All posts by Duf

Taxing lan connections, what sort of idiot comes up with this plan? You have GOT to be kidding me.

I think I may be addicted to home projects. 🙂 I need to go cold turkey. It wreaks havoc on the bank account.

I finally posted my tile progress pics. Look at them here.

A few puppy pics have been added here.

I’ve been getting up early to spray the grout lines with water for the past 2 days in anticipation of the final sealing of the tile tomorrow. I can’t wait to be able to move the fridge back into the kitchen and get back to “normal”.

I’ve been trying to find someone to go see Freddy vs Jason with me but I don’t know anyone down here that enjoys that type of movie. I used to watch all of the Freddy movies growing up. They used to scare the hell out of me but I would keep coming back for more. I only saw 1 or 2 of the Jason movies. I might have to wait for it to come out on video or bite the bullet and go see it myself.

I was playing more Frozen Throne last night and came up against a player with the handle RAPISTWITHAIDS. A truly repulsive handle and surely the person that chose it was a first class lowlife. I was very motivated to beat the scumbag. I did.

3 day weekend coming up.

The weekend of tile, all tile, all the time. We BUSTED ass on it Friday night, Saturday and Sunday. The good news is it is basically done! All we have to do yet is wet the grout twice a day for 3 days and then clean it and seal it. The final result looks pretty sweet, a big change. There are a few imperfections here and there but nothing bad. Grouting was a chore, my knees were screaming by the time I was done. So what is the bad news you ask? We have 3 more rooms to do! However we will be taking a break before we begin the other rooms. The kitchen is probably only a little smaller than the other 3 rooms combined so it wont be as bad. Plus we know more about the process now, so it should go better.

We got done wiping down the floor about 2pm Sunday afternoon. Great, now we can take a break! Nope, the grass needs to be mowed. 🙁 Ali and Nicki almost stepped on a snake cause they couldn’t see it in the high grass so Ali really wanted to chop it down. We set the mower deck nice and low and spent another 2 hours performing lawn care. We have several small pond areas around the yard from the large amounts of rain we got this past week. We got somewhere in the range of 5-6 inches of rain. The skies looked very gray and threatening but we managed to get it all done with only a few drops falling on our heads.

Begin videogame geek talk. As busy as we were, I still found some time to play some Frozen Throne. I had one extremely frustrating match. I was night elves and was playing an undead player. I had an big early advantage, I killed his hero, killed most of his army and had a big lead in resource collection. I let up the pressure and tried to simply accumulate resources and troops since I should easily outgain him. I got cocky and fought some sloppy battles where I lost more troops than I should have and eventually wound up losing a game I should have EASILY won. I don’t mind losing when I am clearly beaten, but to lose a game I should have easily won drives me NUTS. I did manage to win a few games this weekend which is better than I had been doing so I guess it wasn’t all bad.

The “I LOVE THE 80’s” & “I LOVE THE 70’s” is some of the best stuff on TV if you are 30 something like me and like to look back at the past. The show is funny as hell because of the people they have commenting on different aspects of the decade. It is really good stuff. You should check out VH1 and watch one show. You will be hooked. They talk about all aspects of each year, the shows, the toys, the style, the movies, very entertaining.

A lot of people that go the gym are vain to some degree. I mean why else do you go to the gym except to make your body look better? I surely have a degree of vanity with the emphasis I put on staying in shape. But today I saw a guy that was just ridiculous. He was in decent shape, nothing amazing by any stretch. But this guy would do his 30 second set and then spend his 2 or 3 minute recup time doing nothing but flexing in the mirror and admiring his physique from all possible angles. He didn’t just do this once, everytime after every set. I look in the mirror when I want to watch my range of motion on an exercise but never have I done a pose down. It looked really stupid and made the guy come off as a total dweeb to me. Talk about loving yourself… Soon I’ll give my spin on the few “excessive grunters” we have wandering around as well as the techo-dance music selections that certain counter people seem to think we enjoy.

Every night this week we have been working on the tile project in the kitchen. We are well over half done in there and hope to get a bunch more laid tonight. Last night I also had my first experience with self leveling mortar. I used it to smooth out some of the canyons in the floor. Worked well. I am over the inital shock of having the kitchen all ripped up. My insitinctive reaction to want to get it all done quickly is what caused me so much drama on Sunday. Now that I am ok with doing what I can in a steady and thorough process, I feel much better. I think it will look really sharp when it is done. I am accumulating in progress pics of the work but wont post them until it’s done.

Sick of having to enter your email address on a website to only get spam from them? Try out this! It is very cool.

After bragging of my improved performance playing Frozen Throne, I followed up with a 2-12 streak that brought back to that rationalization that I’m just not very good at the game. I’ll keep plugging away.

