Guest Bedroom Project (Part I)

As part of making the upstairs more useful we have decided to turn my basically abandoned den into a guest bedroom.  This project will have three main parts: replacing the computer desk, painting and applying mold inhibitor, and adding new furniture.

The existing desk is an L-shaped particleboard monstrosity we have been toting around for a very long time. It is nearly impossible to move, it is damaged in parts and takes up way too much space to share with a bed in that room. 

It's gotta go, that much is obvious.

Well, that's fine but the computer still needs to live there as do the scanner and printer.  It would be a real cabling hassle to move the modem and router so those need to stay put as well.  These needs pretty much nail any replacement desk to the right side of the room.

A full sized bed will share the space with the computer desk.  The bed will need to be centered in the room to prevent guests from clonking their heads on the sloped ceiling... You know, as I write this it occurs to me that we might need a futon in there instead of a traditional bed.

Sigh.  Whatever.  We'll badly plan, design, and build that bridge when we come to it.

I have been looking forward to throwing together a new desk for a while now but time, money, resources, and/or the will to do it has prevented that from happening. Time is of the essence here because a number of projects need to get done within the next 3 weeks so this is going to be a pretty simple design.  A “Shaker” style computer desk, if there is such a thing.

We got my wife's very simple desk from an unfinished furniture store.  Well, I mean, the store itself was finished... it didn't have only three walls or no roof or something like that.  The furniture inside was unfinished, you understand. Not tables with 2 legs... stop looking at me like that. 

We just wanted something 1) simple 2) made of real wood and 3) cheap for the office/bedroom downstairs.  It was the first two.  It was not the last one.  As a matter of fact, they must get a lot of sticker shock induced comments in the store because they had on their marquee for many months "DO NOT JUST COMPARE PRICES COMPARE QUALITY".  Comes off either elitist or desperate, IMHO.

I definitely could do better price-wise by at least $100, and that includes a small printer stand. As for quality, I guarantee you it would be good enough.

After this long and unnecessarily verbose preamble, there really isn't too much to write about that the pictures doesn't say itself:

• I used the same type of pine prefab top as I did for the Art Table project. 
• The legs are not tapered, made of poplar, and are held in place with pocket joints. 
• I cannibalized the keyboard slides from the old desk. 
• I decided not to build a monitor stand like the old desk had to keep the price low.

The total construction time so far has been 2 hours. Total cost for all materials (wood and pocket joint screws) for this part of the job has been about $70.

Not bad.

Tomorrow I should be able to build the printer/scanner stand and stain both the pieces. I guess we will call the Guest Bedroom Project about 20% complete for now.

(To be continued...)

I'm Cottony Soft, Dammit!

So there I am blearily standin' there thinkin', "Anger?  That can't be right... Oh.  I'm an idiot."

Site Update, Puzzle News

I will be making some cosmetic changes to the site soon.  Nothing big... mostly "stuff in the sidebar" type additions.

I finished Sacred Stone by Clive Cussler.  Well, by "finished" I mean I quit reading it about 60% into the book.  Usually I can force my way through most stuff, but jeez... I totally agree with a lot of the hilarious one star reviews on Amazon, especially the one about the sandwiches...  I don't want to spoil them for you.  Check them out for yourself, if you would like.

Hmmm, what else... Oh, yeah, here is another hint for the Puzzle for Charity:

Hint #2 (Posted 2136 062410): The words and designs on the corks don't mean anything

Remember, everyone: the Prize Pool will remain at "Braggin' Rights" (otherwise known as "zero dollars") until a 501c charity has been suggested and agreed upon.  Like I have mentioned, there is no cost, and there is no catch.  Once a small, registered, legitimate 501c charity has been chosen, the Prize Pool will start to ramp up at a rate I have not decided upon yet.

Why don't I just pick one myself, you ask?  Meh, more fun if you do it, I guess.  Leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail if you have a suggestion.

You can find the current Puzzle for Charity in the sidebar on the right.  Good Luck!

Wait... Who Did What Now?

Ok. This one takes a bit of explaining and suddenly shifts gears a few times so stay with me.

