You know you’ve been working in your house an awful lot when you have somebody’s email address written on a chunk of 2X4 in pencil. I did get the ceiling in the office cleaned and primed last night, and began taping the edges in preparation for skimming. So progress is slow, but steady.
Hey, No Copying. Y’know those odd roadside shrines you see to dead people during your travels to and from the 7-11? Usually there’s a cross, and it’s decorated with some plastic flowers or a wreath. Sometimes they get more involved, like custom-carved names, balloons, or pictures, or sometimes the odd motorcycle helmet. Spooky, right? Anyway, I had the idea a long time ago to drive around and take artsy pictures of this strange phenomena, but somebody beat me to it.
Given that gas is getting outrageously expensive in the last few weeks, here’s a tool that might help us commuters.
My wonderful fianceé did a good turn and helped her mother buy a plane ticket to Florida last week. Considering we live about ten minutes from the dropoff lane of the airport, it makes sense to put her up at our house for an 8:30am departure, and drop her off at the gate. No problem. She arrived yesterday morning and settled in on the couch with five happy cats to keep her company while we went to work.
I returned home with the groceries to find a familiar but unwelcome car parked out front. it turned out that the prodigal daughter knew her mother was staying with us and decided to ‘just drop by’. Given the case history there, Jen and I are about as comfortable having her in our house as we are with elective brain surgery. I invited her to stay for dinner, figuring that it was better to keep her under watch than let her leave with our stereo in her trunk. Jen got home a little while after I did, and when she looked at me, her eyes had the “Oh my (expletive, expletive, expletive) God, who let her in here?” look. Followed closely by a look that spelled H-O-T-W-H-I-T-E-D-E-A-T-H, something that lowers the temperature of surrounding counties by twenty degrees.
We sat and had a peaceful, quiet dinner, and she left after helping her mom do the dishes. As far as we can tell, everything is still where it should be, and no blood was shed. But we decided that’s the last time she sets foot in our house without us being there.
Todd will appreciate this link: Jay-Zeezer: The Black and Blue Album. It’s not too bad, actually.
Monterrey (thx again pop), 3.16.04
Hello, It’s You. (Part 2.) A few years ago, I was lucky enough to meet a wonderful woman who
shared a number of things in common with me. We would sit and write
to each other during work, and I found myself constantly waiting for
her next email. She wrote long, insightful messages laced with wit,
hard-knock experience, and cutting sarcasm which intrigued me.
Luckily, she later became my girlfriend, and then my fiancee. Now
that I get to see her every day, and we don’t work for the same
permissive internet startup anymore, our emails have become more
succinct and matter-of-fact. I miss her writing, though, and I often
wish we were back in that VC-funded Eden where lunchbreaks lasted
three hours, candy was free, and we had eight hours a day to write
what we couldn’t say.
She’s been secretly blogging on the down-low for a while now, and
after a tumultuous year with Blogspot, she bought a subscription to
Typepad. She’s been writing there off and on for about a month now,
and recently decided to come out into the open. Please welcome Jen
into our online circle of friends. |
There had better be a beer or two in my immediate future, because I am in a foul, foul mood.
Required Reading. Vote Democrat.
Crap, Part 2. One of the other joys of being able to field one’s own minor-league kitty softball team is the collective pile of fur they leave behind. Actually, it’s not one big pile—they can’t be bothered to clean up after themselves, of course—but an inch-thick layer throughout the entire house. We are constantly running the vacuum cleaner, chasing after dust bunnies the size of grapefruit, but as soon as one clean swath is made on a horizontal surface, it is covered by more fur. (Or, a helpful cat, who will then commence shedding like Pig-Pen from Peanuts.)
So it was inevitable, of course, that our washer drain would become clogged with the winter coats of five nervous cats and begin backing up into the utility sink (let’s all just savor that word for a minute: utility sink. Do you know how great it is to be able to work in the basement and wash one’s hands without having to run back upstairs to the kitchen? I’m in heaven here, people). I busted out the pipe wrench and attempted to pry the cleanout drain cover off a hundred-year-old iron pipe, with predictably negative results, and then tried running a snake down the sink drain. I’m sure that sink snakes work for extremely talented people and drain-cleaning professionals, but for me the process resembled fighting an agitated ball python in a puddle of sewage.
We called in a professional. This morning Mike rang the doorbell as Jen and I were getting ready for the day, and I ran downstairs to let him in the basement to deal with our balky pipes. Within about five minutes the drain machine was turned on and off, and Mike came back upstairs to present me with a bill for $140 and a sheepish smile.
Thankfully, he disposed of the clog, which I’m sure was the size of a bowling ball.
Funny Bunnies. Just click here. You’ll thank me.
