EMS Artifact

Texas seems to be testing me to see if I’m worthy to live in the state.

First, before we bought our house I got what I refer to as a “Welcome to Texas Sinus Infection.” Just note that I never get sinus infections and even when I have a cold it passes pretty quickly. Mrs. EMS Artifact says that all my years in EMS have given me a strong immune system. Maybe, but it’s also probably the fact that I work out frequently, eat properly (for the most part) and watch my weight.

Anyway this whatever it was made me miserable enough to go to urgent care not once, but twice. The first time got me a prescription for cough medicine and some suggestions on how to get through the next few days. After the next few days and I was worse, I went back to urgent care and got antibiotics and a steroid. In the interim I had a nose bleed that almost caused me to go to an Emergency Department, but fortunately stopped before that.

In due course I got better and we proceeded to buy our house and move in.

Move in day came and I had to use the bathroom. Flushing the toilet resulted in nothing happening. Well nothing good. I went on line and found a local plumber. He came out and cleared the line, but told me it was likely that the lovely Live Oak in the front yard had invaded the pipe via the roots boring through the PVC. He dropped a camera down and sure enough there were pieces of root sticking through the PVC. The prospect of having to call the plumber at random intervals to clear that obstruction was not viable, so we paid to have that section of soil pipe dug out and replaced.

We also had a refill valve replaced because of what my wife refers to as a “Toilet Ghost.” The tank would partially refill at random. The usual cause of this is a bad seal on the flush valve, but in our case the fill valve also needed replacement.

Side note: We never met the sellers of our house as that’s not done at closings any more. We only met the buyers of our house because they wanted to come over and do some measuring before the closing. Elsewise, we wouldn’t have met them.

My post move in impression is that the sellers were not all that much interested in routine maintenance. Which is not to say that they knew about the root problem and didn’t tell us. Those things aren’t predictable. Still, I’ve been doing a lot of little repairs that are not all that much different than what I did to our old house before we put it on the market and even after we had a deal to sell. Just the way I was raised, I guess.

One of the things that they didn’t take care of was the water softener system. As in it never worked in the five years they owned the house. Apparently the original owner didn’t do anything about it either. Our section of Texas has the hardest water in America. Yay us. Which means that water softeners are pretty much a requirement unless you like to buy new appliances every five years or so. We don’t, so we are having the plumbers come back sometime in the next few weeks to install a new system with a ten year guarantee. Hopefully that will save our four year old water heater and less than four year old dishwasher and washing machine.

So, that brings us up to Sunday. Which happened to be my birthday. I decided to move one of the very nice recliners we moved with us to my new “TV room.” Forgetting that I was no longer 40 years old (or close) I decided to move it without partially disassembling it.

Mistake.

I felt a pop in my left bicep followed by a burning pain. At which point I decided to disassemble th chair into it’s three components. I was able to move everything and get the chair back together.

My bicep was another question. Being quasi medical, I self diagnosed and decided that Tylenol was in order for the pain. Truthfully, there was no sense in going to urgent care or a free standing Emergency Department because that’s pretty much what they would do. Plus, before a surgeon could look at it the swelling had to subside.

In the mean time, I selected a new Primary Care Provider and signed up with his office. My only source of information was on line reviews of him. They were uniformly excellent and because he deals with a lot of older people he has a lot of experience with things that afflict older people.

While talking to his scheduler I mentioned my arm and she suggested a visit to an urgent care affiliated with the hospital with which he is affiliated. That way I could get my problem into the system and get a referral to an orthopedic surgeon.

So, today I went to the urgent care facility and was examined by a very nice and competent Nurse Practitioner. The good news is that it’s “only” a bicep muscle tear and not a tendon separation. Which means that the surgery is much less extensive as are the recovery and whatever rehab I might need. She ordered an ultrasound of my bicep and sent in the request for a referral to an orthopedic surgeon affiliated with the same hospital.

The doctor who was overseeing the urgent care center advised that I’d be better off foregoing my three times a week rowing machine sessions as that could cause scar tissue to form and make the surgery that much harder. Great. I’ll have to develop some other exercises for my forearms and shoulders.

Also on the good side I was successful in navigating the Texas process for registering motor vehicles and was able to obtain license plates for both of our vehicles. That’s important because Texas will not issue drivers license if you don’t have a vehicle registered or can prove that you don’t have a vehicle. After that Mrs. EMS Artifact and I found a state drivers license office that isn’t booked into next year and got our licenses.

