Mr. Brian stopped by this morning at 7:30 with a truckful of new shower supplies and started tearing out some of the old stuff that had been roughed in nine years ago. By the afternoon he’d cut out the drain and moved the pipes over to be centered in the newer (deeper) shower stall, made a provision for a bench. By the time he kicked off for the day, there was backing board on all of the walls and an inset in the wall. I cannot describe to you how exciting this is.
All told we got about 5 inches. Finn is off from school today, accompanying me to my oncological checkin this morning. Right now we are sitting on the 10th floor of the Viragh building in downtown Baltimore waiting for my blood draw.
So I had a long list of stuff I wanted to tackle over the Christmas break. I thought, “I’ll have seven full days to get all of this done! No problem!” And suddenly it was day 6 and I was still in my pajamas from Christmas Day and there were still boxes and piles of wrapping paper on the floor and I hadn’t done a thing.
I did get to spend a ton of quality time with Finn and Jen, and for that I am grateful. It’s rare I get to be with them all day without involving some kind of errand or job around the house, so it was really nice to devote hours to building LEGO robots or playing on the XBOX.
That having been said, I have a list of shit I need to accomplish in the next couple of weeks:
Clone the hard drive on my work laptop and upgrade it to High Sierra. I was given a second-hand Mac a few years back with a tiny 128GB drive, and one of the first things I did was replace it with an off-brand drive. It turns out that the latest flavor of OSX doesn’t like some of these drives. This means I’ve got to repeat this process for three other laptops at work. It’s important because the latest versions of Creative Cloud won’t install on Mojave, which is what three of the four machines I’m responsible for are running. I did rebuild the intern’s laptop, which is a start. I have to put together a High Sierra install thumb drive and continue this project over next weekend. Done. Needed to be Mojave, though.
Get the Accord emissions checked, and then get the rear brakes fixed. The former is easy, but the latter may wait a little while, as the Oh-Shit fund evaporated when we had to replace the refrigerator, and Nox had to go in to the vet for some expensive tests this week. Done and done.
Shoot pictures of student work on the light table. I’m giving all of their work back but I need to have some record of what they did and how it looked. Luckily the table is still assembled in the basement so it should be a pretty simple workflow to build. I did this! It didn’t take that long and I got the most important pieces shot.
Clean the Scout seat belt tensioner. It’s getting harder to pull over my shoulder these days, which means the mechanism inside is dirty and needs to be opened and serviced. I did this! It took 15 minutes and made a HUGE difference.
Continue pulling toe moulding off the kickplates and caulking the gaps. I do notice a difference in the dining room wearing socks now, but the house is still drafty.
Rewrite my syllabus. Having a class under my belt after an absence of a year, I realize there’s a lot of stuff they need to know and a lot of stuff I need to overhaul. The syllabus I inherited is probably 10 years old and besides being boring it focuses on the wrong stuff. I’m going to narrow the parameters of the assignment so that I can expand what I’m covering (grids and guides, best practices, color, presentation, craft, production, etc.) because it sounds like they’re not getting half of this in their previous classes. I’m also going to add in an earlier grading point so that they’ve got an idea of how they’re doing earlier in the process.
Our refrigerator has decided it’s time to break down again, just a few days before Christmas and with a 25-lb. ham freshly purchased. I had to make an after-hours run to the store last night for ice, and throw all of our groceries in the coolers, and run two coolers’ worth of stuff over to Christi & Glen’s spare fridge. Meanwhile the temperatures are projected to be in the mid-40’s instead of the 20s like they were last week, which would have been perfect for storing stuff on the back porch. Merry Christmas.
I spent most (well, almost all) of a rainy Sunday at the dinner table grading final products for UMBC, which always takes longer than I think it will. I got all but two finished by 11:30 but by then my brain and my typing fingers were toast. I got the remainder finished by 9:30 this morning, which is a huge relief. There’s just one student’s work files I can’t review for stupid technical reasons, but other than that everything is done and ready to submit.
On Saturday I spent most of the day pulling toe moulding off the walls in the den, the office, and the dining room in order to caulk the gap between the bottom of the kickplate and the floor. When we had the energy audit in January it looked like we were losing a lot of heat at the bottom of the floors, so this looked like an easy way to seal things up. First I did the den, which always feels colder than the rest of the house, and I can definitely feel a difference around the door and perimeter of the room. The office is still a question mark because I have to pull the giant heavy file cabinet away from the east wall to seal up that edge, but I found a section right under my desk where there was a 1/2″ gap letting cold air flow right in. The dining room is also up in the air because of the stupid janky front window that we haven’t replaced yet.
