Didn’t write yesterday- life was moving too quickly. But the carpet is now in the basement, and it looks fantastic. I spent a few nights organizing stuff down there, and hopefully with another few nights I can get everything from the dining room down there and put away in some fashion. The only stuff that’s left upstairs are the two bikes, the cooler and some miscellaneous items.
Next up is to cut and install the shelf by the window; I got paid yesterday so when I get back I can get food and after Turkey Week is over, finish off the front of the house. I also have to have Jeff Curley over for beers when I get the wiring sorted out and roughed in (and the phone lines run) so that he can help me sort out the network questions I have. I also have to run the phone and network cabling up to the back bedroom, which entails cutting into the box in the back of the kitchen to start the line.
I think, after this project has wound down, I’m going to put up the plant hooks I was thinking about in the front room, replace the ugly track lighting in the living room with a longer, better positioned white track, and then *gulp* look at moving the light in the kitchen to the center of the room and replacing it with a ceiling fan.
Seen on a highway overpass on I-83 leaving Baltimore this morning: “We Arm The World” written on an American flag.
Interesting info from Super Scout Specialists as to the highest sale figures for Light Line trucks in America, from highest to lowest:
- Pennsylvania
- California
- Colorado
- Illinois
- Texas
- Ohio
- New York
- Indiana
- Wisconsin
- Virginia
Maryland is number 38.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Sitting here at home waiting for the carpet guys to show up. pleasepleasepleaseplease!
I read up on the Epson printer this morning and found that it won’t print if the black or color cartridges are empty, which is the case. So i have to see how much a black ink cartridge is and drop one in, then see if she’ll print. Hopefully it will be under $20 or so, otherwise I’ll look to see if there’s a good aftermarket ink supply place around. I don’t want to drop $40 on a printer that might not work. promising though, is that the printer powers up and I get a reaction when the test is triggered.
Here’s an interesting link about blocking ads in your browser. The only thing i can’t get to is blocking the proxy settings (step 2). Here also is what is billed as the true story of L.Ron Hubbard.
I had a very busy weekend; Saturday I got up and cleaned the basement for an hour before I left for Jen’s house; we left for the Maryland/Clemson game in College Park at 2pm. The game was fantastic; we had the entire Lockard clan there save Rob and Annie, and Maryland beat Clemson’s ass pretty soundly. We were treated to the vision of the whole crowd rushing the field and taunting the assembled event staff surrounding the goalposts; I’d say about 5-7,000 kids then rushed the cops and overpowered them. The goalpost dipped under the weight of hundreds of kids, and then sank into the crowd like a torpedoed liner. We then returned to the parking lot and shivered over fried chicken and pasta salad.
Sunday I got up and headed back over to Jen’s place; after a fantastic breakfast we picked up supplies and I built a set of shelves in her pantry closet and another set in her outer closet, so she can actually store canned food near her kitchen, get stuff out of the blue bedroom, and store heavy stuff in the outer closet. When I pulled the shelves down in there, the wood they used to tack up supports were pulling out of the wall and about to fall down- basically 1/8 plywood-essentially veneer-over top of a few stringers held in with decking nails. The look on her face after she saw the shelves covered with cans was worth the whole day, but she made me a fantastic chicken dinner with scalloped potatoes and cold beer, and that made it even better. All in all a great weekend.
We found out about an hour ago that another plane fell on NYC. CNN is completely bogged down, but Dan came by and told me that robots.cnn.com is a search area backdoor for cnn, and lo and behold the page pulled up almost immediately. I’m also impressed with cbs’s online news site as well- it’s very comprehensive and came up quickly.
Jen’s neighbor is cleaning out her storage room, and was getting rid of an Epson Stylus Color 800, which I promptly snagged to bring home. It’s sitting here on the floor waiting for a mac printer cable, which I was not able to find this morning.
Great tools for searching websites: atomz.com | Also, these tools will have some relevance in the future on this site: Userland software wrote and builds a lot of XML/RSS tools for the web. At some point I’d love to have my portal page set up with a newsfeed from AP nad CNN.
I found this information on Friday when I had a half hour to kill. This story has always fascinated me, ever since I read Ploesti by Carrol and Dugan (no relation.) I can’t think of any better way to salute the men and women of the military than to educate and read about the sacrifice these men made back in August of 43. B-24bestweb | 98th bomb group | Yahoo Tidal Wave message board | heavybombers.com | Maternity Ward | Bomber Pilot | Into the guns of Ploesti
This morning, buried down by the bottom of the ‘entertainment’ section of abcnews.com, I found an obit for Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Merry Prankster extraordinaire. I spent a long semester reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe and became a Kesey fan pretty quickly; taking a Beat class by the late Joe Cardarelli at MICA drew me into the world of Kerouac, and I loved the idea of Neal Cassady driving the bus all over the country while Kesey and the other Pranksters howled and tripped in back. Kesey withdrew from public view in the late 60’s and quietly farmed in Oregon with his family; only in the early 90’s he came back out and began teaching and publishing again. He was 66, and passed away after battling cancer. God bless, man.
