Here’s some clips of some of our runs yesterday. Your host wiping out and cracking ribs is at about 6:20. Gnarly dude!
In a rare case of planning ahead, I had a stacked four-day weekend full of learning, entertainment, and adventure. Friday, I did the HQL course to get my license sorted out, as mentioned earlier. On Saturday I was in the car headed down to Southern Maryland to visit with my father-in-law, take him out for some Mission Barbecue, and go through his mail. We sat and talked for 2 to 3 hours, mainly me listening about his history in rural Pennsylvania, and then I drove back home through cold dark rain.
Sunday, we hosted Karean and Zachary to go to see the Lion King at the Hippodrome in Baltimore. This required a ton of housecleaning, which mainly fell on Jen, but I threw in that morning to finish up the last minute stuff for their arrival. We were also finishing up an overhaul of the guest bedroom, following a remodel we did last year where the new color turned out to be a bit too vibrant and a couple of values too dark. It was a nice color but made the room feel smaller. We bought a lighter shade of the original color and I rolled it on three walls, leaving one for an accent. Jen framed two pieces of art we bought in Portugal and bought a third for over the bed. After sewing up the new blackout curtains and building a roller shade for the bathroom door, the whole room really came together. Jen picked out fabrics and colors that accent each other and it really feels great in there now—much lighter, larger, and complete.
Sunday morning we got churched up and drove into Baltimore at noon for the 1 o’clock show. This marks the third show we’ve seen at the Hippodrome and it never fails to deliver. This show was amazing: it’s the traveling Broadway troupe and they do an incredible job. The costumes were breathtaking and the set design is incredible. I would bet it’s even more inspiring on a large Broadway sized stage (the Hippodrome is a smaller, Vaudeville-era venue) but we enjoyed every minute and a double Vodka Matata (vodka, ginger, beer, and lime) made everything even more pleasant. After the show, we drove to a fancy Ramen restaurant in the inner Harbor and loaded up on noodles, pork rolls, and gyoza. Properly stuffed, we headed back to the house, got in some warm PJs and caught up on the couch before getting to bed early for the next day.
Monday’s activity was driving up to Roundtop for a day of snowboarding. Finn declined to go so it was just Karean, Zachary and me. We got our rentals sorted out, accompanied Karean to the bunny slope, and gave her some pointers to practice on before her lesson. After watching over her for a run or two, Zachary and I broke off and hit the blue slope. After he got his confidence under him, we really started having fun. The mountain was pretty empty, which was fantastic: the lift lines were almost negligible and we didn’t have to avoid crowds of people on the way down. The snow was typical manmade Eastern stuff, but there was enough down that it wasn’t a sheet of ice and it was cold enough outside to not be slushy and wet. But after enough people went down the slope it started getting rough in patches as they dug in and started making grooves.
On my third or fourth run, I was switching directions, my board caught an ice ridge and I flipped downward on the mountain landing on my left side with my arm underneath me. It all happened very fast and I didn’t have time to cushion myself, and I got the wind knocked out of me. My ribs felt very sore and tender, but I got up and kept boarding. Zachary and I got about seven more runs in before lunch and the grin on his face got bigger and bigger with each ride down the mountain. We did about five more runs after lunch and wrapped things up at three, meeting Karean up in the bar above the lodge. Zachary is really into snowboarding, and I’m going to redouble my efforts to get him out at least twice a year.
My ribs are very tender this morning. It’s mainly the fifth and sixth, directly under my left arm on the side. Jen found me a Lidocaine patch and I put that on last night before bed; I’m going to keep applying them until the soreness goes away. If I had to guess, they’re either bruised, or possibly fractured, but there isn’t much any doctor could do other than tell me “don’t fall on them”.
Two of the weekend’s highlights were from the family advent calendar: Saturday evening we went to dinner at Amoora, a Syrian restaurant in the Inner Harbor. It’s always fun to get dressed up and go out with the girls, and the food and company was excellent.
Sunday we drove back into Baltimore to the Senator theater to see Wicked on the big screen. Unfortunately I didn’t realize they’d added smaller theaters on to the building and that we were in one of those annexes. Still, we all really enjoyed the movie—I was, honestly, a bit dubious about the whole thing but within the first half hour they had hooked me and I was on board. 2h40m went by very quickly. I will definitely be looking forward to the second half.
