As I mentioned before, I've been sleeping on the couch until my coughing goes away. Well, tonight all is quiet, the dishwasher is done, Andrea and Felix are sleeping peacefully upstairs, and I'm sitting at the dining room table relishing the few spare moments I may get this weekend to indulge in whatever I feel like. So of course I'm tinkering on my computer in the basement from my laptop in the dining room. No music is playing, no background noise but the slight whisper hum or the refrigerator and whatever vehicles happen to roll by outside. And then I hear it. Sort of a dry, distinct TAP...................TAP..........TAP......................TAP. At first I thought, "Oh, its probably just something outside, blowing against the window or something..." but there it was again. I pause and wait and sometimes it doesn't seem to come for a while...but eventually, it always comes! It sounds like it is actually coming from the ceiling. It sounds like a drop of water smacking onto a linoleum floor tile after a very long fall or a pebble bouncing off of a windshield at 60 mph. Your basic quick tick/tap/bump in the night. House settling/shifting, etc... It's just so unnerving to here it because of my existing neuroses about ants and water damage and just about this ancient house intending to collapse around us at any moment. For all I know, there's a midget in a timewarp trapped between Felix's floor and the dining room ceiling and he's been working on this time dilated Morse Code emergency communique for the past 10 years. Most likely Felix is rolling around in his crib and that motion is translating down through the floor and seems to find itself released through the same creaky joint in the ceiling. Who knows. It's driving me mad, though.
And of course my homeowners insurance premium just went up a few dollars a month because they are now using credit score to determine your rate? WTF??? My HO insurance is paid out of the escrow for the house...if I stop paying my mortgage, I lose the house, and its not like I can make a claim then, can I? I fail to see how my credit score in any way logically should have an impact on my insurance premium. It's just plain fucked. And on top of that I also get the statement which says, "Oh by the way, now that we're coming up on your one year anniversary in your new home, we're going to make some changes to your policy. Here's two pages of greek. Good luck.
It's getting so it may just be easier for them to send you a list of exactly what they do cover, since it is a much sorter list than what they don't cover...which now appears to include mold, rust, dryrot, bacteria, and water damage that may have been caused by the shitty plumbing job done by the assholes who sold you this dump in the first place. You've lived with it for a year (or it is taking longer than a year to surface as an issue) so now it's not our problem, its your problem.
Sigh... I'm not cut out for owning old, used, expensive things. If we had to live hear longer than another year or so, I'd say tear down the house and drop one of those nice new modular homes on the lot.
Really, my only real fear, the one that all of my other fears are just grubby little children of, is that we will lose our shirts over this house, that we will never get back even what we put into it, that it will crumble around us and ultimately cost us even more to move out of than it did to move in.
It appears that in selling a house you simply need to cover up any problems long enough that they become the next owner's problem.
And did I mention that I saw a wingless female carpenter ant today? She was wandering around by the side door to the house, looking for a good place to start up a new nest. I have never seen such a big ant in my whole life. At first I thought I was seeing things, like it was some sort of special effect. The ant was black and looked like it was almost an inch long. I chased it outside and sprayed it wit the Orth Home Defense MAX I had gotten a few weeks ago. It didn't seem to like it much, but it also didn't seem to slow it down any. It just headed into the grass to get away from me. Andrea asked me why I didn't just step on it. Ok, this was a HUGE ant....and actually I was hoping it would die from the spray and then I could show it to the pest control guy when I finally do make the appointment, to verify for sure that if we don't have carpenter ants IN the house, we sure have them looking around the area. I have not seen a single ant inside the house since I sprayed outside the backdoor, back steps, and the back wall around the foundation with the Home Defense...but that doesn't mean they aren't hiding between the walls and ceilings...methodically, but arrhythmically, chewing through my house with an uncharacteristic TAP............TAP..................................TAP....
It's probably just the wind or accumulation of ambient motion expressing through this one focal carpentry joint. Yes, I will spend the next few days convincing myself of that.
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