The fun of home remodeling

With a house that turned 115 years old this year, it is inevitable that there will be the need for repairs and remodeling. This year we ended up going (relatively) big on that front.

For years we mulled over what to do with our enclosed three-season porch. It had windows in it from the 1940s or earlier. The foundation was sinking and the fact that it sits (sat) at the front of our home made the rest of the large, white rectangular house look rather shitty.

This year, though, we pulled the trigger and  started assembling the materials we would need to basically tear down all but the roof of the old porch and rebuild it from the ground up. I scored a truckload of clearance vinyl windows from Menards. My parents had a truckload of 2x4s, 2x6s and plywood from a temporary wall liner they had built many years ago in their machine shed to store a bumper crop of corn. The rest, though, came from an extensive and ever-changing plan and a few trips to Menards. Another truckload of insulation, plywood, a door and dimensional lumber would build the bulk of the structure.

After an entire day of digging by hand and swinging sledgehammers inside relatively confined holes we were ready to pour the concrete pads on which the 6x6 posts would sit and provide the support for the new structure.

Next up was removing the existing walls and floor while propping up the existing roof at the same time. The construction of the new floor went surprisingly fast and so did boxing in the underside of the new floor joists with treated plywood so the new floor could be insulated. Along with these steps came wiring for an exterior light on the front of the new porch and running yet more wire for the eventual installation of electric baseboard heat.

Insulation went into the existing ceiling and the 1940s-era beadboard went back up. The home's first housewrap went on making this new piece of construction the best built piece of the house yet. Windows were installed and made weatherproof on the exterior. Vapor barrier went on after I insulated the walls and next up was the drywall.

On the exterior we installed new Cedar siding and sleek new trim harkening back to the simplicity of the original house built in 1899. I even went the extra mile and matched the existing wood drip cap installed above the rim board on the original house making the new porch look like a well-maintained original piece of the house.

The lengthiest portion of this project, though, has been painting. This 20-foot tall two-story home has a ton of surface area and trim. Using a total of three colors maintains the character but makes painting a straight up pain in the ass. While the wife tackles what she can from the ground and using a step ladder or two, I perilously cling to my trusty extension ladder and paint the upper story of the home's siding, soffits and window trim. And with changing the colors from white (siding) and blue and red/pink (window trim), much of the house requires two coats of paint. Having already gone through 13 gallons of paint and a trip to Menards for another gallon or two, the paint alone is costing us a small fortune.

With most of the garage left to paint, the two way-too-high-up dormers, hardwood floors to install and stain, a ton of interior window trim to cut, paint and install and new front steps to build; this project seems to have no end. I look forward to working on projects like this because it's not a part of my day job but I am looking forward to seeing the end of this one because after two-plus months, I just want to experience some summer weather that doesn't involve me on a ladder until 9 PM every night of the week.

Reverb10 - Future Self

December 21 – Future Self. Imagine yourself five years from now. What advice would you give your current self for the year ahead?

Hey, so you turn 32 years old this year. You may think that's old but I'm turning 37 and, you know what, that's almost 40 so quit your bitching. Yeah, your knees are in worse shape now than they were back in 2011 but that's because you still insist on doing some pretty stupid shit. A word of advice, replace the gutters on your house and do it right because that little incident way back in 2008 when you insisted on crab walking along half of your roof line with a small garden trowel in hand to clean the leaves, seeds, branches, gravel and other assorted crap out of them was flat out stupid. You do realize how high up your roof is and that your driveway isn't made of feathers, right?

Don't worry about going gray or having thinning or even balding hair. Trust me, in the next five years you barely add to your rather distinguished collection of gray hairs so quit asking our wife to pluck them with that damn tweasers. She hates it and it makes a terrible fucking mess and we both know how little you like cleaning.

