Breakage

The past week has been one of breakage, but everyone's OK.

On Friday, while we were prepping for the St. Patrick's Day party, it was very windy outside. While we were in the kitchen, we heard and partly saw a giant branch of a tree across the street fall down, with the result below:
It knocked out power to those two houses, and caused some damage, but no one was hurt. So that was the neighborhood drama. You may recall that a little less than a year ago, we had another tree come down nearby. Trees. We must kill them before they kill us.

The other breakage was in Jake's hand. Before you get too upset and pick up the phone, he is fine. While riding to work on Thursday, his bike slipped on some nasty ice, and he went down. he was able to ride the rest of the way to work, as well as home in the afternoon, but he was in some pain. On Friday he went to see the doctor, and the X-rays indicate that some of those tiny bones in his wrist have some tiny fractures. He's doing fine and the swelling has gone down. He'll see a hand doctor on Monday.

Yikes!

We also had a broken salt shaker during the party, but other than that, the party was breakage-free. More on the party in the next post. We're still a bit tired. It's one of those Zombie Mommy (TM) days.

In which we break our house

It has been raining a lot. The chimney has been leaking a lot. This has led to the discovery of water in the spare room closet. It's obvious that this has happened before, but it's the first time we've seen an active leak. So it was not so surprising exactly, but it certainly wasn't pleasant. The plaster is all wet and soft, so we decided to take out a big hunk of it, both to get rid of some of the wetness and (we hoped) expose the leak so that we could direct it more productively (say, into a bucket, rather than into the rest of the plaster).


It's rather shocking to see a hammer knock off plaster.

With our shop-vac, we sucked up all the mess. Jake hung some towels from the laths, hoping to direct the water seepage out of the walls. There's not any active driping at this point. I think we actually contained a fair amount of the drippage in the attic by putting more plastic up there.


Incidentally, horse-hair plaster is crazy stuff. There are CLUMPS of hair in there. I am not kidding. We took some pictures, but you can't really see it; you'll just have to take our word for it.


So that's where we stand. I don't know if there's anything else we can do at this point, other than wait for chimney-repairing weather, which may be a few months.