ch-ch-changes

trimmed

Posted on by Dave O

The little maple tree out back was not so little so we had to cut it town.

It started out as a helicopter that sprouted in what looked like a pretty good spot for a tree, so I put a cage around it to keep the bunnies away and remind me not to mow over it.

It might have been a good spot for a tree if the tree had grown straight up. Instead, our little maple split into four trunks that spread out and began to overhang the electric service. On very windy days, this made me very nervous.

So an arborist came by on Sunday and cut it down, and now there’s nothing left but a stump and a pile of brush by the curb. So long, little maple, and thanks for the shade you gave us.

budgeting skills

Posted on by Dave O

It’s another lovely day today but there will be no quiet reading on the lawn under clear, sunny skies because our next-door neighbor’s house is getting a new roof today, which means we’ll have to listen to the whap-whap-whap of nail guns while an air compressor thrums constantly in the background.

Yesterday was a lovely day but I didn’t get out into it because I don’t know how to budget my time. I intended to hang a humidifier from the furnace vent and that’s all I wanted to do. After I did that, I intended to stroll through the leaves in a park somewhere or go for a ride on my bike, something that would get me outside in the fresh air.

Hanging the humidified on the furnace vent went so well that I was pretty chuffed about it, so I decided to try to hang the controller as well. That took a lot longer because I didn’t have a drill that would cut a hole in the vent that was big enough but not too big. Took a long time to figure out the work-around for that.

Getting the controller hung meant I could wire the controller to the furnace and the humidifier, which was a lot more challenging than the wiring diagram makes it look. I didn’t finish up until just after three o’clock and by then I was covered with so much dirt and sweat that I had to hit the shower.

It was three-thirty by the time I was cleaned up and ready to get some fresh air. Because of effing daylight savings, the day’s almost over by four and the sun sets at four-thirty, so I had just enough time to take a short walk around the neighborhood.

Somewhere in the middle of hanging the humidifier on the furnace, My Darling B came down the stairs to let me know the news media had finally called the election for Biden. Hilarious that they waited until Trump was on the golf course so he was less likely to call a press conference or rant on Twitter. Across the United States Americans literally started dancing in the streets to celebrate Trump’s eventual removal from office. How awesome is that?

Venting

Posted on by Dave O

Pardon me while I … vent.

The guys who put the siding on my house installed the dryer vent on the bottom. It’s basically a flimsy aluminum tube shoved through a hole in the wall with four flimsy plastic flaps to shut out the weather. It’s not screwed or glued or fastened to the wall in any way. Nothing’s holding it in place except the vinyl siding. I found this out when I started poking at it, looking for a way to add a draft excluder.

I added the white dryer vent on the top. There’s been a hole in the wall for it since we moved in. I guess the dryer used to vent out the top but for whatever reason somebody decided it would be better to add a vent closer to the floor. From my point of view, it’s a lot harder to hook up the vent that way. I have to climb on top of the dryer and reach as far as I can, hanging over the back. I’ve hurt myself a couple times doing that but never badly enough to motivate me to move the vent back up top. I couldn’t figure out how to remove the crappy flapper vent without damaging the vinyl siding, though, so today was the day the vents got swapped around.

The upper hole used to be plugged but the guys who did the siding must have knocked the plug out because there was just a handful of fiberglass insulation wadded up in there. Besides the fiberglass, all that was keeping the weather out was the vinyl siding and a layer of plastic. I drilled a series of holes around the edge of the hole, then cut it open with a Dremel tool. The white vent has a heavy-duty aluminum pipe sticking out the back that slid in as if it was meant to be there, which it was, and four construction screws fastened it to the wall. I had to trim the pipe, again using my trusty Dremel, but the hardest part of the whole operation was moving the dryer, which isn’t all that heavy but is rather large and hard to get a grip on.

I stuffed the wad of fiberglass insulation from the upper hole into the crappy flapper vent and covered it with a piece of extruded foam for now. I’ll do a better job of patching that up when I figure out how to do it without messing up the siding.

