Po & Izzy Go to School

Obedience Training for Cats
As you may be aware (see A Dietary Indiscretion and Other Blunders), our two cats can sometimes be real pests. I mean, they're fuzzy and cute (especially Izzy), but they're also demanding, whiny, and attitudinal, and they do charming things like scratch door frames and ravel carpet and yowl at dinner time.

For people whose prior pets were limited to a well-beloved ficus and some parlor palms, this kind of behavior is infuriating, to say the least.

So fairly early on, we got the idea to train them, partly hoping that it would help channel all that energy, and partly just for the sheer pleasure of barking out an order and seeing them do what we tell them for once. We got a cat training book (Train Your Cat in 10 Minutes--or something like that) and got them reasonably competent at Sit and Come, but they were crap at duration, and everything else we tried to teach them (Jump, Stand, Stay, Get the Hell off the Counter You Spawn of the Demiurge) just left them confused.

Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that my friend Cathy, who teaches dog training (specifically a kind of sport-dog training called "rally") might have some useful insights to offer.

Lucky for us, she was intrigued, and she's given us several training sessions plus lots of between-session advice. (We're propagating some roses for her, and we're going to do a little landscaping this fall, so we're not just takers--we're givers, too.)

Izzy is learning to target

Anyway, we had a session today, which made me realize how far the little stinkers have come.

Po stands. He was tired when we took the picture--usually his form is a little better than this.

They both know Stand, and Po can hold it for a really long time. They Sit and--especially Po--stay put as long as food appears to be in the offing. They both Twirl (go in a circle), though Izzy's is kinda rough. Po's been struggling with Lie down, so Cathy came up with a new way of teaching him (called capturing), and he was a real whiz. She also taught us a new way to try and make Po stop spazzing out at dinner time. She j-u-u-u-u-s-t got him to understand the first piece of the process today--we'll see how he does over the next few attempts.

Po learning to recline on command. So far, he's heavy on the reclining and light on the command part.

Here's what I've learned about training pets in general and cats in particular:

(1) It's really, really logical, but not at all intuitive. We have to break down what we want them to learn into a lot of little steps and provide a range of very finely calibrated responses. Everything Cathy tells us to do makes perfect sense--and I'd have never thought of any of it on my own.

(2) Coordinating my voice, hand gestures, clicking, and treat dispensing is astonishingly difficult. If I could dance or fence or do karate or had, in fact, any kind of physical skills whatsoever (typing doesn't seem to count), it might not be such a challenge, but it requires far more awareness of my physical presence than I would have ever expected.

(3) Learning this from a book kinda sucks. It makes a huge difference having a knowledgeable person watch you and give you feedback--explaining how your actions might be ambivalent or too complex or inadvertently teaching the wrong thing. Plus, Cathy's very good at coming up with alternate approaches when one thing doesn't work for a particular animal. Po, for example, responds well to the Stand hand signal, which is an up-pointing version of the Sit signal. But Cathy pointed out that Izzy's hesitant performance was probably due to a difficulty in distinguishing between the two signals, so I'm going to modify the signal for her.

(4) My friend knows a lot. Of course, I always assumed that she did know plenty of stuff (she has a JD, an MA, and and MBA), but I never realized how much there was to know when it came to pet training. But she's got a really astonishing depth of information and experience about the most minute aspects of training, from getting your pet to look you in the eye when you call (did you know you have to train some animals to do that?) to what kind of treats work best for training to what you have to do with your shoulders to get the best response from your pet. She's been a longtime horse rider and dog owner, so I shouldn't be surprised at how well she can read animals and how precisely she can intervene with them, but I totally underestimated the complexity of the subject.

(5) Cats can be trained! And not just by Hollywood animal trainers or that blond German who got chomped on by his own lion (name eludes me. There were two of them. In Las Vegas. Frosted hair, sparkly leisure suits?) Cathy tells me that Po is learning faster than some dogs she's trained. That's right--my cat is smart! He's kind of a grumpy, entitled jerk, but he's really, really smart!

Po does Twirl

(6) Which brings me to point 6, that training my cats makes me fonder of them. This is very useful (for the cats) when they scratch a door frame or knock one of Matt's Big Reds (Matt loves Big Red) onto the carpet. When they're being brats--which, alas, still happens--or needing expensive visits to the pet ER, it's helpful to reflect that the little hellions can do tricks on command and are smarter than dogs (Po is, anyway; Izzy... well, she's very cute) and generally have redeeming and people-pleasing qualities.

