Bike, Torino, deflated

So during the day on Friday I picked up the bike I bought at the UPS depot. They tried to deliver on Tursday but noone was home.  Friday night while we were watching TV I worked on putting it together.  The bike seems pretty nice to me.  The instructions were less than stellar. Putting it together took me awhile but it wasn’t all that difficult to do.  I took it out briefly later in the night just to give it a quick test ride.  It seemed ok.

Saturday Ali had a meeting to go to.  I had some server work to get done at the office as well as a good chunk of things I wanted to get done around the house including mowing/weed whacking the grass.  I got busy and worked diligently until mid-afternoon.  When I was done I thought I would load the dogs up in the party van to go for a quick ride to refill the propane tank.  They were quite excited when I pulled out their leashes.

After I got back I decided to take my new bike for more of an extended road test.  The bike came with the toe cage type of pedal.  I’m not nuts about them.  In fact I removed the tightening strap altogether and just used them like regular pedals.  I went up to the dead end in our street and back a round trip of about 4 miles. It took some fiddling around until I got comfortable with a riding position as well as getting a feel for the shifting mechanism.  The bike seemed to be riding well enough although there was a bit of noise in the gears that makes me think I need to adjust things a little bit yet.  I went most of the way in 7th gear, peddling hard the entire way to maintain a decent amount of speed.  By the end of the 4 miles my legs were burning, I forgot just how tiring biking can be.   I need to score a helmet, bike pants and maybe a different set of pedals before I hit the open road for a longer ride.

After Ali’s meeting she picked up my mom for her sleep over visit with us.  Mom brought along her taxes for me to do and her Roomba for me to clean/work on.  Ali bought a vegetable lasagna for us for dinner but it took 2 hours to bake.  We killed the time by eating salads early and then started watching Gran Torino, a movie mom actually requested to see.  Luckily I had already gotten the movie a few weeks ago. 

Gran Torino is about an old, grumpy guy that fought in the Korean war.  The neighborhood he lives in has been taken over by asian families and he is not very happy about it.  If you are offended by ethnic/racial slurs then you might not want to watch the movie.  Clint has a 72 Gran Torino that is his baby.  He had it since new and helped build it as he was a Ford auto worker for decades. 

A friend of mine in high school had a Gran Torino just like it.  His name was Hoyt Feister.  That thing was a beast.  When he stepped on the gas hard your head better had been on the headrest else it was going to be planted there in a split second.  Anyway, the movie started out with lots of humour as Clint curses out everybody in a manner that made you smile.  Towards the end things get much more serious.  It was a very good movie.  Who would have thought Clint could pull offf a psuedo-Dirty Harry role after almost 80 years on the planet, pretty amazing.  Mom said she would give the movie a B, I give it a solid A.

After the movie I hopped online to turboxtax.com and did mom’s taxes.  Since her return is simple I was able to use the absolutely free version.  Yep, free as in ZERO.  It even included e-filing in the free version, hard to beat!  Mom is getting more back than last year which she did not expect, a pleasant surprise for her.

Sunday morning we hung out for awhile.  This was mom’s first meeting with Sadie.  Of course Sadie was very happy to meet my mom just like she is everyone else.  She hung all over her throughout her stay.  At times mom had a hard time distinguishing between Nicki and Sadie.  She got to see the crazy dog antics first hand as the two of them put on many wrestling exhibitions as well as rapid chase sessions around the yard.  

Mom killed the battery on her Roomba.  She was only running the thing twice a month which isn’t sufficient to keep the battery cycled.  It’s my fault, I never told her that she needs to run it more.  It also was badly in need of a thorough cleaning.  I wound up giving her my spare battery.

After lunch where I made burgers on the grill we packed up and headed out.  Mom agreed to go with us to Home Depot to look at kitchen counters.  She has a much better decorating eye than either Ali or I possess.  We looked at both Silestone, a granite-like man made substance and granite.  We were walking around the area for quite awhile and no Home Depot employees came up to us asking if we wanted any help.  Instead I had to walk over to the desk where two of them were shooting the shit and interrupt them.

The guy that helped me was nice enough but he was not much more than  just an order taker.   We told him we were looking at Silestone and we had our measurements.  He didn’t try to tell us anything about the product he just started adding up numbers.  On the wall it said they were running a promotion where you get a free sink with a Silestone installation up to a $499 value, sweet, NOT.  You only have a choice of three or four sinks and if you want another style too bad.  That is stupid.

When we ran numbers on Corian a few years ago the install figure came out somewhere between $3000 and $3500.  With Silestone there was a wide range of pricing.  It started at $44 a square foot installed up to nearly $70 a square foot.  Of course the styles Ali and I liked were the most expensive variety.    Jack starts adding up numbers.  There are a lot of ancillary charges he is mumbling as he scratches out figures on a blank piece of paper.

So the installation charges you pay doesn’t really cover the installation.  What it gets you is a new counter top installed.  However they nickel and dime you on everything else in addition to the “installation” charge. To me when you say there is an installation charge it should include everything required for an installation, not in Home Depot land.

Ok so the install includes a hole for the sink.  Oh, you want the sink undermounted like is typical with granite?  That is an extra $250.  You want the plumbing actually hooked up to the sink, that will be another $550 or so.  You say you want a rounded bullnose edge on the granite?  That is another $13 per linear foot ($400-$500) You need a big arc cut into the island to match the existing piece, that’s extra too.  This is my favorite one, you expect Home Depot to actually remove the old counter tops before installing the new ones? No problem, just hand over ANOTHER $400-$500.

As this list of charges accumulated my initial enthusiasm had dwindled down to nothing.  Jack spit out numbers that were in the $4500 to $5000 range, f’in ridiculous in my book.  Keep in mind that would be pre-sales tax and also not counting us paying additional for a sink and fixture that we actually wanted since the throw in sinks were shitty.  So if we wanted Home Depot to come in and do ALL of the work we could easily drop close to 6k which would spend every penny of our tax return as well as another grand our so out of our pocket.  Yea, right.

After we went through the Silestone quote I asked Jack for his opinion of just getting regular granite versus Silestone.  He said he actually recommended granite instead.  WTF, I thought to myself.  I was annoyed he wouldn’t take a more consultive stance in the process.  I guess when you are dealing with people that receive no financial incentive when they sell stuff to customers that is what you are going to get, order takers. Anyway he ran numbers on granite and they were almost exactly the same as Silestone.  His stance was granite carries more weight when it comes to resale.  Everyone knows what granite is, not many know about Silestone.   

We thanked Jack for his time.  It didn’t take long for me to indicate to Ali that I was not happy at all at what we just sat through.  Those numbers were ridiculous in my opinion.  I am having a similar feeling that I did when we initially got quotes from professional fence installers.  They quoted us numbers that were equally sky high.  In the end I did it myself and saved more than 50% in the process.  Now obviously I can’t fabricate a piece of granite myself.  I can however probably  manage to remove the old counter tops myself and muddle through hooking up plumbing to the new sink.  We could also save some money if we go with a less expensive edge treatment, we didn’t really look in detail at all of the options. I plan to go to Lowe’s as well as contact some smaller local shops to get some comparisons.  All I know is I’m not spending 6k to get this done.

After Home Depot we dropped mom off, helped her flip her mattress and then headed back home.  Sadie managed to not destroy anything in couple hours alone.  The rest of Sunday Ali was busy cooking a months worth of food for Nicki.  I spent a lot of the time in WoW working on levelling my engineering profession.  I was able to hit the max skill level and create myself an epic head piece and gun.  It was the first time I played WoW in 5 or 6 days.