Pawprints From Space

This November our little city will hold elections for Mayor. So far there are three candidates and the primary is just under two weeks away. I did not make it to the candidate forum sponsored by neighborhood associations tonight but I did attend the first one and I doubt the rhetoric has much changed since then. One candidate has been our Mayor for several terms. He is competent, calm and in full command of the facts. Next is a former sheriff who has convinced himself and is trying very hard (for about three years now) to convince the rest of us that the city is going straight to hell - crime is out of control, housing is falling apart all around us and the immigrants are going to steal our jobs in our sleep. Vote for him or else we're doomed, we're all going to die. Candidate three has been on city council for some time. He represents a particularly troubled part of town and is the only minority on the ballot. Unfortunately he also struggles with putting a coherent sentence to...

I am presently a good 14 hours into a bathroom update (not counting the exhausted sleep of last night). This should have been a simple one day event. Nope. Not in this house. As some readers may know, anything troublesome in this house has its base in water. This project revealed another level of that problem. I ventured into the project with the idea of pulling up the old vinyl because, due to some odd staining, I believed there to be mold growing beneath it. The other simple part of the project was to replace an old, water-hogging toilet and faucet. The vinyl was stubborn and finally came up but left its felt backing stuck to the subfloor. Apparently someone had used what I like to call "adhesive-from-hell". So off to Lowe's to find an antidote to adhesive-from-hell. That accomplished the goo was applied. Oddly enough even after using the entire bottle and three hours of waiting and scraping nothing was happening. Upon closer inspection a "mushy" area was pull...