Today was all about an unsuccessful attempt at re-texturing a shitty textured ceiling and doing the first sanding of the new smooth wall between the rooms.
Fun was had by all.
That all... being me.
Depending on how successful I am tomorrow at finishing up the wall and cleaning and washing down the dust, I may be able to start the first coats of paint on Saturday afternoon.
So I was feeling better today and got a lot of work done.
Tested out the Cliveden Leather color that I really like.
And I also got most everything except the "new" 2nd floor wall primed.
For the full story... visit Day 9 over at The Sietch.
Not that you care, but I'm extremely happy that Blu-Ray has pretty much trounced HD-DVD so we can get on with our high-def future.
As a consumer, I was extremely reluctant to dive into high def (HD) since at the time I saw absolutely no reason to upgrade.
Retailers such as Best Buy, HHGregg, Microcenter and others failed to show me any reason to upgrade with their various HD sets all looking like bad web video half of the time. Their staff members are also pretty much full of shit when it comes to straight talk about HD, especially ones that live off of commission.
I've actually had Microcenter staff tell me how great a given image's picture quality was when anybody viewing it would say that it was total shit! Of course, they live off of slapping their little name stickers on products so they can make a commission and I've found over the years they'll say anything (or often do anything) to get that sticker on a box!
Anyway, I was very happy that recently I found a very cheap DVD player that upsamples to 1080i on my new Samsung. It really made a difference in the DVD playback.
Now as a consumer, I wasn't going to touch the whole HD next generation Blu-Ray or HD-DVD players until one of the formats was dead. I don't care what anybody says, it was the whole Betamax versus VHS war from the early 80s all over again. I'm just old enough to remember the whole thing quite clearly as it played out with various family member's purchases.
As with HD televisions, I've sat on the side lines watching how the players would end up until I felt the time was right.
Thankfully, based on several recent major supports dropping HD-DVD support, the world can now be a better place because Blu-Ray will become the standard. (And don't let Paramount's HD DVD only policy fool you. They'll go wherever the dollars are to be made.)
Let's face it, technically, they are pretty much identical, with Blu Ray having shitloads more of capacity and HD DVD really only have Region Free players (which I wish Blue Ray had since that is my major DVD headache).
What's amazing is that HD DVD could have had a real competitive chance if the oh-so-great Microsoft, supporter and a major creator of HD DVD, would have thrown HD DVD players as standard in their XBox system like Sony threw Blu Ray in the Play Station.
That Sony move definitely gave Blu Ray the momentum and saturation needed to drive disc sales.
What's also nice is that Blu Ray also is driven internally by substantial amounts of a Java Virtual Machine, which of course has to piss Microsoft off.
It'll be awhile before I drop money down on a Blu Ray player. But it is nice to know that essentially all the pieces are in place for us to benefit from it, at least in the living room.
Now that Blu Ray has more or less been christened the winner of the format war, I can sit back and watch the flood of eventual cheaper and more affordable players hit the market and let vendor competition on price help me to find the player I'll own.
Who knows, by that time, I may even upgrade to an HDTV upstairs too. Though of course, there's not much point in doing that unless we have cable TV run upstairs as well. Though honestly we could live off a digital antenna if the quality was worth it.
Now that's something I need to explore further.
So I got up at 4am and by 4:15 was skulking downstairs to get dressed and head to the gym.
By the time I had my small breakfast at 4:30 I felt miserable like I wanted to make pukies.
I have no idea what hit me.
I ended up skipping the gym and just laying on the couch until 5:30 with Hensley surprisingly wanting nothing to do with me.
After a very hot shower I felt a little better but something's still wrong.
I'll see how long I last at work now.
I feel like I'm still on the verge of pulling a Regan MacNeil all over the place.
I know that a lot of people at work have been sick or out and I'm afraid I may be coming... and they say "down with the sickness".
Grrr....
S'gotta be the recent jump from 7 degrees to 45 in the span of 4 days!
Hopefully I can start on the ceiling texture patching tomorrow.
All I'll say is if I start getting angry and swearing I'm going to leave the shit as it is and just prime and paint it no matter how crappy it looks!
Any day now it'll look like I've made some progress.
And I was shocked to find this again.
Damn. Number Six is so huge compared to when that was taken back on April 06, 2006.
And alas, none of those fish in the Aquarium of Love are still around.
Giga was able to get the lock off today.
He bought a Dremel which something we've needed for some time.
Baby Jesus is happy.
Teenage Jesus not so much because he can't sneak out at night without making noise now.
So I sorta kinda twisted my back wrong this afternoon at work.