Webmonkey, the online help site Wired put together back in 1996 to help morons like me learn how to code HTML, is no more. Terra Lycos, who bought Wired Online’s assets, pulled the plug and fired the remaining staff last week, which is a shame. Many a day I was hunched over the keyboard attempting to learn Javascript or figure out the maddening rules of frames, and Webmonkey was the place I looked for answers.
Mike Lee posted a link to a new article on the O’Reilly MacDevCenter about home automation, which reminds me of a previous post; there’s some good juicy info in this article with more to come. (My thought was to pick up three or four outlets and the software to control the lights while we’re away on our honeymoon.)
Tonight I was alone, as Jen was at a work pow-wow, so I picked up some more 2×4’s and started building a workbench in the basement. I’ve been making do with a leftover bench from the garage—’bench’ only loosely defines this collection of planking, nails and scrap wood—and it’s gotten to the point where stuff is piled on the floor in heaps. The plan calls for an eight-foot long bench three feet high with one large shelf underneath. I had enough wood and deck screws to get the main frame built but I need more of each to finish the job. Dad will be happy to know I used his laser level to get the thing close to stable, but sad to learn that one of the two leveling bubbles is cracked and empty, which means I will have to test the Sears return policy.
This is funny, but perhaps NSFW. But then again, maybe it is. Todd has a link on his site to a barber’s ‘greatest hits’ picture page. Yeah, that’s right! Laurel, Maryland! The funny thing is that it looks like half the pictures are of the same kid. Where’s the one that says, “Punch Me Here?”
Blah. For a guy who got 8 hours’ sleep last night, I sure feel cranky, bored, and uninspired.
In honor of the previously mentioned Catholic SAT’s and the Jungian personality test (ENFP) they sent us home with, I bring you humorous games: Check out this link and tell me how you did. Fascinating stuff. I got 15/20, and it seemed that I mistook each type (fake/real) almost equally. #13 threw me, but I called it right.
Then, go take this test at McSweeney’s (Linda, this one is for you) to see how well you fare under the rule of the Empire.
The Catholic church has this mandatory thing they do for couples who want to get married in their church where they sit the kids down with upstanding members of the congregation for ‘counseling sessions’. On the surface, it’s actually a good idea, because, as a friend of ours said, it’s a lot easier to get married than to stay married. However, as with any activity or social group consisting of more than three people, I looked at the idea with more than a healthy dose of skepticism. What are they going to ask us? Are they going to split us up into separate rooms and come at us like the Scientologists? Are they going to grill us on our beliefs or quote scripture at us until we beg for mercy?
We talked to a good friend about it the night before, and she assured us it was not as bad as our (OK, my) imagination. Essentially, the Church is trying to weed out the folks who aren’t really prepared for marriage—the kids who saw Nick and Jessica get married on MTV and thought it would be bitchin’. So after about a half hour through the first meeting with our sponsor couple last night, I felt a lot more at ease. (There was a point, when she read a prayer for marriage early on in the meeting, when I got a little worried, though.)
One of the things they do is sit you down with a booklet, a pencil, and a Scan-Tron sheet like the ones we got in 9th grade for spelling tests, and have you each answer the same set of 150 questions. The test is designed to highlight the stuff in your relationship you haven’t really thought of or covered yet, like money, sexual, or family issues, and see if you have the manual dexterity to fill in a page full of teeny circles. The questions range from the mundane—Would it create a problem for you if your future spouse earned more money than you did? to the funny—I have a gambling problem which will cause future problems in our relationship—to the expected—We have decided to raise our children as members of the Catholic Church. You fill in an answer for ‘Agree’, ‘Disagree’, or ‘Uncertain’. They take these answers, collate them, and then work on the areas where you’re out of sync.
Really, we weren’t supposed to be comparing our answers, but some of the questions were vague or worded poorly, and it took some figuring to understand what the question was really asking. (e.g.: My future spouse and I seldom disagree about how we spend money.) We did find, however, that our money situation is the place where we need to pow-wow before we sit down with the counselors again, because we still approach it as two separate individuals instead of one single unit. I do have to say, though, that based on a lot of those questions, I think we’re about forty light-years ahead of other folks. Still, I’m nervous about getting our church SAT’s back, because I’m pretty bad with math, and if I fail us, we won’t get into heaven.
Under the Radar. Because he is a on the down-low, ‘I’m not into making a big deal about my birthday’ kind of guy, Todd has not mentioned his birthday today. I had to read about it on his log. (frowning.) So stop over the the Land Of Pleasant Living and say “Happy Third Birthday” to XLT.
