Restoration (cont.)

I'm on my way up to the new apartment to meet an appraiser.  I have to get a little loan to cover the cost of the restoration.  Restoration is a beautiful thing, but it doesn't come cheap, so it's kind of like I'm restoring my bank account to a state that provides me with a sense of inner peace  Inner peace is the whole point of everything, if you ask me.

The restoration project in the apartment continues to provide an lovely metaphor for the restoration of my Self to whatever sort of perspective provides inner peace, joy and all that stuff I've been working on these past two years or so with A Course in Miracles.  I'm nearly done - and as it happens, I'll be finishing the Course at almost exactly the same time as all my stuff comes out of storage.  Another Restoration, when you think about it since my treasures will be restored to me.  Granny's Ashes, my tiara and my shot gun weathered the hurricane nicely although I still can't say exactly where they are.  I just know they're all safe in some warehouse in Queens.

When I first got the apartment, the wall behind the bath tub looked like this:

Then it looked like this:

Note that the faucets are really far to the right.  The shower head is up on that little wall which would have been built sometime in the middle of the last century whenever somebody decided it was time to install a shower.  I'm not sure why that end of the tub is squared-off when the other end is round, but that's just the way life is.

That funky looking cylinder is the bath tub stopper.  It's fixed now,  but the sink did not survive.  For the moment, it looks like this (only not blurry in real life).

I'm putting in a fancy new wall mounted sink with jazzy chrome everything. I'm happy to say that Eva at the contractor's office found the company who sells to Gracious Home - the high end hardware store.  Now I can get all this cool stuff wholesale.

The bath tub has been a bit of a challenge.  Because the drain is at the left end and the shower is on the right end, my head will be leaning back against the wall with the shower when I take a bubble bath.  That's not a big deal, but I didn't want the faucets knocking me in the nose when I was letting Calgon take me away.  Andy the Contractor and I talked about it, but when the plumber put in the faucets, he left them in the original location.

I therefore wrote a note:

"Is it possible to move this faucet as far to the left as it will go?"

It was a few days before the election, and I realized that I wished the whole country would move as far to the left as it would go.  I think the country actually IS as far to the left as it will go which is a crying fucking shame.  After the election, I experienced my first bout of  Hippies' Despair - a condition that I first noticed in my buddy Woody who came back from Vietnam and hit the streets for peace.  He wound up chucking tear gas grenades back at the cops and dragging injured friends to safety after the cops beat them up.  Lots and lots of people worked very hard back then, and thought they made some progress - then watched it all fall to shit under Ronald Reagan.  It keeps falling and falling, too.  So here we are today all wondering if Wall Street is going to pull us into war under the pretense of standing by our Israeli allies.  God knows every fool in Washington DC will support that bullshit - and really, there's not much difference between Israelis bombing little Palestinian kids and Obama droning little Pakistani kids.  Dead kids are dead kids, but as long as there's nobody droning this country, nobody at Walmart gives a shit.  They keep buying crap from China and griping that Americans don't have any jobs.  They don't even care how hard the Walmart workers are fucked just as long as they get the lowest prices possible.
There is much over which a Hippy can Despair.

Nevertheless, I instructed the contractors to place the bath tub faucet so that I can work it with my toe.  That was I won't have to put down my wine (or my reefer, as the case may be).

Now the wall looks like this:

Actually, the guys may have finished tiling the bathroom over the weekend. I'm pretty sure that they need the work because of time lost during the hurricane, and more importantly, people whose homes were damaged need the guys to come work on their places.

With a little luck, Velvet and I will be moving in during the first week of December.  I had hoped to have our stuff out of storage before we had to pay for December, but I am getting used to the idea that I'm paying for December.  At the moment, the delivery service Ikea uses has fucked up and my kitchen cabinets are stuck on a truck somewhere in New Jersey.  Meanwhile, the superintendent of my building has flipped his shit over the plaster dust and called the EPA.  The super thinks the dust is contaminated even though Andy patiently explained a hundred times how that's impossible.  The EPA is coming Tuesday to analyse the dust.  Andy says, "Bring it on."

Personally, I thought that tipping my super fifty bucks at the start of the job was supposed to prevent this sort of thing especially since I'd have tipped him another hundred at Christmas.  I probably still will tip him at Christmas - and who knows? Maybe they'll bring the kitchen on Tuesday while the EPA is there.  All I have to say about the whole thing is:  I love New York!  I really, truly do.  Velvet and I decided we're having Christmas at our house and everybody can come see us.