I am not a facebook person. I have an account and a few times a year go and look at it but I don’t go there often and when I do it is usually to find something specific. Tonight I signed into my account looking for the photos we posted for the insurance people. In order to get our home equity loan to finish paying our contractor we had to have insurance. They had to have photos of an actual house, not just a sort of house. Facebook worked perfectly.

We are an actual house now. Not entirely but nearly. The whole upstairs is almost completely finished. There are a few things to tweak and the HVAC people are still crawling in and out of the trap door in my spouse’s bathroom where the heat pump sends its heat from outside and the fan sends it through the duct work. We had water over last weekend. We could wash clothes but the washer was feeling sick so we only tried a couple of loads before we said, “Call the washer doctor.” Upstairs on the next floor we had water that was threatening to come downstairs.

Thankfully I found that drip pretty fast. It was coming from a not quite right cartage in a rough in valve. The water extruded from the small hole in the tile where the shower head was to go and from the larger hole in the tile where the water mixer handle was to be. The pathway for the water was simpler on the inside of the tile wall, not the outside. Our studs and insulation were getting wet. My immediate response was near panic. Fast n the heels of my 30 nanosecond response was resolve. I reminded myself that I had helped build this house and a little drip, which in reality was a pretty big, little drip, was not a big deal. I had resources. I texted our contractor. While I was waiting for him to text back I arranged a black plastic trash bag so that the drip ran from the inside of the tile at the shower head area down behind the wall to the place where the water adjustment handle was and then scooted out across the plastic down into the shower pan where I hoped we had a functioning drain.I found a piece of plastic that I rolled into a tube like a maple sugar tap and tapped the rough-in part where the shower head would go.

After a bit our contractor texted me back and after a few rounds of texted photos we had the problem fixed. He uses his cell phone camera for everything. I once saw him take a photo of the label on the inside of an exhaust fan. We could not read the tiny print from where we stood.We needed to know the SONES (a measure of the loudness of the fan) were to know for sure we had the right fans in the right bathrooms. He whipped out his camera, took a show, enlarged it on the screen and we found out that we had the .9 SONES exhaust fan in the right place.

Tonight I went on facebook so I could check to make sure the right photos got posted in the right place for the insurance company. My spouse posts photos for the family to follow. I found the ones I sent him last night for the insurance person and I found a lot more. All of them were of our house. A few of them I had never seen. I looked at the photos and did the thing that facebooks counts on, I clicked out to other things on facebook. Before I knew it I had spent 30 minutes doing nothing but clicking to find out who washed their dishes with a blue sponge and who had a cold and when this person left for work and did not spill their coffee at the toll both.

Facebook is truly weird. We live each others lives vicariously on a moment-by-moment basis. We know if someone is sneezing and we know where they are going to be Saturday and where they were on Tuesday. The most amazing part of it to me is that people put all that stuff up there voluntarily. Tonight I took information off of my facebook page just to increase the security of the information. I was moderately surprised to see that there was a map of the world with pins from my life stuck in it. Most of the pins were linked to places I had jobs or went to school. A couple of the little pins were linked to places I had been but could not find any information as to how they got there.

Which is like facebook. Information flitters about but none of it reveals its traveling route. I checked on the photos and made my escape before they took more information from me by inquiring my click stream.

The photos showed a house that is coming to closure. They showed a house in which I could imagine residing, not just working. We reside in the basement apartment, (aka the Cruise Ship), all 380 square feet of it.It is finished to our eyes and our habits. It has running water, heat, rugs and a bed. There are a few cosmetic things that need to be done in the area but overall it is done and after living months in such a tiny space it does not look new anymore. It looks like a place where people live.

We had planned to bring some furniture and things over today officially starting the moving-in process. Both of us decided we were not ready for it. This coming week is going to be like the week we moved into the Cruise Ship apartment with me here trying to make living space habitable and my spouse out of town. It won’t be like last time since we are not moving but it will be a busy week.

When the time is right the furniture will come and we will have more pictures to post on facebook. Others who have looked out for us theses past 23 months since the fire will be able to see the photos on facebook and vicariously move in us as we move upstairs into our new replacement house.