Why the rush? Because you need a Texas drivers license to file for property tax exemptions. Who doesn’t love property tax exemptions?

While talking about the differences in how things are done in Texas versus our old state I joked that Texas is like a whole different state. Mrs. EMS Artifact said, only half joking, that it’s more like a different country.

Which ever it is, I sure hope that it likes me enough to let me stay.

The moving truck was here first thing on Tuesday. Which right now seems about a year ago. Driver and two helpers were very efficient, pleasant, and helpful.

I let them do their thing while I dealt with a serious issue. Our main sewer line clogged and nothing would flush away. I went on line and found a local plumbing company. The lady on the phone was very pleasant and helpful. She found a crew finishing up a job nearby and promised to send them along. About half an hour later a plumber and his helper showed up.

I explained the problem and they got right to work. This area had clean out access outside the house, which is nice. It took the crew about 20 minutes to get things, uh, flowing again. They then offered the option of dropping a camera into the line to see if they could find the cause. Truth is, the plumber had a really good idea of what was going on because as we say, it wasn’t his first big job. Sure enough one of the pretty oak trees in the front yard had bored it’s way through the sewer line in search of water.

Great.

The plumber wrote up the estimate and sent it back to the office for approval and forwarding to me. Not a pleasant surprise, but I came to find out that this is not uncommon even in this neighborhood. I think that I’ll have the tree removed unless the HOA objects, which they shouldn’t since I’ll still meet the one tree requirement. I just have to find a landscaping company to do the work.

Two things that all home owners find out pretty quickly. With a house there is ALWAYS something that needs to be done. Home owners, at least the all the ones I know have an assortment of tools, develop some pretty good handy man skills, have a lot of spare screws, bolts, nuts, and other assorted hardware around the house. They also have a “Rolodex.” Even if these days it’s kept in a smart phone. For some reason, a reliable plumber who won’t over charge and will show up is always at the top of the list. An electrician is sort of a distant second as at least in my case I can change outlets, switches, lights, and even in the past ran Romex and installed new outlets where there was none before.

I have to add a handy man to the list even though for the past forty three years I was mostly my own handy man. My oldest friend was my helper and when he needed to do a job I was his. He is of course 2,000+ miles away, so not an option. He’s going to be impossible to replace. Growing up we lived five minutes from each other. We went to different colleges, but when we graduated we returned for a short while to our respective childhood homes.

In due time, we both got married and for a few years we saw each other less. Then my wife and bought a house. A couple of years later my friend and his wife bought a house in the same time. Once again we were about five minutes from each other.

Our daughters coined the term “Heterosexual Life Partners” and as funny as that sounds, it’s true.

All of which is to explain why I need a handy man to do things that my friend and I used to tackle together.

I’ll have to find a lawn company, hopefully one that can also get rid of that pesky tree. I have no intention of dropping a tree on my house by accident.

On the good side, I don’t need a guy to clear my driveway of snow. I sold my snow blower to a friend and I was very happy to wave goodbye to it. I gave away assorted shovels, driveway markers, ice scrapers, and other snow tools to a friends son in law. Again, we were both happy.

Back to moving in. Everything is unloaded, but there is still a lot to unpack. I think my wife is going to end up donating a lot of stuff to Goodwill. Despite my suggestion, she over packed and we still have about 40 boxes of the original 140 that were packed. My office is still a mess as I’m awaiting delivery of a new to me office desk. I was hesitant to buy an expensive desk, but my wife insisted it was a good deal. So, I’ll have a nice office when it’s done. And a separate TV room to relax in, but I won’t bore you with that story.

This weeks tasks include registering our vehicles in Texas and getting our drivers licenses. The latter is important because there are significant discount to property taxes we’re eligible for, however you need to prove residency and the only way to do that is with a drivers license or state ID. Oh, we’ll need those licenses in order to vote too. And we intend to vote.

Texas requires vehicles to be registered before being eligible to get a drivers license or declare that you don’t own any vehicles. There’s a process, of course.

We’re getting used to doing things differently. Doesn’t matter if we think those ways are better or worse, because we don’t expect Texas to change how they do things. I really hate the people who start out their “welcome” with some advice not to try to bring out old state ways. Yeah, I get that part and don’t know Mrs. Kravitz to tell me.

