entire weekend. Tacos with fresh corn tortillas and homemade cherry ice cream. Takeout Salvadoran food, and delicious burgers. Some people managed more than one, like N.