And another thing, quit fretting about your job. The powers that be, even though it doesn't seem like it to you in 2010, recognize you as one of the cornerstones of the company. Even though you see no possibility of moving up -- and instead view your only hope of advancement as moving out -- there is hope. All that crap you're struggling with in your down time will lead to that move up you've been looking for. It's actually going to be pretty big so that place in the country you're always half-joking about will happen. It also seems that you were serious about having an orchard of sorts because the amount of pears, apples, grapes, blueberries and other fruit you sell and give away is pretty astounding. And that stuff you give away finally shows yourself that you have a heart because that fresh produce helps alot of people and keeps plenty of families from going hungry. You don't have to worry about looking greedy because for everything you think you've been handed without working hard enough for, you are now working harder than ever and end the days feeling exhausted but also fulfilled.

Lastly, stop thinking of yourself as a nomad. Those neighbors you have in 2010 will make some damn good friends and even though you do, in fact, move again a few years later it isn't very far and with that place in the country you find yourself doing alot more entertaining and mixing old and new friends will prove to be easy as, amazingly, they all just get along and actually have shared interests.

Just keep your chin up. That hard work will pay off and don't let the downfalls hold you back. Every mistake will actually propel you forward and teach you something. Vague, right?

Reverb10: Make

December 6 – Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it? (Author: Gretchen Rubin)

Building and creating things with my own two hands is something I love to do. (At least that's what I get out of today's prompt) It keeps me from being technology fatigued in my daily life as a graphic designer and keeps me tied to my roots growing up on the family farm. In 2008 I built a rather impressive swing/play set for my then six month old daughter using a large truck load of lumber, a circular saw and two drills. The amazing thing is that it only took me about twelve hours of my own time and some help from my next door neighbor to move the large tower in to place.

My next project -- in terms of construction -- is to reconstruct my 111 year-old home's front porch. It looks to have been added in the late 1940s or early 1950s -- around the same time as the rear addition of the house and is showing its age. I hope to make it a more livable space as it is currently only usable from late April through early October. It sat mostly unused for the first few years of owning the house but has since become my daughter's favorite place to play while still indoors. At two years old, her toys have become a fixture in the porch -- sharing space with some porch-worthy furniture.

I want this space to be an almost four-season space. New, better-insulated windows, insulation in the ceiling, walls and floor; not to mention a better, more solid foundation, inviting front steps and a period-appropriate front door. It is the one thing most lacking about the home's exterior and I can envision actually using it. Whether it's playing there more often with my daughter, working on the laptop as birds chirp just outside the windows or watching snow fall as we sit, as a family, playing some simple board game. This project will be my largest yet but I know it will happen in the next two years. That's my goal and my goals happen.

The battle of the leaves

Fall is a pretty kick-ass season. The air is crisp. The stores are full of costumes - some especially scandalous ones for the ladies. The colors seem more vibrant. And the leaves are falling. For the past five or six years I've had a love-hate relationship with those falling leaves. For the first couple years I simp ly chopped the hell ot ouf them with my shitty old lawn mower and let things be. Then the third year of owning our house the fallen leaves seemed thicker than usual. I raked them that year and haphazardly composted them in my garden. The fourth year I had my shiny new lawnmower complete with a bagger and after using it in mulcher mode a couple of times I bagged most everything from my front yard the final few mowings.

Then this year happened. Despite my pre-planning consisting of bagging my front lawn beginning back in early September when the go-getters decided to hit the ground, I hit a thick leafy wall by the last week of Sepember.

I mulched, bagged and raked all in the course of one week but with only a tiny percentage of the leave having fallen I knew I was fucked and threw in the towel.

I've now gone about two weeks without mowing my front yard but my old lady, full of good intentions, raked things up midway through last week. That progress was quickly covered by another thick blanket of fallen leaves. Sure, they made for a kick-ass playground last weekend for the daughter but with nicely manicured lawns all around my home, I realized last night that those fucking leaves had to go.

Below is the situation I was greeted with when I arrived home from the local coal mine last night.
Before the supper bell rang I had corralled this massive pile of leaves and nearly broken my rake no less than 15 times but had only reached the front portion of my narrow side yard. Combine the hefty weight load of a yard full of leaves and a child insistent on playing in this fucking huge pile of leaves and what you are left with is one tired guy.
But I wasn't done. I was determined to land this hugetastic mountain of annoying leaves in the far back corner of my yard and eventually compact them in to my compost bin and be done with the most annoying part of fall. This battle would be won if it killed me but I WOULD finish it by 7 PM because I get cranky if I miss my stories.