Saturday morning I drove down to Lexington Park with the OG-V packed to the gunwales with tools; we’re in the middle of a long-term project at the FiL’s house to replace the garage door original to the house with a modern mechanized version. This began two weeks ago with the drywall project, and after we got the go-ahead from the installers, it was time to move to the next phase: moving the Chrysler out of the way.
When last I left the Chrysler, I was looking at the brake system. Because it had been parked in the garage with the emergency brake on, three of the four drums were frozen to the pads. I’d put the front passenger wheel up on a stand and commenced to whacking it with a sledgehammer, but couldn’t get it to release. This was after several heating and cooling cycles, and at the end I’d actually taken a chunk out of the edge of the drum. So I bought and brought a set of four heavy-duty wheel dollies on Saturday, figuring they would be better than nothing. After hoisting the broken door up and out of the way, I moved stuff around and swept around the car. I had all four wheels up on the dollies within an hour, and moved a bunch of stuff out of the way before breaking out the tow strap.
I was a little nervous about using the OG-V to pull with, but the Scout is down with some unknown leakage (more info on that to come) and the new CR-V doesn’t have a trailer hitch yet. I had Jen’s sister come out and keep an eye on things, and after a lot of starting and stopping we got it out of the garage and onto the uneven pavement where it began to jump off the dollies when they got bogged down in divots and sand. The Honda did fantastic pulling the heavy beast; I never should have doubted it. The Chrysler is now far enough away from the door that there should be room to make a mess without coming near it. Then we used leverage and gravity to move his other disabled car, the Escort, down to the bottom and up behind the Chrysler, leaving a wide lane on the left side.
Humorously, I brought a car cover I was using for the Travelall, which fits with room to spare. It will not fit the Chrysler. It’s not long enough. So I rigged it up with a tarp in back and a box in front (to keep the radio antenna from poking a hole in the cover). With that done, I moved everything in the front of the garage to the back, clearing out the space for the installers to do their thing, and closed the door. After taking care of some other housekeeping, I hit the road for home.
In two weeks, I’ve got to head back down with another car full of tools, put the Chrysler up on jack stands, and beat the shit out of the three bad drums with a sledgehammer. At this point I don’t care if they split in half; I need them off to free up the wheels, because the dollies will not work going back into the garage—it needs to be on its own wheels. Beyond that, I’m going to have to buy a winch and anchor it to the floor with some beefy bolts to get the car back inside.
A follow-up to my Lowe’s rant from Friday: I rented a truck from their local store (cheaper than U-Haul) at 6AM with my brother-in-law and loaded it with all the supplies unavailable in Southern Maryland. We drove south and stopped off to pick up a drywall hoist right before the bridge in Solomons, making it to the FiL’s house by 8:30. By 9 we had all the supplies loaded into the garage and got straight to demolition.
What we had to do was pull down and replace 5 sheets of drywall that had gotten water-damaged from a leaky roof. This was complicated by the fact that the garage, while much cleaner than it had been two years ago, was still full of stuff, and that the original drywall on the ceiling was hung with 4×12′ sheets. (I remember seeing 4×12′ drywall sheets years ago at an old-school lumberyard, but not anytime recently). We started in the middle and worked our way to the front, getting three and a half sheets hung by 2PM, then made a dump/lunch run. After eating—and a very well-timed ice cream sold by an honest to god ice cream truck—we got back at it and hung the final two sheets. Then we raced back over the bridge to return the drywall lift before the rental store closed, returned to FiL’s house to replace two sheets on the wall, repaired his overhead shelves, and put everything back in the garage. We hit the road at 7:15 and made it back to Lowe’s by 9:30 to return the truck.
It was a job worth doing, and my BiL was super helpful the whole day, but it absolutely wrecked me. I was pretty useless on Sunday, mainly puttering around the trucks and doing some small jobs in the garage. While the drywall hoist was absolutely the best possible thing we could have rented, all the ladder work and moving stuff from one place to another took its toll on me. I’m glad it was a three-day weekend because if I had to go back to work today, I would have been a zombie.
But the garage should be good for a contractor to come in and install an automatic door and opener, something it’s desperately needed for years now, and it will be useful for tool storage and supplies. And that will unlock the ability to get other things done inside the house, which is also desperately needed.
