People live here.

The tool for me and for the Campsie Project? Ladies and Gentlemen, I again give you the Nippers. Without them so much would not have gotten done around here.. At the very least it's how you get the unpullable nail out…so far anyway.

By the way, we really kind of live here. Lucy really does live here. I kind of live here. I don't know how I'm going to get out of Bassett. That's another blog probably. Saturday we had a liquidation yard sale at my Bassett house that was fairly successful, if under pubicized. There's something so very American about sitting out in your yard and making a nice chunk of change selling off the stuff you don't need. Scratch need—want is really the operative word. Sure—people all over the world sell stuff in front of their houses. But I would venture that such transactions are frequently an important part of their livelihood. Most yard sales I visit (and host) are really just about getting rid of excess (what an understatement) stuff and making money just sitting there.

Anyway, back downtown to Campsie—Lucy and I did some bike riding this weekend. I'm happy to say that she has a new birthday bike and that we're attempting to stave off the pumps by leaving the cars parked. One of the nice things about living downtown, right? And some work was accomplished, too. Lucy, she's the paint maven. I'm not so hot for painting myself. I'm impatient and somehow painting exacerbates that. I like destruction, though; today it occurred to me, as I ripped up the former bathroom/future laundry room floor that I spend a lot of my time working very hard to undo other people's very hard work.

Take this floor (please): Some unknown number of years ago, a former resident had the gumption to have red pine floors installed in the bathroom. Nice. Except, now, years later—when so much of the hardwood in the world is just gone, we need to salvage that red pine to fix the floors downstairs. So after days (no—weeks) of pondering and consulting, I finally got busy today and took up the floor in this 10' x 8' room.

Wow, did it seem bigger than that, based on the effort exerted? aw, yeah. In fact, this was one of the hardest jobs I've done since scraping up the linoleum downstairs with the linoleum spade or even digging out the basement. Damn, it was hard. But as usual, disassembly is my specialty. Seems like we frequently leave assembly to others, but tearing stuff down? Hell, we're all about that.

And the floor is now up. The wood be salvaged. Which means we can get Tim "the floorman" Taylor back in to magic up the hacked apart downstairs. AND we can move forward with outfitting the soon-to-be laundry room. THEN we can move the washer and drier out of the common area upstairs. Seeing the sort of domino thing here? I've been seeing it lately.

Oh, something else—Magic Digging Meridith was teasing me about our temporary kitchen (lucy insists that 'temporary' always be included, lest we fall into sloth and never get the 'real' kitchen done). She said we should publish a cookbook of recipes, which is actually a great idea. We just need a publisher. We'd call it "The Improvised Kitchen" and it would be full of delicious recipes that are limited to the toaster oven, microwave, and fridge, with dishes being all done in the bathtub.