To wrap up this story before you slip in to a coma, the leaves lost their battle. Their fallen brothers and sisters lie scattered across the front, side and back yards but the majority of their colorful army of leaves are messily piled in a massive mountain in the back yard alongside the daughter's swing set. Mark my words: the leave swill rue the day they fell on my lawn and they will become rich, black compost because I own them. I own those leaves.

How I almost earned a Darwin Award

I spent last Sunday tidying up the outside of my house. It wasn't exactly the way anyone would like to spend their Sunday afternoon but some things just need to be done. Those menial tasks involved transplanting a few perennials, pulling crap from various landscaped areas which were missed last fall and standing on my new extension ladder for nearly two hours as I scrubbed a couple years of accumulated dirt from the upper reaches of the siding of my house.

Not dead yet, I turned my attention to the front yard. There was a branch in one of my Maple trees which had beed dead since we moved in to the house five years ago. Determined to get rid of this eyesore, I grabbed my trusty ten-dollar bow saw and proceeded to saw away at the approximately 8 inch diameter branch. Standing on the next to the top step of my step ladder, this act alone should have earned mea t least consideration for a Darwin Award.

Not satisfied with my own stupidity, I took it a step further. After sawing through approximately 90 percent of the branch's girth, I, with the aide of my old lady watching from the safety of the porch, decided that some sort of makeshift pulley system would be wise. After all, I had seen actual professional tree trimmers do just that - how hard could it be?

Turns out that two tie-downs I bought a while back makes a damn good pulley system. It also turns out that there wasn't enough space in the crotch of that tree to make a relief cut so my saw wouldn't bind up and get stuck before cutting enough.

That's when my old lady yelled for me to tug on the tie-downs and just snap what was remaining of the branch and move on so she could collect my life insurance and go on to really live her life. The tugging on the tie-downs actually worked. What didn't work was the somewhat short overall length of them. Sure, they reached the ground but there wasn't enough length for me to actually lower the branch. So now with the branch snapped free from the tree, I had to hold it via the makeshift pulley system while climbing the extension ladder I had wisely repositioned earlier. It turns out that one additional arm would have been nice but in the end I lived to write this. Sure, my old lady didn't collect on my life insurance policy but spring has barely begun - there will be plenty of additional opportunities for me to off myself.

But hopefully I live to keep finding awesome photos of Minnesota for MinnPics!

Purging is a lot of work

I'm doing something I haven't done in quite some time. Purge. No, not in the "I have an eating disorder way". I am purging myself of stuff.

If you asked me five years ago if I ever thought I'd see this house which we had just purchased feeling rather full, I would have said "No" and left it at that. But that's just what has happened. It took five years and I'm pretty sure that adding a kid over a year ago played a big part in it but we've managed to make this house which seemed rather huge - 2,100 sq. ft. plus a basement adding just over 1,000 sq. ft. - feel rather tiny. Maybe it's just because it feels very much "live in".

We have stuff in every closet. As I sit in the office, which doubles as an art studio, I can see with the open closet shelves from floor to ceiling nearly completely full of boxes. I've deemed the contents of each of those boxes necessary at some point in time but I'm sure if I could sort through them during this busy week I'd be left with an overflowing garbage can and some more space.

Some of the stuff is just stored away. It's stuff we've used in the past and may very well use again. We are slowly accumulating clothes that the rapidly growing little lady of the house doesn't fit in to any longer and just in case we'd need them down the road, we have them. Of course on the flip side, I found the old mirror from our pre-remodel bathroom stuffed away in the same closet which was home to a nicely framed Ferarri poster I accumulated during a tour of some printing company in the Twin Cities when I was in college. Those items will be curbside as soon as possible.

It's that never ending battle of deciding what is worth saving and what has served its purpose that we must all fight or risk becoming an episode of "Hoarders". I've seen what living life attached to possessions far beyond their usefulness is like. I helped that couple move last summer from a 2-bedroom apartment to a five bedroom house. All their crap, and most of it was just that, didn't even fit in the house. They still can't use most of their garage because if they bought it, there must be a purpose for it and they'll surely need it - eventually.

