Camp Dad

My house is a mess. Absolutely everything is covered with dust. Some of the dust is plaster dust. Some of it is wood dust. A little of it I suspect is coal dust. This is the result of a marathon visit from dad. Dad retired earlier this month and is relishing his new found freedom. I am very pleased that his first adventure as a retiree was a trip in his new van back to see me. He brought every tool known to dad-kind. He used every one of them, too. He and My Beloved fixed the furnace, installed a garbage disposal, and hooked up the ice maker. Then they really got down to business. They used something with a name that sounded like "Sawzaw" to cut out a section of the main sewer pipe from the upstairs bathroom. This pipe had a big crack in it that My Beloved had temporarily fixed with some metal glue. Now there is a section of PVC pipe in there with the old iron stuff. Next Dad had to build a box around it since it is right there in the front hall and all. The Boys also reopened a doorway from the hall to the dining room. This doorway existed at some point in the past and had gotten walled over. The doorway had to be drywalled and required a lot of horrible "mudding. " The mudding is horrible because it requires lots of sanding and plaster dust is nasty I've discovered. They also stripped and sanded the floor and woodwork in the hallway. Hence, more dust. Needless to say (needless if you looked at the pictures anyway) a good deal remains to be done. The floors need polyurethaned, the woodwork needs paint. Let's not even start about the foyer. There is about a million years of sweeping and dusting and mopping and wiping up to do.
Now through all of this the boys got along pretty much okay. You've got to know that my dad is one of those loner types. Something Clint Eastwood as The Man with No Name meets Johnny Cash. And, that My Beloved has what he thinks is an extremely mild case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. At one point he wore on dad's nerves so bad that dad would only grunt at him for about a day and a half. Dad asked me later "has he got that same thing your sister's got?" Yep.