Floor Removal
This is the result of four or five hours’ work pulling up a layer of linoleum, a layer of luuan, another layer of linoleum, and finally a layer of tarpaper on top of perfectly good Georgia pine.
Kitchen floor, mid demolition.
Here’s the kitchen floor after two layers of crud came up. Note the lovely tarpaper and gunk on the otherwise untouched and remarkably intact hardwood.
Walking In My Sleep.
Well, the weekend went off pretty much as planned, and I am dragging ass today (as expected.)
Friday night was exactly what I needed. We met up with the gang at the bar in Birches (strangely enough, the same bar we shared farewell drinks at six years ago when they left town) and caught up over a delicious dinner in a mostly deserted restaurant. The entire Yuppie population of Canton must have left for the beach or something, because parking spots and empty barstools were easy to find. After dinner, we headed over to Lulu’s to meet up with another bunch of friends, and despite all the best intentions, stayed to shut the place down. Frankly, we could have stayed for another two or three hours, as we’re friends with the owners, but when the magic number hit 3 we wisely bid goodnight and crawled back to the County for some sleep.
I can’t describe how good it felt to sit and talk with old friends again. In the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that my personal social barometer rises and falls like a pogo stick: I get intensely antisocial for periods of time, and then binge on groups of people. I don;t know why this is, other than the simple fact that I’m busy and lazy and have nobody else to blame but myself. I have to keep up with my own 2005 resolution to stay in contact with everybody as much as possible.
Saturday we decided to attack the floor in the kitchen, and so we began demolition in earnest. The first layer of linoleum came up pretty easily. The Luuan underneath (very thin, very jagged plywood) came up pretty easily too, even though it was installed with a million ring shank flooring nails. The third layer, another coating of linoleum, is a different story. At some point, some idiot decided that using tarpaper as an underlayment for linoleum was a great idea. About half of the tarpaper is so brittle with age that it’s relatively easy to remove. The other half is next to impossible to budge. I tried two different kinds of citrus-based gel stripper with disappointing results, and the heat gun just made this smell worse. It’s looking like the kitchen floor will not be included in the upcoming refinishing job, unless the contractors have some kind of magical suggestion that I can pull off in a week.
Update: There is no magic bullet. Unless I can clean it up by Monday, we’re waiting on the kitchen until we get back from Ireland.
Otherwise, the weekend was full of success. Our vegetables are growing and blooming rapidly—We have tomato plants that are almost four feet high. Jen’s perennial bed is growing out of control. Our cherry tree is loaded with almost-ripe fruit. The rose bush under our dining room window is covered in blooms this weekend. Our gladiolus bulbs are six inches high. The peonies in the front yard are blooming and fragrant. Everything seems to be ready for summer.
And I want to go back to sleep.
East Coast vs. West Coast.
This evening we’ve got some old friends from the Left Coast jetting into town to attend the wedding of a fellow MICA graduate. Having Matt and Soph in town is always an occasion for late nights, excessive drinking, and monumental hangovers, as well as an excellent time. It’s a shame that, given our current lifestyle and schedule, it takes a visit from out of town to show us how much fun our humble city can be sometimes. We have reservations at Birches in Canton (aaaah, the old neighbahood) at 7:30, which should give us enough time to get home, get fabulous (when you have peeps from San Francisco in town, you have to represent, so I’ll be putting in my gold teefs) and get into Canton to hunt for a parking spot, which will probably be as easy as delivering a baby while water-skiing.
We also have a standing invitation to join our friends Rob and Karean for a party on the river in Annapolis on Sunday, which will have to be considered carefully, given our full schedule. I have plans to rip the floor out of the kitchen that morning, so any festivities will be predicated on our success in there, but I could really deal with an afternoon away from the house with my baby.
Bad Technology.
I had the misfortune of test-driving a wireless Bluetooth mouse this morning, and the experience left me huddled under the desk, twitching. Ok, maybe not that bad. Ever shared a cellphone conversation with somebody on the West Coast where each of you is continually talking over the other person? The lag time is just enough that the ordinary human pause-before-speaking is offset so that you’re both starting a sentence at the same time?
That would be a wireless mouse. I’m enough of a tactile being that any lagtime between my hand and the tool I’m working on is absolutely infuriating; Wacom tablets, some new-fangled laser mouses, and old graphics-intensive operating systems (OSX 10.1.X comes to mind) all tend to drive me crazy. Coming from a drawing/illustration/contracting background, I like precise control over the mouse. Anything slower or sloppier just doesn’t cut it.
This mouse was slow and imprecise—adjustments of a pixel or two were next to impossible, which is unacceptable for my profession. I’ll stick with my Pro Mouse, thank you very much.
Low Notes.
I love classifieds. I’m sort of addicted to them. My wife will tell you that I look at the Pennysaver religiously every Thursday. I scan the DC/Baltimore Craigslist every day for…stuff, stuff I can’t afford but sure would like. I had a brief dream of buying my bride a used Miata for an anniversary present (you laugh, but they’re pretty cheap) until I remembered that the Ireland trip is still being paid off and a new bed is much more important.
Yesterday, I found an ad for a $700 used 3/4 upright bass. I played upright bass for about ten years and put it down when I went to college, always hoping I’d be able to pick another one up someday. This morning, I went out and took a look at it, hoping for some reason not to want to buy it. I picked it up, felt the familiar balance and weight, and years of practice came back to me. It looked pretty good; it had a nice deep tone. The action was good; the strings felt like they had life, and the fingerboard was pretty smooth. Closer inspection revealed a cracked neck at the top of the body (it looked like it had split clean through, and the owner told me it had been repaired with a steel rod by a luthier in Annapolis) and a bunch of chips around the edges. There were two bows, both German (a good sign) and they felt pretty good, if not bent a little too much.
