in chicago hghts resting and working on my mom's house... when you get old, you tend to let little things that go wrong with a house, stay wrong. you might complain some (especially to transient sons who know how to fix things but are never around) but basically you live with problems--as they grow ever bigger.
when we got to my mom's she pointed out that one of the 'box beams' in her back room had partially fallen and needed to be put back up. jalil and i took it completely down and my sister and i took it apart, somewhat. after a trip to the local home depot (or whatever it is called in the midwest...) we had the hardware and tools to put it back up. the problem now was maneuvering about under the beam as needed.
(here is the part of the story that portends what my kids have to look forward to--only with building materials.) my mom has a lot of plant stuff--collections of plants, mostly dead, plant pots, potting soil, knick-knacks of all sorts to decorate plantings, wooden crates of this and that needed to plant or help plant things...essentially all kinds of things for planting. my sister and i moved things again and again with every change in position of the ladder until i started ranting about throwing 'junk' out. to her credit my mom let us! at least she consented to getting rid of at least half of the stuff we convinced her she would never use.
long story short, we got the beam back in place and i am pretty sure it will stay put--the other one in the room might fall, but i will be back in new england by then.
that was the big job i was able to accomplish. i begged off the plumbing fix as being not nearly likely to go as well, for either of us. the resting we did was actually pretty nice as it mainly involved eating. i even cooked a meal that my mom said she liked. we also boxed up jalil's bike and my sister and i delivered unboxed biker to the bus station and the boxed bike to fedex. it was a sad day to lose jalil but we had some long talks into the night before he went west to school.
it was a fine couple of days puttering about and i got to see, a brother, sister, and my mother...
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