I lost the whole blog I thought. I had to reconstruct it by the seat of my pants

 fortunately I was very lucky I was able to do it in less than two hours.

(random unrelated picture here)

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I woke up really early this morning. I was in bed pretty early I guess.

Nice colors in the sky, a little coffee finally and I’m ready to go!

So, we’ve been having this problem Dana and I… no car at all. I know that ultimately we have to give it up and I’m really not to broken up about the car not working. I’ve been missing riding my bike anyway. Trying to run a non-profit office and organize (walk and chew gum as they say) was making it impossible to ride my bike at all.

So, in the last several days, we’ve spent a little more than $100.00 on parts for the car trying to figure out why it won’t run. To the left you can see the coil pack (the old one), cost us $66.00!

Last night while on the phone with my love she’s saying that her dad is mentioning that sometimes there are chips in the keys nowadays…

Even though I’d actually driven the car with the new key already, I thought about this all night. This morning I remembered what Dana’s dad had said and I went back in the house and found the key that we always had used and which may have a chip and tried to start the car. It took it awhile but it started!

 Now I don’t know if we even needed to replace the coil pack at all.

I think I’ll try using the other key that I had made again and see if it conks out on me again.

Then I’ll try and take the slightly used coil pack back. Not likely to meet with any success there I bet.

I should put the bike rack on and strap my bike on and take a test drive.

Maybe I’ll go get that video game I’ve been wanting.

Maybe I’ll go get the stuff out of the ACORN office in Davenport like my laptop, bulletin board, scanner, etc. this morning.

Maybe I’ll drive all the way to Chicago to see my love!

Maybe I’ll go find stuff to make beer!

Maybe……. I’ll find out if the Habitat for Humanity Restore is open saturday and go look at tile for the bathroom!

Hope you’re having a great time in Chicago Dana! Happy trails

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Be sure to note the additional links to poetry in the right hand sidebar 

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Thought you’d like to see some pictures of the upstairs bathroom before it was ripped out.

All that got ripped out because of a clogged bathtub drain. It probably won’t drain much better than it did when we get done with it either. That’s what sucks about this whole thing…. 

Also, be sure to check out the new page I put up with pictures of ceramic tile from Habitat for Humanity’s Restore. bathroom tile

 Widdy biddy says hi

checkout the-$4,000.00 cat

Ahhhh, the final piece of drywall goes in right there in the corner. Major hurdle here.

Now I can start to mud and tape the room.

I’m going to tile the bathtub / shower stall and see where it makes sense to stop that.

There is this tiny piece of wall bordering the tub and shower stall. I think I’ll tile that as well so that the break from tile to regular painted drywall occurs at the farthest corner of the wall that the tub is on.

A milestone has been passed and that certainly deserves a leinenkugels.

As everyone knows, the water in Wisconsin is just a little better perhaps than the water here in Rock Island. I say to hell with bottled water, we can just do a final filtration ourselves with a brita pitcher filter and be happy not contributing to the amount of plastic consumed.

If you’re going to purchase fluids to replenish those you may have lost previously in the day, be sure that they actually put something in there. Maybe a Leinenkugels is what you’re really looking for.

It’s inexpensive and tastes like it was really brewed instead of this stuff they pass off as beer that most people drink here in the states.

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I saw the finches and some chickadees too.

They like to hang out on the dying sunflower quite a bit it seems.

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Here is the view from the little roof above the downstairs kitchen. Not quite up with the dawn, the light just looks dim because I’m shooting into the sun.

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 Whoever worked on this roof before me did a horrible job on it. They left gaps two and three inches wide between rolled out shingle material… don’t know what to call it but it isn’t what you would normally see. Eventually (next spring I hope) we’ll get to really fixing this thing.

It’s looking like it’s going to rain today. I hope it does and maybe I will have staved off the roofing till next spring. It would be nice since I have a few other jobs pending as far as work on the house.

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 You could see all the way down to the original roofing material (shake) in a very wide crack at the base of the south facing wall.

This should hold it for at least the winter. The house needs a whole lot of work done and very soon. I need to talk with my buddy Steve about getting on this thing next spring or so. That will be the best probably for the garden below. If we can get to the roof early enough we won’t do too much damage to the garden.

