Wanton Hussy complained about her Cant this week. I think she's being a bit too hard on herself, but then most good people are pretty demanding of themselves.
Sometimes when I sit down to write, I have all sorts of ideas. Sometimes I don't have any ideas, but I'm caught up in a thrill of inspiration to write something. Most of the time, I don't seem to have either ideas or inspiration, so I start casting about for easy targets.
I could write about circuses. The world is full of circuses. The circus in Iraq would almost be amusing if it wasn't growing clearer by the day how patently those in power lied in order to paste together a flimsy excuse to go to war and families weren't losing loved ones on a daily basis. The circus in California would almost be amusing if it didn't mean we were going to get either the same gutless, slimeball crook or an Austrian clown at the end of it. Also, the fact that Californians are going to be paying for this circus for years as a result of higher debt cost gets me a little burned.
But I'm tired of even thinking about circuses. I just wish an elephant would go rogue and gore and stamp all the clowns into red stains in the sawdust.
So in the spirit of one-upmanship (or more precisely, one-downwomanship), I submit this week's installment on home improvement. I'm going to write about tiling our bathroom, a subject that promises to be boring enough to cause intrepid readers to fall asleep or hallucinate.
I've never set a single tile in my entire life. I've never even stood by while someone else did it. I did spend some time watching work crews in Brussels lay sidewalk pavers, but that doesn't count for several reasons. First, they don't use mortar or thinset under the pavers, just sand. Second, all the sidewalks in Brussels suck. There's no "Old World charm" to the pavers they use. They're just bland slabs of brick/concrete. They're so drab that you'd think they'd be utilitarian, but they're not. The pavers are always sinking, cracking, and being pulled out by destructive street urchins. The sidewalks of Brussels are like an endless, broken, obstacle course filled with boot-catching ridges and ankle-twisting holes. I feel sorry for anyone who tries to navigate the streets with a wheelchair, walker, or even a cane. Brussels apparently recognizes the sad state of their sidewalks and so keeps numerous crews of masons constantly working. The sidewalks are made of inferior materials that are always degrading so they need crews of masons to repair the sidewalks with inferior materials that are always degrading so they need crews of masons... ad infinitum. It's like a conspiratorial Möbius strip on the part of the masons, which wouldn't be a surprise to most folks.
Brussels would be vastly improved if they would replace their dangerously silly sidewalks with a few thousand cubic meters of concrete. Better yet, considering what an armpit Brussels is, how about pouring 100 million cubic meters over the whole damned town?
But I digress.
I set my first field of tiles last weekend. I spent a bunch of time making sure the layout was correct. I checked that all my reference lines were straight, level, and plumb. I cut the corners off of four tiles to make a space for the soap dish. I taped a sheet over the tub to protect it. I mixed up some thinset and let it slake. Meanwhile, I laid out all the tools and counted out the full tiles I was going to use.
About this point I was at pucker factor 10.5. I had that heart-racing, hyperventilating, cold-in-the-chest sensation that I've only felt before my first game of high school football, just before the Xtreme Skyflyer bungee-style ride at Paramount's Great America, and just as I was preparing myself to leap across a cataract to a two-inch ledge on a Boy Scout trip.
So I was a bit stressed.
After 10 minutes of slaking, I stirred the thinset and got to work slapping the goo on the wall, raking it with the notched trowel, and setting the tiles. I quickly figured a way to keep more thinset on the wall and less on the bed sheet using the straight edge of the trowel.
Everything was going well until the fourth vertical course of tiles. Somehow, the top row of tiles was being offset to the right by a tiny bit. The gotcha with tiles and other such repetitive operations is that a tiny error at the beginning accumulates into a huge error at the end. I needed to do something and I needed to do it before the thinset hardened.
I could take all the tiles down, scrape off the thinset from the walls and all the tiles, dump out the thinset in the bucket, clean everything off, and then investigate why there was a tiny error in the top row. This would be the "right" thing to do.
The prospect of doing the right thing depressed me more than words can say.
Instead, I used my tile finishing stone to grind down the spacing lugs on the next few tiles to bring them into alignment.
So the first field of tiles looks pretty darned good now. It still pisses me off beyond measure that I could be so methodical and careful and still have something like this go wrong, but the most critical part of laying the tiles on the back wall is done. Now to finish the rest of the tiles on that wall, including all the tiles around the window. That should be fun. After that, I get to do the tiles on the other two walls. When I'm finished, I just might have some idea of what the hell I'm doing. Then, when the time comes, I can tile the shower in the master bathroom with confidence.
Yes, it never, ever ends.
Pakeha