But I won't live that way. I've been busy, using free minutes here and there, shredding old papers from my hulking filing cabinet. It's step one in my purge. When the weather thaws the shed out back gets the same treatment and if the couch keeps misbehaving it, too, could very well end up curbside on spring cleanup day. Am I alone in this process of heavy purging from time to time or do most people do light purging more frequently? Is it a yearly thing or have I let things - mainly my filing of documents - go three years too long?

Or should I just close the door and focus on updating MinnPics? I think we all know the answer to that. People would much rather look at the pretty pictures of Minnesota than read this drivel!

The fire department should fix my water heater

Late Saturday morning I noticed a couple fire trucks on the move. This usually happens only when they have an actual fire to tend to. I assumed that some dumbass sat a space heater next to a towering stack of newspapers and headed outside dressed entirely in Carrhart clothing to walk their six giant dogs. It seems like the type of redneck behavior that would lead to fire trucks having to be dispatched.

Thinking nothing of it, because my house was not smoldering, I loaded up the Toyota crossover and took the child and my old lady to the grocery store because that's about all the excitement someone of my advanced age can handle before noon on a Saturday. After buying about fifteen pounds of meat and getting the child a McMeal we arrived back home.

I had frozen goods to put away and headed down the basement steps to throw some crap in the chest freezer and heard what sounded to be a faucet running at a fairly decent pace. Except it wasn't a faucet and it wasn't exactly headed towards the floor drain. Water was streaming out of the relief pipe of my water heater and running across the floor - finding its own way to nowhere.

Stumped as to what was happening, I did the only logical thing and called my dad. Of course he knew what the likely problem was and posed a solution which lead to me making a trip to the hardware store. And of course the hardware store was out of relief valves for water heaters because - wait for it - about half a dozen other residents from my neighborhood had run in to the same problem. This was all because the fire department - and two others from neighboring cities - filled their tanker trucks numerous times. But this was not for an emergency fire. No, this was for a controlled burn used for training purposes. A controlled burn which blew out relief valves on numerous water heaters and even destroyed a neighbor's water softener.

I support the volunteer firefighters in my city but use a little common sense next time because even now that I can easily fix that portion of my water heater, it doesn't mean that I want to fix it again.

If you like supporting good causes, check out MinnPics. I don't make a dime from it but I keep doing it because photos are art and I love both art and photography.

2010 goals - part 2

Each year, just as the year begins all full of promise and hope, people feel the need to make New Year's resolutions that will only be dashed in mere days instantly bringing the stench of disappointment and failure just days after that relatively clean slate. I admit that I've done the whole New Year's resolution bit before. Just last year I resolved to exercise daily - even if it involves as few as fifty sit-ups. While it wasn't a complete failure - and it got me back in to jogging during the summer months a few times each week - I didn't exactly end the year with washboard abs but it did make me much more aware of the fact that even brief vigorous exercise can shake off the day's worries and make you feel new again.

So this year I have become more realistic in my goals and resolutions for the new year.

Again, I'm vowing to exercise more regularly. It's far cheaper to exercise than to buy new jeans after packing on a couple additional inches. It makes sense due to the fact that I have the running shoes (barely used) sitting in the closet and that our bikes barely made it out of the storage shed last year. Sure, the whole lack of biking was due to a very young youngster but she's getting bigger and is practically begging to get her sticky little hands on one of those fancy bike trailers so she can get pulled around town. Of course the fancy bike trailer will be more bike trailer than fancy. Let's keep things in perspective - dad doesn't crap gold bricks.

My second goal is to work more on improving the exterior appearance of our now-111 year-old house. The porch is a thorn in my side as I hate the shitty old windows and its somewhat settled foundation giving it an unsightly slope. It's not the most noticeable to passers-by but I know it's there and it's very obvious given that the windows on its ends barely open due to the slope it's taken on over the years. Something tells me that the foundation simply sits on the ground lacking footings. All told, it's probably better (but more labor intensive & somewhat more costly) to tear the sumbich completely off and start from scratch. My parents have graciously donated the bulk of the lumber I'll need which leaves me with concrete, shingles, rubber roof membrane, a door, insulation and 15 windows. The windows are what will financially rape us. That's approaching $2,000 with that alone. Ouch. But if all works out today for my old lady (keep your fingers crossed) we'll continue to be a two income household and that will go a long way.

