Doorknob

A word of advice - don't ever buy a house if you work midnight shifts. I get home at 6:30 a.m., and then of course, I'm wide awake. But at 6:30am, being wide awake doesn't mean that I want to work on the house - it means watching a little tv, or going online, or maybe throwing some laundry in, but that's about it.

Then I decide to go to sleep, maybe around 8, and sleep until maybe 12 or 1pm. So actually 1pm is my "morning" and I wake up groggy and irritable (as I always have) and the last thing I want to do is go out and pound nails or rip up carpeting. So I usually dawdle.

And if there's an errand thrown into that day, it totally throws things off! If I have to be somewhere at, say, 11am, then I usually don't sleep beforehand. So then I'm just wired on caffeine or these awesome "Charge!" pills that I get at Walmart. :) When I get home after that, then there just seems no sense in going to bed, but I know I have to at some point, because usually I have to go back to work at 10pm that evening.

Last night I worked with Carol, and I love her, but she can drive me insane at times. And last night she was sick - I mean cold/hacking/stuffy sick, and to the extreme! Her coughing was enough to drive me up the drywall. And since she was sputtering and coughing all over everything, I was paranoid, so every time I touched something that I KNEW she had previously touched, I washed my hands, and then washed my face. (They say that you most likely transmit a cold to yourself by touching the virus and then touching your face. And I am a squirmy type, so I touch my face a lot.) It makes a lot more sense to me now - people who are sick should just STAY HOME! Especially in the work environment that I am in - we have 6 retarded people (and if you get offended by the word 'retarded', too bad - it's right there in their case files) and it's not fun when they get sick -for us or for them. Anyway, Carol must have 84 weeks of sick time built up - she's worked there for 14 years. I work again with her tonight, and I think I'm just going to wear a garbage bag over my body.

I'm not usually that paranoid of sick people. But I HATE getting a cold. Some people are lucky - they get a sniffle which lasts a couple days, and then they're fine. When I get a cold, I literally have a non-stop spigot of snot somewhere in my head, and I get crabby and sore and SICK. And it lasts a week. And yes, I smoke a lot, and when I didn't smoke for a year, I never got a cold. We won't go any farther with that.

So back to the beginning - I really haven't got much done with my house in the last couple days. And I notice that the floors are really cold, which means more insulation needed under the house. But I do have new doorknobs.

I have beautiful old interior doors - four panel, with keyholes and the kind of lock mechanism that is attached to the door instead of built in - they are VERY old. But none of them had doorknobs! The bathroom door is the only one I have kept closed, because there is still some openings in the wall where the cats could get through, so every time I exit or enter the bathroom, I close the door. To open it, I have used a screwdriver, but about 28 percent of the time, I lock the screwdriver on the other side of the door from where I am, so I have to hunt until I find something else to improvise with.

So one day at Home Depot, I went through the doorknob department, and I thought to myself - hmm.....maybe they sell replacement knobs for those old doors (the knob mechanism is much different on an old door than a new one.) Anyway, I looked and looked and I didn't see anything remotely resembling what I needed. Bummer.

A couple days later, I was again in Home Depot, buying screws or something, and as I was leaving I inadvertantly walked through that doorknob section again. And what caught my eye? Crystal doorknobs! They were on the right side, not the left where I had been looking before. They had old-fashioned crystal doorknobs, and old-fashioned faux-porcelain knobs, and brass knobs. And they were cheap - from 5 to 7 bucks a piece. So I bought a crystal one for the bathroom, and a "porcelain" one for the front door. And they are awesome! I dreaded the thought of putting modern "technological" knobs on those doors, and now I don't have to. Very cool.

Well, off to babysit my nephew for an hour, and then work again tonight. Ho hum.

ps. - If you like conspiracy theories and are just a little open-minded, google "Loose Change", which is a documentary some young guys made about the 9/11 attacks and the inconsistencies within the Commision report, etc. You can watch the movie online. Maybe a little over-the-top for some people, but like I said, watch it with an open mind. There's a lot of unanswered questions about that day, and for some reason, they never get coverage anymore.....

Dougles