All finished ‘cept for the cleanup. Let it rain today!

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I’m acually geting somewhere on this thing I think. Been working on it for a few years now. 

So I took a little while to finally get to this project. I was working for ACORN for quite some time and finally had to focus on myself. Ulcers sent me to the hospital and our office ran out of funding at the same time. I was sad to see things roll to a stop.

 Maybe I’m just taking a break from the high stress world of organizing to lick my wounds and get some things done around the house.

Here is a picture of what went on the walls before I could mud them. As you can see, I’m off in the mirror drinking a beer after a days work on the bathroom.

I think I’m going to tile the whole room. I was talking with someone at the hardware store I go to and they convinced me that it would be worth the effort in the long run.

Not really looking forward to the enormity of it all but the project does sound fun. I intend on using the Habitat for Humanity Restore for most of my material needs. Hopefully there will be some natural stone there for me to buy. I want to use quite a few large(12?) tiles and some smaller ones. I really want to use a natural stone border at about eye level though. Maybe stone that I find myself.

 Originally I was going to just do around the tub and shower stall itself in ceramic tile. Now I’m rethinking that.

The next two pictures will show how far I’ve come in the last few days. If I can find our camera that is…. Dana!!!!

 I love you dear, do you know where our camera is?

I started thinking about how much money it wold cost to have this done by a professional… It began to make more sense to me to Do it myself when I thought about spending 3 or 4 thousand dollars getting our upstairs bathroom finished. I was losing money working for ACORN (see; www.acorn.org) and so now I’m working for myself and my sweetheart!

It’s almost impossible to get a good camera angle on this room in order to show you what is really going on.

 In the next photo you’ll see a milestone passed. We haven’t had the bathtub working with running water for almost three years probably. Lots of reasons for that, mostly no money! Struggling to get by in the second installment of the Ronald Reagan Administration (cheney, rumsfeld, wolfowitz)…. nothing seems to be trickling down ‘cept this melting yellow glacier stuff….

Hooray! Water in the Tub!

Nothing can stop me now!

More to come!

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illinois
hillbillies
400 miles of mississippi
big wetlands
shawnee
geese and ducks
blue heron
catfish, gar pie
bluegill
sunfish, crappie
racoons, muskrats
bass
frogs
cattails and crawdads
beavers
grass for miles and miles and miles
and buffalo

10,000 little towns
crickets
mosquitoes
coyotes
deer
next door to kentucky
and Iowa
and michigan
missouri and
indiana
rock island
center of the universe
everything turns around it
folded into
the river running west
with the rock river for a while
tufts of grass
breaking up the
concrete
corn
blackhawk
sauk
fox
Iliniwek
loud thunder
tall clouds
big rain

the little island for the newlyweds
with waterfalls
on the mississippi
right here in paradise

only thinly veiled
by concrete

rock island crossroads
between here and everywhere
new orleans
twin cities
new york
la
boston
san francisco
rock island
at the center of it all

been watchin’ this river all my life
this river is my life
this river carries me to the gulf of mexico
parts of me float a hundred miles up
parts of me live in fish out in the atlantic ocean
my water is everywhere
I am everywhere
no need to leave paradise
it will leave me soon enough

my love was born here
I want to see the exact place
she came into the world
through illinois
and was drawn to this place
paradise
thinly veiled
by concrete
where the river runs west
you can see it from space

illinois means “people”
iliniwek, chippewa,
cahokia, kaskaskia,
michigamea, moingwena,
peoria, tamaroa,

wolf, bear
buffalo children
tears to wash away
the blue sky

eagles still gather here
even though the
rapids were lost
to white mans “improvement”
so we didn’t have to walk
with our canoes
around the white water
the eagles still gather
they used to like to fish here
when the waterfell
onto the rocks
at rock island

when the winter came
the sauk and fox would live here
in long houses
open water even in the dead of
winter
falling water
on the rocks
made the fishing good
the eagles liked it
convergence of
life gathered around
this womb of the earth
from hundreds of miles away
sacred life giving
river
paradise

now
only thinly veiled
by concrete

D VanThournout

Spring 2006

dave.vant@gmail.com