| Author | Message | ||
     virgilian Citizen Username: Virgilian Post Number: 208 Registered: 7-2001 |
A dandy? Male? I hold no position in any committee of any sort at the local level. I do carol, but with no discernable accent. Gosh. | ||
| virgilian Citizen Username: Virgilian Post Number: 209 Registered: 7-2001 |
themp, The rum! sorry about the vomit on your bed-linens. | ||
| themp Citizen Username: Themp Post Number: 386 Registered: 12-2001 |
Don't question my memories. And don't play the gender card, Virg. And please don't ride that old-time giant wheeled bicycle across my lawn anymore. When you ride that around puffing on your pipe you look like a steam engine, what with the top hat. | ||
| virgilian Citizen Username: Virgilian Post Number: 210 Registered: 7-2001 |
themp, dear, Before we re-visit our past, let's handle one bit of pressing house-keeping. I have a bone to pick with you. Three or four of your illegitimate children are throwing rocks and Hummel figurines with Glade inserts at my original circa 1910 multi-paned wood windows. I am at an utter loss--should I replace them? Themp, sweetie, you know it is your responsibility to pay for this damage, just as you pay child support for the 9 or so others that I've wet-nursed for you. Step up to bat and buy me some vinyl replacement windows. | ||
| themp Citizen Username: Themp Post Number: 387 Registered: 12-2001 |
On Halloween, the combination of homemade treats and bizarre costuming overmaster the natural curiousity of the kids. They take one look at the witch/warlock under the orange porchlight, and figure this may be just as advertised - the real thing. So the kids take a pass. Poor Virg stands on his porch all night. I don't know, I'm freaked out by heavy face makeup and tights, aren't you? Anyway, he has a full set of Ladies' Home Journal and Colliers magazines from the 1890's, back when people "knew how to have a home life" as he puts it. He draws all his treat recipes from these dusty tomes, and it tastes like there's ought of magazine crumbs in these concoctions, too. To be polite I tried a few, and mothball was the dominant savor. Mothball and that old lady style of sugarless cake. Everything has little chrome-looking bb's on it that are almost indigestible, and the effort to make green icing for the goblin cookies creates an appallingly unappetising, mosslike briquet. The sheer volume of the apples hitting Virg's asbestos cement siding once the sun goes down (don't try to tell him it isn't "quartersawn oldgrown cedar")is like a naval bombardment of old. Maybe Teddy Roosevelt era gunboats could match it. The kids have sore arms the next day. Virg is an object of almost supernatural fascination among them. He always points out if their costumes are "store bought," and they give him the old fingeroo and plenty of apples. | ||
| themp Citizen Username: Themp Post Number: 388 Registered: 12-2001 |
Just saw your note. As stated, throwing of figurines, apples et al is in direct proportion to costume-wearing. May have been related to recent jodpur incident, which was ill-received among youths. Power to reduce same is yours. Modesty in dress is a key consideration. Kids are not my mine. "Illegitimate" went out with petticoats and work houses. | ||
| virgilian Citizen Username: Virgilian Post Number: 211 Registered: 7-2001 |
themp, get it into your Hair Club for Men mullet that I can't take the constant harrassment from the neighborhood children. Especially ours. And for the record, I'm starting to think little Breighe-Anne is not really mine. I saw her tumbling out of your Subaru Spawnwagon yesterday as you were dropping her off for visitation and I noticed she had three eyes instead of two. If I'm to continue this charade of "motherhood"... ...can we get this fixed? | ||
| virgilian Citizen Username: Virgilian Post Number: 212 Registered: 7-2001 |
Ouch! A Franklin Mint Lee Greenwood Limited Edition Big Gulp Double Drink Caddy just came sailing through my conservatory fenestration. Egads, this must stop. | ||
| bobk Supporter Username: Bobk Post Number: 4305 Registered: 5-2001 |
This is getting good!  | ||
| extuscan Citizen Username: Extuscan Post Number: 251 Registered: 6-2001 |
Ok really people, the cheapest easiest and best thing to do is to repair those old windows. It just isn't that hard. I even had the windows in the garage working, opening top and bottom. It just isn't that hard. First thing you need to do is remove the thin molding that holds the windows in the frame. Pry them off with a putty knife. You might break them in two, but its ok because once you repaint you can't tell. Pull out the bottom window. There is a small pocket in the window frame where you can unscrew a panel and retrieve the window weight. The upper window is probably more trouble. At our two Maplewood houses these were endlessly painted shut and in many cases nailed shut when the sash cords broke. Remove the nails, and cut the painted shut window free. This window can then also be removed. The windows probably have gunky paint and stuff all over them. Take a belt sander and take the ugly painted edges off the window frames. On the inside of the window sash the paint has gotten very thick where the top window should drop. Sand or strip this off. Then, with that dividing strip removed, belt sand that whole inside track area. This will allow the windows to open and close very easily. On your bottom window frame, sand the faces smooth. Your windows have all sorts of nasty paint, all uneven, making the windows hard to open. Paint gets sticky in the summer, it sucks. Sand it off and put a fresh coat on. Additionally, now is the time to re-grout the windows if yours is all broken. Very cheap, just put in some new points as needed and all new gunk. Well it all goes back pretty easily! We replaced the sash rope with chain. The little pulleys at the top are constantly covered in paint and spin poorly. They can be stripped, chipped, or replaced. The little pocket in the side of the window allows you to replace these sash cords. Finally, put the window back together! The only real modification to make is to sometimes reattach the thin outer molding in an additional 1/16th of an inch or so. If your windows rattle in the wind, or air blows in... they just aren't tight enough. This is how you tighten them! The wood does shrink with age and this slight modification should help out alot. Also, there is a small flange on the back of the lower window on top, and at the bottom of the top window on the inside... make sure these are bent in the right shape so that they can seal. They are pretty effective. So there you have it. Very easy. Looks good. Cheap. Do one a week, or do it when you paint. ---John | ||