We are members of a local pool club so my wife bought the boy some water toys that are more appropriate than the bath toy selection we normally bring with us. She bought a set of something called “Toypedos” which are a set of colorful, torpedo-shaped underwater throwing/diving toys.  They are remarkably hydrodynamic and travel forever if you flick them just right. The package says you aren't supposed to throw them at anyone. Sureokwhatever.

Anyway, my kid loved them to the point where he clumsily carried the whole set with him for days afterwards. Occasionally, he will take a toy to bed with him when it is time for his nap. These were his toy of choice for a little while.

He was sick this week. Nothing serious, but he had a high fever as a side effect of an ear infection, so he spent the past two days at home with Mommy instead of going to daycare. Mommy decided to take advantage of his extended naptime to take care of some e-mails and other computer-based stuff.

My wife and I occasionally get e-mails from our church telling us about current events, requesting volunteers for things that need to get done, the church's vision for the future, etc. The last one we got (entitled Vision) she couldn't read because it was in a more recent version of Word than she had on her computer so she sent it to me at work for me to convert. I did so and sent it back. My wife then sent me a short, one-line email telling me how the poor sick boy was doing.

Well, at least she thought she did. Fast forward to tonight.

My wife was taking care of some of the decorating for Vacation Bible School at the church when the pastor approached her with a look of genuine concern on his face and asked if “if I was okay”. My wife replied, in a confused and now-borderline-concerned manner “He's fine... Why?” He says “Well, I got the e-mail you sent and I didn't know what it meant...” The one-sided conversation lurched along in a very awkward manner for about 20 seconds before it hit my wife what had happened.

She had accidentally sent the pastor the infinitely cryptic message, entitled “Vision”: “He went to sleep with his toypedos at 2pm”. This apparently caused the pastor to deduce that I was ill – down with a case of the toypedos, I guess. He never heard of that (maybe vision-related?) illness, so he looked it up, but nothing he found made any sense whatsoever, so he thought he would ask her to see how I was doing.

She cleared things up, but I shudder to think of the possible connections he could have made while trying to parse the sentence “He went to sleep with his toypedos at 2pm” into a reasonable, logical reflection of his worldview. I can come up with a few family-friendly guesses from his point of view, but they are all very unlikely or completely insane.  One guess involves hostages and secret codes, for instance.

Unfortunately, I can come up with quite a few family-unfriendly ones as well... I don't think she helped the matter by sending him the photo above. If the sermon next Sunday turns out to be a fire-and-brimstone style rant entitled “Shame on You, You Horrible, Horrible Person” that seems to be directed entirely at me, I will know for sure what he believes really happened...

Happy Summer Solstice!

This past weekend I planted some new tomato plants, fertilized the lawn, repaired a minor roof leak, grilled out a couple of times, went to the pool, built a railing for the stairs in the garage, cleaned the front porch (in preparation for staining it) and cleaned and sealed the cedar shed out back. 

I even managed to install Red Dead Redemption on the Xbox (awesome Father's Day gift) and I worked in a two hour nap (even more awesome Father's Day gift).  Thanks, family!

Most of that aside, I want to talk about the stuff I used to clean the deck and the new gas grill.  Why?  Because it is rare that I run into stuff that does exactly what it says it does on the box and in the reviews.  Also, I can't think of anything else right now...

Anyway, first up is Olympic Premium Deck Cleaner.  All you do is pour it in a pump sprayer and go.  No scrubbing - you just let it sit for 10 minutes and hose it off (no pressure washer required)!  The before and after pics on the front of the container are not some idealized exaggeration achievable only in laboratory conditions dreamed up by some scumbag sales staff.  And the stuff works fast.  By the time I went 10 feet with the sprayer the color change in the treated lumber was extremely obvious.  Bird droppings and mildew-y green areas were just lifted away.

Unfortunately, I under bought so I had to head back to Lowe's to pick up more in the middle of the job.  On the bright side, they started stocking larger containers for the same price, so I had enough left over to clean the shed (it did awesome) and still have enough to clean the back porch when I get around to it.

This stuff might or might not be nothing more than bleach water, but I can't argue with the results.  Spending an extra $10 per deck cleaning (versus making your own old-wives-tale cleaning solution out of parsnip hearts and spearmint chewing gum or whatever) is totally worth it to me if someone else has done the precision mixing and there is no scrubbing. 

