The city is finally beginning work on my alley today! Jen and I woke up at about 7:15 and by 7:30 there were a bunch of guys out on the north end of the alley with a jackhammer busting up the concrete. I am so happy this is underway. I have to rent a sledgehammer from Home Depot and break up the concrete shelf around the old garage footings so that I can *ahem* throw the busted-up stuff on their carry pile. The only drawback is that trash pickup is out fron this next week- we’ll have to make sure the street stays clean.
The first coat of stain is on the shelving and the finish molding downstairs. I still don’t have money in my account from work, so I can’t go and buy supplies, but I have enough to work with for the next few days- getting the basement cleaned, installing the electrical board and the closet pole, fitting the last kickplate board, sanding and staining, and finishing off the shelving. I can’t wait to start on that tonight. I ran some steel wool over the stuff I sanded and smoothed it out- it’s going to look great when it’s done. I used polystain on all the woodwork; I hope it holds and does a good job. (it’s a stain and polyurethane all in one.)
Sometimes, we hold these truths to be self-evident department: Never buy or eat a grocery store-made sandwich. Yuck.
Hmm. What’s happening today? it’s a beautiful morning this morning. I woke up (that was hard to do today) and made some coffee, played with the cats, and straightened up the house. After a hot shower, I went downstairs to inventory what I need for the basement this week (which, given the camping trip, will be a short one) and just took stock. Hopefully the rest of the stuff I need will be inexpensive- the last big outlays I see will be the carpeting and the stairs. (maybe I can rip the stairs partially out tonight- hee hee!)
I have to call the guy about the Scout today and Mikey about the Tortoise as well; he hopefully has fixed both the idle and the pull to the right, which will be wonderful.
I have also noticed, that despite what could possibly be the best commercial for a convertible ever concieved, filmed, and presented, that nobody who owns a Volkswagen Cabrio ever puts the top down. What’s up with that?
I also found out last week that Cidera laid off another 40 or so people a few weeks ago. At this rate, they have five Senior Exalted Vice Presidents and a janitor left in their employment. What a mess.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
11:18 – Working on some scripts this morning, and I found all the old notes scripts from 2 years ago archived on CD. I also found most of the old sites I did at System Source on CD as well, except for the one I was looking for, The Jewish Times. It’s really good to see that I’ve not lost a lot of the reasoning and learning I did a few years back- I was able to identify problems I made two years ago and fix them, as well as look at some of the problems and begin to think about new ways to solve them. I’m really excited to get working on this.
Still no word from the Globe poster guy. That bums me out- I want a bunch of those.
I replaced cnn.com today on my links page with abcnews.com‘s news page; after a long relationship with cnn.com going back to about 1997, I can’t use their site anymore. it’s just too much hassle to find any news worth looking at. So I’m going to give the Mouse a try, and see if their newsfeed is any better. I might give the AP site a whirl after that, but other than those sites I don’t know who else has a decent online newsfeed.
As for other news sites, I can’t get over how much news.com and zdnews.com are the same. One REAL bad thing about this economic tailspin we’re in right now is that all the content portals have curtailed their reporting to the bare minimum- I fear in a few years that the only thing to read will be direct pulls off the AP newsfeed. Which is about all the current newspapers ever print anymore.
Baltimore-the City That Reads. Too bad the city newspaper, once home of H.L. Mencken, is now designed and written for a 7th-grade education level. No shit. Somewhere it was just published that this city is proud owner of the highest rate of syphilis in the country. Isn’t that nice.