Almost forgot to mention: I got voicemail from the guys who did the siding. They wanted to know if there were any jobs around the house that I wanted them to do. I was half-tempted to reply with something snarky, like, “No thanks, I’ve already patched up all the half-assed stuff your guys did.”

reddening

Posted on by Dave O

Our little house is becoming red again!

new siding for our little red house

This is the most completed part of the project so far. I wish they had started on the front of the house instead of the back so the part of the house that was done was a little more appealing. It’s vinyl siding and I’m not especially keen on vinyl; it makes the house look like a big plastic play house. The original cedar siding looked much nicer where it wasn’t rotten and the paint wasn’t peeling away, but it was in fact rotten in several key areas and it needed painting, which was going to cost as much as new siding. Vinyl doesn’t have to be painted; just pressure-wash it every so often and it looks like new. In the end, that’s why we went with vinyl. We’re probably going to live here until the kids ship us off to assisted living, so the biggest plus is we won’t have to get the paint brushes out to get it ready for sale.

windowless

Posted on by Dave O

We had a somewhat unexpectedly big day here at our little red house: a small crew of men arrived in the early morning hours to knock the picture window out of the front of the house and replace it with a newer picture window. This was only somewhat unexpected because I actually contracted with a local business to do exactly what they did, but that was months ago, and it has taken so long to finalize the deal and get them to commit to a schedule that I frankly began to wonder if it was ever going to happen in my lifetime. Until yesterday morning.

I noticed I got a call from the contractor when I took my phone out of my pocket after I got to the office yesterday. I called them back right away — this was at about seven-thirty in the morning — and the guy who answered said something like, “I just want to make sure we’re still on for today.” And I answered, “On for today?” in the tone of voice of a person who isn’t sure exactly what he’s being asked to commit to, for the good reason that I wasn’t.

“Didn’t you get my voicemail yesterday?” he asked. “A couple of guys are going to replace your windows this morning.” When I asked what time we could expect a couple of random guys to show up at our house, he said probably between eight-thirty or nine o’clock.

“I wonder if you could hold off until I can make sure my wife is awake?” I asked, this time using the tone of voice of a person who was warning him not to wake my wife if he had any idea what was good for him.

By lucky chance, My Darling B was home from the office yesterday. Lucky, because one of us would have to be at home to let the workmen in so they could knock the old window out and install the new one. Unluckily, however, B took the day off from work so she could relax; you know, hang out in her pajamas with a hot mug of coffee and a book, which was very unlikely now that I knew big burly men were going to be hammering and drilling and tromping around in our living room. Also in our kitchen. They were going to replace the kitchen window, too.

I called B immediately after I got off the phone with the contractor, but she didn’t answer because it was seven-thirty in the morning and she would never be awake that early on a day when she does not have to get out of bed before she just naturally awakens, which normally happens any time after, say, nine o’clock, and sometimes much later. I called her again about ten minutes later and at ten-minute intervals after that until, at about twenty past eight, she finally answered. Before I could tell her much at all, she sleepily informed me a truck just dumped a pile of construction materials in our front yard. She even sent a photo of the pile to me via text message.

I quickly explained to her that several strange men would shortly ring our doorbell and ask to be let in so they could bash out the windows, and that she should probably think about gathering up the cats and sequestering them behind a closed door of one of the rooms in the house, or maybe I suggested that she put on some clothes first and then round up the cats. It’s hard to remember exactly how I conveyed to a very sleepy woman who had anticipated spending the day drinking hot coffee in the cozy comfort of her home would now have to look forward to a day of loud construction in the very rooms where she had hoped to lounge.

She was a little on the grumpy side of unhappy about this change of plans, as she had every right to be, but she managed to corral the cats and pull on some blue jeans and a sweatshirt in the few minutes she had left before the construction crew showed up. She spent most of the day barricaded in one of the bedrooms trying to stay our of their way and keep warm in a house that suddenly had a very large hole in it in the middle of winter. The hole was filled with a new window in just a few short hours, but the construction crew wasn’t done hammering and drilling until about three o’clock in the afternoon, so almost the entirety of B’s day off went down the tubes and she was still a tad grumpy by the time I returned home at five o’clock.

storm windows

Posted on by Dave O

I put the storm windows on last weekend. It’s finally too late in the year to put it off any longer. Luckily, it’s not especially hard to do. Most of the windows of Our Humble O’Bode were updated many moons ago, except for the window in the dining room, the windows around the back door, and the big picture window in the front, which is flanked by a couple of double-hung sash windows. I replaced the old windows in the dining room and around the back door years ago, so the two storm windows hung over the sash windows flanking the picture window are the only ones left. They’re part of the picture window; I don’t believe they can be replaced without replacing the picture window, too, and I never had the moxie to believe I could replace such a large window, even if I asked for help, so the picture window and its accompanying sash windows remain the last original windows in the house.

