Two weekends ago: set up clothes line… just in time for Sunday’s rain!

Last week: set up a cat quarantine/acclimation gate between the kitchen and the rest of the house. I am hoping to write up an instructable on it some time soon.

This most recent weekend: set up a Pallet Compost Bin (pictured below, alongside clothes line.)

“What’s that smell? Is something on fire? It smells like something is burning. It kind of smells electrical. Is the teakettle on? Did it boil dry? Is it inside, or out the window?”

It turned out to be the heater kicking in for the first time in months, and the subsequent burning off of dust from its innerworkings.

Based on feedback, both online and off, I think I am going to go with a Flickr Pro account for my photo hosting. The Aperture integration is beautiful and the functionality is great. I’ll miss being able to pull up stats and the ability to mess with people who hot-link pictures from MySpace.

I’m waiting a week or two because the wildcard is Apple’s rumored upgrades to the .Mac service in a week. Their services and disk space have never warranted the $99/year price tag, but if they are able to significantly lower the price or significantly increase their service offering, then I might go that route. The rumors also point to better iPhone integration, which (depending on the feature set and price) would be nice, too. At the very least, I am waiting to see how this pans out.

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There was a bad TV show in the 80s. Well, there were a lot of bad TV shows in the 80s, but the theme song of one in particular has been stuck in my head for days. I wonder if you remember this particular show? The main character was a girl and she was either a young teen or pre-teen. She was half alien, living with her (human) mom in a fancy house in one of the “bay” towns in California (Morro Bay, Bodega Bay, something like that.) She had some kind of crystal cube, propped up on one corner, that (with the help of horrid 80s television special effects) she could use to talk to her dad, in outer space or whatever. I think she had some kind of powers, but I don’t remember what. Anyway, the theme song was this Frank Sinatra song “would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar?” I only saw it a few times, but either it was on all the time or my little sister really liked to watch it a lit–I don’t know which.

I do not think that knowing the name of the show will cause the theme song to exit my head, but it will be one less “on the top of my tongue” thing bugging me.

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Our house seems to be the hangout spot for all the cool cats in the neighborhood. And by cats, I mean cats. We are sort of next door to a concrete and asphalt apartment complex and the pointy-nose Siamese over there seems to find our yard much more fun and interesting than his place. Additionally, there’s a black and white fuzzy cat from a neighbor in the other direction that always wants to hang out at our place. There are several others, too, that we only catch glimpses of. The Siamese and black-and-white are the most chatty.

Exhibit One: There have been a few mornings where I wake up, stumble down the stairs, and glance over at the cat sitting on the kitchen windowsill. After a quick double-take, I look again at the cat sitting on the outside kitchen windowsill, looking in.

Exhibit Two: If we leave the door open and the screen door closed, throughout the day the Siamese and black-and-white will take turns coming to the door to talk to us. Yesterday, while doing work around the house, each one was at the door a dozen times throughout the day.

Exhibit Three: Bribery. While not intended to bribe cats to our house, we do happen to be growing (or maybe past-tense would be more correct) catnip in a little terra-cotta trough out front. This seems to have attracted the attention of all the neighborhood kitties. It is heavily grazed upon, often knocked over, and on a few occasions, has been uprooted and pulled from the pot, left several feet away. It’s dead enough at this point that it is no longer of much kitty interest.

Exhibit Four: The white picket fence separating the front yard and back yard has a very deliberate slat missing from it. We have dubbed this “the kitty highway” because of the number of cats that use it to get to and from the back yard.

Exhibit Five: The birdfeeder is similarly dubbed “kitty TV” because cats, both inside the house and out, spend hours staring at it.

The good news is that everyone is much less hissy now: our cats interactions with the neighbor cats and the neighbor cats amongst one another. One day, everyone will be living in peace.

The other good news is that I doubt we will ever have a rodent problem of any kind.

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I’d tell you to mark your calendars, but I don’t know a date yet. We will be having some kind of BBQ/potluck/housewarming party in a month or so. December, even though the white Christmas was nice, was not very conducive to a housewarming. In the intervening time, the state of (dis)repair of the house was not particularly conducive, either. But now, things are clean and stable enough that we can get away with having a housewarming we can be proud of. Keep an eye open for an email or phone call from Kim or I in the next week or so, as we figure out what weekend works best for her and her travels.

This is a sweet picture!

Well, it would be sweet if it wasn’t a cameraphone. And if it wasn’t just a test run with cold water. It is the first end-to-end, fully-functional test of the jacuzzi tub.

I had to reconfigure the switch panel to make it work. It had two “normal” switches, side by side, which I had to convert to an over-under style switch and a timer.