Anyway, I'm exceedingly grateful for the copious free advice and training Cathy's been giving us. If you're at all interested in dog training, you should definitely check her out at austindogsports.com. If she can achieve these kinds of results in her first attempt to train cats, her dog skills may well bend the laws of physics.

And in Other Things Zoological
Other happy things are happening at the Menagerie Chez M. Our fish made babies! (And after they'd only known each other for a couple of weeks, the little tramps. If I knew who was responsible, I'd rename them Jezebel and Casanova.) We've seen one little 3/4" white fish and one 3/4" yellowy one swimming about. We dubbed them Pearl and Penelope, respectively.

And then I recently learned that the nursery up the street actually sells both pond plants and fish, which is great because I wanted to diversify our fish collection with a couple of shubunkins. Matt said (because he is wise in his generation) that their coloring is too murky and they'll be impossible to see in our pond. This turned out to be true, but at least on those occasions that they pop up near the surface, we'll know who they are. The more different our fish look from one another, the more interesting I find them. A school of 15 gorgeous, iridescent, rainbow-striped fish that are all identical would be less interesting to me than my 12 ordinary little goldfish whom I can more or less call by name. (Or at least identify as being one of a few of individuals). Matt thinks the shubunkins are kind of freaky looking, or so I infer, because he named them Spooky and Crazy Eye.

Welcome to Chez M, Pearl, Penny, Spooky, and Crazy Eye!

A Dietary Indiscretion and Other Blunders

Hey! Cat: Don't Eat That!
So, my cats. Not, perhaps, the brightest creatures on four paws. Last week, we noticed they were eating less, and Po started vomiting a lot. At first we thought he was trying to hork up a particularly stubborn hairball, but eventually their decline in appetite became positively alarming. We also noticed that they had nibbled at the leaves of the Easter lilies in the den.

So I googled to see if there might be some relationship there, only to discover that Easter lilies are lethally, horribly toxic to cats (they cause death by kidney failure). So we made a late night run to the veterinary emergency room Sunday, stayed for 4 hours, spent pretty much all of our rainy day fund, and learned that their kidneys were fine (thank goodness). Apparently, they hadn't eaten enough to cause kidney damage, though possibly enough to make their tummies sensitive. But as for what the real culprit was, that remained a mystery.

So we were told to keep an eye on the beasts, and if they didn't improve, take them to our regular vet for a battery of tests. Okay.

Izzy improved quickly, but Po malingered. And then on Tuesday, I found the culprit in the hall, covered in a repulsive brown matter that made it very clear that the item had spent some quality time in Po's intestines.

An entire elastic headband. (Sort of like the ones at right, only tan and less... spotty).

WTF?!?

That doesn't look like food, smell like food, or feel like food. Not on the first swallow, nor on the thirtieth, which is what it must have taken for the little beast to consume the entire thing. Interestingly enough, vets refer to this sort of thing as a "dietary indiscretion." That doesn't quite seem to cover it, does it?

So Po isn't dying (yay!), he's just thick as two planks (☹).

Pond: Oops.
Meanwhile, we chugged ahead on the pond. We put 1-2 inches of sand on all horizontal surfaces.

Then we put our carpet remnants from our nice neighbors down.



And finally, we put a king's ransom worth of 45 mm rubber liner down.



And then we filled it.

And discovered that the east leg of the pond is about 8 inches lower in elevation than the west end. Somehow, we never quite realized what a drop it was. Whoopsie.

So now we have to build a berm on the east side to raise it so that we can put in enough water to come up creditably high on the west side. Bother. The good news is that we were planning to put in a raised bed anyway, so the new highness, hopefully, won't stick out too much.

Lots of Roses
Meanwhile, the roses are full of awesomeness.

Below is the petitely charming 'Climbing Cecile Brunner.'



And this is a frothy pink noisette whose name we somehow lost track of*.



