I’m entering the second month of work wind-down, and so far, it’s been very busy. I feel like I’m putting more of myself into a lot of different projects than I was before, and staying busy right now is a good thing.
People at work seem surprised that I haven’t completely checked out, including the COO, who I talked with briefly on Friday. I laughed and told him that as long as they’re still paying me, I’m working for them. It’s a measure of how strongly I feel about the mission and the organization; I have no beef with them, other than the fact that they didn’t plan well enough, but I want to see WRI succeed. I like to think I’ve also finally learned something from leaving some of my previous jobs, where I did a terrible job of staying in touch with people—some who I really liked, and some who I didn’t. I have a lot of regrets about that, actually. I was never able to maintain long-term friendships going back to the days when my family moved around a lot, and with a few exceptions, I don’t talk much to my friend group from high school. I’ve never been good at maintaining these kind of things, because I’m afraid those people won’t want to talk to me, but I’ve been working to get over myself and put myself out there some more.
In the meantime, I’m trying to average sending 1-2 resumes out per day, depending on what’s posted, but I’ve only heard one thanks-but-no-thanks reply. There are a number of job websites out there with pretty decent listings, but a lot of the social media stuff that’s suddenly entered my algorithm is about how people haven’t been able to get past the AI bots to have their cover letter seen by a human being. Having been on the other side of this, I know how hard it is to weed the wheat from the chaff, especially when you’re getting 200 applications each day, but I always did try to take the time to look at every submission myself. This new way of doing things seems capricious and arbitrary. I’m doing that thing I hate doing the most [see paragraph above] where I reach out to my network and kindly ask if anyone might know of anything. I’ve actually gotten a couple of good leads from friends, and I’m hopeful that the network will do what the bots will not. The LinkedIn post I put up about ‘moving on from WRI’ got a HUGE response from people, and I made sure to reply back to everyone that posted to boost it further. Here’s to hoping the right people see it.
I’m also looking at other ways to start generating income. There’s money to be made doing housepainting and light carpentry, which I have plenty of experience with, and our old friend Jen, a realtor, can funnel me work. I can load the OG-V with carpentry and painting gear and work for hire without a contractor’s license for what I’m told is pretty decent money, and she could share my name around with her peers. It got me through college, and it can work in the short term now.
I’m headed over to Brian’s this weekend to take stock of the EV project. Making a go of this would be the best possible option, although it would take me away from home for long periods of time. He’s been busy with personal stuff, but I’m hoping we can make a serious go of it in December.
At the house, I’m finishing up the Travelall floor and also looking at inexpensive ways to insulate for winter. I got to thinking a couple of weeks ago about the underside of the front porch floor, which had originally been sealed up with some sheets of plywood over the joists, which were filled with insulation. When Brian and I shot foam against the sill plate shared with the ice room, we never covered that area back up, and there’s a section of the office floor that hangs out over that open space. I got under there and covered it back up a few weeks ago, but I then thought about how our kitchen floor is always cold. In the basement we have insulation up against the underside of the floor but it’s not sealed with anything, which I’ve learned is basically useless. I did some research and found that some simple sheets of 2″ semi-permeable foam sealing the cavity between the joists would keep heat from soaking downwards into the unheated basement. So I’m going to do some experiments in the next week with that to see how well it works.
Meanwhile, my left wrist has been bothering me for the last couple of days—right after I had my checkup with my GP. I’m going to make another appointment to go back in and have him look it over, but what I fear is that this is the beginning of arthritis. About 30 years ago, I was mountain biking with Rob, and we were riding downhill toward our car at dusk on a dim single track. I cartwheeled over a chain spread across the trail, invisible in the fading light, and did a half-decent tuck and roll, avoiding a cracked skull—but I planted both wrists on the pavement as I tumbled. They hurt pretty bad for a week or so after that, but as a newly minted graduate with no health insurance, I couldn’t have them looked at. I’m pretty sure I fractured or tore some cartilage that day, and I’d bet it’s coming home to roost now that I’m older and the weather is colder.
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.
Lifehacker published a really good article on installing a simple solar house setup with battery backup as a bundle. One thing the author mentioned is that a lot of utilities aren’t crediting the full amount for any power fed back into the grid, which is bullshit. His total cost was $8000 for the panels, battery and inverter, and he says he got a deal on the latter from Costco, which is good to know. I’d really like to install solar on the house somehow, but, as with everything else, money isn’t available right now.
As with previous Labor Days, I spent the majority of mine laboring. I started out on Saturday with a long list of tasks to tackle around the house, and by Monday afternoon I’d accomplished all of them plus a few.