I opted to not work on the walls when I got home and instead decided to make some kind of decent dinner for Giga since he's been having a shitastic week.
Me? I had some very low cal soup and steamed green beans. He had roast pork, mashed potatoes with cheese, chives, and bacon and some basily sour kraut I threw together.
I'll finish that off the kraut tomorrow.
My back has been feeling a lot better lately. I'm up to about 3-4 miles consistently on the elliptical machine every morning and I started some weight resistance training focused on my back on Tuesday.
It still hurts from time to time but what really worries me more is the left scapula pain that has been slowly popping up. I'm pretty certain that I have some kind of chronic scapula bursitis like I developed in June of 2006.
The massage therapy helps a great deal and I think between that, getting back to these 3-4 times a week workouts, and generally getting the weight I gained since May off my gut I'll be almost back to normal.
I'd love to still get down to 210 or so.
I'd be happy with that.
But just being able to make it through the pain, keep up with the diet and gym, and still be able to work on the house every day or so will make me satisfied until May.
Ok.
Let me get this straight.
The illusion of the corporate-controlled US Government and economy is that is is supposed to be a "free market" where the market itself dictates supply and demand.
I've been fed this illusion since grade school and no doubt, that's still trotted out all the time to kids and adults today.
But now the Federal Government is going to attempt to bail out this market for fear of a recession that they themselves caused by making it easy for corporations to whore out loans to people who should never have received them as well as then bowing to these self-same corporate masters by altering bankruptcy law so that people who could not pay them can never really ever pay them because they can't actually declare bankruptcy.
Um...
Hell is on Earth now and it is the corporate-owned US Federal Government.
Whores.
All whores.
They get whatever disease they deserve by fucking themselves and the people they "serve".
The seeds of the Great Reset get sown every day.
I used to think it would be maybe 40 years out.
But no.
It is coming sooner now.
Much sooner.
Long. Tedius. Hurty. And just so filthy!
So we've had some problems with the back door lock.
The core never seemed properly installed, so it would rotate as you tried to turn your key.
Some days were better than others, "were" being the key word here.
The other day, Giga's key broke off on the outside so the lock is pretty much hosed.
What makes matters worse is that the last two screws won't come out from the inside so we can replace the thing.
They are stripped and you just can't seem to get a flat head to stay there in the groove either manually or electric.
Balls!
Personally, I think maybe getting a quote to have a new lock installed, and all new locks/cores installed in the other doors might be a good idea.
Ok. Got started on the wall/ceiling seam along the exterior wall in the stairwell as well as some corner rebuilding.
And I managed to make soup too!
More scraping, spackling, and also a bit of spraying done today.
Later this afternoon, I'll scrape some rough bits down and do some first coat plaster skimming.
Well... that depends on how my back works out.
I really did twist the hell out of it earlier in the bathroom.
So I twisted the shit out of my back trying to get into and behind the 2nd floor toilet just now to repair the supply intake.
Hopefully I didn't twist it too bad. At least I have a massage schedule tomorrow after work.
Ok. Onto the wall spackling for a bit and hopefully soup-making and tool sorting.
I have so totally wasted this past weekend.
I did absolutely nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Nothing on the house. Nothing on my body. Nothing at all.
And now it is Monday and I have a MLK day off and it isn't even 10am and I still haven't done anything other than watch a shitload of Futurama .
However, the 2nd floor toilet supply line from the valve to the tank is leaking so I'm going to try and get that replaced today.
I have to at least do something over the course of 72 hours!!!
Woohoo!!!
I came home this afternoon to some White Castle coffee sitting there on the counter.
Not sure where Giga found it but I'm happy.
I'm... how does one say in English... "Ich bin total das Kugelschaukeln glücklich."
Woot!
moar funny pictures
So the Time Warner cable guy was here waiting for me way way way before he was even supposed to be here at 10am.
Apparently this was once again a situation, as often happens it seems with Time Warner Cable, in which the tech couldn't do anything and it was actually the people at the office who had to make some change.
Which of course makes me wonder yet again which incompetent person Giga was on the phone with for 60 minutes last night.
I mean... why the hell couldn't they solve the problem?!?!
Grrrr...
I so hate dealing with them, though I suspect WOW and the others are all exactly the same.
Anyway, the HD channels look great. The regular channels not so great.
It'll be interesting to see if these other cable channels actually alter their programming to HD when the analog to digital switch over occurs at the end of the year.
I mean, is it really worth it to pay for cable period then if less than 10% of their content is actually in a format that is the new standard?
At least my HowardTV looks good. I was worried there.