The next item is the Spirit E320 Gas Grill from Weber.  I got this on Memorial Day Weekend and I am pretty sure I have cooked out more since that day than in the entire two years previous to that.  It is my first gas grill, so I was pretty intimidated by this thing but the reviews were good and it came pre-assembled for free from Home Depot (thank goodness, because this thing has, like, twelve billion parts).

Man, to think of all the years I thought that having a gas grill would just be one more dangerous hassle I didn't need, I just feel foolish. Don't get me wrong - I still think the ritual of lighting coals and whatnot makes traditional grilling a very satisfying experience.  Let's just leave it that I grossly underestimated the benefit/cost ratio of gas grills.  Well, this one, at least.

It's got three separately controllable inside burners and a side burner (for sauces, sauteing mushrooms, etc.) It has an inside "warming rack" that is about 4" higher than the primary cooking surface. I use that for veggies, certain shellfish, and even garlic toast. It came with 5 V-shaped metal pieces they call "Flavorizer Bars" which sit under the grilling surface and are alleged to precisely burn drippings from above and impart a smoky flavor to your food.  I don't know about that, but I do use one to act as a shield to prevent the middle burner from getting gunked up – which works fine

Cleaning this grill is very easy.  Preheating to 500 degrees for 10 minutes then brushing removes any residue from the cooking surface.  The stainless steel pan under the burners is easily removable and easily cleaned.  Excess grease is captured by little disposable aluminum cake pans.  Weber was cool about this and made the pan dimensions and materials something normal (instead of a proprietary 9-sided RFID enabled thing or some such nonsense) , and the company goes out of their way to say that you can just use aluminum foil if you want. Sweet.

Well, the cooking is done for today and the front porch has been sealed and stained, so maybe I'll actually have time to play Red Dead Redemption... after the little man goes to sleep, of course. :)

The Roof, The Roof, The Roof is on Fire...

... but don't you dare do anything about it.

New Secret Puzzle

I pasted this puzzle on the bottom of the desk from the Desk Restoration project. 

Like I mentioned in the Pallet Table posts I have begun incorporating puzzles into certain projects I make before sending them out into the world.  My original intention was to have the craigslist buyer eventually discover (or not discover) this, alert me, then I would post the puzzle.  Alas, there were no buyers.  The desk went to the local charity depot instead.  Who knows... someone might find it yet.

There is one more Secret Puzzle out there, btw...

As with all the Secret Puzzles (but unlike the Puzzle for Charity) there are no prizes other than Braggin' Rights.  You can find all the puzzles via the sidebar on the right. 

Speaking of the Puzzle for Charity, I will start adding money to the Prize Pool andthe Charity Pool once a reader suggests a good 501c charity to donate the money to.  There is absolutely no cost and there are no catches.  Check out the rules (again, link is in the sidebar on the right).

I will post another hint for the current Puzzle for Charity soon.  The Secret Puzzles will have no hints.

Cranky Old Man Restaurant Review

This past weekend, the wife and I determined that there is no such thing as "the nice Chuck E Cheese", at least in this area.  If you have not been in one, just picture a crowded, seedy Atlantic City casino. Overlay that with a Gen Pop scene from the original HBO series "Oz".  Pack the remainder of what little space remains with rambunctious kids ping-ponging between broken, dirty rides and games.  Now serve delicious pizza.  That's Chuck E Cheese.

Kids love it.

My kid liked his first experience a couple months back and kept asking, night after night, "I need to go to Chuck E Cheese an' ride the red doggy" as I would lay him down to sleep.  We had a bunch of tokens left over from the first time, but we weren't going to go back to that one.  See, we were very alarmed by the state of the place and what appeared to be a thriving, umm, non-taxable goods exchange in the parking lot.  I say "appeared" because I'm only 98% sure.

"Why did you keep the tokens, then, if you weren't going back?", you ask.  I don't know.  Just cuz, I guess.  Plus we knew there was another one in the area.  Maybe it was better.

Was it? No. Well, the parking lot was nicer.  And the pizza was "as good or better" than at the other one. 

We stayed about an hour and a half. After buckling the boy into the car seat and driving off I was silently wondering what to do with the leftover tokens, knowing for sure that we will never, ever come back.  Ever.  But, like something out of a Lifetime made-for-TV movie the not-yet-two-year-old pipes up with this completely unsolicited comment: "Daddy thank you for taking me to Chuck E Cheese."