The house has settled enough over the years that the sash window on the left doesn’t fit squarely in its frame any longer. There’s a big enough gap around the window that a pretty noticeable breeze can blow through it when the storm window is not in place. Our one recliner sits in front of it and when the wind is up, whoever is seated in that chair can count on the breeze to turn pages in their book if they’re not holding on to them.

When I put the storm windows on, I tape plenty of weatherstripping around the left window, which helps a bit, but the window is so out of true now that the only solution that’s going to keep the winter winds from seeping in is a total replacement of the whole window. I’m really not looking forward to that, partly because it’s going to cost a lot of money and partly because I’m not sure we’ll be able to afford another picture window. I really like that picture window and I’d really miss it if we had to replace it with something like a row of casement windows.

smartphone

Posted on by Dave O

new smart phoneAs I mention earlier, we replaced our dumb phones with smart phones. We made up a lot of reasons that sounded good for doing this but the real reason we did it is that SMART PHONES ARE AWESOME!

The dumb phones we had were the pay-as-you-go type, which were fine for making phone calls. In fact, they were better than the land line we still have but will soon be getting rid of because the only phone calls we ever get on the land line are from telemarketers and political action committees. I’d put up with daily in-home harassment if the land line was amazingly cheap, like five bucks a year. Or, I’d be happy to continue to pay them whatever overinflated price they wanted for their very dependable service if they would guarantee that I would never receive another call from a telemarketer. I’m pretty sure that neither of those options are going to materialize in the near future, though, so we’re going to drop the land line.

We already stopped paying for the dumb phones. They were good, as I said, for making phone calls but obviously they don’t do any more than that and besides, we weren’t ever completely sure how much we were paying each month for our dumb phones. As it was somewhat inconvenient to find out too late that I couldn’t make a call because I’d forgotten to top off my account, I gave them my credit card number and said, “Here, take out ten bucks whenever I’m running a little low.” Like running a tab at the bar, I didn’t think about how much I was paying because I didn’t have to. My Darling B did the same thing. When we reviewed the costs of keeping a land line and topping up the dumb phones, though, it seemed a little silly to keep on paying that when, for a bit more, we could have SMART PHONES!

They were delivered last week Wednesday, if memory serves, and I use the word “delivered” very loosely here. The FedEx guy was supposed to drop them off after seven, which would have given us more than enough time to get home after our dinner at The Wise if he had, in fact, stuck to the plan. When we got home, though, there was a note from the FedEx guy on our door that said (paraphrasing): “I gots here at 3:30 – Where Was You?” We jumped back into the O-Mobile and burned rubber to get to the FedEx facility on the north side of town just ten minutes before they closed.

When we had dumb phones, My Darling B put a happy face sticker on hers because otherwise they looked exactly alike. Remembering this, when B ordered the smart phones she got a white phone for herself and a black phone for me. That girl’s always thinking. I don’t know how her brain doesn’t get musclebound from all the thinking she does. In case you care, she ordered the latest model, Samsung S4. All that means to me is that they’ll be obsolete in about six months, if they’re not already. That, and they’re not real. They’re science fiction, completely make-believe. Or, as Arthur C. Clarke, one of the greatest science fiction authors who ever lived, put it, they’re magic, as in “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Even Captain Kirk would have thought so. All he could do with his communicator was make phone calls. It was a dumb phone, really. He couldn’t use it to look at a map or search the ship’s computer. Spock would have killed for a smart phone. The one I’ve got beats his tricorder all to hell. It’s smaller but it’s got a bigger screen and I can tuck it in a pocket. It doesn’t hang from my neck on a leather strap. Way more handy than that boat anchor he had to carry around.

And it’s one hell of a lot smarter than Spock’s tricorder, too. Thirty seconds after I turned it on and told it my e-mail address, it knew way more about me than probably my own mother does. Our phones use the Android operating system so they’re connected to The Google, and The Google, as everybody knows, is more powerful than all the nimrod politicians in the world and probably more powerful than every branch of the military. Man, are those guys going to be surprised when they figure that out. If The Google lets them figure it out.