I've also found a setting on the HD cable box that was not set to 1080i so hopefully changing that will help image fidelity-wise.
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The new mattresses came today!
Hopefully it is worth the extra $$$ I dropped down on it.
It isn't remotely one of those $3000 mattresses that gives you a blow job or anything but it has to be better than that 30+ year-old one I inherited from J-K-Not-Rowling.
And hopefully my back will notice the difference too!!!
Now to get a headboard I really want instead of this one. I tend to avoid looking at it since it is so ugly.
There's a few I've found that I really like.
I'm not a fan of footboards though. At 6'2" I tend to like to hang my feet off when I can.
---
It took about 5 minutes after the delivery guys left for The Asshole to sneak upstairs and begin to get comfortable!
Grrrrr....
S'what I get for not closing the door.
Tonight's my final night on the shitty mattress.
Tomorrow, between 10 and noon, I'll get the new queen size bed!!!
Yes!!!
In other news, Giga picked up our new HD cable service box today and he's attempting to install it and activate it as I type. Even got another HDMI cable to ensure only the highest possible quality signal to the new Television Of Love.
Oh.
And I did break down and by that Bose sound system.
I'm not completely sold on it yet.
It does sound a lot better, especially because there's now some decent bass in the room, but I just don't know if the same couldn't be achieved with something cheaper.
Giga's given me permission to return it.
I feel bad having opened it and used it and all.
So I started major work on my new house project today.
The full info can be found over at the Domicile site page.
Major scraping and prepping for the next 2 days or so.
I've also chosen a warm tan color called "Prairie Dance" as the final color.
The swatches have all been sitting on the window sill for a few days so I could see them in different natural and unnatural light.
I think this'll be nice, especially with the new light fixture I found that I think will work. More on the light later.
More on picking Prairie Dance here.
I had to have this today.
So tomorrow I'm going to start on the foyer/stairwell/hallway project.
I've made a decision on the ceilings based on some thoughts on how future lighting could really be improved in the foyer.
I'm going to just repair, and possibly retexture, the existing ceilings, making them consistent and trying to improve the shitty previous job so that I can at least look at it and say "I can tolerate this for a while." and be done with it until the electric in the house is rerun.
Instead of one center light (like above), each individual window would get a small recessed light in front of it, as well as the double doors.
They'd be on dimmers so a "mood" could be created in the foyer and if done right, the light patterns cast down from the ceiling would be noticeable from the outside.
It isn't remotely vintage to the house, but I think it would really make that room nicer and something unique from the rest of The Domicile.
Since that'll require major wiring and hole cutting, it might as well be done after the wiring is redone in the house.
After that, the floor in the foyer would be ripped up and tiled or hardwood would be layed down.
So... basically I'll just be doing my usual plaster wall repair work and attempting to do a not-so-half-ass paint job.
I actually do a pretty decent job considering nothing in these old houses has perfect right angles anymore and they walls are 80 years old.
I'd love to redo the trim and baseboards but I can live with what I bought for now.
So to continue to help my back improve I finally broke down yesterday and purchased a new mattress. I got an Orthopedic Luxury Firm. I wanted the harder and firmer one but I compromised.
I think anything will be an improvement over the 30+ year-old mattress I've been sleeping on the past 7 years or so.
Gotta queen size one too... once the bedrooms are redone and finalized there may be a king-sized version in the future too with this one going into the guest room.
Giga used his Store-That-Shall-Remain-Nameless-Because-We-Feel-Dirty-Going-There giftcard from work and we also got a Phillips DVD player with HDMI that upsamples DVDs to 1080i high-def.
DAMN!
With the new HDTV I bought for Jesus' birthday there is a noticeable improvement over image fidelity from the DVD recorder we've been playing on, and even the other player I recently bought.
Futurama looks fantastic and I put on The Two Towers and it was beautiful!
Baby-stepping to high-def was definitely the way for us to go.
Giga's going to upgrade the cable service to HD too now that we know the right signal and right connection can really shine on the new telly.
There's a basic Bose sound system for the living room in our future too.
Nothing huge or top-of-the-line but definitely something that will make having people over watching movies and shit far more enjoyable.
And I can use some of the Target gift cards I got from Xmas on it.
Holy crap!!!
The sun is out!
There's no pouring rain or dreariness.
Cowtown weather.
Always a roll of the dice.
I forgot to mention that I had my 2nd massage appointment yesterday.
She totally worked over my lower thoracic area all the way down to my oh so perfect bubble butt *snicker*.
Actually, it was rather weird having my fat ass massaged. I can't say that I've ever had that done quite like this before.
