Category: home and garden

Michelle and I installed a drip system today. Its immensely satisfying to have a highly efficient system for watering the flower beds. However, my fingers and thumbs are numb from punching holes in the 1/2″ hose. Hopefully by next year the flower beds will have overgrown the hoses, and the yard will be a wonderfully full and luscious environ. We’ll see.

Michelle and I picked up a used garbage disposal from the ReBuilding Center, and I finally got around to installing it yesterday. After the $12 in parts, we can now grind up waste like there’s no tomorrow. Fortunately my parents were chronic home-improvers, so I learned enough to fake it. The only question left is why there wasn’t a disposal there already, when it was wired for it. Oh well, what’s the point in asking questions?

I’ve reached new hights of luxury: Sitting in a hammock listening to music and surfing the net, all while enjoying a malty beverage and watching the dog play in his kiddie pool. Nero would be proud.

The deck is nearly complete, lacking only railings. The decking itself is 2×6 cedar planking, and they’re quite nice. I’ll post pictures of it and the carpet shortly.

Michelle and Sarah hit the beach today with the dogs, and sounds like they had a good time. It was quite hot here in Portland, and the girls escaped to more hospitable climes. The dogs played in the ocean, and the girls had a chance to chat and eat. Barley got to meet Porter & Baci off leash for the first time, and it wasn’t a disaster. Whew.

Scott was stuck in meetings, and I was stuck without a DNS server at work, so we would have been better off at the beach too.

While watering the plants this morning, a baby squirrel hopped across the yard. Looking quite startled, it climbed a tree. On the other side of the fence, two neighborhood cats (Tigger’s subordinates, no doubt) were following it across the yard, evil plans intact. Not wanting to witness the early demise of a squirrel, I sprayed the cats through the fence. They backed off temporarily, but waited at bay for their chance. Determined to protect the squirrel, possibly encourage it to travel by tree instead of grass, I stood between the two, occasionally sending a jet of water at the would be killers. The squirrel eventually realized it wouldn’t get away on the ground and moved through the trees. Good luck little buddy!

The carpet is in, and it looks quite nice. a brief escape before moving stuff around, I went with Scott and Sarah to Fuck up some Enchilada’s shit at Baja Fresh. I love spicy. Alas, the distraction had to end.

Now I’m moving stuff back in to place slowly. I have a desk again, we can finally unpack stuff, and best of all, the rooms don’t smell like cat piss!

I hope you’ll excuse the downtime – I’m finally getting carpet installed. I expect things’ll be back by 3pm Pacific.

I finished painting the large, opulently pained window in the living room tonight. It took a couple hours, and I can now rest. While I was painting, a child in a diaper who had been riding his big wheel up the street dismounted and started walking up the sidewalk towards Tigger, our cat. His older sister encouraged him to come back, and they rode off.

Michelle, Barley, Kathy & Jason are all at the beach for the next couple days. I’m quite jealous, but at least I’ll be here when the carpet gets installed. It was in town last week, but it was “on the truck” so it couldn’t be installed until Tuesday. Now the delays are just getting absurd.

We finished painting the walls, and half the woodwork in the living room. We ran out of time, so its all we could do. Cleaned up and got to bed at around 10:30 Sunday night. Woke up at 6am Monday to finish moving things out of the rooms, shut down the server, and waited. Waited. 9am we got a call from the carpet people. They were having problems finding the carpet in the warehouse, otherwise the installer would be there soon. 9:45, on my way out the door, a second call. Carpet is missing. Can’t find it, hoping it turns up in another warehouse. 6pm, Carpet genuinely missing. Reordered from manufacturer, should get here by next week. Hope you didn’t mind not having 2/5ths of your house to use, because you’ve got at least a week more of it. Perfect ending to the perfect month and a half waiting for carpet. I’m somewhat annoyed. Michelle is dismayed. Barley keeps stepping on the tack strip.

I’m afraid we were overly optimistic about painting today. We did 13 hours of prep work, with a short break for loading 2 truckloads of yard waste for hauling away. We tried using a paper tiger (scores the wallpaper) and a un-adheasive solution for getting rid of the wallpaper. I wasn’t impressed, and in many places, it was much slower than a traditional steamer. We did patch some nasty holes in the plaster, and anticipate getting to the painting tomorrow. Right…