It’s been a busy week here at IdiotCentral; there’s some news I’m not ready to share yet which has been taking up most of my free time preparing for. In the meantime, I’ve been taking care of some small tasks around the house that have been nagging me for years.

• There’s been a spot in the tile up in the master bathroom that has been missing its grout for years. Way back when I was working on the sinks, one of the cats knocked over a jar of purple PVC primer, which stained the brand-new epoxy grout (I don’t even want to know what’s in that stuff). A new container of the grout we originally used is only sold in 5-gallon tubs for $70, which was a lot of money to spend on a section the width of a china dish. I finally bit the bullet and bought a $10 container of standard grout made by the same manufacturer in the same color, and filled the crack with that. It’s impossible to see a difference, and the crack is filled.
• It’s FOOTBAW season again, which requires the use of a digital aerial to pick up local TV signal—I refuse to pay for cable and/or an NFL package, or as it’s now known, the content shown in between betting app commercials. As I’ve mentioned before, our house is a faraday cage, being clad in heavy Eisenhower-era aluminum siding, so I had to first map out where the local tower is (northeast, above Baltimore City) and then figure out how to get a digital antenna to the top of the house facing that direction, and run coax all the way down to a powered signal splitter in the basement. I stuck the aerial in the eastward attic window and hung coax over the edge of the roof and down to the basement window, where it’s currently feeding me the Ravens game in the den. WHITE TRASH FOR THE WIN. When it’s dry outside, I’ll lengthen the cable and mount it to the side of the house safely, then drill a hole through the window frame and seal it to be able to close the window properly.
• There’s been a tiny section of the living room bookcase that was left with a gap as I put the moulding back in place, and it’s bugged me ever since then. I milled and sanded a tiny piece of wood, tapped it into place, so now I need to hit it with some paint in order to forget about it.
• Next to that, we’ve got a functional audio system in place. I bought a cheap phonograph preamp for the record player to boost the signal on our head unit, which doesn’t have one, and that makes all the difference. Meanwhile, in a box of castoff electronics at work, I found a 12V power supply with the correct input for Dad’s old circa 1993 portable Kenwood CD player, and connected that to the system.

I’ve made plenty of progress on the 2026 house punchlist, but there’s clearly more that can be done before the snow flies—the one that stands out the most on that list is working on scraping and painting the outside windowframes.

And I posted another truck update on the YouTube channel. I’m still just outside YT’s requirements to be able to monetize the channel—I’ve surpassed the subscriber number, I’m posting the right number of videos, but I can’t seem to cross the watch hour threshold—I’m consistently hovering at 2,900 and I need to get to 3,000. I’d really love to be able to link my storefront to the channel to boost sales, so I’m going to focus on a big project in the next couple of weeks to see if I can boost views.