I’m really having a hard time knowing what to do here; I’d offer $550 for the whole thing, knowing the neck is split, but I’m having a hard time justifying the cost when we have so much other stuff going on. Plus, I have an electric bass that I don’t get to play at all, given my current schedule.
I hate classifieds.
Personal Tastes, or: Your Music Sucks.
A couple of years ago, I bought some used iMacs from a guy who, in hindsight, probably pinched them off a truck somewhere. The deal was great, and based on some fortuitous timing, I resold one and recouped the cost of all three. Having an extra machine to tinker with was good, and I put it to work as a music server and low-cost backup for my MP3 collection. I wound up bringing it to work and quietly advised some friends to download a copy of iTunes and take advantage of the library streaming feature.
Since that time, our company has grown to the point where there are twice as many employees, and word of my music collection leaked out. At one point, I was organizing a group of fellow music lovers to buy a used server and consolidate our assorted collections into one big library, but as the number of people expanded and the RIAA got more litigious, I decided to back away from the idea. (Dear corporate lawyers: I’m above board, and I don’t fileshare.)
These days, an interesting phenomena has occurred: new iTunes libraries are popping up inside the company. Some days there are as many as seven or eight, but usually we average about five. There are some gems in there, like the collection of Lewis Black recordings, or the guy that has seven Charlie Parker albums I haven’t heard, or the Metallica back catalog, or those killer Stevie Ray Vaughan bootlegs. But mostly, it’s one or two Pink songs, follwed by the entire Final Fantasy catalog (apparently there is one guy who only writes music for these stupid games), and then some band called Finger Eleven. New rule: your band immediately sucks if you have a number in the name. Three Doors Down. Third Eye Blind. Seven Mary Three. Eve 6. Echo7. These names tell me that the major music labels have a computer program that spits out dumb generic names, like the Pentagon’s “Operation” namer. Also, Linkin Park just sucks, and no amount of whining by that annoying lead singer guy will convince me otherwise.
I do wish people would name their tracks something other than “TRACK_1″, though. Spending some quality time being anal about metadata would be helpful, so I could make an informed choice about listening to a collection of Manga soundtracks or Bible chapters or muddy Evanescence live recordings. (No, no, and definitely not.) I suppose not everybody is as obsessive-compulsive about this as me, but I’m proud of the fact that 98% of the stuff I’ve got is correctly tagged so that searching provides useable results.
It’s funny, though, to see the variations in collections throughout the company. Scrolling through the lists yields the odd REO Speedwagon tune you hoped you’d forgotten, or a block of the Monkees, or a mislabeled Johnny Cash tune, or half the Footloose Soundtrack, or a whole library of hair metal.
Good times.
Kitchen Floor, Beginning
Here’s what the kitchen floor started out as, in May of 2005. (That’s right, I tore the floor up in the end of May, and we’re just now getting the tarpaper off.)
The Marathon.
I’d better find a way to sleep on my lunch break, because the next three weeks are going to be brutal. We have the following events scheduled for the days leading up to our trip to Ireland:
- Having the first floor sanded, which will take four days and require
- Removing the floor-standing cabinets, sink, and stove from the kitchen in order to
- Pull up two layers of linoleum down to the bare wood beneath.
- Oh, and move all our furniture out onto the front porch, don’t forget that.
- Then, there’s travelling by plane to North Carolina the weekend before our overseas trip for the Lockard Reunion, and
- Somehow fit life, freelance, and a few beers in between.
We are doomed.
Graduate.
This weekend Jen’s sister Christi graduated from U of M, and we hosted 4/5 of the family in Catonsville. Saturday Jen spent the day retrieving people from airports while I attempted to mow the front half of the lawn before it grew higher than our roofline. We took everybody out to the Ship’s Ahoy (our local dive-bar-turned-respectable-restaurant) for crabs, something everybody wasn’t really sure they were in the mood for until the lady dumped two dozen steaming hot 38′s on the table. We had a great time sitting around and catching up with everybody over what turned out to be too many beers (our bar tab equalled or exceeded the food bill) and returned to the house to accidentally call Jen’s Dad and share our anniversary cake. I have pictures of all of this, but they’re stuck on my phone.
Just for the record, the bakers got the cake wrong again for the second time. (They offer a complimentary one-year anniversary cake free of charge so you don’t have to keep the dregs of your actual wedding cake in the freezer, which is a nice idea.) We were not amused. Almond, DAMMIT!
Sunday there was much driving. And sitting. And waiting. Speeches were given, asses were numb, and Christi walked across the stage. We hooted and hollered, and took blurry pictures, and then waited through more speeches to leave.
Congratulations, Christi!
Tiny Apartments
Small Cool Apartments
I’ll never look at 250 sq. feet the same way again. And I thought 3000 sq. ft. was getting small…
One Year.
One year ago today, I woke up a bachelor for the last time in my life. One year ago today, I promised to love, honor, and cherish one special woman. One year later, I still can’t believe how lucky I got.
My Governor is a Douchebag.
My Governor is a Douchebag.
Health benefits for all vs. 380 jobs. Great choice, you whore.
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