I went out and bought the wire rack from Sam’s Club last night; installed in the basement, it just clears the tops of the joists and holds nine of the green Tupperware storage tubs, which is perfect. There’s room on the top shelf for another set of items; currently I have all the old CPU’s up there but I’ll replace them with other stuff when they get put in the closet. I was able to remove everything except the cooler and radio boxes from the dining room last night- what a relief. Tonight I’ll organize some more and hopefully be able to get the rest of them downstairs so I can begin cleaning the dining room and perhaps *gasp* paint…!
The Epson printer is dead, at least through the AppleTalk port. I’m taking it home tonight and hooking it up to the NT box through the serial cable, and we’ll see if there’s any luck there.
Last night I got the stairs re-installed, save the bottom and top treads. I still need to do the top kickplate, and cut a new bottom kickplate before the carpet guys show up on Wednesday. I was also able to mount the shelf in the closet firmly on the end, so there’s no more sag, and run two 4″ wood screws through the wall into the frame around the switchbox, so the closet pole is sturdy and ready for hanging. Now to just clean the rest of the crap from behind the workbench and give the place about an hour’s good scouring, and then paint the uncovered parts of the floor, and I’ll consider letting the cats downstairs.
The workmen out back had finished the wall in the backyard about 2 weeks ago, but are just now cutting the concrete pad out back to re-pour the footings (!!!). I toyed with the idea of bribing them to just leave the whole thing unpoured so I could set up the planters on my own time, but then decided against it. I’m just going to buy a bunch of used brick and build new planters over top of the pad.
Looking around the web this morning before I went to work: Laid off. | The Samuel L. Jackson Soundboard. | Nowhere girl, a really well-done graphic novel published online.
These are some truly heroic and very sad photos of the WTC, taken by a guy on his way out of the building.
Last night, I was able to pull off the bottom and top stair risers and sand/stain them, drawing the Toxic Refinishing portion of the project to a close. They look pretty good; I suppose they could look better, but I need to get them re-installed and finished pretty quick. Once the treads are down, I’ll probably put about 2 more coats of poly on them, but they look pretty good so far. All the backs are covered with 2 coats of white paint so they’ll match the rest of the basement (and not look so frickin’ bad) and at least surface-sanded. The only thing left is the very top kickplate (actually the cross-joist support) which needs to be heat-gunned and sanded/painted.
I also put in the closet pole; the brick wall side went in fine but the closet wall side is a victim of poor planning- I didn’t put any vertical supports in so there’s nothing to nail or tie that support into directly under the drywall. I think what I can do though is put a set of 3″ drywall screws through to the box I made which straddles the 4-pot electrical box on the other side of the wall. If there’s too much vertical stress, I’ll add a 4″ support running from the bottom of the bracket down to the top of the kickplate. Above the closet pole I installed the wire shelf, and this also fell into the ‘should have planned better’ category. There are two central studs in the middle of the wall, but nothing on the ends off the wall, so there’s about a 1′ length that is unsupported- unacceptable. I’m going to buy a third long angle support and try the 3″ screw trick at an angle to try to hit the edge of the stud frame. Other than those issues, it looks great; I’m really happy with the results. Now that the shelves are up I can get to working on the wiring issues.
Next up is getting the stairwell finished- sanding, priming and painting the rest of the uncovered drywall and then painting the whole enclosure. Then I’ll vacuum up the rest of the dust and generally clean up the mess; there’s a lot of covering painting to do, but that can wait for now. I have to wait for my next paycheck to pick up a 4’x4′ sheet of sanded finish plywood-that will be about $25 or so-for the front shelf. I measured out a 4’x’4 square on the floor and laid the two 10″ planks to see if I could get one sheet of wood out of it- it looks to be no problem, although I don’t like the idea of cutting across the grain of the plywood. We’ll see how it goes. I’d like to concentrate on the wiring next, and get the phone and cable hooked up; after that we tackle the admittedly harder job of wiring the RJ-45. I’d also like to do some of the small stuff around the house, like actually cut and install the finish molding in the upstairs hall and clean up the old radiator-area in the front bedroom.
Steely Dan seems to be the right selection of music for today. Very melancholy, world-weary, cynical, vaguely optimistic jazz-pop from the 70’s.