So probably because I have a gmail account and because I’ve been using The Google’s browser, Chrome, for a while now, my smart phone autoloaded everything The Google knew about me. My list of contacts – everyone I might call on the phone or send e-mail to – was imported from my various on-line e-mail accounts. My photo gallery – the folder of photographs in my camera-ready smartphone – was suddenly filled with all the photos I’d ever uploaded to the net. And so on and so on. This thing called “privacy” that you think you have? You can forget about it. The Google knows all about you. If you have never in your life sent an e-mail message, placed an order on-line, or used a cell phone, then I suppose it’s possible that you might have managed to evade The Google’s all-seeing gaze, but if you have ever experimentally dipped a toe into even the shallowest of social media, you are in for a shock when you activate your first smart phone.

And do you want to talk about distraction? A smart phone is literally all the distraction in the world gathered together in a package that you can hold in one hand. It has these things called “apps” that are hot buttons of one kind of distraction or another. All you have to do to be distracted is tap one. If and when the distraction of that app runs out, you can tap the next one. And you will tap the next one. You will keep on tapping the next one until you fall asleep sitting up, and when your head hits the table, waking you up, you will tap the next app to be distracted some more, because going to sleep is boring but a distraction is, well, distracting. You will not notice you’re tired. You would not notice conquering armies invading your city. Not that I’m suggesting smart phones could be part of an elaborate conspiracy to keep tabs on us while distracting us from the coming subjugation of an invading army. In fact, I’d like to go on record as saying that even if this were a thing, I for one welcome subjugation as long as I get to keep my apps. How bad could that be?

two trips

Posted on by Dave O

Wow I hate going to the hardware store twice. I don’t mind going once but that hardly ever happens. I almost always have to go twice. It’s like a physical law of the universe. When I’m working on something that I’ve never worked on before, I have to go get the parts to start working, then I have to go back to get the parts I didn’t know I needed the first time. When I’m working on something I’ve worked on before, I have to go get the stuff I need to start working, then I have to go back to get the stuff I forgot to get the first time, even when I make a list.

Then there was last weekend. All I needed were two slabs of plywood and a pair of already-built racks. I was throwing up some shelves in the basement and they were going to be the most basic shelves ever: Rip the plywood into two-by-four boards for shelves, fasten some cleats on the racks, screw it all together. I already had the screws, and I had lots of scrap wood to use as cleats. That’s it. Done. I was sure there couldn’t possibly be anything in a plan as simple as that to make me go back to the store for something I forgot, or didn’t know I needed. Sure of it. What a dope.

After picking up and putting away all the tools that were scattered across the top of the outfeed table that doubles as a work bench, I grabbed the first slab of plywood and, as I was maneuvering it into position to make the first cut, noticed that in one corner of the slab the plys had come apart, as if they hadn’t been glued together properly. The plan I had for building the shelves was simple, but I needed every square inch of that plywood to make it happen, and I couldn’t use plywood that was de-laminating. I would have to take it back for an exchange. There was no way around it. But first, I had to cuss a lot.

Once I got that out of my system and loaded the plywood into the car, I made a quick list of all the supplies I needed to make another batch of beer later this week. If I was going all the way back out to the far side of town, I might as well. Two quick stops, one at the grocery store and one at Brew & Grow, and I had everything I needed. Brewing beer never seems to require two trips to get more supplies.

Then back to the hardware store. There was just one guy working the returns counter, and the people he was helping at the front of the line were returning about a dozen boxes of ceramic floor tiles and all the cement and grouting they would have needed to lay that flooring. They seemed to be in the process of opening every single box of tiles so the guy behind the counter could scan the price tag of each and every tile. The rest of the seven or eight people in line ahead of me each had just one item to return. On the up side, my piece of plywood was large enough to lean on.

I got to lean on it for only fifteen minutes or so. Thought it was going to be a lot longer than that, but after ten minutes or so passed, the return-counter guy must’ve stopped scanning floor tiles long enough to call for help, because two other people joined him at the counter, cranked up a couple of cash registers and started waving people at the head of the line over to get their returns.