Also in bloom:
Cramoisi Superieur (x 2 - and how!)
Ducher (still just seething with blossoms)
Georgetown Tea (covered in polymorphous big fat pink flowers)
Belinda's Dream
Climbing Old Blush
Buff Beauty
La Marne
Archduke Charles
Mystery Pink Globes (Margot Koster? Mothersday?)
Mutabilis (x 5 - blooming riotously)
Mystery Red Legacy Pillar
Reine des Violettes
Souvenir de la Malmaison
Maggie (x 2)
Graham Thomas
Duchesse de Brabant
Green Ice (x 3)
4th of July (x 2)
Comtesse du Cayla
Autumn Damask
Kaiserin Freidrich
Mademoiselle Franziska Krueger
Isabella Sprunt
Martha Gonzales
Maybe Katy Rd Pink


It might have been easier to list the roses that aren't yet blooming, or only barely:
Mystery Hybrid Perp
Lichterloh
The Fairy
New Dawn
Wild Blue Yonder
Ferdinand Pichard
Burgundy Iceberg
Madame Joseph Schwartz
Mrs. RM Finch
Red Cascade

Most have a good excuse: we just transplanted The Fairy, Red Cascade doesn't get enough sun, Ferdinand Pichard is recovering from a bad brush with RoundUp... But overall, I think this garden is about 1 week away from hitting Peak Bloom for 2010. It's wonderful.

----------

*After a little research, I strongly suspect that this is 'Madame Alfred Carriere,' a name I often get confused with 'Alister Stella Grey.' In fact, before it bloomed, I thought maybe it was ASG. However, ASG is much too yellow for our rose. There is a faint possibility that it could be 'Juane Desprez,' but the pale pink looks more like MAC to me.

$2.99/gallon ! Halleluja!!!

Exxon on 290, just east of Elgin

Yup. Today I paid less than 3 dollars for a gallon of gas. Takes just a little bit of the sting out of the whole Great Depression: The Sequel thing we've got going on.

Other updates: (1) We finally got some rain on Tuesday. It was only 4/10" but it was good to know that water still falls out of the sky sometimes. (2) We gave Izzy her first bath. She didn't much care for it. Poor little skinny kitty. (3) They finally moved Mt. Albert II last week, although the road that they presumably put it on looks about the same. Mt. A. II had been there since August--I think communities of woolly marmots and lichen had started to move in. (4) We finally tried the red taco stand on far east Main St (Dos Amigos)--they make a damn fine smoky chicken fajita taco. (5) After a year in the ground, 'Buff Beauty' finally put on its first--kinda funny-looking--bloom.

Buff Beauty's first bloom. When it gets its act together, it'll climb up the gazebo.

We're lovin the cooler temps. Aside from being hopelessly dry (that little rain doesn't seem to have accomplished much), the weather's been consistently beautiful. A little warm in the afternoons, but clear, cool mornings and evenings. It occurs to me that we haven't been grilling nearly enough, which seems ungrateful of us.

We finally took our inaugural bike ride in Elgin this morning. One of those things we've been meaning to do (for a year and a half) but hadn't quite gotten around to. It was very nice--we biked to HEB, which is pretty exciting for this suburbanite. I've never really lived in a place where the non-hard-core could bike to run errands. That was one of the original attractions of Elgin (well, that and really cheap real estate), and now that it's October and all mellow and gorgeous, there's no reason not to.

Biking in the towny part of Elgin (10th St to Ave C, Ave C to 11th) was just fine. The streets are wide enough and the traffic slow & infrequent enough that there were no problems at all. And we got to admire people's Oxblood lilies and yard bling.

But crossing Hwy 290, on the other hand, was a bit nerve-wracking. Lots of fast-moving traffic, lots of people impatient to turn left, and my hand-me-down bike is about 2 inches too tall for me, which makes stopping and starting an ungraceful and often painful process. Next time we may take the long way around via Central Ave., which goes under the highway.

Other possible bike destinations: the Seed & Feed General Store on Dildy St. (yes, "Dildy." It was named in a more innocent time), the dry cleaners at the intersection of Main & 290, the organic grocery downtown, the ice cream shop downtown (if it's still in business. sigh...), Bloomers nursery at Ave F & FM95, the park on 12th, the gas station at Taylor and Main, and possibly the hardware store, though biking on FM95 is probably not the safest thing a person could do.

Izzy, trying to recover her dignity after the trauma of a bath. She was not happy with us.

PORCH GLIDER!

We finally finished it! We've been working on it since February, and we finally got it done.

Ta-DA!

Completed porch glider in its new home by the patio

The rotten, rusty original came with the house, and we replaced the slats, the metal brackets, and all the hardware and painted everything. It's now go stainless steel bolts, red oak slats, and brackets made from hurricane fence pipes. It glides beautifully, it's wonderfully sturdy--it's altogether satisfactory.

And when we finished, we sat on our porch glider in the mellow, breezy, golden afternoon and just chilled. Exactly as I had planned.

