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old jacuzzi in the grass Sunday, July 19 2020
At some point in the middle of the night, the dogs became agitated and went running out into the night (normally the pet door would've been latched to prevent them from causing trouble with an unpleasant neighbor, but it hadn't been latched last night). So I got up and went to see what they were up to. They'd run down to near Crazy Dave's cabin (causing his dogs to go berzerk), and Neville was doing that bark he does where he tilts his head far back and goes "Woo! Woo! Woo!" (It's not a particularly loud bark.) Neville was moving so quickly that it was hard to keep up with him, though it was hard to tell what he was chasing. I heard rustling in the bushes in the direction Neville was heading, but what sort of animal couldn't climb a tree or outrun Neville? (He's slow for a dog.)
Eventually Neville crossed Dug Hill Road near the end of our downhill neighbor's driveway, whereupon I gave up my pursuit. I wasn't wearing shoes, had a splinter in my right foot, and I saw Ramona hobbling down Dug Hill Road towards me. She still has some sort of injury on one of her front paws keeping her from running, but (since she's the most prey-obsessed of the dogs) I figured it was best to prioritize getting her back in the house.
By the time I went out again, this time wearing shoes and carrying a leash, Neville's barking was coming from behind our unpleasant neighbor's house. I ran back there, and eventually captured him, though it wasn't easy. When I eventually fell asleep, I experienced a series of vivid diphenhyrdramine dreams.
When Gretchen and Powerful set off for Woodstock late this morning, Gretchen had Powerful drive (he's had a learner's permit for about a week now). Backing out of our eighty foot long driveway is hard even for experienced drivers, but for someone like Powerful who has almost no driving experience, it is especially so. He did okay the other day, but today he backed into the forsythia bush and then seemed to gun the gas pedal when he should've been hitting the break. This somehow pushed him past the bush and not through it, but it was a disturbing enough sight that it haunted me the rest of the day.
While they were off in Woodstock, I continued with the demolition of the old tub area in the upstairs bathroom. My original plan had been to remove all the tile and Wonderboard on the drain end of the tub so I'd have room to pry the whole thing upward and then wrestle it out vertically that way. But today when I went to remove the control handle for one of the two showers (which protruded into the space I needed to jack the tub through), I realized that I'd forgotten about one of its four connecting pipes, and to remove that would require removal of yet more tile. So I changed my plan to one of demolishing the plywood-topped platform the tub had been lowered into and then pulling it out sideways. This required me to pry up the tub somewhat (in order to cut out the side of the plywood platform). But in so doing, I managed to wrench a branch drainage pipe out of a sewage pipe in a somewhat-inaccessible joist bay in the floor. Evidently the PVC gluing job used to create that branch in the plumbing had been less than top-notch (it predates our ownership of the house).
It turned out that the battery-powered chainsaw was the best saw for reaching far into the available gap to saw out the plywood platform at the drain end. At the non-drain end, I used both a chainsaw and a reciprocating saw. When it became clear that I still wouldn't have room because of the way the non-drain end of the tub had been tiled into the wall, I cut away a small part of the tub's fibreglass-strengthened-vinyl lip using an oscillating saw. It turned out there was a piece of rebar embedded in there somewhere, though I managed to cut around it. With all that done, I was able to gradually scootch the tub out of its nook, inching it a little on one end and then the other until it was all the way out. Once it was out, it was light enough for me to slide all the way to the top of the stairs. And when he came home, Powerful helped me carry it out of the house. We left it in the grass, the way hillbillies do. The tub features a powerful water pump, which used to power its jacuzzi functions. I'll be salvaging that.
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