Everything is (…basically…) up to Oregon code (which is National Electrical Code 2005 plus a few amendments.) It’s on its own dedicated 20A breaker, with a GFI outlet, with everything wired up correctly. Getting everything wired up correctly took two tries, unfortunately, because I had a brain-fart in the crawlspace under the house and reversed the hot and return lines. I do say it is “basically” up to code because you’re not technically supposed to have light switches and such within 5 feet of the tub. The existing light switches were already there and already 3-4 feet from the tub, so I reused their box instead of going through the major engineering effort of re-routing all of the electricity in the bathroom. I don’t think it’ll be a problem, and our inspector didn’t point it out when we bought the place.

Fortunately, the bathroom is one of two rooms in the place that is drywall instead of plaster. The next project is, of course, drywall repair. Fortunately, that’s relatively easy.

This was me, getting ready to have fun this afternoon:

All the house’s wiring is accessible from the basement… except the stuff I needed to get to inspect today, which is in a crawl-space under the kitchen… with what appears to be asbestos wrapping pipes and ducts above… and bug powder on the ground below… In retrospect, I should have dug out my steampunk goggles. My regular safety goggles cover the fronts of the eyes, but still allow dust to get in around the sides.

Earlier this morning, I *ahem* had fun with my caulk in the bathroom.

I just never get tired of saying “ballcock.”

To riff on a theme of (…or, as I like to call it, “plagiarize”…) Brandon’s from a few weeks ago, this flapper is (mostly) universal. I was fortunate in that the toilet is new enough to have standard spacings and sizes.

Since it’s difficult to measure and map out exactly the size and shape of flapper required, I crossed my fingers and bought this half-expecting to have to exchange it for a different one. It fit fine.

Today, I bought a BALLCOCK!

These seems to be some kind of… barnacle…? Residing in my toilet tank…? WTF?

1. Near-freezing temperatures today: the weather could not make up its mind whether to rain, snow, or hail this morning.

2. Massage. Yeay! My back’s still pretty f’ed up, yo. Usually, the massage helps, but today things were especially bad. I’ve lost weight, though–most of my pants no longer fit me–but my back is a twisted mess of muscles.

3. Trimming the hedge that’s overtaking the driveway, scratching the cars as the come in and out. In the freezing out-of-doors.

4. Replacing the 11″x14″ windowpane that got smashed by cat action. In the freezing out-of-doors. Glazing compound looks and acts like frosting. This is enhanced by the way you use the putty knife to work with it.

5. Kim now has a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens. *snicker* Thanks, mother-in-law. Or something. The magazine was fun to giggle over today, but I can see the joke becoming less and less funny over the next year. Fun stuff to do with your kids! Uhhh… kids? Valentines day tips! Uh, sorry, no. Spices for your arthritis relief! Know those toll-free numbers for family health!

6. Hey you Cali folks! My mom is bringing Kim and I down to Teh OC in February for Christmas vacation… in February. We were not able to get down there in December because of house-buying and house-fix-up and all of that, so X-Mas had to be postponed. We’ll be there 2/8 through 2/11. We’d love to see everyone!

7. To riff off of Kim’s “Good Stuff” post, Ebenezer is indeed one of our cats. He does like to play with anything he can. As many cat owners know, often the lamest, most unintentional, items become the best toy. In this case, a leftover piece of weatherstripping is now the coolest toy imaginable. Also, Ebenezer is the only cat I know that tries to get people to play fetch with him.

(H.264 MP4 video, 43 seconds)

This is a home improvement update, but not with Tim “The Tool-Man” Taylor, although my hammer is a Tim Allen signature series, for what that’s worth. Why does my hammer have a little brass-colored insert that is printed with the signature of an actor who played a home construction guy? Does this make sense?

Basement!

The basement now has four new outlets on a new circuit from the breaker, supplying 20 amps for Kim’s machines. This was the part I was expecting to be hard, but ended up being pretty easy because it was a 100% new wiring run that did not have to deal with any legacy cruft. While it was easy, conceptually, there were a number of smaller snags. If I were to do this again, I would have gotten larger junction boxes because 12 gauge wire really does not want to yield itself to being bent nicely into a small junction box. I actually had a short to ground at one point that, fortunately, the GFI outlet properly detected and popped before even flipping the breaker.

There were several occasions when I had to call Kim down to be a spotter. “There won’t be fireworks and I won’t get zapped, but in the unlikely event that there are sparky fireworks and I do get zapped, here’s a wooden broom handle to knock me away from the wires.” While I do possess a bodybag that my EMT little sister gave me for Christmas a few years ago, I’d prefer not to have to actually use it for its intended purpose.