Other than that we’re getting used to no snow, warm to hot as Hades weather throughout the years. H-E-B, and everything else that goes along with living in Texas.

I miss my friends, but modern technology allows me to stay in touch.

In another week I’ll start doing what passes for work. Another thing I’ll have to figure out is how to do it all remotely. Not exactly rocket science, but just different.

Just note that the featured picture is not our house, it’s just a house picture I picked at random.

My last post was way to long ago, but we’ve been busy. We finally were able to depart our former state on November 8. The trip to Texas took about five days and included a side trip to visit my son, lovely daughter in law, and grand kids in South Carolina. There were some items I left with him for safe keeping until we are actually in our new home.

Speaking of which, we finally got to visit the house in person on Monday. It was less than ideal committing to this purchase via the Internet, but we just didn’t have the time to get down to the Texas before our seven day option expired.

Fortunately our realtor is very good, used a very thorough home inspector, and our daughter’s boyfriend is familiar with construction as he’s an engineer.

We weren’t disappointed. Mrs. EMS Artifact loved the kitchen, master bedroom, master bathroom, and her gigantic walk in closet even more in person than she did on line. While all of those are very nice, I was more interested in the garage where my workshop will be. And the 10′ x 12′ wooden shed out back. Which I’ll put to use for various things besides storage.

One of the guest bedrooms will become my office and I’m actually eager to get back to work, although that won’t be until our belongings arrive and are in the house. Which hopefully will be before the end of the month.

We aren’t sitting around the hotel just waiting. There is a lot to do and much of it different than how they were done in our former state. Some of this I knew, other parts are a learning experience.

It was easy setting up the gas and electrical services. Electrical service is unregulated in Texas and that means that multiple companies broker electricity at various prices. There is only one company that actually generates power, no one can buy directly from them, hence the brokers.

There were at least a dozen providers offering electricity to our area. I picked the one that I thought offered the best deal. Of course customers can change brokers every year or two as contracts expire.

We’re going to be in a “propane community” which means that there are huge propane tanks buried in an obscure part of the development and we all buy from the company that owns the tanks and propane. Not a lot different than how Natural Gas is bought in our former state.

Internet and Cable were similar although there were several options. I decided against cord cutting and stuck with a traditional cable company. Same set up as our old one, but with a different large indifferent provider.

Water was the last utility on the list. Well, technically water/sewer/trash. In our new city there are three separate water providers, however which one you use depends on where you live. Again, different than what we are used to. When I say “different” I’m pointing out a fact, not offering an opinion.

Of all of the services we’re signing up for, the city utility department was the most persnickety. We had to prove that we’re the actual buyers, submit ID, fill out a form, and agree to a “soft” credit check. I was told years ago that the two most important things in Texas are land and water. It sure seems that way because the city expects people to pay for their water on time and no excuses. I will say that the lady in the office couldn’t have been more helpful. She signed us up and recommended that we use direct deposit from our checking account to avoid the 4% surcharge for using a credit card.

Today I signed up for two “TX Tags.” These are for use on the several toll roads in the area. It’s not mandatory to use those roads, but there are times when it’s faster. Plus I inadvertently got on to one today and can only imagine how many surcharges I’ll get on that two mile journey.

Once we own the new house we also have to file for the county Homestead and Senior Citizen tax exemptions. Something that our old state didn’t have and which we kind of like. Well, we really like to be honest.

The house is not perfect, but everything that it needs is normal wear and tear for it’s age. It’s bigger than our old house by about 400 square feet and it’s all on one level. Forty Three years of four sets of stairs was more than enough.

Once my tools get here, I’ll start on the minor stuff and start looking for someone to do the work I can’t do. That includes a new roof, which is number one on the list. It doesn’t leak, but it’s nearing end of life. Then we need to get the HVAC serviced, but that will actually be first as it’s easier and less expensive. Then we’re going to get a whole house generator. This area is not immune to power outages and I am definitely not going to sit in 100 degree weather without electricity.

We have decent punch list from the home inspection, much of what I can do myself.

So, that’s what has kept me from blogging for several weeks. It’s actually a bit exhausting learning all of these new things, and I expect that while not as tiring as packing, we’ll be spending time unpacking things and figuring out where to put them. Sort of like Christmas every day was we open boxes and remember what we actually put in them.

More later.