Last night, after throwing my non-functional Uniden portable phone at the floor and breaking it in an attempt at leaping two flights of stairs between four rings of the phone, I was able to sand and stain all but one of the stair risers, mount the telco junction box on the wall, and cut a piece of trim to fit between the top of the closet doorway and the joists. The basement is now filled with toxic lead paint dust, and surely killing me slowly. Yay.
Well, another one bites the dust- EA Engineering redid their website, and I have to say with no small bit of modesty that it looks about 1,000 times worse than the site I did for them 4 years ago.
Not a whole lot getting done on the basement this week. I got all but two of the stairs pulled up, and I got the tread faces sanded with 60 grit paper, but I need to finish-sand the others and then sand the bottoms. I’m going to use the old stair kickplates for the new treads, removing 1 layer of paint off the bottom, and use the old treads for the new kickplates. The old treads were just so destroyed from years of abuse, the edges were chewed off-then painted over. Taking layers of paint and varnish off the tops of the old treads was just so time consuming, and the treads were just so messed up, this seemed to be the best way to do things. I stained one tread last night and looked at it today, and it’s OK- there’s some discoloration at the edges, but the tone is relatively even and clean, and the wood is beautifully deep and rich in color.
I was also able to buy a 4′ wire shelf-that shelving you see in those ‘custom closet’ pictures, where it’s dipped in white vinyl. With brackets, arms, and shelf included, the whole thing was $10. You just can’t beat that. Now I have to do some work to find exactly where the studwork is and install it and the hanger pole on the right side of the closet. I’m also going to pick up the steel case for the A/V wiring today-it’s about $40-but I like the idea of keeping all the dust and crap out of the wiring bundle. Next I need to figure out how to wire up the DSL switch and mount it to the wall- it has no brackets or mounting hardware at all. Once the A/V cabinet is installed, I’m going to re-wire the phone line from the entry point at the basement door through to the closet. Currently it’s a mess, and dates back about 40 years.
Network Solutions just emailed me with the invoice for Duganfamily.net; I’m going to let it lapse, because I have noplace to host it, nor do I have the time to update it. So I’ll archive the pictures and dump the domain name, unless my pop wants to buy it.
God is broke. This is funny, and also a little creepy. Read the FAQ section.
Hmm. What’s new in the boring world of Bill this friday? My basement is really coming along; with the exception of the shelf in front of the window and the area around the top of the closet, all the woodwork is done, stained and installed. I’m going to be refinishing the stairs this weekend, as well as getting rid of all the garbage down there and in the backyard; hopefully then I’ll be able to move around enough to add the valves on the water supply and then move the washer to the back. Once that’s done (and some general cleaning is complete) I’ll be able to move the junk upstairs back down the the back of the basement. I’d really like to get all that done.
In the news, here’s a good story about the Can Company building, formerly home of the Bibelot by my house. I’ll be happy to be able to walk down there from the house and grab a cup of coffee and sit to read for a few hours- I miss that. I won’t miss Bibelot’s high prices, either. And there will be a One World Cafe there instead of Donna’s, which seems to be waning too. I also heard that there are lawyers trying to sue Osama for damages related to the WTC bombings; there are other lawyers fighting these lawyers for first position- the guys who are ‘representing’ the folks hurt and killed in the embassy bombings back in 98. Lawyers…
This is a fantastic article that makes one stop and consider our current action-and responsibility-in Afghanistan.
I got paid yesterday. Hallelujah. The carpet is ordered and all I have to do is set up a time when they can come and do it. Hopefully in a week or so. And, I saved about $100 or so from my initial estimate- I thought it would be about $500 and it came to a little under $400 with better padding. I also bought the rest of the trim molding and stained it last night; I bought 2 lighted 3-way switches for the stupid hallway light, so that will finally work again; and I bought 4 planks of 8″ wood, 2 maple and 2 pine, for the stairs. Then I installed them and found the stairs were actually 8″ deep/tall, not 7 ½” like the stupid lumberyards cut everything now. So I cut 2 planks, they don’t fit, and I’m going to return the other two (hopefully.) I guess I’ll heatgun/sand the old planks and then reinstall them- they were ugly, but still very sturdy.
The backyard is finished- the wall is up and looks good. So, next spring I’ll start on the revamping back there.
I also installed a Voodoo 5 card in the NT box last night; it’s running fine and works great. It also fixes the nagging gamma problem I’ve had with the Sony monitor, so I don’t think I need to buy a new monitor right away. Thank god. I’ve been trying to install the Voodoo 3 in the Mac here at work but it isn’t working right now- after a long search for all the proper install files and a flash of the card’s BIOS, it crashed on a boot of Marathon and now isn’t working anymore.