This weekend was a busy one, mainly because it was Jen’s birthday. So that meant it was good busy. We started off Saturday morning with a walk down the street for coffee with the dog, and circled back home to shower and change. I had several surprises planned so I told her to dress casually and I’d take care of the rest. I drove the girls into Columbia and we stopped at a new health-food restaurant for breakfast smoothies, and then I dropped her off at a spa on the lake for a manicure and facial. Finn and I went over to the giant thrift store and then a used book store to kill time; I could easily have spent another hour looking through CDs.
Jen emerged from the spa with a healthy complexion and pretty pink nails (one of which caught on the zipper of her purse and had to be repaired later). We got a brief lunch at the Whole Foods and then drove into Baltimore and Second Chance to find a matching lockset for a closet door I just hung in the bedroom; the door came without hardware so we browsed the bins of old guts until we found a match, and then pored over a giant display case of crystal doorknobs until we found a matching pair we liked with setscrews.
Second Chance is expanding, and they’re growing their collection of Old Baltimore artifacts: they have the original City Pier signage from Fell’s Point (the City Pier is now expensive condos, which was invevitable, I suppose) and the small U from the Domino’s Sugar sign in Locust Point—which is probably 10 feet tall and very impressive.
By then it was too late to do anything else before dinner, so we headed back home and took our time getting ready. I had reservations at a Spanish-menu restaurant in town, and it wasn’t until we pulled into the parking lot that I realized it was in the building I used to work in before I moved to WRI. Dinner was delicious even though the place was a bit overwhelming, and we left feeling stuffed and happy.
Sunday we took our time getting up and moving. After walking the dog I took Jen back to the spa to have her nail repaired and we went back to the smoothie place to try out their sandwiches, which were also healthy and delicious.
Back at home, I gathered my tools and pulled our failing 20-year-old microwave off the wall above the stove with Finn’s help. When we got it out of the way I disassembled a wooden baffle in the upper cabinet covering the vent hose and measured the cabinets once, twice, thrice, and four times before being comfortable with the position and orientation of the mounting bolts and electrical cord. Saying a prayer, I drilled three holes in the cabinet and had Finn help me heave the new unit up into place. By some miracle, all three holes lined up perfectly, and we had the new unit powered up in place in minutes. I re-assembled the baffle with the nailgun and covered the hose back up.
From there, I cleaned up the kitchen and all of my tools and headed upstairs to pull the closet door off its hinges. The house is out of square just enough that the bottom of the door scraped the floor when it was about halfway open, so I put it on sawhorses and trimmed 1/4″ off the bottom. Back upstairs I rehung it, tested the swing, and then installed the new(used) lockset. Finally, I thinned out the paint and brushed a final coat of high gloss white on both sides. It’s the first time we’ve had a door in there since we moved in, and it took a little getting used to. But it looks good, and it fits the house. It feels good to knock these projects out quickly. And it’s nice to have a little less chaos inside the house. Happy birthday, Blondie.
I’ve been spending a lot of time away from the computer in Portugal for both mental and practical reasons; I spend most of my waking hours in front of one on a normal day so it’s great to look up from the keyboard and not think about looking back down for several days on end. I have had to consult it here and there (where are we going? is there street parking? what time are the tickets? do we need ID to get in?) but I’ve tried to keep things as non-technological as possible. My Instagram feed is pretty quiet as well.
We’re back in Porto, where we have an apartment lent to us by friends, for the first time in five days, and we’re sitting on the couch relaxing while a tiny European washing machine gurgles on the patio next to us. Today’s itinerary is “fuck-all”, as we’re catching up from some travel through Portugal, into Spain, and back again, and waiting for clean clothes. We put about 745 miles on a rented Peugeot 308, staying in hotels along the way, and we got to see some amazing sights. Portugal is like what Ireland would be if it was in California: there’s another castle over every hill, except that they’re still in excellent shape and not surrounded by sheep. I’ll write more about the details later.
I made a conscious decision not to bring a ton of cameras on this trip after talking it over with Jen. Instead, we both upgraded our aging iPhones to new 15 Pro models, and I’ve used mine as my primary since we’ve been here. I also brought Dad’s 35mm Minolta X7000 and my DJI Action camera, but that’s the extent of what I’ve been lugging around. It’s weird not to be using a dedicated camera for the first time in 25 years, but what I’ve been getting out of the iPhone has been pretty damn good. And I’m not ashamed to say we’re leaning into the selfie on this trip, as we don’t have a lot of current shots of the three of us.