View from our shade patio

Matt did most of the final work on the swing (I did help with the hacksaw, though. Sawing through fence pipe--not fun work). Meanwhile, with my trusty cultivator hoe--I love that thing--I slowly, carefully chipped the large mound of hard-backed earth from the buttress part of the cottonwood. Our tree guy was adamant that we needed to pull that soil back and let those buttress roots get air.

In the picture below, you can see the bit I had fully excavated on the right and the partially excavated side on the left. I think I gingerly dug off about 8 inches of soil.

And now I remember why I decided not to become an archeologist.

Partially excavated cottonwood

At the same time as all the swing/tree excitement was going on, one of our Oxblood lilies was blooming pink. I know that a pink subspecies or variety exists, but why didn't we see these last year? Do we have the true pink, or is it just some response to drought stress? Pretty, though, isn't it?

Pink Rhodophiala bifida (Oxblood lily)

And here are some picture of the cats. They are still pretty wary of each other (Po keeps getting in Izzy's personal bubble. Izzy doesn't like this. At all.) but no blood has been shed. And we only let them mingle under supervision. On the good news side of things, Izzy adapted to her litter box right away.

Po, whose gargantuan paws are twice the size of Izzy's.

Po's GlamourShot (TM)

Izzy, who sometimes looks shockingly sarcastic for such a young little kitty (1 to 1-1/2 yrs)

The Great Dictator

Matt and Izzy

Many New Things

New sofa! (and ottoman)

Well. Today certainly has been full of excitement.

The long-anticipated sofa (with ottoman) finally arrived. It's very big and very comfy (if you like your sofas firm, which we do). I'm having some slight regrets about the lovely cotton velveteen espresso-colored upholstery we chose. At the time, it seemed charmingly decadent, but it would also appear to be a fuzz magnet. And Po's striped hairs show up beautifully on that dark brown. I guess we'll have to keep some lint rollers handy and wield them often.

We'll test the sleeper this weekend. The old one had a pretty decent mattress, for a sofa bed. We'll see what this one's like after several hours.

Next on the list of new things, Matt's work had this spare gas grill that they wanted, somewhat inexplicably, to get rid of. Well, we give used appliances a happy home here at Chez M, so he loaded that sucker up and carted it off. It's much larger and less rickety than our other second-hand gas grill, so that's nice. If anyone wants the older old one, let me know--otherwise it'll be hitting the freecycle.

And finally, most dramatically, we acquired a new cat.

This was rather a big step for us, as I only became a somewhat reluctant cat owner last year, and, since, moreover, our catspace is not big and is currently full of Po, who is large, and contains multitudes.

However.

She'd been hanging around the yard begging handouts for some weeks, and she's such a sweet little kitty with a Little Tramp moustache and the most plaintive meow ever. And, furthermore, there's some sort of cat disease going around Manchaca (deep south Austin, for you out-of-towners. Pronounced "man-chaack"--the last "a" is silent, for some reason.) We couldn't continue feeding her and petting her if there was a risk of passing something on to Po. But at the same time, we didn't want to abandon her to whatever-the-germ-is. She's very affectionate--if skittish--and so very skinny. We named her Isadora, which seemed like a good name for a wee skinny little cat with dainty paws. But she almost immediately became "Izzy."

We snagged her Sunday night and put her in the garage till we could take her to the vet, but our garage (French for "decrepit old shack") turned out to be anything but hermetic, and Izzy--who loathes confinement, we have discovered--escaped. To our surprise, she came around again last night (we grilled--Izzy positively cannot resist the smell of a cookout) and was gullible enough to come within snatching distance. We nabbed her again, this time putting her in a great big crate (the kind you put Rottweilers in). She mewed piteously, and we had to keep reminding ourselves that it was for her own good in the long run.

Today we took her in to the vet. They confirmed that she wasn't microchipped and hadn't been fixed, so between those facts and the absence of a collar and her general skinniness, we assume she's a bona fide stray. The vet gave her a clean bill of health (apparently, her ears are "gorgeous" from a veterinary perspective) except that the feline leukemia virus test came back indeterminate. We're to come back in months for further testing. Fortunately, Po's had his shots and boosters, so he should be okay. The vet also recommended feeding them separately and keeping them physically separated until they've had time to get used to each other.

