Up In The Air, part 8

All right, there wasn't a seven. But the last entry was actually #7, under an assumed name.

This one will be short, if I stick to the topic. The plumber has done his below-concrete work: setting the floor drain, roughing in the drain connections for a future bathroom and for our laundry area, rerouting the sewerage pipes. The contractor has one more footing to set, and he says the floor will be poured on Friday (rain and other wetness issues permitting). Next week will be at best a four-day work week, with July 4th coming on Friday, but a four-day work week would be a record; nothing happened today, and our contractor has become enamored of moneymaking opportunities in the rebuilding of Iowa ("it hurts to see the devastation..." Hah!) so I'm not counting on much moving forward tomorrow or Thursday.

We have a wall clock with lovely chimes that Wendy is fond of. The chimes stopped a couple of months ago, and when we took the clock down to avoid its falling when the house went up, we took it to a repair shop. It came back today, and I'm waiting to re-learn how to ignore the bonging in the wee small hours. UW-Stout's clock tower has bells that chime the quarter-hours every day, but they don't begin until 7 a.m. and they quit after 9 p.m. I don't know how to make this clock do that. My father used to tell how he hated the cuckoo clock at my grandparents' cottage: it would sound once on the half-hour. He would wake in the night and hear one cuckoo, and, not knowing if it was 12:30, one a.m. or 1:30, or some other wee small half-hour, he would lay awake until he heard two or more cuckoos.

As the house settles on its new foundation, it's finding some new alignments. This results in a door here and there that needs to be planed at the top or bottom, a crack in the plaster above doorways or in corners, etc. I'm not sure we'll ever open a couple of casement windows or our pocket doors. Nothing big has fallen yet, no falls of concrete or new gaps to the outdoors. A couple of folks have said, "sure, now it's setting on a level square foundation and before, who knows?"

Tomorrow will be another journey to the laundromat, my third. This one won't be quite as fierce as the last one, when I did seven loads. But my wife always rips on me for having a healthy supply of underwear and socks, not to mention khaki pants, and that sufficient wardrobe may get us through to the completion of plumbing and the return of the appliances to the basement.
At worst, I may need another yellow polo shirt for work; I've been trying to put off the need for a new one, as the dye lots have changed considerably and the new shirts are about the color of the inside of a pumpkin.