"My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too." - Peter De Vries

Rain in the desert usually means a downpour that lasts for two hours tops, after which the sun shines and temps return to normal (i.e. hot). Today it rained like Seattle - a steady, even, light rain almost all day. It almost made me homesick.

I can't remember the last time I had that many unsettling dreams in one night. I must have gone to bed with some serious stress. So I got up this morning and went right to work. First some Monday morning church tasks like editing and posting the sermon sound file, creating the service order for next Sunday and answering some emails. Then to work on the master bedroom.

The popcorn is off the ceiling (hate that job), the carpet and pad are up and the tack strip removed. It will only take me an hour or so to yank all the trim off tomorrow morning. That will take care of the demolition part and I can get to work on rebuilding. First step is fixing the ceiling.

These houses were built (ours in 1967) with evaporative cooling systems, AKA swamp coolers. A big metal box on the roof with a filter-like element over which water flowed. A blower moved air across that element and then through a system of ducts and into each room via a vent in the ceiling. That's pretty effective most of the year when the humidity is in the single digits and the temps in triple digits. But if the humidity rises at all an evap system is worse than worthless. That's when you used the AC unit mounted next to it.

When whole-house AC units got more effective and cheaper most people had their swamp coolers removed. They tended to leak water into the attic and weren't at all effective during the hottest - and most humid - months of the year: monsoon season. When they yanked those systems they just screwed an ugly plastic cover, 14" square, over the ceiling vent in each room. I need to replace that with a piece of drywall I'll get at Home Depot tomorrow. Tape, mud, and blend it into the rest of the ceiling so that when I paint nobody will know there was ever a big hole in the ceiling in the first place.

Our neighbor still has his evap unit on the roof. When they bought the house six months ago he climbed up there and reconnected the water lines. Everything old is new again, and with the high price of electricity these days he's saving a ton of money.

That whole Libya thing is looking a little trickier over the last 24 hours. Funny how those undeclared wars tend to go like that. Welcome to the mess, Dems. If Iraq was Pres. Bush's war, Pres. Obama can lay claim to Afghanistan and now Libya.

What happens to all the people, thousands of them, who survived the quake and tsunami but don't have a house to go back to? In many cases the land on which their house sat is essentially gone. Where do they go? Many of them are seniors.
Sad.