| virgilian Citizen Username: Virgilian Post Number: 214 Registered: 7-2001 |
themp, I'm leaving you for John. | ||
| themp Citizen Username: Themp Post Number: 389 Registered: 12-2001 |
I might have confused Virgillian and her brother. Not a paper's thickness separates them as far as appearance and deportment. She lives a block over and he tells me stories about her obsessive interest in dressing up little children in anti-bellum costumes and having "Bull Run" picnics, where they must recite long scripted pieces while eating, as if they are watching that civil war battle from a nearby hill as so many picnickers did many years ago. "Oh, mummy, how the canons roar!" - stuff like that. Apparently the kids hate it. They have to eat bread and jam and she pays their parents in gold coins, of which she has many jars. I heard that many years ago, in her girlhood near the dawn of our last century, she posed as a stable boy and worked for several summers on Cristina Todd Whitman's fabled estate, all in the service of her ambition to become classy as hell. She was a currier and stable hand, until one night when Malcolm Forbes made inappropriate advances after drinking mead and beating the serfs all night. Luckily Steve Forbes, his rigid grin set in a rigid grimace, rescued her, honor still intact, by smiting his famously rich, leather-clad father a mighty clout to the jaw. In the ensuing scandal, the Forbes family settled a large amount of cash on her and gave her some forgetting pills. And she has forgotten, almost. Now a horsy woman of means herself, quick with a stroke or a blow with her own servants, she lives on among us, a living relic of that earlier "more gracious" time. Some say her brother is actually Ms Virgillian herself, since none have ever seen them together and no birth certificate exists for him and sometimes they will both have a spot of egg yolk on their chins all day on the same day. Sometimes when the moon is high over her tiffany brand oak trees, a rigid Forbesian grimace steals over her face as she meditates on ways of making herself more annoying, and dreams of her undying love of the New Jersey horse set. | ||
| notehead Citizen Username: Notehead Post Number: 864 Registered: 5-2001  |
What is that breeze? Ahhh, it's thread drift grown into a full thread wind. | ||
| themp Citizen Username: Themp Post Number: 391 Registered: 12-2001 |
Totally guilty as hell of thread drift. I'm done with that crap now. I just got one over one Marvins installed on the second floor, and it has made the second floor so much warmer than the first that it is driving me crazy. We have to set the thermo to 60 to keep it below 80 upstairs. Just goes to show how good replacement windows are. I'm also fixing some of the old windows, but honestly, the directions above per Extuscan, while excellent, are time consuming, and you have to think about lead any time you strip stuff of old paint. I wish I had 20 extra hours per week to work on the house. | ||
| virgilian Citizen Username: Virgilian Post Number: 215 Registered: 7-2001 |
Ah Malcolm, Malcolm, lifted up by heady montgolfier into the angels' realm, smiling down at my oasis amongst my OWN desert, my OWN lack of cultured neighbors. I've invented MY OWN North African tableau... ...but wait! it's the dulcet echoes of Doris and Jackie, chiming in like zephyrs-- My sole appreciative audience, those shadows of Yesteryear's Garden State. A gentler time, indeed civilized. As I nibble a marmite-scented, difficult-to-obtain crust, with beanbags, lanterns, several decorative, charming Arab Youths thrown in, setting the perfect tone for a timeless desert fantasy shared by only us of breeding, the sylphs' whispers grow ever louder: You must save the Garden! | ||
| virgilian Citizen Username: Virgilian Post Number: 216 Registered: 7-2001 |
Oops Sorry it took me so long to post that one. | ||
| notehead Citizen Username: Notehead Post Number: 865 Registered: 5-2001 |
Themp - I relate. I replaced the original windows in the bedroom, and now that room is so warm when heat gets going that I have to kick the covers off. I'd feel the tiniest pang about the fact that they are, in fact, vinyl-clad wood... but they have a clean, modern look and I am in the slow but steady process of giving my entire circa 1935 "extended Cape" a clean, modern look. (Not to be confused with a cheap, uncultivated look.) So nyah nyah, all you would-be denizens of "Ye Olde Village of Yester-Yeare". Y'all oughta pick up an issue of dwell magazine, and learn a thing or two about design. | ||
| virgilian Citizen Username: Virgilian Post Number: 217 Registered: 7-2001 |
note: why fight the style of a house? why not modernize a more modern house? best modern works tend to use real materials too, but then I should learn more. your 'dwell' thing is great if you're starting with nothing, or starting with a more abstract house. | ||
| Lizziecat Citizen Username: Lizziecat Post Number: 131 Registered: 5-2003 |
Thank goodness, Virgilian, you are not one of my immediate neighbors. By "anal" I mean that you are fixated on a particular subject, and cannot seem to get beyond it. This is the third lengthly thread that you have started regarding windows. I maintain that it is none of your business what other people do with their houses, as long as they are within the guidelines of town ordinances. "Anatomical" is the correct spelling. "Anal" has nothing to do with your anatomy, but with your mindset. You are a childish busybody and I do not intend to respond to any more of your posts. | ||
| virgilian Citizen Username: Virgilian Post Number: 218 Registered: 7-2001 |
Geez. It's not my fault you have vinyl windows. Meanie-meanie mean-mean. |