Izzy: the new kitty on the new sofa

She's now curled up (shedding white hairs) on the new sofa, apparently happy as a clam. She's been assigned temporary sleeping quarters in the master bath while she and Po acclimate to one another. Tonight we'll discover whether or not she has an intuitive understanding of the litter box. She does seem to have grokked on to the come command, though she's not always terribly motivated to actually respond to it. (We've been training Po over the months--he's a wayward kitty, and it relieves my feelings to see him obey me in at least some things. He does come and sit beautifully. He does stay and go when he's not feeling naughty. And he does jump, down, and stand, but these are newer acquisitions to his vocabulary, and he's a little hesitant about them.)

More Roses and Dr Jekyll & Mr Po

A Few More Roses

Here's 'New Dawn,' a climber that will eventually be trellised to enclose the Croquet Lawn. I don't have a lot of experience with the cultivar, but so far, it seems most impressive as a bush rather than as an individual flower. The flowers are kind of sloppy looking up close, but from a little distance you just see dark green foliage and copious, good-sized pale pink flowers.

Meanwhile, I've got a tentative ID on our mystery stripy rose: ''Ferdinand Pichard.' If the internet is at all a reliable gauge (and I'm not sure that it is) there are actually relatively few striped roses. Bicolors, yes. Stripes, not so much. And of all the stripes only FP looked at all close. In most pictures, it's a bit pinker than ours (most people describe it as red on pink rather than red on white), but I've noticed that the younger our flowers are, the pinker they are. (See below--older flower left, younger flower right) And I found this picture by this French photographer on pbase that's really a dead ringer for our rose.

And here's our rose bed--much remains to be done, especially in terms of adding small trees and trellises, but I'm pleased with the progress the bushes have made thus far. I'm on the fence about whether or not to risk a bay laurel and/or a 'Forest Pansy' redbud this late in the season. Probably best to wait till September, but it'd be nice to get a little screening in place now that baseball season has started and our neighbors are coaching again. Sometimes I step out the kitchen door and feel like I'm on stage. If I'm in my PJs and bare feet, this is especially disconcerting. I need the enrobing action of a nice, stout evergreen like bay laurel.

I've got a better picture of our unknown crinum, more fully in bloom than before. I think the flowers are a bit too small and pale to be 'Ellen Bosanquet,' but based on the pictures I was able to find, I couldn't really say for sure. Other possible candidates include 'Elizabeth Traub' and 'Eagle Rock.' It has an pretty large umbel of flowers--I count 14 buds in a single inflorescence.


Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Cats of War
And finally, the kitty. Yikes. We sleep with our bedroom door locked.


Actually, although he looks like a vampire fiend from Hell in this picture, he was just yawning. He was bored by me taking pictures, but not especially annoyed or inclined to lunge for my throat. A second later, he looked like this. Good kitty.



A Meteorological Note
The sky is really flinging the rain down on us by the bucketfuls. They threatened hail--I hope it skirts our (newish) magnolia. But our recently re-transplanted ginkgo and 'Reine des Violettes' rose will appreciate the moisture.

Rimlock

I wanted to do a slightly better job of documenting our rimlocks. We've got 2: 1 came with the house, and the other we just bought.

A rimlock (or rim lock) is a lock whose mechanism is attached to the exterior of the door. I don't know anything about the history of the rimlock--they are unknown to wikipedia, and the few mentions on the internet were sketchy and brief.

Here's our original:

Original antique rimlock

You can see that ours is missing the piece that rimlock latches into (the "catch plate"). There was obviously a place for it on the door, but the piece itself is gone. Not sure how difficult it will be to replace it.

And here's the one we recently bought:

Our RL. Co. rimlock

I don't feel entirely confident that the catch plate and lock are a match set--they're different sizes, and the ornamentation on the two parts doesn't match. Still, it's functional.

Well, sort of. Neither of our rimlocks are in working order at the moment. The house original is currently broken down into its constituent parts, and Matt isn't sure how to reassemble it. Apparently, he unscrewed what my Dad refers to as "the Jesus screw." Dad had warned me about that screw, but apparently Matt wasn't around at that moment, because when he took down the lock to clean it, he went right for that screw and the whole thing sprang apart.

The new rimlock is by the company RL. Co. (do you suppose "RL." stands for "rimlock"?--I think it's very weird that there's a period after the L, but not after the R--as thought it were an abbreviation, not an acronym.) I haven't been able to find out anything about them, though I did find our exact same model for sale on the internet at Scherer's Architectural Antiques for $90. Here's how it looks when it's all prettied up:

The same model as our RL. Co. rimlock

Here's a similar model for sale (for $175! That $22 price is looking pretty good) at Mowery Antiques:

Another RL. Co. rimlock--a slightly different model

Check out all the nifty matching doo-dads. I especially like the little keyhole frame for the reverse side of the door.