Once again, today I feel like my back has had a really good gym workout without all the sharp pains.
I'm beginning to wonder what percentage of my pain has been the tensed muscles spasming all these months.
I'm definitely going to commit to going for about 4 more times, once every week, and then maybe once every month or so depending on how I feel.
All I can say is I feel a helluva lot better than I have in ages.
So I briefly woke up around 1pm last to the worst rain banging against the west side of the house and the wind whipping the shit out of the magnolias out back.
Little did I suspect what what happening out front.
I got up at 4:30am to get ready for the gym and when I got outside, the entire driveway behind my car, as well as the yard and street in from of The Domicile were horribly littered with major tree debris.
The wind really beat the shit out of the two dead maple trees out front.
I came back around at 6:30 on my way to work and tried to quickly clean this out of the street and sidewalk.
I'm going to have to saw some of this crap up.
I so have to get the city to cut those trees down.
It'll suck... since I'm a major foliage tree guy... but they were long gone before I bought the property.
It could have been a crappier morning though. A good chunk of Cowtown was without power due to the stormage.
Happy Three-One to The Cousin.
Why is it that I feel older when you have a birthday than when I do???
So I'm in the process of planning and hopefully starting the first Domicile project of 2008.
Unfortunately, I'm in a quandry at the moment that I need to resolve.
Now when I bought the house I knew the state of the ceilings, especially those with the godsawful texture paint.
After the work in the dining room and living room, I'm fairly certain that the textured paint was put up to "cover" what should have been properly repaired: broken plaster keys and major cracks.
Those ceilings in those two rooms were at least done with a more consistent pattern and I can live with them.
Let's face facts too... the square footage that those ceilings cover would be a massive restoration job way above anything I would personally tackle, I can't imagine the costs involved in having them professionally redone even!
Anyway, the ceiling in the foyer, stairwell, and upstairs hallway are horribly done, with more of a half-ass pattern, areas of the ceiling sagging, texture paint drips down to the wall, etc. Just pure badness all around.
And these problems I notice multiple times a day.
I even suspect some previous water damage in the foyer is lurking under that texture paint and has contributed to the plaster keys breaking.
Now I can make this new project simple, and just do the usual basic wall repairs, better repainting, new light and switches, etc., which won't take more than maybe 2 weeks total. Or I could tear down the foyer ceiling to the joists and really make sure that a proper new non-textured ceiling, drywall though it may be, will be installed.
That potentially extents the work a long time, creates quite a long period of dusty mess that we have to constantly go through multiple times a day, and also opens up the potential to find other major problems.
Then there's the fact that if I do it in the foyer, I may need to do it up the stairwell, and then most definitely in the 2nd floor hallway which has major problems near the attic access.
Now that's a huge undertaking by an amateur like me, but I would attempt it.
However, that leaves the fact that the electrical wiring that feeds the switches and lights is also ancient knob-and-tube and really should be rerun while the ceilings are down and such.
But... without knowing how to prep that right, I don't even know if it would be possible to do without having the entire house's electrical situation redone beforehand to feed the necessary new circuits and electric runs.
So... you see... I'm in a quandry.
On one hand I want to do it right... and do it now... but at the same time I know that to do it right is impacted by other things that need to happed.
Perhaps I should just do the wall repairs and paint so that I can move on to the bedrooms.
That way... work will get done in the winter time frame, the house will look more like "us", and I'll just wait to redo those ceilings after I make hard choices about the major electrical revamping.
Thoughts?
Ummm...
Hmmm...
It is January 7.
This is Cowtown.
It is 68 degrees outside.
What's wrong with this picture?
Yes.
It is a sign of the vagapocalypse!
Ok.
In my mind today is now Day 0 of the Foyer/Stairwell/Hallway revamp project.
This will be the first project in my recent life in which I will begin using multiple new skill sets learned from the old House of Love III repairs.
In the cards is drywall, plastering, electrical work, and Primus knows what else!
Fun. Fun. Fun.
The goal is to have these 3 areas done by February 15 or so.
After that I'll start on the street-facing bedroom.
While I hung out with Rescue Rooter Dude, Giga proceeded with the exterior unmaking of Christmas, removing the lights and ornaments I had put up in the outside last month.
What's funny is 3 other neighbors all seemed to pick this afternoon to unmake Christmas too.
I got the inside trees and stuff all down and packed up earlier this week.
So I did a load of laundry this morning and didn't notice anything really out of place.
However, after the 2nd load, and a flushing of the toilet, I was graced with this (below):
Yup!