Our house sale is finally complete. It was a rocky road, but it worked out fine in the end. Not only that, but after our first buyer backed out suddenly, we re listed the house and got a better buyer.

Better as in no bullshit, and she waived the home inspection. That was in large part because the one the first buyer paid for showed nothing that wasn’t bullshit. That buyer was nuts and would have been a PITA to deal with.

Plus the second buyer needed to be out of her house by the end of this week so she paid us a nice premium for our efforts to get out and close early. Packing and getting the moving company in to remove what’s going south with us was perhaps the most stressful thing I’ve ever done.

There was a lot of packing, sorting, selling, giving to friends, and throwing out to be done. It’s amazing what you can accumulate in Forty Three years.

So that’s good news.

Better news is that we made and had an offer accepted yesterday evening. I’ll be somewhat vague about the location, but it’s in Williamson County, TX. Close enough to Austin to be able to go there when we want or need to. Far enough and outside of Travis County so that the Left Wing nuttery is not an issue.

It’s going to be different dealing with an HOA, but the one we’ll be in is older and less intrusive from what I’ve seen.

The house is bigger than what we have now, and more importantly is a single level. No more stairs for us. Forty Three years of climbing three levels of stairs to get around the house was enough.

We’re still in our soon to be former home state for a week or maybe two and then we’ll be driving down to our new town. We can’t close until after Thanksgiving, but we’ll be in Texas for the holiday.

We have something to be thankful for, that’s for sure.

I’ll try to get back to somewhat normal blogging, including the attempted invasion of Israel by Paleostinian terrorist thugs. Hamas is the army of Gaza, but my guess is everyone who lives their supports them to some extent.

More later.

Mrs. EMS Artifact and I have decided that it’s time to pull up stakes and leave the state in which we’ve lived our entire lives so far. This has been a long time in the making and until a few months I wasn’t sure it would actually happen.

The story started almost eleven years ago when I retired from my EMS career. I’ve long wanted to leave the state and resettle somewhere more in concert with the lifestyle I wanted to live. Mrs. EMS Artifact’s statement was that she’d go wherever I wanted, as long as it was with me. At the time I had three or four states in mind. All were somewhere in the south, where the politics were closer to ours, guns were not treated as a threat, there was no winter. Well, at least no winter like that in the cold northeast.

When we started this process our son and his family lived in New Jersey, our daughter lived local to us. That changed over the next couple of years when our son moved to Alabama and our daughter moved to Texas. Which, incidentally she’d wanted to do since she was about ten. Everyone was aware of that except her father. Always the last to know.

At the time, my Mother in Law as a healthy 95, but she was still 95 and my wife was her support system. So, we agreed that we’d do nothing until she no longer needed us. No big deal, I figured. Ha! She lived until the ripe old age of 102, not dying until fall of 2021.

I passed the time with part time work, exercise, dieting, and generally trying to stay healthy. That part worked and worked pretty well. I also started getting the house ready to be sold even though it was not going on the market. One of the things one learns when one owns a house is that there is always something that needs to be done. Unless the home owner has a lot of money, he learns to do a lot of things on his own. Not necessarily well, but well enough. Working and raising kids often means that repairs are sufficient to keep the house running, but are not done well. “Mickey Mouseing” is the term we used to use.

Over the years I leaned some carpentry, some plumbing, some electrical, how to maintain the yard, even how to fix the whole house AC if the repair was simple enough. With a life long friend, I replaced windows and doors. I painted when necessary even though I hated and still hate to paint. I also learned how to landscape, and again that’s something for which I didn’t care.

One of the luxuries of being retired is that I now had time to go back and fix the repairs the right way. I also had money, now that the kids were out and on their own to pay people for some things.

Herewith is the list of projects I either did or had done to the house. First is the expensive stuff I paid other people to do.

Replace our boiler and oil tank. Here in the cold northeast, we use oil to heat water which is circulated around the house in pipes and radiators. Well, some people use natural gas to heat air that is circulated around the house to heat it. Replacing that required moving heavy and dirty stuff, knowing plumbing, electrical systems, and then moving new heavy stuff in and hooking it up.

Painting the house inside and out. Then, the next year having it repainted due to a particularly harsh winter in which it snowed every day in February. Every. Damned. Day. Which meant running the snow blower every day. During that we had ice build up and when the ice melted it destroyed the exterior paint and some water leaked into the freshly painted rooms. Fortunately, the insurance company paid for that. Insurance didn’t pay for the new windows, though.