Damn it.

As negative and snarky as I am toward the place, the fact remains that he absolutely loves it.  Whereas I was at DEFCON 3 for the duration, he legitimately had a pure and good time.  I temporarily lost track of the fact that the world looks a lot different when your eyeballs are only two years old and only 32 inches off the ground.

So it looks like we are going to be holding on to the tokens a little while longer. :)

One Hecto of a Post

Hey!  This is my one hundredth post (under the name SnowUrchin, anyway).  Not only that, my wife has a milestone birthday is this week, and my son turns 100 weeks old as well.  Neat!  Let's celebrate with a swarm of mini topics.

The kitchen was painted.  As I predicted, the behind-the-fridge part was a pain, but I am glad I did it.  The machine at Lowe's matched an extra backsplash tile pretty closely so now the walls are a light slate color.  The job took nowhere near the 8 hours I thought it would and the color is perfect for the room.

The wife and I determined that there is no such thing as "the nice Chuck E Cheese", at least in this area.  The 101st post will be about that.

My father-in-law prides himself on finding good deals.  He is especially successful in finding inexpensive happy-making toys for his grandson, but this time he found a 9-year-old battery powered 5 3/8 inch Skil saw for $20 at Wal-Mart.  It is new in the box, so I guess it just got lost in inventory somewhere and repeatedly marked down.  It charged up just fine, it is light, and is fun to use.  It will come in handy for quick, small jobs.

Gave the garage a thorough cleaning. It was a complete wreck after the months-long parade of projects took their toll.  As a part of that effort, the desk from the Desk Restoration Project is finally gone.  Hopefully someone at the thrift store can get some use out of it.  I wonder how long it will take them to find the puzzle I glued to the underside of the drawer...  I will put up a Puzzle Post soon.

I officially gave up my membership to the gym. I simply have no time, and don't see the wisdom of paying $80 a month for the honor of keeping a pair of shoes inside a locker in a building I will not see the inside of for the foreseeable future.  So Wii Fit, staying active, and eating right will continue to be the order of the day.

The family room was painted and new lights were put up.  We need to put a lot of stuff on the walls and it will be pretty much done.  A room transformation post will follow.

I read The Chase by Clive Cussler. Meh. It started off fine, but the over-the-top super-powers of the main protagonist made the whole “smart handsome guy with practically unlimited resources” thing a little much to swallow. Also, it had a forced “I betcha this would be a good movie someday” feeling to a lot of the scenes that was pretty distracting. It ended fine.

So now I am reading another Cussler book called Sacred Stone. Another meh. The obviously un-researched descriptions of asteroids, comets, buckyballs, radiation, viruses, and how complex machines are put together would be easy to ignore if they didn't pop up so damn often and showcase how badly the writer is out of his element. But, I guess you can't write a book where everyone is in a snowcat or a helicopter the whole time. Although he sure tries...

More soon...

Return to Childhood

Adults lead stressful lives - that's kind of the definition of "adulthood", really - but sometimes it can get to be a little much.  My not-yet-two-year-old son seems pretty happy so I asked him for some simple pointers we adults could use to regain a little bit of our childlike wonder.  Here's what he came up with:

1) Don't walk.  Ever.  Madly dash at 90% of your top speed when traveling between any two points, regardless of distance.  You should flail your limbs wildly as though you were in a barely controlled horizontal free-fall. Furthermore, it should take you no more than two steps to achieve that velocity from a standing start.

2) Don't just fall, sprawl.  Don't try to catch yourself if you trip or if you start to lose your balance because you are taking corners at 90% of your top speed.  Just go from vertical to horizontal in the least acrobatic way possible. You will know if you have pulled it off successfully if people around you wince and suck air in between their teeth as they watch your ungraceful impact.

3) Bump your head at least a dozen times a day. Few people know that one of the ancillary uses of a skull is to determine the location of objects around you much like a cat uses its whiskers or a blind person uses a cane.  For the right effect, make sure that you rack your noggin hard enough for it to slightly dislodge whatever it is you hit, whether it be a toybox, a table, or a doorframe.  Act utterly surprised and bewildered at the apparent sudden materialization of the object that attacked you.