Tomorrow, I will probably attack the lighting situation. This one is a bit more dicey, as I need to reverse-engineer the current lighting’s wiring and figure out if I want to (or even CAN) graft into the pre-WWI cloth-covered wiring (ehhh…not so much), replace it outright, or run a new circuit alongside it.

Network!

I now have an actual server closet! I suspect that while it is unique to have a server closet in a turn of the century house, I am probably not the first person to do this (given that lots of local businesses are in converted houses), but I am probably the first on the block. The server closet is literally a closet, but does not contain actual servers. It may or may not have been manufactured in a facility that processes peanuts. It has a shiny new power outlet for a gigabit switch as well as a smallish patch panel for CAT-6 cabling. Right now, the only room wired up with proper CAT-6 outlets is Kim’s office The rest of the house has long-ass network cables running across the floor, laying in wait to trip the unsuspecting. Wireless is nice, but too slow when moving DVDs worth of data across the house.

I spent part of the evening making short patch cables. Because of this, I have a newfound appreciation of any sort of automated machine that manufactures network cables. Trying to get all of the wire colors to stay in the right order when crimping on connectors is a pain in the butt. Also, I discovered that the cutting blades on my crimper (there are three of ‘em! Count ‘em!) have no real shielding or protection. They’re quite sharp, though, and can make a very clean cut very quickly–in fact, fast enough that the nerves that should say “hey, this hurts” don’t have enough time to react. Such cuts bleed profusely. And hey, remember those sprinkler toys from childhood that were “snakes?” Effectively, they were a hose that, under pressure, squirted water everywhere. That was the Betadine bottle in the bathroom as I dropped it while trying to clean the cut. It got to squirt out all over the place and leave a wonderful rusty-brown-iodine-colored mess…on the sink, on the walls, on the floor. The only thing it did not actually spray on was the thing it was supposed to get on: me.

Bathroom

Nothing to report. We have mortar, grout, sealer, a new wax ring for the toilet, and quite a few other things. We do not have the actual tile itself.

Today was a white Christmas! ’round about noon, it started snowing for a few hours. These photos were pretty early in the snowiness. Later, it rained and washed the snow away (and probably a few itsy bitsy spiders, too.)

i have completed gutting the non-load-bearing things from the basement. (As a sidebar, every time I hear or use the term “load bearing,” the first thing that comes to mind is the “load bearing goth” from this particular Cliff Yablonski Hates You at Something Awful.) Tomorrow, we clean and route new power from the breaker box for Kim’s machines. It turns out the thing I thought to be hard (routing new power for her machines) is easy and the thing I thought was easy (fixing and modernizing the existing lighting) will be difficult. Entirely too much of the turn-of-the-century knob and tube wiring is active, live, and spliced in and out of pieces of the existing modern wiring, grafting the old and new together in unusual and unexpected places. This explains why the majority of the three-prong plugs don’t actually have a functioning ground.

Christmas eve was pretty low-key around here. In fact, several weeks ago, we decided we’d call off Christmas this year. With a new house, there’s not much money for presents and not even a lot of time for the things that don’t require much money, like cards and such.

For not having a special meal planned, Kim sure can whip up a tasty last-minute dinner, improvising based on what’s in the fridge. Immediately before our formal Christmas dinner, I brushed the majority of the basement dust off of my pants. That’s how formal we were. We ended up having some kind of spicy asian noodles with roasted vegetables. That was partnered with a nice 2001 bottle of Edgefield’s Black Rabbit Red that we picked up last time we were there–two Thanksgivings ago, at a dinner with my family, if I remember correctly. Dinner as a whole was mighty tasty, with no hint that it was improvisational. Kim is able to, as she says, “keep adding stuff until it tastes good.” This is great if you can do it. For me, it would be more like, add stuff until it tastes bad, then add more stuff until it tastes worse, then add more until it’s even worse than that. I have no nose (or tongue?) for seat-of-the-pants cooking and always need to start with a clearly written recipe. And even then, the kitchen disasters are more frequent than I would like to admit.

Oh, and the cats got a special side of bonito flakes with their Christmas dinner. Ebenezer, being the vacuum cleaner he is, simply could not get enough and licked all of the bowls until they were shiny and spotless.

Today’s tasks: finish removing the basement wall, assemble Kim’s cutting table, and perhaps even get to the wiring if I have time. Oh, the wiring. More on that in a future post. It’s sort of a cross between looking at the internal organs of the house and performing an archaeological dig to piece together how the infrastructure evolved over time.