TV and the Noise

I take the kids to LA every so often not only to let them play with their cousins and to see my family, but to give Michael some down time. I would go crazy in the house alone for 4 days, but he loves it. He usually does a lot of work, relaxes some, watches tv or movies, sleeps in, and goes on some runs. This past weekend was no exception except for the exception.

The TV

When I called to say hi on Sunday and asked what he was up to, he hemmed and hawed a bit. Then he said it was a surprise only to give away the surprise moments later. He had climbed up on the roof and attached our fabulous antenae to it. We had decided not to buy any cable or dish or anything else when we moved as we found ourselves watching lots of Iron Chefs, Cupcake Wars, and anything else on the food network at Rhoda Ave, but admitted that we couldn't go without watching Survivor on it's televised night. So we got a antenae (or actually two before we realized what we needed) and propped it up in the tv room so we could watch Jeff Probst insult the castaways. It gave us CBS and FOX nicely, but that was pretty much it except for some Spanish, Japanese and Korean channels. Oh, and we got the WB or UPN or one of those and watched a bunch of old Friends and Seinfelds. You couldn't walk in front of the antennae, which occasionally fell over, without the picture breaking up and we had to move it back and forth since the best position was up against the window (blinds up), which left the big cord stretched across the room.

So...when Michael told me he had climbed up on the roof (and if you have seen our place, that is pretty damn high), I was surprised at the least. He got it all hooked up and now we get all the networks, plus about 30 other channels. Yay!

The Noise

When we moved in, our place had many things wrong with it. The toilets didn't flush properly causing daily clogs. The dishwasher didn't clean. There were safety issues everywhere. Cabinets didn't close, blinds were not hung. Etc, etc. Some of it was annoying (like the toilets) and some of it didn't bother us (they repainted a lot after we moved in, even though we said we didn't have a problem with the paint as is.) One thing that drove me up a wall was the strange noise in the bathroom. This "Thump, thump, thump" would happen at strange times, day or night without much of a pattern. It didn't seem related to water use. It didn't seem related to our room use. It just went "thump, thump, thump" in the ceiling of the upstairs bathroom. I asked the landlord about it and at first he said he would look into it. He stood up there for a few minutes, didn't hear and said problem solved. When I told him to try again, he did and did hear it. So he had a plumber that was here for the toilets, snake the drain in the shower. They removed a big hair chunk and considered the problem solved. When I told him the noise was still there, he came back again to investigate. He determined it was a "spook" noise...some sort of echo in the pipes that had to do with the shower. He said, "Sorry, you'll have to live with it."

Since I can hear the drop of a pin during a rain storm, I was fairly distraught with the thought of waking up in the middle of the night to pee (which happens twice every night) and then lying awake listening to the "thump, thump, thump."

So when Michael texted me that "Oh, I fixed that noise in the bathroom" I almost died. I rarely say "I love you", but that deserved a big one. When I got home he told me all about it. How he was doing the antennae and was about to head back inside when he saw this opening. It had a screen on it, but also a flap under the screen. He could see the flap move back and forth and literally heard the thumping while standing on the roof. He removed it and felt damn proud of himself. I'm still deliriously happy about it and go up to look at the flap sitting on the landing outside the bathroom window often.