Last week we had talked about heading to Home Depot to check out ceramic tile. You know, see what we like, get some info, the basic stuff. Well in typical fashion (for us) that evolved into coming home Saturday night with 320 square foot of tile in the back of the truck as well as tools to boot, even a wetsaw! After much debate regarding if we wanted to tile over the vinyl or pull it and tile to the concrete we decided it would be best to pull it up. That is the optimal way and I don’t want to be “half-assing” a project. So with my trusty how-to tile book in hand we began removing the vinyl at the entrance way. WOW, it pulled up easy! Just get a corner up and yank! Wait a sec, what is that gray paper down there? Oh SH*T. The paper backing was still glued to the floor. Hmmm, no problem, I’ll just get out my flat bladed shovel and edging tool and scrape that stuff up lickety split. Hahahahahaha. After attacking the 3 foot by 5 foot area with the shovel, the edger and a hand putty knife/scraper and clearing maybe 2 square feet, the ugly reality hit us that this was going to be a nasty job. We bagged it for the night and I said I would go to home depot in the morning to find some sort of tool to assist in the vinyl removal process.

I woke up bright and early and motivated to attack the project. I got to Home Depot at 7:45 am Sunday morning. Doh! They don’t open till 8 on Sundays. I grabbed some coffee, went back and stepped up to the rental counter. “What do you have that can make removing vinyl floor bearable?” I asked. He said he had just the tool, brand new, never rented before. 50 bucks a day to rent it! Whew, a little steep but I figured with this fantastic tool I could strip all of the vinyl areas in a single day! This machine was big and HEAVY. I asked the guy if I could get it into my truck myself, he said SURE, it has a handle in the front to lift it. It probably weighed close to 150 lbs if not more. I managed to swing it up onto the bed barely. One guy asked me if I was ok, I guess the veins popping out of forehead and neck were a giveaway. I called Ali with the great news of the super vinyl removal machine I was bringing home.

I unloaded the behemoth and shortly afterward began attacking the vinyl at the front entrance. It worked well, stripped it down however we noticed that we had to do some lifting of the machine to get enough downforce to get certain spots to come up. No big deal. We got the entrance done in maybe a half an hour. Time for the kitchen. The kitchen is a large area. We had to first pull the top layer of vinyl off by hand and then go after the paper and glue underneath. It seemed like if I wanted to get all the way down to the concrete I pretty much had to have the machine lifted all the time. This was ok at first, but shortly resulted in very sore forearms and ribs. 5 hours later we were done with vinyl removal in the kitchen.

Removing the vinyl revealed a very ugly picture. The concrete underneath looked like it was jack hammered and then filled in sloppily with some low grade patch mix. Evidently they were not concerned with it being very flat. It was a wavy, ridged mess. Not a good thing for laying tile. Grrr. We should have called it a day there. Shoulda have taken a breath and come up with a game plan. Nope I pressed on. I wanted to get some tile laid damn it!

We laid out the tiles “dry” so we could figure out the cuts we had to make. After doing so I went to our new wet saw and went to town. This went well except I couldn’t find a way to avoid being hit in the face with ceramic, watery spray from the saw. I had to wipe the film off my safety goggles after every cut. 30 seconds into my first cut, the sky opens and rains on me as I’m cutting. I ignored the bolts of lighting around me and pressed on. Must, get, tile laid.

After getting the tiles cut for the entrance I had to mix the thin set, the stuff you stick the tiles into. Ok read the directions, 6 quarts of water, mixes with 50lbs of thin set. No problem, throw in the water, then throw in the mix on top and fire up the drill mixer. Haha. Hmm not going so well, it is very stiff. Hmm maybe if I press the mixer to the bottom where the water is it will go better. Doing so locked the bit in place and instead spun the bucket, throwing thin set mix all over me and anything within 6 feet of me. Argh. I get out the hose and water it down (even though I’m not supposed to do so) 6 quarts my ass, there is no way that was enough water. After a messy 10 minutes of mixing I have something that looks like it should work.

We start spreading and laying. Wow this is a mess, a big mess. Quickly my hands are encrusted with the crap. I try to keep somewhat clean with rags but it doesnt work. Why did I wear shorts? Initially I was the spreader but soon we noticed that Ali did a better and cleaner job of it than I did. I became the tile placer. I worked the tiles in and tried to make sure they were level. They were for the most part but there were certain ones that were off some due to the uneven areas of the floor. I tried to pull some of them to readjust. It was a major battle to pry up a tile that was put in place only 30 seconds ago, it was stuck like super glue. Because of the force I had to use to remove it, normally when it did release it would result in me getting coated in even more thinset. It was really a bad scene.

We pressed on into the night. Got about 20 tiles set in the kitchen and bagged it. I was more frustrated than I ever had been doing a home improvement project. I was dejected, beat up, tired and miserable. To her credit, Ali was upbeat and did a great job of keeping me from totally blowing my cool. We cleaned up the mess and finally got to eat dinner at 9:15. As discouraging as it was, as bad as I felt, I was back at Home Depot with a positive attitude today getting a few items to help me win the war against the tile. I will prevail. I think the final outcome will be nice I just need to realize that I can’t do it all in a day.

I along with everyone else feared that the huge NE power outage was the groundwork for some terrorist plot. Yay it wasn’t. But look at the mess it caused, the cities affected are a MESS right now. How many anti-American terrorist groupd stood up and took notes once this happened? Seven MAJOR cities dark from a SINGLE point of failure. You know that just made it to the TOP of the to do list of terrorist organizations. It was bad enough just losing power, imagine if they lost power AND some sort of attack was coordinated with that? The world today sucks.

This is cool.