The third goal is to replace my shitty plastic gutters. Those snap-together jokes need to go away. They are uneven, not fully connected and half full of rook gravel and maple seeds. I will giggle like a little girl if this goal reaches completion.

My fourth and final goal is to build the popularity of MinnPics. The photos I choose to post there receive a fair amount of attention but some have basically heaped praise on the blog. It's intensely Minnesota and if you love the state you live in it's a logical fit to check in your daily routine.

That popping sound

If you haven't heard, it's cold here in Minnesota. It's so cold that my car, after not driving it for two days, barely started and it has a nearly new battery in it. But more disturbing than that is what the cold weather is doing to my house.

No, the frost on the inside of the windows isn't anything to worry about. That's par for the course in a 110 year-old house. It's the loud popping sounds we've been hearing. In the last two days I've heard no less than half a dozen frighteningly loud pops. It sounds like someone is in my attic firing off shotgun shells. I even joked today that it's only a matter of time until part of the roof falls in on us and finally puts us out of our misery.

But I guess it really isn't a joking matter. The facts are as follows: there is at least a foot of, at one time, heavy and wet snow stuck to every inch of my roof. My gutters suck (I have those joke-like almost Lego snap-together pieces of shit) and are likely full of ice which will only back further up my roof when the snow melts in early June. The neighbors have laboriously drug roof rakes across their snow-laden roofs but I'm one to let nature take its course. With my fingers crossed I can say that I haven't had any water issues thus far with my roof and I have easy access to it from my spacious attic so I hope I'm safe.

But if I am woke up by another shotgun-like pop I'll do something about it. Probably buy a pair of ear plugs.

If you make and keep only one resolution in 2010, resolve to visit MinnPics daily and bask in the glory of fabulous photos from all over Minnesota.

Vampires alive and well in my house

It involved a garbage bag, a dust pan, two fly swatters, a pair of pliers, an ice scraper and a can of hornet spray. No, it wasn't some sort of new auto-erotic asphyxiation sex game where the last one standing wins. This all took place in the home office/studio last night. Again, it wasn't a kinky sex game.

As I downloaded photos in silence I heard scratching against metal. I immediately knew it was coming from somewhere near the vent adjacent to the desk. Normally I wouldn't have heard anything because I'd have iTunes open but the old Mac was running slow as it choked on the addition of 600+ wedding photos from Saturday. The scratching on metal after 10 PM weirded me out. I assumed it was a mouse and prepared to grab the fat cat remove the vent, close the door and let the cat have a free meaty meal. But I decided to get a second opinion for the scratching diagnosis.

My old lady came in and instructed me to shine one of the funky lights towards the vent and her prognosis was - wait for it - a bat. I pondered just what the hell to do and came to the conclusion that if I could get the vent apart we could cover it with a garbage bag and easily trap the miniature vampire and go to be in five minutes. But 10 minutes later I had gathered a dust pan (the weapon that brought down the last bat about three years ago), two fly swatters, pliers to remove the vent and a garbage bag.

Fast forward another five minutes and after poking and prodding at the bat who clung to the side of the duct we had made absolutely no progress. My next brilliant idea was to gas it out. I automatically thought of the flying insect spray I had bought in bulk (why buy one can when they come three to a package?!?) and returned with a full can of hornet spray. But before I resorted to that, I turned the A/C on hoping to freeze mini-dracula out. Fail again. Now with the corner of the garbage bag slightly opened and the stink of my own failure rapidly filling the room, I shot a few long jets of hornet killer into the open vent. Then we waited. Hoping to hear a small thump on the metal below, we instead heard little claws on metal.