4) Look someone dead in the eye while pooping. Now, it will be instantly obvious what's going on to whoever is around you, so immediately start denying it even before you finish. If denial doesn't work, try and change the subject. Madly switch between topics in the hopes that the witness will be distracted enough to forget that you just soiled yourself. Some topic suggestions include describing the color of objects around you or recapping a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse episode in a rapid-fire disjointed manner.  After changing the subject fails, try and offer the witness something. Any random object will do as long as it is nearby.  Continue until you run out of objects to offer.  Then cry.

5) At mealtime, people around you should be absolutely shocked that anything at all gets in your mouth. Insist on using a fork and spoon that are 3 to 4 times as large as your hands. Eat corn with your fingers, nibblet by nibblet. Having pizza?  Don't start at the point or with the crust or even one of the sides.  Your first bite should be smack in the center of the slice  This will rip the cheese and toppings off in one giant piece and paint most of your face and neck with sauce so just let it drop onto your chest if it is too much to handle. By following these tips your dinner companions should start off amused but end up impatient and disgusted.

6) Wear t-shirts with enormous lettering with generic statements such as MONKEY or SPORTS STAR or ROCKET SHIP.  The clothes should look like they would fit someone either twice as big or twice as small as you, but never, ever anyone exactly your size.

7) Turn bathtime from a mundane, relaxing affair into one giant emotional roller-coaster ride from start to finish. Start by crying as you disrobe and run the tub.  Then giggle with glee as you take a few naked laps around the house (don't forget to run at near top speed). Cry again as you enter the tub then start splashing with joy for a full minute. Calm down and relax while playing with upwards of two dozen bath toys. Get bored and start ejecting the toys from the tub. Cry angrily as the water is drained.  Ramp up the anger as you dry yourself off and get dressed.  Run around with glee afterwards.  It doesn't really matter in what order you leap from personality to personality - people should just be impressed with your ability to switch between emotions faster than a bipolar, coked-up hummingbird.

Of course, I am paraphrasing a lot of what he said, here.  But following these simple guidelines is not only a good way to get in touch with your inner child, it will allow you to get in touch with the paramedics, the unemployment office, the parole boards, and maybe even the staff at the mental hospital. 

Good luck!

Garden Project (Part V)

Evergreen border hedges were added last week.  I needed a lot of additional topsoil to make up for the 18 inch drop in the garden from the right side to the left so the 12 hedges were at the same height relative to the walls.

Unfortunately, I had to use bagged topsoil which was I little more than I wanted to pay ($1.20 a bag) but it was convenient to unload and higher quality than what I usually get bulk from the local garden center. It was convenient to load, too, since I just bought a pallet of it and had the Lowe's guys forklift it into the back of the truck. No fuss, no muss, but a little disconcerting to see the vehicle riding so low in the back...

This past weekend, I took advantage of the "nice" weather to add mulch, plant the final large hedge in the center of the back semicircular area, and install the solar lamps (8 of them - one for each "corner").

There are a few more things to do directly related to this project.

1) Make or install stepping stones to go from the deck to the garden.  I am not sure if I am going to pour concrete for this or just buy some natural or pre-fab units.  I would like to go with concrete so me, my wife, and my son can put our handprints or footprints in it.
2) Install something in the remaining semicircular area.  The initial idea was to put a small circular paver patio there, but the shape and size of the area seems to suggest a water feature instead. Obviously I will need a pump, but I don't have a super-easy way to power it that is seperate from the low voltage lights on the deck.  We will see what happens, there.  I have been toying with the idea of mounting solar panels on the shed or the playhouse, but this is probably not the way to go.
3) Install permanent watering solution.  I can't run a water line from the outlet to the garden because, literally, it would cross every single utility on the property. It will have to be a quick-connect hose adapter mounted in the wall near the upper right corner, I guess.  I would like to have a copper garden art sprinkler in the center... whether I buy one or make one myself is TBD.

More "soon".

Everybody Wants to Rule the Parking Structure

Occasionally I will look either on Google News or at the Union Sun & Journal website to find out what's going on in Lockport, NY. 

The US&J police blotter is a ripping good read and is an excellent source of info if you are interested in which of your former high school friends got busted for DUIs this week or whose $12 lawn chairs got vandalized "between the hours of 3AM and 7AM Saturday morning".