I’m going to follow up with a couple of the bedrooms upstairs, starting with Finley’s, during the Christmas break, and see if I can make more of an immediate impact.
Monday morning I took advantage of working from home and drove into Glen Burnie to visit the specialty moulding shop I mentioned a few weeks ago. The guy at the counter immediately identified what I needed and went in back to cut up the sizes I specified; within 15 minutes I had 62 feet of moulding shrinkwrapped and ready to stuff in the CR-V. Once the shelves are hung I’ll start mitering the cap moulding and installing it, which will be a nice indoor winter project.
I was out with a group of work friends on Tuesday night and stepped up to the bar to pay our tab. I noticed the bartender expertly mixing a manhattan and asked her what rye she used while waiting for my bill to be rung up. We got into a discussion about the quality of the various rye whiskeys available. When I told her I favored Bulleit, she frowned and said many of the bartenders in DC have stopped carrying it in a show of LGBT solidarity. Puzzled, I asked for details. Apparently one of the children of the founders came out and they shut her out of the company as a result. Disappointed, I asked her what I should use as a replacement and she suggested Rittenhouse, which I will definitely try. Or, I could go with Pikesville Rye, distilled by the same company, which uses a Maryland-based recipe originating in 1895.
Jeep announced the new Gladiator today, a four-door pickup based on an elongated Wrangler platform. This is the first Jeep I’ve actually been interested in purchasing since the old Cherokee platform (the 2-door model of which I was reasonably happy to own for five years). Two items of note: the windshield folds down and the roof comes off, which is pretty awesome, and it comes with an optional 6-speed manual transmission. No idea on price yet (I’d imagine it’s steep) but I’d consider buying one of these.
Thanksgiving is behind us, and we enjoyed a wonderful day with Karean and her family in Easton. This was our two-year anniversary of Friendsgiving, which was just as warm and welcoming and hilarious as 2016. We laughed and drank and ate, and even though there was someone important missing, we filled the house with love.
The rest of our holiday weekend was pretty quiet, and that was good. We took in the matinee showing of the new Fantastic Beasts movie (verdict: not as good as the first; too rushed, not enough time with our characters. Visually pretty. The way the story was left made Finn nervous.) and spent the rest of the day lazing around the house. Saturday was project day at the house and then we made an abbreviated but delicious Thanksgiving meal and had the Gebler clan over for dinner.
After a busy couple of days of fabrication, the shelving I’m building for Jen is nearly complete. Finn and I did some scouting for wall anchors and found an excellent product that only required a 7/32″ hole, and so all four brackets are firmly mounted to the wall. Before I put them in for good, I lopped about 1/4″ off their ends with the angle grinder and beveled the edges.
Meanwhile, Finn filled the nail holes with putty and I showed her how to use the random orbital sander to smooth the whole thing out. Later in the day I routed channels out on the back for the brackets. On Sunday afternoon both shelves got a coat of white paint outside, while the weather was 60˚.
Also, Brian stopped by on Friday morning to look things over in the bathroom and visit with us for a little while; his tile estimate is roughly $500 less than the quote I got locally, which is excellent news. He’s thinking he can get started as soon as the order comes in, which means we might be showered up by Christmas. I can’t think of a better present than that.
I got a little bummer news at work this week; one of my long-time employees is leaving us at the end of November for a great opportunity elsewhere in D.C. She’s been with us for three and a half years, and while I always am aware that no job lasts forever, I’m sad to see her go. She was nervous about telling me, but I assured her I was happy for her, and I wanted only the best for her and her career. At the same time, I was able to get another of my designers switched over from contractual to open-ended employment after over a year with our organization (long story), so we had an upbeat Friday after I gave her the good news. We’re planning a farewell sendoff/celebratory dinner the week after Thanksgiving, and hopefully she’ll keep in touch after she gets settled in the new gig.
As reported here, the Scout meetup went well. What didn’t meet with success was my visit to the alignment shop to install caster correctors; after waiting across the street at a Starbucks for three hours I walked back over and was told the mechanic tried for two hours to get the spindles off my steering knuckles with no success. Rather than break my truck, he backed off and told me he wasn’t charging me anything, which was solid of him. At the meetup I talked to another friend who had the same work done, and he referred me to a older mechanic in Dundalk who loves Internationals and may be able to help me with the situation. I’d much rather drive to Dundalk and work with a greybeard than a 22-year old tweaker at a 4×4 shop, which is what I was faced with before.