And another example, from e-bay

Another slightly different model

Ours is missing a spring to make the tongue stick out. We're hoping the locksmiths at Cothron's locks in Austin will be able to help us out. Matt tried jimmying with a spring, but he couldn't get it to work.

The un-springy innards of our RL. C0. rimlock. Needs a good polishing, too

And on a completely different note, here's Po. (It's late, and I'm tired. I can't come up with a plausible segue. We have some pictures of Po and I'm putting them online. Period.) We've been training him--he now sort-of responds to "come" and "sit." Isn't he sitting beautifully?

Po, looking demure. Check out his big galumphing thumb.

However, Po doesn't much care for flash photography.

Po, looking extremely irritated

A Whole Lot o' Shakin' Goin' On

Yowza. It's been a month since my last entry. Various excuses: job...weather...guests...travel...malaise... (I didn't say they were good excuses.)

The happy thing is that I've got quite the backlog of news to share (some of it has becomes olds in the interim, but whatever.)

Introducing... Po!
The most important thing: the house has acquired a kitten! Matt was seduced by a little feral tabby at his work, and next thing you know, we're cat-owners. His name is Po--mostly named after Lightnin' Hopkins who frequently referred to himself in the 3rd person as "Po' Lightnin'." As we got him the night before Halloween--on All Hallow's Eve Eve, if you will--his name is also a nod to the poet laureate of Halloween, Edgar Allen Poe. And lastly, and most implausibly, since I am an italophile, and there is a river somewhere in Italy called the Po, his name is also an homage to the land of pasta and expensive footwear.

He is ferocious cute. Check him out:

Po, our very cute kitten.

He's also a freak mutant. He's a polydactyl cat, which means he's got a weird toe deformation that gives him, in effect, thumbs. He's got giant clodhopper feet, too. Our little clydesdale.

Matt's totally besotted. Which, in itself, is actually even cuter than the kitten.

Matt & Po

So far, I've had very few allergy problems. We bathe Po and keep him out of the bedrooms, so that probably helps. I think I've mostly outgrown the cat allergy, fortunately. (The oak allergy, on the other hand, is still going strong. If I could sell phlegm the way other people sell plasma or sperm, I'd have already paid off my student loans.)

My name is Ozymandias, tree of trees
In other news, we have finally pulled down both our dead trees. The chinaberry came down a while ago, but we just toppled the ash on Sunday. It was a fighter. And nerve-wracking, because it was right next to the garage. However, we used guy-lines and a sort of a pully thing to hold it in the right direction. And then Matt went after it with a chainsaw very, very carefully. To our delighted incredulity, it came down with textbook exactitude: It didn't fall on the garage, the fence, the sapling bur oak, nor on our elderly neighbor who insisted on standing unnervingly close to the thing to watch it come down. The wood was very, very hard--poor Matt got tennis elbow dealing with it. But now we have a yard full of high-quality firewood--we shall have fires in the fire pit this winter! And drink hot libations while looking at the stars. Splendid!

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Also, Matt's been working on installing our chandelier in the dining room. You may remember that the fan that had been in there was off-center, so we had to cut a new hole and thread the wires over to it. That part went fine--Matt just reached into the ceiling and pulled the wires over. The weird bit is that there were six sets of wires feeding into the old fan. Six! So he's having to test to figure out which are live, and that has been complicated. (Matt doesn't like volt-meters--he doesn't trust them. Much the way I feel about tire gauges, I think. I just never feel confident that they're measuring accurately.) So we're going to have to patch up the spare wire and plaster over the hole and do some more testing and then--hey presto!--new chandelier.

See all the freaky wires coming out of the old hole (foreground)? That pink stuff coming out of the new hole is wads of plastic--Matt says it's something to do with the insulation.

What, you may ask, have I been doing while Matt risks life and limb chopping down trees and fiddling with electricity? I've been "spotting" him (yeah, it's a pretty cush job) and working on that misbegotten incubus, the epoxy. I've been scrubbing off the old, sticky epoxy preparatory to yet another desperate attempt to refinish the pedestal tub. I'll be tackling the new epoxy soon. And that, my friends, is the last time. If I can't get it to work this go-round, I'll be hiring a professional to handle it for me. It ain't cheap, but I can't afford to lose many more brain cells to epoxy fumes.