The blotter is also very therapeutic. If you are having a crummy day, go ahead and read through about a week's worth of the police reports. I dare you not to be smiling before you are done.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

Hey, we all can't be astronauts or marathon pancake flippers, you know...

Anyway, I just found out that Tears for Fears will be rockin' the Main Street parking garage area August 13th.  Sweet.  It got me to thinking, though...I wonder what is worse bad luck: a former 1980s megaband having a Friday the 13th concert date at that venue or smashing an endless string of mirrors with a t-shirt cannon modified to launch black cats and Greg Brady's Hawaiian wooden tiki things...

Well, at least the band can enjoy some Mighty Taco while someone carves anarchy symbols into the side of their limo with a house key.

The New Deck

As part of our recent spate of home improvement projects, we decided to put in a new deck. I mentioned that I was looking forward to having a go at building it myself but, in hindsight, I am very,  very glad I didn't. There is absolutely no way, even without considering the other projects and day-to-day side-tasks that needed to get done, that I would even be close to finishing it. I would have been in over my head right from the start.

The end result of my recognizing my limits before I hit them (for once :) ) was that the family was able to enjoy a nice cookout on Memorial Day in comfort and style instead of avoiding a nightmarishly slapped-together contraption made of equal parts lumber, tears, and incompetence.

We got a couple of books on decks from Lowe's and drew up a fairly good sketch of how we pictured the end product.  Nothing too fancy, but we just wanted the broad strokes in place so we could have some cost benchmark to go on once we started interviewing contractors.

As luck would have it a home show was in the area about this time so we went to talk to the deck company hawking their wares there and to get ideas for other improvements we could make.

Man...  This dude would not shut up about the benefits of composite lumber. Literally. I asked him, like, 3/4 of a question and that set him off on a filibuster extolling the virtues of this and that and the other. I managed to finish up asking my question while he took a few seconds to get a sample book (and presumably to slam a couple more Red Bulls and hyperventilate on pure oxygen), but this only set him off again. Once he finally wound down I was able to get a rough estimate of the cost of our proposed deck, which turned out to be about 125% above what my neighbor and I figured for materials.

The next guy visited the house and surveyed the property while I was dismantling the old garden and the while wife and the boy went to take care of stuff in town. He spent about an hour measuring things and drawing up a rough sketch of his vision for the deck on a sheet of legal pad.  I met him up on the porch when he ordered me to "take uh break and come'n' see what I got forya".

When I say "rough sketch" I mean almost comically so, but you could see he was either 1) genuinely proud of it or 2) ashamed of it but acted like he was proud of it because he is a typical salesperson scumbag.  I couldn't tell which.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming he was just providing an overview so we could hash out talking points, I asked how long it would take to get a quote. He said "I can give you a quote right now, but I gotta tell ya, May is lookin to be a busy month for me so if you want this deck built, I have to know now."  "Well, regardless of the number you give us I will still need to talk it over with my wife," I say. He replies "I was wonderin why she was leaving when I got here.  Hmph... I thought we'd be able to do business today."

After that uncomfortable exchange I started looking through his sample book (in his defense the photos looked pretty good) while asking him about his company's policies on a few topics. To sum up, the following came to light:
1) He lamented that he has problems with his crew standing around and doing nothing unless someone is there to tell them what to do.
2) He won't try to make sure that nails and screws are cleaned up because "you never find them all anyway".  Obviously, this would be bad for my kid.
3) There is no such thing as a construction crew that is professional enough not to curse around two-year-olds. "Even the Amish swear in German" he tells me. I answered back with stunned silence.
4) He hadn't considered renting a port-a-potty for his crew, "since the woods were right there".
5) He won't leave his Tom-Cullen-esque sketch because he is afraid that I would use it as a blueprint with which to design my own deck so he is taking it with him so as he put it - and I'm not joking here - "to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands".

His quote was a little less than that of over-eager home show guy's, FWIW.

The last guy was courteous, non-pushy, and professional.  He drew up a detailed plan of the deck which we were allowed to keep.  He did not try to wow me with a story of his gang of hard-to-manage, foul-mouthed, sharp-object dropping, high-priced clowns that would have spent most of their time standing around and pooping behind my shed. Plus his estimate was only 50% above cost.