After making coffee and letting Hazel out for her morning constitutional, I drove down the street to a yard sale and was happy to find a bunch of tools priced exactly where I like them: cheap. I picked up a toolbox full of name brand box-end wrenches, two pairs of dikes, and a pneumatic cutoff wheel for $20. I’ve now filled all the gaps in my wrench sets—I was short on a couple of key SAE sizes as well as the metrics, and with this haul I’ve got full sets of quality US-made tools out in the garage, in my tool bag, and in the basement, so that I don’t have to continue running around to find a second wrench.
My trucks like to mark their territory, and the Scout was getting worse at this until I replaced the power steering pump. I bought a cleaning solution from the Jungle Site which promised it would remove oil stains from asphalt. This stuff is full of enzymes that are supposed to suck up the oil and then dry into silica, leaving puddles of white dust. After brushing the residue away, I sprayed the spots with the power washer until the water ran clear. I’m pretty pleased with the results—most of the smaller spots are now invisible, but the larger ones are going to need another application.
Over the last month or two, Jen and I have been pulling up the FLOR tiles in the living room and using the pressure washer to clean them. We’ve had them for almost 20 years, and they’ve held up very well given the abuse they take on a daily basis. There’s only so much dirt and pet hair that will come up with a vacuum cleaner, even one as good as our Dyson, so it was impressive to see how much came out—and how much cleaner the tiles look—after they dried in the sun. With that success, I hung the dining room rug up on the front of the garage and pressure washed it(you will begin to notice a theme for this weekend) to try to clean that up too. Given its location and proximity to food-related accidents, it’s a miracle the rug didn’t look like abstract art, but overall I think it came out OK.
Then I used Purple Power and a mop to wash and scrub down the plastic on the outside of the greenhouse. Over the last couple of years it’s gotten really dirty from all of the tree sap, especially the side that faces the house. After working it over a couple of times I was able to get about 90% of the dirt off, and then worked my way around to the other side. With the pressure washer, I carefully blasted all of the algae and dirt off the rest of the structure, and it’s about a thousand times brighter out there now. This plastic hasn’t lasted as long as the first batch I bought in 2005, and I’m going to have to replace some sections in the spring—but it looks a hell of a lot better now.
Something that’s been bothering us for a while has been the smell of our clothes after they come out of the washing machine: they don’t smell like they’re actually clean. I did some research and then disassembled the top half of the machine, which eventually required the employment of a car jack and two sections of wood to remove the main agitator basket. When I pulled it out I found the bottom half caked with yuck, and the container in the machine was brown with dirt and sediment. Out in the driveway I used more Purple Power and the pressure washer to blast all of the parts clean, then re-assembled the machine. Jen ran an empty load with some bleach to clean out the rest of the yuck I couldn’t reach, and told me it smelled like it was finally clean.
When I poured a new concrete fitting around the basement surround, I didn’t make the second step deep enough. What had once been a narrow lip around the edge was now half as wide as the other steps, so something had to be done. I put a masonry wheel on my circular saw and was able to cut about 3″ deep all the way across, but there’s still another 5″ left before I reach the top of the step. I think I’ll have to rent a full-size masonry saw with a larger wheel in order to cut it back and level things off.
There were a number of other smaller projects sprinkled in there that I can’t remember now, but by about 4PM on Monday I was beat. We made some guacamole to go on some grilled burgers with fresh corn (EXCELLENT idea, Jen) and I spent the rest of the evening sitting on my ass.
A few weeks ago, we had a pretty violent thunderstorm roll through our area. I don’t remember where Jen was, but I had Hazel hooched up on me like a tick on a deer as I did some budgeting and watched the trees blow sideways out the window. It wound up being more bluster than precipitation, but the sky did get that weird green color that means “Git in the storm cellar, Dorothy!”
Anyhow, a week later I was in the driveway when my neighbor walked over and told me one of the limbs from a silver maple in the back corner of our lots had fallen on her garage and knocked out her power. This tree was next to a pole holding a transformer that used to explode regularly during windstorms; after fifteen years and a final eruption of green fire and carcinogenic PCBs, BG&E finally sent a crew out to update the unit and it’s been pretty solid ever since.
The tree was almost directly in the middle of where three lots come together, as far as I can tell, but I’ve been the one maintaining it, and I had several branches over our yard pruned a few years ago. I felt bad about the neighbors’ power, and the only main branch remaining hung low and threatening over their garage, so I offered to have it cut down. Silver maples are ugly, dirty trees which grow fast and drop shit everywhere, and this one was choking the light off our greenhouse, so I’m not that upset to see it go—but the number of shade trees on our lot has been reduced dramatically over the years.
They found a service who offered to do it for half of the next lowest bid I found, so we made out OK, but I wasn’t prepared for that surprise bill. I can think of several other things I would liked to have spent that money on.