One of the first people that got waved over was a guy pushing a shopping cart with a boxed tool set and a little girl in the rumble seat. When the guy took the box out and set it on the counter, the little girl stood up in the seat to get a better look at what was going on over daddy’s shoulder. She got bored with that pretty quickly, though, so she turned around to see what else was going on, and she liked the view so much that she kept turning around. Then she did a little dance. Then she seemed to want to sit down again, but it was a feint; she jumped up and began to dance again. I could tell who the parents were in the line ahead of me: Their eyes were locked on the little girl and kept almost-stepping forward, wanting to grab her and sit her down so she wouldn’t fall out of that goddamned seat.

The lady at the cash register took one look at the piece of ply I had and said I could go get another piece and bring it back, requiring me to make the trek from the exchange counter in the front corner of the store to the opposite corner in the back of the store, then trek all the way back to the return counter to exchange it. Have I mentioned lately how much I hate the enormous size of the newly-remodeled hardware store?

Once my second trip to the store was over and done with, I could get down to the business of building those shelves. And it was every bit as simple as I had planned it: Rip the plywood into shelves, attach cleats to the racks, screw the shelves in place. Took about an hour and a half, although I took a break for lunch right about in the middle of the project. It would’ve been done before lunch if I hadn’t had to make that second trip.

paint rules

Posted on by Dave O

The first rule of painting a room is: Cover the floor. Your superpower is not painting without drippage. You will drip. Even if you could be as careful as you think you are, nobody has the intensity to be that careful for the hours and hours it takes to paint a room. You are going to drip. A lot. Cover the floor.

And I know I said this before, but it bears repeating: There’s a reason that some paint costs ten bucks a gallon and some costs forty dollars a gallon. If you go for the cheap stuff, you’ll have to slap on four times as much paint. You don’t think you will. You think you can lay it on thick enough the first time that it will cover any color, even traffic orange, but you’re wrong. Put a crowbar in your wallet and buy the expensive stuff. You can’t go wrong with that, but you can go way wrong with the cheap stuff.

Our bathroom used to have bright blue walls but the paint faded and grew splotchy in places. We’ve been thinking about painting it, which means that My Darling B was thinking about it and I was going to do it. Well, about two weeks ago I finally got up the motivation to schlep my hinder down to the hardware store to buy a can of paint. That’s when I bought the cheap paint. I slapped on two coats of that crap as thick as I could lay it down but the blue paint underneath still proudly showed through, bright as a neon sign.

So last week I schlepped myself down to the hardware store again to buy a bucket of the most expensive interior paint they had in stock. Easier said than done. There was no one at the desk when I got there and, no matter how long I hung around looking impatient, there continued to be nobody at the desk. Eventually I headed down the aisle to the desk where they sold window blinds to ask the guy there if he thought he could find someone to help me out in the paint department. He put a call out over the PA. Five minutes passed. Another member of the “Customer Courtesy Team” wandered past and asked me if I was being helped. “Not yet,” I answered, with what I hoped was a patient smile on my face. Another page went out over the PA, and several more minutes passed.

Finally, a gal identified by her badge as Katie P dragged herself in behind the desk. “Help you,” she sort of asked. Her attitude was Surly Teenager but she appeared to be a nearly full-grown adult. I pushed the bucket of paint I had across the desk toward her and handed over the paint chip I’d picked out. She took the bucket and the chip from me without a word, mixed the paint and stuck it in the paint shaker, then went to help the next person. She literally never spoke to me after those first two words. And yes, she was wearing a blue “Customer Courtesy Team” vest.

Back at home I scrounged a pan and a paint roller out of the stack of supplies in the garage. There’s a reason we keep this stuff, although I could tell from the color of the residual paint in the pan that I hadn’t used it since about 1997 or 98 when I painted the interior of our bedroom in the last house we owned in Aurora, Colorado. I still miss that house.

The expensive paint didn’t cover the bright blue paint in one coat. By this time I was pretty sure that a bucket of black driveway sealer wouldn’t do that. But it looked a hell of a lot better than the cheap stuff, and after the second coat went on the walls were pretty enough for company again. I have an “after” photo but I can’t figure out how to get it off my camera, so you’ll just have to imagine our bathroom with walls painted beautifully in antique white.

I’ll tell you the story about the furshlugginer camera later.