august 2006
august 31 2006 00:45 pdt right now i'm listening to this. (careful if you click, it's 40 minutes and 70 MB of copyright violation. no i'm not hosting, but i am linking... does that make me a pirate too?)
yes, it causes some cognitive dissonance, but then that and opposable thumbs is all that sets us apart from the chimps.
i find it amusing that scientific research, acamdemic scholarship, and the foundations of legal theory are all based on the idea that one person can freely quote from the works of another as long as appropriate credit is given... but if we're talking about music, the current standard is that you have to clear the samples in advance. it's almost as if the people who earn money from making music want to ensure that we don't take their business seriously.
august 31 2006 00:26 pdt two days ago, i let the cat outside in the back yard. she ate a bunch of grass, and then she threw up on the concrete patio. then she went back inside. i stopped watching. she barfed again on the new floors, and i heard her do it, and i RAN INSIDE and grabbed her and threw her back into the yard again. then i grabbed the handiest cleaner (areosol pledge) and some paper towels and did my best to clean up the mess.
the next morning, i stepped on the pledge-slick spot on the floor and almost went ass-over-teakettle. i was holding an empty coffee mug in my right hand, and in my urgent desire to keep myself upright, i dropped the cup and grabbed wall. the mug fell on its handle and the handle broke into several pieces.
tonight, i bought some crazy glue and repaired the handle. the cat is forgiven. tomorrow morning i'll get to see if the damage is undone.
august 27 2006 15:57 pdt remember. in javascript, linebreaks matter.
august 14 2006 22:15 pdt the truly sad thing is that eventually we'll have to put furniture on it.
august 14 2006 17:40 pdt we finished the deck today. i'm thinking about washing the car to celebrate.
august 14 2006 00:19 pdt only twenty-eight inches to go. my whole body is sore from bending at the waist to hit little pieces of wood with a big hammer. i want to sleep for a week... but we're still not done.
one of these days, we might even unpack the rest of the boxes in the garage.
but seriously. we're going to finish the deck tomorrow, and return the tools, and move on to other things. sure, there is a (roughly) 3/8" (irregular) gap around the outside of the floor, but it's not like one of us is going to fall into it and die there. sooner or later we'll cover it up with something- and if we don't, it will fill up with cat hair and all will be right with the world.
august 12 2006 00:12 pdt so tired. so very tired. but we finally started to put down the new floor today, and it looks great so far. i can't wait to move on from the hallway to the other rooms in the house- it's going to make the place look so much lighter and more modern.
we did a pretty good job installing the subfloor. the 4x8 sheets were easy, but cutting the pieces for the edges and holes for the ventilation was kind of a pain. cutting to fit the fireplace was also a pain, becuase the wall isn't precisely square behind it, so one side needed to be slightly longer than the other.
we've been lucky so far. nothing totally insurmountable has come up yet, although the particle -> plywood transition was a pretty significant scope creep. if we had ignored the directions and online advice, or if we'd just been ignorant and plunged ahead, we might have been nailing floor down a couple of days ago... but then in six months, maybe it would have started to come apart becuase the nails wouldn't hold and hey presto there's $1500 down the drain. so i think we did the right thing for the long term. this floor is going to be bombproof, and if we're lucky, we might even finish the majority of it tomorrow before the rental tools are due back to the shop.
of course, now that we know what a pain in the ass it is to do a project like this, we'll never ever ever attempt anything like it again.
august 10 2006 9:48 pdt home improvements continue apace. today we're going to finish ripping out the particle board that was under the carpet, and we'll make a trip to buy plywood and rent tools to put it all back together again.
august 7 2006 1:09 pdt hooray, finally dsl that stays up for more than an hour at a time. not sure what exactly turned the trick, but i have all kinds of stuff plugged into my old linksys wireless router, and it seems to be working just fine.
of course, along with all the convenience of fast internet comes all the responsibility i've shirked in the last week becuase i couldn't be engaged.
plus, in terms of home improvement, we've already bitten off more than either one of us planned to chew on. it's very liberating. now i know that angus can in fact haul 1000 pounds of crap in the back without totally bottoming out the shocks. not that i'd care to repeat the experience any time soon, but there you go.
august 4 2006 9:16 pdt yesterday was challenging. i was more angry at UPS than I was at qwest, because ups delivered a package to the old address instead of the new one, and in the package was my dsl modem for qwest internet. that was until the qwest service guy told me i could go to bestbuy and just purchase a dsl modem, instead of waiting for ups to get their wires uncrossed. so i went and paid $70 (!! wtf, that's about $60 too much by my count, but what do i know) for a brand-new actiontec dsl modem, in anticipation that it would allow me to connect up, 3 days after i was supposed to have service here.
of course it didn't work. the modem seems to be fine. qwest hasn't provisioned service on my line. so now it's 4 days after i've started paying for service, and they still haven't started to deliver it. if they can't fix it by the end of the day today, we're going to just cut our losses and go with comcast.
i was all excited to be a qwest customer, after what i'd heard about their unwillingness to roll over for the thugs from the nsa. now i'm inclined to think it was a decision based on organizational disfunction rather than any desire to serve the customer before the government.