On Saturday evening Jen and I met up with a cancer buddy, a real nice lady who we met in during radiation treatment at Hopkins. She was in for radiation on her larynx and our schedule overlapped for the whole time I was in treatment, so we got to be waiting room buddies. We’ve all connected on Instagram and she’s recovered stronger than I have. We met up at the Guinness brewery and she gave us big hugs and we sat at the bar and caught up. So far we’re both one year clear and we celebrated with some dinner and laughs. It’s inspiring to see other people kick cancer’s ass and keep moving forward.
The shelf project is going well; I’ve got fronts and sides glued and tacked on to the MDF. Now I’m sorting out how to hang the hangers on the wall with the most support possible; what I’ve got are T-shaped brackets with two holes on either side, about 4″ apart. That’s enough to anchor one screw into a wall stud, but the other screw–4″ away–will be going into plaster and lathe. I don’t feel comfortable with that yet. I did buy a cheapo Harbor Freight drill press so that I can drill the holes in the shelves straight and level, but the bracket question still needs to be solved. [Sips beer and thinks…]
Speaking of beer, I tapped my session grapefruit IPA on Sunday evening, and…it’s not bad! The hops are definitely stronger than the real recipe but balanced out with the grapefruit, this isn’t a bad beer at all. And it’s great to have something on tap again.
Jen is always a tricky woman to buy Christmas presents for. She really doesn’t want for much, at least, not in the way of stuff, so it’s hard to find just the right thing for her every year. I’ve taken to writing down gift ideas in February so that I don’t forget them in November. Two years ago I was super-romantic and bought her a 40 gallon fish tank to replace the yard-sale sourced starter tank she was working with. She was surprised and it went over well, I think. Last year sucked ass but I was conscious enough through pain meds to buy her a couple of items from Emily McDowell, including a tote bag emblazoned with the words “Groceries and Shit” in beautiful hand lettering.
This year she’s asked for several house-related things, including some shelves for the living room. We’ve had a blank wall in there for years, waiting for some mystery artwork to appear, but she’s sick our shrine to emptiness and asked me to make something to mount to the wall to put stuff on. I looked around Amazon and found some invisible hangers for shelving, and Sunday Finn and I hit the Home Depot for supplies. We got a sheet of 1″ MDF and cut it down to 4′ x 4.5″, then glued and double-stacked four sheets for two shelves. Next I’ll be cutting down a 3″ furring strip and mounting it to the front for a slipguard. When the mounts come in I’ll drill holes and set them up staggered on the wall so that there’s some space on the end for something tall.
Another thing she’s asked for is if we can finally finish the woodwork in the office and den. Sometime between the installation of the front porch windows and the big side window, Lowe’s/Home Depot stopped carrying the equivalent cap molding to our windowframes in stock. This is somewhat short-sighted, because I’d wager EVERY HOUSE IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD uses this same cap molding. I’ve looked into setting up a router jig and making it myself, but I’d probably spend several thousand dollars on the jig and I’d honestly much rather have a finished bathroom. I found a woodworking shop over in Glen Burnie who I’ve been told can make this molding for me, and hopefully it won’t be too expensive, because I need 65+ linear feet of it.
I spent a little time kegging beer last night. My intention was to get the grapefruit IPA in the cooler, but for some inexplicable reason I transferred the session IPA and added grapefruit extract to that instead. So it’s going to be an intense batch of beer. I doubt it’s ruined but now I’ve got to figure out what to do with the base beer for the original grapefruit batch–it’s probably a lot milder than the session, so it won’t be as good on its own. Looks like I might wind up with two grapefruit batches instead of one, unless I decide to dry-hop this batch for flavor.
I spent a good chunk of the weekend grading my first class project. Friday night I reviewed work, looked over their files, and filled out a checklist for each project. Saturday morning I fed that into a spreadsheet which averages the score from the checklist and converts that to a letter grade, and from there I adjusted up or down based on attendance. Saturday evening I filled out most of the comments at the bottom of each grading sheet (because what are grades without feedback?) I built this system after realizing how time-intensive grading is during my first semester, and it’s paid off really well.