The little bastard bat had retreated back where it came from. The good news is that we didn't again break the dust pan as we did during the last bat battle. The bad news is that there is still a bat living in our home's ventilation system. Somewhere in the snaking maze of ductwork, a bat, for now, lives and we wait in fear of a bat swooping through the house, biting us and turning us in to vampires.

In other news, Minnesota had an awesome weekend and the photos tell the stories. Check out MinnPics now and frequently all day long.

Water, softening and the headaches they cause

Rarely do I get truly scared about something but this is one of those times. Let's take a step back a few years to when we bought our house. It was the coldest day in January waaaaay back in 2005. We closed on the house on the only day which had snowfall and it was as close to a blizzard as we've had in this part of Minnesota for quite some time.

The first full day in our house found me making two trips back to my old apartment to pick up the last remnants of our stuff and return the trailer I had rented. I also picked up some softener salt because, dammit, a water softener needs salt. I remember grabbing six bags because I was there and I had a relative's truck. I made my way back home and deposited the bags of salt into the softener. All was working well.

Then about a year ago I noticed that the water felt hard. I was all too familiar with this due to the fact that while growing up on a farm, the hard and rusty well water would sometimes wreak havoc on the softener in the basement. My dad eventually became well accustomed to the quirks of it and could muddle through the mechanics of this foreign device on his own and save literally hundreds of dollars in service calls and expert repairs. He, of course, became my lifeline as I looked for help with my own water softener. Whatever I did worked. The softener started sucking up salt again and we had soft water.

Then this past winter the water became hard again. I noticed more moisture than usual on the concrete floor and upon popping the lid off of the softener's brine tank I found it to be totally full of water. It had been overflowing with each regeneration - spilling water on to the floor and down the floor drain (eventually).

Since that time the water softener had wobbled between hard and soft water and because of the wife's leg lotion consumption, I am at a breaking point. I am confident after looking through some similar owner's manuals I found online that I can remove the valve assemble of the water softener control module and I have a good idea of what the problem is.

This is where my fear comes in. What if I get the whole thing disassembled and because of the lack of any discernible model number (and the owner's manual being M.I.A.) can't get parts? What if I break the whole damn thing in a fit of frustration? What if I lose some integral part in my hasty disassembly as the wife makes me sweat while asking aloud "are you done yet?" or "do you know what you're doing?"? Or what if I fix the whole thing and can't get it reassembled? Those, my fellow do-it-yourselfers, are my fears.

Some people had better weekends than mine and they can be seen on MinnPics. Check it out!

How did you spend your weekend?

A couple tons of mulch. That's what my weekend boils down to in the simplest of terms.

It had been over two years since I sparsely mulched our yard's landscaping with brown wood mulch and frankly it was beginning to look like shit. I don't like my yard looking like shit and my old lady definitely doesn't like our yard looking like shit.

It's one of those never-ending battles. We have to set aside entire weekends to clean up what, on the outside, appears to be tiny messes but upon further inspection turn out to be epic disasters. Yesterday, which was a perfectly dreary and cool day, seemed well fit for that indoor maintenance. So we tore apart the contents of the office closet. We shredded half a decade's worth of old bank statements. We made room for the still-boxed high chair for The Youngling and filled our garbage cart.

I cleaned up the mouse poo remnants of our early-spring rodent infestation (11 caught) and furter sealed tiny holes which seemed to be the source of the little bastards. And The Youngling cooperated. She slept when she needed to and was awake when she wanted to be.

Sure, I hate cleaning up messes as much as anybody else but I have to admit that having just a couple areas of our ramshackle villa tidied up feels like a huge accomplishment.

So, what did you do with your weekend?

If you're looking for more fun, check out the photos at MinnPics and see what you've been missing since its launch.

Where's my bailout?

Is it just me or was there a serious flaw in Senator John McCain's plan (mentioned somewhat briefly during Tuesday evening's debate) to buy failing mortgages with taxpayer dollars? He also mentioned allowing folks (his words, not mine) to renegotiate the terms, including the principal, of their mortgage.