Jen found us a fun thing to do on Sunday morning: the tiny cemetery in Baltimore City famous for being where Edgar Allen Poe is buried also has a catacombs that’s open for tours. Many, many years ago, my friends and I walked downtown late at night and jumped the fence into the cemetery on the anniversary of Poe’s death. In those days that part of town was Not Safe, and nothing we said would dissuade the girls we were dating, whose idea this was. We didn’t run into any trouble, and everyone had a good time, but the graveyard felt very unfamiliar this time around.
At one time in the early 1800’s this cemetery was at the edge of the city, and most of the prominent members of Baltimore society were buried there. As the city expanded, the trustees decided to build a church up and over a number of the graves to make sure the cemetery did not get sold and developed. We learned a bunch more about early Baltimore history, including the fact that a man named Cumberland Dugan was a prosperous city father, and that the pier where the current National Aquarium sits was originally called Dugan’s Wharf.
Leaving the cemetery, I resolved to learn more about early Baltimore history (Fun fact: Patterson Park, two blocks north of my first house, was the site of Hampstead Hill, the main defensive fortification built to stop the British from burning the city) and do some digging into the Dugan family history, most of which we lost when my Dad passed. I will admit, visiting his and my grandparents’ gravesites a week ago did set this idea in my mind. I know Dad shared his information with my cousin Brad, who will be my next contact to see how far back they went. A cursory web search claims my namesake great-grandfather was actually born in Indiana, which was a big shock to me—but sounds kind of suss.
As the years have gone by, I’ve taken fewer and fewer pictures of the Catonsville parade, but I do still pick up the phone to shoot interesting things.
This year, the weather was so hot (“feels like 112˚”) there were probably 1/3 of the usual participants in the parade, and 1/2 the people normally watching. It was just miserable outside. As usual, we spent the day before preparing for it through the heat, and I was outside from about 8AM until 1:15 getting everything set up before I could run upstairs for a shower. Jen’s sister and her family were with us, and it was a low-key day, but it still took everything out of me.
As this beautiful shoebox Ford drove past, one of many classic cars, I commented to my sister-in-law that it was the one I’d want in my driveway out of all the others present. About 20 minutes later, a man tapped me on the shoulder and asked if he could charge his jump box from one of my outlets: it was Larry, the driver of the Ford, who told me the car had sputtered to a halt one house past ours, as the generator wasn’t charging the battery. I got him an extension cord and some water, and we stood in the shade while it started charging the box. Turns out Larry knew me from my trucks and figured I’d be the guy to ask; I didn’t recognize him because he wasn’t driving his sick blue T-bucket hot rod, which he normally has at Cars & Coffee. As I mentioned earlier, the parade ended early, so we walked up the street and were aided by four firemen who helped push the car back and into our driveway, where it cooled off under the tulip tree.
Once the jump pack was ready, I threw my tow straps into the Scout and followed Larry back to his house, where he tucked it into the garage. Along the way we saw another of the antique cars from the parade dead on the side of the road; I think it would be a huge gamble to take my trucks through a parade on such a hot day.
I think the only time any of us were outside was during the parade and its aftermath—it was just too hot to be outside. Our guests left at about 9:30, after a passing thunderstorm cooled things off a bit, and we all collapsed into bed. I had to tackle Hazel while the local pyromaniacs lit off fireworks until 11:30, and then we were able to go to sleep.
I spent the entire Juneteenth weekend at hard labor, taking advantage of unseasonably mild mid-June weather. The temperatures were in the mid-80’s but with little to no humidity, which made being outside pleasant, even if I was swinging Dad’s mattock into our rock-hard topsoil. We inherited a bunch of poorly-poured concrete sidewalks with this house, which I’ve slowly been removing over time, and this weekend I broke up and hauled out a section sitting right in front of the basement stairwell, itself a poured concrete structure set into the side of the house. During heavy rainstorms, water would over the top of the saturated grass and down the slab, which had settled backwards towards the house, up and over the edge of the stairwell and down into the basement. This was a primary cause of flooding during both of the 100-year storm events we shared with Ellicott City, requiring Jen and I to man the bilge pumps and shop-vac to bail out the house.
After knocking the slab into sections (it was only 2″ thick at its deepest) I hauled it over to the driveway and stacked it for future disposal. Then I trenched out a 8″ area around the stairwell about 14″ deep, built some plywood forms, and mixed 8 cubic yards of concrete to pour, bringing the next step up another 5″. I had to go out twice for more ready-mix, because the both internet and the instructions on the bag were completely incorrect for estimating how much I’d need. I also used the mattock to break up a section of topsoil where another area of sidewalk had been, mixed in some new lawn soil, and laid out a piece of sad-looking sod in the hopes that it will root and take. by 6PM I was beat, and after a shower I took it easy for the rest of the evening.