Somewhere under the basement slab, the main drain line to the sewers decided to pick a Sunday morning to become clogged.
F. U. N.
When I flushed the one toilet Giga was greeted by nice gurgling in the kitchen sink.
No. Really.
Super mega fun there.
Thankfully, Rescue Rooter was here in like less than 30 minutes or so. Damn fast!
Now one thing that I found out was that he couldn't do a proper cleaning of the sewer line because I no longer have a 4" or greater drain clean-out plug. Even being flexible, the larger spingy 6"+ cleaning blade won't clear the curve of the 3" pipe.
See (above). When previous owners installed the 1st floor bathroom, they tied the plumbing drainage to the main stack at the 4" clean-out, installing a 3" pipe and 3" clean-out along that run.
Now here in Clintonville, the sewers are in the 100+ year old range. Most of the houses are also in this general 80-100 year-old range and have tiled sewer lines to the main. The amount of mature trees means that most of these tiled drainage lines have roots all through them and require regular snaking and cleaning.
The Rescue Rooter guy said that most houses in this area require sewer line root cleaning at least once a year due to the age of the mains and the root infestation.
But it is all taken care of now.
Thankfully it was only around $250 and everything seems to be draining fine now.
He recommended buying some of the foaming root killer to user regularly that will help maintain the pipes but it is likely that they'll need to be cleaned every 18 months or so, even a bit more frequently since there are 2 huge trees out front of the Domicile.
Oh well.
At least I can shower now.
And I feel good knowing I have a baseline date/time to know when the line was cleaned.
What's really funny? I had to do this about 3 months after I bought the House of Love III too.
Well my grand plans to get back to the gym hasn't happened this week.
Between this cold that returned and now lingers in my upper chest, as well as my craptastic back, 2008 is slower than I wanted.
However, I finally did something I've been planning to do and it made a huge difference yesterday.
Yup!
I looked up a local massage therapist, plopped down $60, and spent 80 or so minutes getting my back worked over like you wouldn't believe.
And?
My upper back, while sore this morning, feels fantastic!
She hit every damn pain point in my neck and around both shoulders. I was close to crying but I've learned that the pain of the massage is temporary. And sure enough, it was.
This morning I feel sore, like I had a good upper body gym day, but I don't have the lightning pains in my shoulders.
My lower back?
Still hurty.
One thing I hadn't realized until she really started working the muscles over was the fact that a lot of my pain is actually farther down in my sacrum and not higher up.
Major trigger points for pain down there, which makes sense considering how poor my sitting posture has become due to my overall back pain.
She basically said she'd focus on the lower back/hips area next week and see if she can get those muscles to release.
I never realized how tense my back is and so much of my pain is due to that tension.
Grrrr.
This was $60 well spent yesterday.
I'll be happy if I can get back to the gym by next Wednesday morning.
I ganked this from Hoop, who ganked it from others, and so on and so on.
I haven't done a net meme in years.
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Here's that class privilege meme that's going around - developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University.
Bold what applies to you.
1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college (if attending a vo-tech to get certification counts)
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home (i'm guessing here, but it's pretty likely.)
9. Were read children's books by a parent
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18.
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels This was early on. We didn't do much in my teens.
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18 Being the eldest, there were no such things as hand-me-down.
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child
23. You and your family lived in a single family house
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home. I think.
25. You had your own room as a child. Only child.
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18.
27. Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
28. Had your own TV in your room in High School. It was small, black and white, and I bought it myself at a garage sale.
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16.
31. Went on a cruise with your family.
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up. A few museums.
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.
So.
What does this make me?
I'm basically an extremely over-edumacated foul-mouthed blue collar Polish-American.
And I wouldn't have it any other way!
So.
2008 brought major changes to the workplace frustrating me a little bit and frustrating others a shitload.
It seems that the powers that be have decided to block all streaming media services so that means no occasional video, radio, etc.
Now the radio part is what is killing me. I'm without my Sirius channels so that means no more Stern which will totally drive me crazy.
They've also blocked sites that remotely smell of Social Networking so that means no more Flickr and no more blogs.
They've also also blocked all sites that remotely smell of "Entertainment" so that means no no TF crack sites.
Even gmail no longer works, no doubt because of that goddamn embedded GoogleChat functionality.
At least I'm left with access to reading some RSS feeds. I can't comment anymore or post at my own sites while working but at least I can still catch up on some net craziness while I'm at lunch.
Barely.
Szczesliwego Nowego Roku!
May your 2008 be free from the ever present threat and danger of stinky meowy butt.
And may I find the motivation to take down all these damn decorations today.
Enough is enough.