The big flaw there is that what you do for one homeowner leaves another sitting on the outside looking in. While I can (barely) pay my mortgage payments (even with the loss of my part-time gig and loss of hours at my full-time gig), I'd still love to be the recipient of a write-down of the principal owed on my home. A nice, round number like 23% (coincidentally the same percentage my 401k has lost this year) would be pretty damn swell with this Danish dude.

And as far as buying out failing mortgages, I'd be happy to be a 21st century property baron because what The Man does with my money is most certainly my business. I'd be cool having total oversight of the house that my future taxpayer dollars bought. I'd happily collect rent from the tenants on a monthly basis with a firm but fair hand. When it comes time for maintenance, my toolbox is mere steps away. Bring it on, this guy's itching to be a property baron and when more mortgages fail, I'd be all for the use of taxpayer dollars to add those to my vast property portfolio because I'd finally have oversight on how my tax dollars are spent.

Yes, you in the back, you have a question?

Oh, this isn't about me having any say in how my tax dollars are spent? It's all about the government having the potential to turn a few bucks because we're serfs in this country? Huh. No more of you talking, okay? That kind of harshed my vibe.

My neighbor, a great source of humor

Every day at my house has a certain level of excitement. Of course people have different definitions of excitement but mine is equal with bungee jumping with a frayed bungee cord over a pad of solid cement. That's just how I roll.

Last night, though, was no different. It was a special, fun-filled evening at Casa De Sornie as I walked upstairs to one of our house's back bedrooms and witnessed something I had only heard of before (via the old lady).

It was our rahter odd (crazy) neighbor behind us mowing his "lawn" (a patch of various weeds littered with piles of retaining wall blocks, landscaping timbers, patio pavers and dog shit) that hasn't moved in the over three years we've owned this house. Now some are thinking "what the holy hell is funny about some hillbilly mowing his lawn?" Well, picture a guy wearing a threadbare muscle shirt and sweatpant-style shorts pushing his landmower with one hand around the various obstacles he hasn't move in well over three years as he struggles to not chop up the electrical cord powering his lawnmower.

First off, kudos to Senor Insanity for doing his part to avoid using a miniscule amount of gasoline. Secondly, who actually thought that an electrical cord combined with a quickly rotating and sharp metal blade was a good idea?

Apparently, Captain Crazy thought this was the best way to spend a couple hundred bucks from his steady flow of cash he somehow receives from not having a job.

To us, it was laugh therapy to see him throwing the cord about, keeping the mower from rolling over the various piles of crap on his "lawn" and hearing him, over the noise of the mower, cussing and cursing various things but nothing clearly discernible and even possibly having some sort of person to person conversation although nobody else was present.

I'll end this by saying it was hard to stifle my laughter after I had already finished mowing my lawn. Hell, Commandant Bonkers would have been better served by a push reel mower. See, I really do have a crazy neighbor. If only I had the foresight to snap some undercover, papparazzi-style photos.

Work as a vacation

Sometimes, after a particularly grueling weekend, working the old 9 to 5 (or, in my case, around 8 to whenever) can seem refreshing, almost like a vacation. This entire week will seem that way. Those who know me more personally than most readers here know that I have been contemplating the bathroom remodeling project since April when we bought literally a truckload of tile. As of Saturday, November 17th, it became very real that we were going to actually do the remodeling project as we gutted the bathroom down to the ramshackled studs and haggard lath that backed the plaster.

We found plenty of surprises behind those walls that had remained untouched for almost 110 years and some rather interesting approaches to construction which included studs which were nothing more that two-foot chunks of wood stacked on each other and electrical wiring which didn't actually make a complete circuit but mysteriously worked until we added the second switch for the light/fan combination which turned out to be the straw which broke the camel's back.

Friday morning, though, things started to be put back together. We started with four hours of electrical wiring. All told, I now hate the very insulation I put in my attic only two years ago because it's dusty and is a pain to move when adding more electrical wiring.

Sure, it sounds boring on the outside but I am amazed at the shear amounts of dust that come from cutting cement backer board and I can't wait for more dust from the impending drywall mudding and sanding that I'll be getting done this week so we can paint next weekend and install tile the following weekend which will allow us to get back to life as normal as possible. I know I can't wait and I have a feeling that the missus is even more eager than I am.