Saturday we were back at it, beginning the day by filling the back of the Scout full of garbage for a dump run. The County is getting squirrelly about everything, so I had to take the time to cut all of the wood down to 18″ sections, which took time. Jen and I went over to the church to break down the steel rack she’d bought to store donated food, and we continued working on the rest of the sidewalk, as well as excavating a section of lawn next to the garage for a new planter. I drank about five gallons of water and might have peed a thimbleful all day.
Sunday we got back at it, employing Finn with the mattock to finish up the sidewalk planting while Jen and I scoped out the garage planter. By about 4:00 we had the trench dug, lined with landscaping cloth, and filled with eight bags of river stones. All of this excavation yielded about six wheelbarrows full of extra dirt, so we spread it on the far side of the garage, cleaned up our tools, and went inside. Jen heated up our dinner and the girls went out to bring me back a shake for dessert, which I sipped on while laying on the couch on the front porch, a nervous dog snoozing under my feet.
This morning I’m moving slowly. My brain is foggy, and my joints are stiff. It feels good to have a lot of long-gestating projects closer to done, but that took a lot out of me.
I’ve had dreams of putting a real live deck on the back of this house ever since we moved in, but the parade of other priorities required to keep it habitable have always taken precedent. I don’t think we’re going to be doing any major traveling this year, and one of the things Jen and I have talked about is finally pulling the trigger this year. We’ve agreed on the basic shape and footprint, so I used an online deck builder to rough out what it could look like.
One of the requirements is to have a wide set of steps leading gently down to the ground, vs. the almost vertical set of ladder stairs we inherited with this house. We can’t really cover the entire back of the house without covering a hose bib and two of the remaining four windows, so we decided to go outwards and have the stairs drop down facing the garage. An area of 10′ by 15′ will give us plenty of room for a table and chairs, and a set of stairs with 8′ wide by 10″ deep treads will provide plenty of space to get up and down.
Using the deck builder and some quick-and-dirty Photoshop, I mocked up what it could look like on the back of the house.
Of course, the Lowe’s deck builder thing does an automatic calculation for the materials, and it comes out to over $11K. This is, of course, because the decking is all Trex, but we’re going to have to do some saving up before I can tackle this.
Along with getting work done on the trucks, I took care of some projects around the house, some of which were on the 2026 list.
First and foremost, Hazel got a bath. She has smelled like landfill dirt mixed with old socks in a bag of moldy Cheetos for the last two months, but I don’t like sending her out into 30˚ weather soaking wet after a bath. I took advantage of the warm weather to scrub the stink out of her fur and let her dry off in the warm sun on the back porch. I’m sure she quickly rolled around in the mud to spite me.
I pressure-washed the dirt and green algae off our front stairs, which has been bothering me since November.
I climbed out on the roof and replaced the section of aluminum siding that was blown off during the windstorms in December. The aluminum itself was AWOL until last week, when it magically appeared in the flower bed below the den, as if to say, it’s time to get me back up there, Chief.
Along with that, I pulled the rest of the fiber tiles off the attic ceiling down and stacked them by the stairs. I couldn’t bag them for removal, but that will be the next step in cleaning out that space.
The greenhouse has been straightened up for the first time in three years. My residual anger from the Caterpillar Massacre of 2022 seems to finally have subsided, and I was able to get in there and clean things out. I even put three of the bins out on the table in the center and considered buying a couple of bags of soil and some tomato seedlings just to have something growing in there again.
All of the neighbors’ leaves that have collected under our back porch are now bagged up and ready for the County to collect on Thursday morning. And there are three contractor bags full of garbage from the garage and greenhouse ready to go as well.
Monday morning: there’s about 2″ of very damp snow on the ground, and the outside temperatures are 34˚. We were supposed to have a boiler repairman come by sometime between 10 and 2 today, but as of 11:45 this morning I have heard nothing from the company. We’ve got space heaters working overtime to keep things warm, and it’s averaging about 65˚ inside, but I’d really like to have our heat back.
Update: they sent a nice plumber out to look at the system, who admitted sheepishly that he’s not an HVAC guy, and rescheduled for tomorrow morning. I don’t blame him in the least, but that’s an asshole move by the company.
I spent most of Sunday putting the final touches on a presentation I’m going to be giving at the Yale School of Management on Wednesday about data visualization for social good, an invitation I was very pleased to accept after helping teach a graduate course at MICA last semester. I’m still practicing my delivery, and after doing the talk for Jen on Sunday afternoon I wound up re-ordering a whole section. I’m hopping a train on Wednesday morning, doing the presentation that afternoon, and they’re taking me out to dinner in the evening. They put me up in a hotel overnight and I take a train back on Thursday morning. It should be a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to the experience.
[frantically returns to practice]