Awesome. Get to work, sir, if you please.

Not only did this guy's team will this deck into existence in the shockingly short timeframe he quoted, the work area was extremely clean the whole time.  He even replaced two outlets on the outside of the house with ones that were better quality - for free - because "the electrical guy was there anyway", he said.

I write this as I am out there now cooking chicken and corn for my family. It is 80+ degrees, but I am in the shade and the breeze is blowing real nice-like.

And, to put the icing on the cake, I found a buyer in the Russian Mafia who will pay top ruble for cartoonishly bad deck plans that will somehow play a key role in their takeover of the Eastern Seaboard later this summer.

"The wrong hands..."  Give me a break.

Yeah, Yeah. I'm Doin' It.

I read once somewhere that “You really should stop comparing yourself to Sisyphus, because at least that guy actually tried to get stuff done”.

Memorial Day weekend was, happily, one of the least relaxing ones on record.   The capstones for the new garden and old firepit were cut and mortared into place.  New bushes were planted and weeds were pulled.  The yard was mowed and chemically treated. I assembled furniture for the new deck and learned how to use a gas grill.

I like to actually get stuff done, you see.

But none of that really matters, because honey-do lists don't acknowledge the existence of work items that are not on honey-do lists.  They don't get shorter just because other, equally important things are getting accomplished.  If a task is not on the list, then performing that task, logically, is the same as 'playing' regardless of how exhausting, time-consuming, or sunstroke-inducing it may be.

Likewise, the difficulty level of a task is, apparently, proportional to the number of syllables in the directive. This means that MOW LAWN is 33% less work than DO DISHES and about the same level of effort as TAKE NAP.  This is especially true if PAINT KITCHEN is still on the list.

Yep, time to paint the kitchen to match an as-yet-to-be-determined backsplash tile. I figure it will take about eight hours.

“Eight hours?  Isn't your kitchen kind of small?” you say. I say “Why, yes, yes it is.”  This 8 hour window includes driving to Lowe's, selecting paint, buying brushes and stuff, and doing all the prep work and cleanup required.  And don't forget about moving the fridge...  that's gonna add about 30 layers of suck to this task. But that PITA pales in comparison to painting above the cabinets. 

I am not the size of a Feegle or Fraggle or Smurf or similar, so I can't just clamber up there. Although he would fit, I don't think my 2-year-old has the fine motor skills or stick-to-it-ive-ness to do a good job so I can't stuff him up there either.  I can't just shove him in the playpen for 8 hours while I work.

Well, I can, of course... I am much bigger than him and routinely outmaneuver, outrun, and overpower him when it is time for diaper changing or a bath.  What I mean to say is that I choose not to at this time.

I am not tall enough to reach the areas above the cabinets without standing on something. I can't stand on the granite countertops (because the seam is right there) or the glass-top stove (because that would seriously violate the warranty). 

The only real solution available to me is to use a wooden stepladder to get close, but we had new flooring put in the kitchen. Concentrating all my weight on smallish areas might crack the ceramic tiles or grout, so a felt covered piece of plyboard will be needed to help redistribute the weight. Fine. Now I am on a ladder 6 feet from the wall. Now what? 

A long pole and a small roller will get me to the wall, sure, but avoiding painting the ceiling and cabinetry will require a second person to hold a paint guard in place, or at least hold my ladder while I lean over and do it myself. I can't tape the area off because I can't reach it.  And where does the paint pan sit? On the stove? On the new floor?  On the new countertops? In the garage?

Maybe I just need to get drunk and cut a massive hole in the ceiling and simply reach down and paint it from upstairs. Or maybe I just need to start a honey-do-it-your-own-damn-self-if-you-want-it-done-so-bad list.

I would probably get in less trouble for doing the former...  It would sure as hell be less short-sighted and ungrateful.

I love doing mindless stuff like painting as long as that stuff is truly mindless, and not actually some mentally exhausting 40-step This-is-the-House-that-Jack-Built style brain teaser that results in a mindless looking end product.

Pulling weeds or shoveling mulch in 90 degree heat for hours on end might sound awful, but 'toil' can be a nice break from 'work' sometimes, you know?