Random Fun Links. ooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhh. Nice. Totally gotta get us one of these little babies. You Are Watching Big Brother. Swipe, from the good folks at Turbulence.org, helps you read your driver’s license barcode, provides links to data warehouses, and calculates how much money you should charge for your personal data.
winter (via my beautiful fiancee), 2.4.04
It could just be my brain playing tricks on me, but this morning I woke up and the house was positively balmy. For the past two months, I’ve been wandering from room to room layering and unlayering like a Vegas stripper due to the unequal climate zones in our house. The first floor is barely heated because many of the radiators were moved out to the enclosed porch, which is barely insulated. Our clothes are stored out there (long story), and there have been weeks where picking out that day’s wardrobe meant hopping from foot to foot and peering through the fog of one’s own breath. Making coffee in the morning started not with cleaning the pot, grinding beans, or getting the milk, but opening the lower oven door and cranking it up so my feet weren’t frozen into blocks of ice, ghetto-style. Meanwhile, the upstairs rooms are a faithful recreation of the Sahara desert. Jen has been positioning herself directly over the humidifier to stave off splitting sinus headaches due to the total lack of moisture in the air.
Today I was grinding coffee beans and looked out at the thermometer in the kitchen window. It read thirty degrees, which was enough to send me into spasms of chills a month ago. This morning, I casually considered wearing shorts to work.
Q: Is It Gonna Make Me Sweat? A: Yeah! I learned this afternoon, in doing some research on steam heat that if your radiators are noisy (e.g. the radiator in Jen’s bedroom, or the one in the living room), you should place a small, thin block of wood under the side without the pipe to off-level it slightly for better water circulation. I also found out that in steam heat systems, cleaning or replacing the air vent can wake up a dead radiator—close the shutoff valve at the bottom, unscrew the air valve, boil it in vinegar and water for a half hour, and replace it. And finally, using the shutoff valves to regulate the amount of heat won’t work in steam systems; you need an adjustable air vent instead. All of this is good information.
Welcome To The Jungle. Li’l Gn’R. I shit you not.
Yesterday I enjoyed a snow day from work, which brought back memories of Star Blazers, Legos and grilled cheese sandwiches in second grade. Instead of regressing to age eight (I don’t own feety pajamas anymore) I packed Jen off to work, answered some email, and then looked over the linen closet in the hall with a fresh cup of coffee. Over the years it’s been hacked apart for access to the tub plumbing, new shelves have been jury-rigged, and the floorboards were cut open. I’ve been wanting to get inside and start rehabbing it for a while now, and because I’ve got the shared wall opened up in the blue room, the time was right.
I started by pulling the shelves down and the trimwork out, then began to scrape the ancient wallpaper the old-fashioned way—hot water and elbow grease. Once the walls were clear, I started a wire run from one side to the other (the door opens from left to right, and we decided to have a light switch on the left inside wall). By dinnertime, I had wire installed from the inside of the Blue room (the linen closet will share the same circuit) up the wall, over the doorframe, and down the left wall to the switchbox. There’s a ton of stuff to be accomplished before it’s done, but having a light in there will be a great start.
Your Mailbox is Full. Based on the amount of bullshit email I got this morning, this stupid new worm is making the rounds. If you emailed me in the last 24 hours and haven’t heard anything from me, assume I mistakenly deleted your email with all the emails titled “Mail Delivery System” and “Test”. Apparently the purpose of the worm is to DDoS the SCO corporation, which is kind of funny, but still annoying. I’m glad I run OSX.
Random Fun Links. Excellent reading from Edmunds.com about Car Salesmen. Given the dilapidated condition of the Taurus, I’m sure this will come in handy.
Jen, in her loving, special way, decided she would try to make me some meatloaf this week. (Actually, she has been planning to bring the cow for about a week now, but took sick last Thursday.) She looked at Martha’s site and found a recipe that sounded good and looked easy. Now, let me just clarify here: She hates meatloaf. As with tacos, eggs, ham, water, and practically any other recipe, her mother has burned, undercooked, or otherwise wrung the enjoyment out of meatloaf for her to this very day. So it was with a sense of destiny and great foreboding that she mixed the ingredients and placed it in the oven. I got home, gave her a kiss, and told her that it smelled really good (it did); we waited for the required hour, and pulled it out.
It was not done. It was still pretty loose; it smelled good but had a gooshy texture, so we upped the temperature and put it back in. And we waited.
45 minutes later, the top was black, but the insides still fell apart like loose ground beef. it did not look like the example in the picture. I tried to console Jen, telling her it was because the recipe was bad, and I think she agreed with me, but she has vowed to never make meatloaf again.
Which, upon reflection, isn’t really a bad thing anyway.
Call Me. Looks like AT&T Wireless is putting itself on the block for sale. Considering Jen and I both have AT&T as our cell carriers, it should be interesting to see who buys them and what happens after that. I’m still trying to find the time to research other cell plans and decide who to go with.
Random Fun Links. Yesterday I updated both the Pink and the Blue room pages with some boring shots of wiring.