BYOC = Bring Your Own Chair

Since we have an empty house and nothing to do, Friday night we had a bunch of people over for a BYOC. We spent the evening sitting on the floor (no one thought the name of the party was important, I guess), drinking some brews and eating some of the local fine dining (pizza delivery!). It was nice to catch up with people and get to know some of our newer friends better.
Matt brought his harmonium bicycle, which was a crowd-pleaser. Basically, he has an accordion attached to the handlebars of his bike and when he rides the tube that is attracted to the front tire makes enough wind to blow through the accordion and he presses the keys on the keyboard to play songs. Pretty freakin' awesome. (Sorry, we forgot to take a picture ...)

While we were sitting on our front step, Bea, a woman who had lived on this street for 40 years and in this house for 20 years stopped by to say hi and see the house. She said that the house was always full of people -- at one time 12 people were living there! -- and good times. A few of her friends have stopped and attested to the fact that our house was the party house on the block. (Parties in the sense of coffee and conversation with a lot of people while kids ran rampant throughout the house.) It's nice to know that the house is well-loved and we hope to keep up the tradition of hosting tons of people while we live there.

We gave her the photos we found -- they were addressed to Bea's cousin, Carmella. Bea told us the sad news that the youngest boy in the photo just passed away. He was only 31 years old (he was 2 years old in the photo). It felt good to know that we saved those photos and were able to give them back to the owners.

Saturday there was a big arts event at my work for most of the day. I have been talking to so many people recently -- my job is basically to interview people and especially focus on the neighborhood where our apartment is, so I spend most of my day chatting with people at their work or locals on the street -- that my jaw has been seizing up from smiling too much. Damn happiness and being productive!

After the arts event, I joined Joshua at the house and began taking down the rest of the ceiling. We took down the wooden slats, the plaster, the lattice work under the plaster. There was about 6-8 inches of debris on the floors of the living room and dining room when we were done. We have successfully filled up the entire backyard with debris from the house -- the ceiling, the wood paneling, etc. -- so we cannot wait to put the curl test to use. As you can see in the photo, Joshua is has been wearing his Utilikilt while we work on the house.

Now we are just waiting to get an electrician, heating specialist, drywaller, and flooring guy in to work on the house in the next three weeks. It has been difficult to line up all of these guys ... Joshua worries that if they don't come soon, we may not have any house left!

Sunday night we went over to Patrick's mom's house for the hero's welcome home (for vacation) BBQ. It was great to see Patrick and my college buddies. I'm looking forward to playing kickball next weekend with them. Because that is what adults do: tear down houses and play children's games!