Trees cut down and the wood removed. Not little trees.

Roof replacement. It was time and after the winter two years before every snow storm was anxiety inducing. Definitely no a do it myself job.

Whole house generator. Another complex project that involved gas piping, extensive electrical work, inspections by the town. We did that after having multi day power outages that only happened in cold weather.

More trees cut down and the wood removed. Not little trees. Not only is there danger of a parts of trees falling on me, but even worse parts of trees could fall on the generator. Can’t have that.

Replaced the central air conditioning. Again not a do it myself job.

Insulation and air sealing the day after the AC was replaced.

Tree branches cut back.

Had second bathroom built. Another job that was more complicated than it appeared at first. Another not DIY project. Not cheap, but worth it.

New railings for the front steps.

That’s the stuff I paid other people to do. Here is the stuff I did either by myself or with my friend.

Landscaping. Not my favorite activity at first, but I kind of grew (no pun intended) to enjoy the physical labor.

First, I cut back Forsythia that had taken up about 1/5 of our back yard. Forsythia is pretty, but it’s invasive if not trimmed back diligently. During that time I was working, I just didn’t have the time to do that and the forsythia continued to grow. Kind of snuck up on me. This involved cutting the bushes, then digging up the roots, then burning the bushes and the roots. Then burning the ashes, just in case. Then dumping the ashes way back in the woods. By the way, roots seem to love to grow around rocks. So, often I’d have to dig out pretty good sized rocks to get the roots out. As with northeast farmers a couple of hundred years ago, the dug out rocks were dragged to the edge of the tree line.

Then top soil, grass seed, fertilizer, water. For reasons I don’t understand, it takes about three years for grass to take root in my yard. It’s a journey not a destination. This became a spring ritual as I cut back more brush and expanded the size of the grassy area. The last part of this was just this last spring when I had a stump grinder come in and remove the stumps from the cut down trees that were now not at the edge of the grassy area. That required more top soil, more grass seed, and more water. I don’t expect to be here in two years when that area is completely filled in. I’ve lost track of the amount of top soil I’ve spread over the years to improve the condition of the soil, but it was a lot of it. Several yards, I’m sure.

I’ve fixed, replaced, or refinished just about every interior door we have. That is not hard per se, but it is fiddly as the saying goes. In some cases I re aligned doors so that they closed properly. Not hard, but time consuming. Now that I had the time I could do the job correctly. I actually smiled several times when I finally got a door to close tightly and without sticking.

Painting and patching here and there. Another benefit of having time is that I could do the preparation properly. Just about every job will be easy if the prep is done right. That includes painting, carpentry, electrical, and well everything

Painting including removing the basement windows, sanding and derusting the frames and once again painting them. This was actually a good project to do during the panicdemic when there wasn’t much else to do.

I painted the inside of the garage. The garage, like a lot of them, had never been painted. The walls and ceiling showed their age, so I painted them with gray primer. Raw plaster sucks up primer and it took several days and seven gallons to get the job done. This was actually one of the first jobs I did after I retired.

Fast forward to last year and I repaired or replaced all of the hardware on the garage door and painted the interior side. A stupid little thing, but I felt it needed to be done.

I replaced just about every wall switch and electrical outlet in the house. Just because they were all over 50 years old and original to the house. A little preventative maintenance.

Finally, the last few weeks I’ve been patching and touching up various small areas around the house. That includes painting the stoop on the back stairs so that it didn’t look like it… needed to be painted.

All of this was to get the house to the point where it wouldn’t need a lot of work when the time came to sell it and move.

That time has come. Today we signed on with a real estate agent who will sell our house. She’s optimistic that it will sell quickly as there is not a lot of inventory in our town and our town has come to be a hot property over the past few years.

Now, what we have to do is clean, sort, pack, toss, forty three years of accumulated “stuff.” This was our “starter home” from which we are finally ready to move.

Next week we’ll travel to Texas near where our daughter lives. We’ll be looking at properties although we are not yet able to commit to buying anything. Now that our parents and older relatives are gone, we are the older family members that will eventually need a support system. Our daughter has agreed to be the point person, although we expect that our son and daughter in law will pitch in if and when necessary.

Where are we going?

Texas. Where we expect to be quite happy.

Know anyone who needs a snow blower?