Author Archives: gary

C is for Cookie….

and yes, that is good enough for me.

So, generally, I have to admit…I don’t cook. I suck at it, I don’t enjoy it, I don’t have the motor skills nor memory to keep several things going all at once in the kitchen and quickly get overwhelmed by the simple tasks in front of me. I’m sure there is prescription medication that could help me with this issue, but for now I muddle along and stay generally in charge of “dinners out”.

However, once in a very blue moon, I bake something really simple…cookies (well, once I baked something out of a box and now I can’t recall what it was, some kind of snack bar from a packaged foods company that starts with a K and has a name sounding similar to the clown on the Simpson’s). Last night the moon was as blue as it can get, and I made some cookies (with some help from Maya’s expert eye along the way).

I started with the chocolate chip cookie recipe from Easy Cookies. My hope was that this site would be geared toward children. If it were, then there was some hope I could get through the cookies without showering Maya with too many stupid questions. The very second instruction in the “easy cookies” recipe baffled me and sent me to google to do some research.

“Cream the butter and both sugars”

A concept totally lost on me, but I found some overly helpful and frightening advice at baking911.com. Maya told me most cooking sites seem to be designed to keep you out of the kitchen, and she may be correct. You have no idea how I fretted about the this process prior to Maya telling me to mostly ignore it. I even almost backed out of making the cookies entirely, but since I had mentioned them earlier in the day and Maya said she was already looking forward to them, retreat was not an option. Really, the tone of this stuff had me thinking we would need to rent a laboratory up at the University just to get the correct conditions for this highly technical creaming process. I suspected we might need to invest in some additional tools, or perhaps we should hire the work out to an expert. Fortunately, Maya put my fears at ease, and for the most part, the Kitchenaid Mixer did all the work.

Now, I can’t just make chocolate chip cookies, what fun would that be. Again, Maya helped me out here by telling me that the quatity of chocolate chips recommended by the recipe would leave us with a mess (it seems like all of the recipe was halved, except the chocolate chips). I figured I’d grab whatever leftover nuts, or what not, we had in the cabinet…but the almonds were raw and apparently someone (it was me) ate all of the hazzlenuts that were in an already open bag I had seen in there previously. BUT, I found an open bag of sweetened coconut and some mesolithic Almond extract to add with half as many chocolate chips as were recommended by the recipe.

I am generally in favor of a hint of almond in my snacks. I like Almond in my lattes and many years ago (last time I made cookies) I made peanut butter cookies, BUT not peanut butter cookies, because I used Almond Butter. The result…Hard, Flat, Greasy and FANTASTIC almond snacks. I highly recommend that you try it with your favorite peanut butter cookie recipe, but be forwarned, your cross-hatches on the top will be vaporized in the cooking process. I don’t know the science here, but you have been warned, they will be hard, crispy, flat and delicious.

Which reminds me of a funny story not at all related to the cookies I made last night, so let’s digress from the topic at hand for just a moment…

Way back in the mid-90’s (when the biggest crime our president commited was perjury regarding a blow-job, ahh the good old days) I provided telephone techinical support for Adobe PageMaker 4,5, and 6. If at that time you typed in “hard and greasy” into the knowledgebase you would get an article that contained corrections for the cookie recipe that came as part of the recipe card templates for PageMaker 4. I think the title of the article was “PageMaker 4 cookies are hard and greasy”. I couldn’t find any quick references to this little bit of publishing software history out there on the net, so I thought I’d mention it and hope I’m not violating any NDA I signed last century. Speaking of funny publishing software history stories, as I recall one of the senior techs told me that the first PageMaker 4 release would anounce that “The Space Needle Could Not Be Found” when you first launched it because the default printer at the old Aldus building used to be called “Space Needle” and that setting slipped into the final build. I have no direct experience with that one, but as I recall it was in the database at the time as well.

So, back to the topic at hand, the cookies from last night. It all went very smoothly with Maya’s assistance, and in the end the cookies were really delicious. The recipe made just under a dozen of them (wouild have been a dozen, but some of my cookie wads were bigger than others). So, take the recipe from the website above, add a healthy dash of Almond Extract and about 3/8th of a cup of sweetened shredded coconut and about half the chocolate chips they recommend, and enjoy…

In completely unrelated news…I burned some idle cycles today adding the Amazon link feature to the “Stray Random Quotes” plugin for WordPress. I don’t do PHP, so this was good little project to start dipping my toes into it. I imagine with the economy going the way it is the big MS based projects might run a little thin, so I getter get on the open source stuff to some extent. This was a quick and dirty modification of the existing script to add a spot for my associate id and the ASIN of the product associated with the source of the quote. No where near polished enough to distribute or even recommend as an add on to the current plugin, but it is serving my purposes, so I’m happy with it.

Mess ‘o beans, happy chickens, and an update on the old man…

No, really, a mess of beans. Yesterday’s gusts up to 40 mph took out our half-ass bean trellis yesterday (not surprising, I suspected the stinking Skyway winds would take their toll on it eventually). As an aside, one of the things I initially loved about Seattle was how infrequently we experienced hellish winds (unlike my home town where children learn ealy how to walk with a lean into the semi-permanent wind). Low and behold, however, once I left downtown, I think I managed to move to one of the absolutely windiest outposts of the city (and we aren’t really in Seattle, though we have a Seattle address, we live in a lawless nether-world known as “unincorporated King County”).

The aftermath of the aftermath of the trellis collapse

The aftermath of the aftermath of the trellis collapse

Since the bean trellis toppled dramatically yesterday (sorry I don’t have pictures, I really suck at running for the camera to document the minutae of daily disasters, I’ll get better…I swear…), we cleared out the vines and made a final harvest of green beans and green bean seeds, and then fenced off the back end of the garden so that the girls could have at that patch of ground. Blume, the littlest of them all, immediately snagged a worm almost as long as she is tall, and the pecking, scratching, and cooing continues at this moment. The girls will do their land clearing dirt turning weed eating magic on this patch of earth and it should be ready for some sort of fall cover crop in no time at all.

The girls at work...clearing land and turning refuse into delicious eggs...

The girls at work...clearing land and turning refuse into delicious eggs...

Also, we took Hemmy to the vet for a followup (see previous entries for details on his trevails), and aside from the blindness he is doing really well and can eat whatever he likes. The vet recommended we have a kitty opthamologist take a gander at his eyes, so we’re looking into that this week. Despite the blindness, he is getting a little bit too bold for his own good. He jumped up ONTO the child/doggy gate we use to keep him in my office. My office has no door and is one wall shy of being a “room”, but sits at the top of the stairs across from our bedroom appropriately isolated from public view. Someday, perhaps, when you and I have developed a close enough relationship, I might let you see the hell hole of boxes, inoperable equipment, and construction supplies in which I spend most my days.

Additionally, we went over to J&X’s place last night for a fantastic dinner of seafood linguini prepared by J from Crab and Halibut he brought back from fishing in Alaska this summer (commercial fishing in Alaska that is, not to be confused with a 3 month vacation to drink beer with buddies while hanging a line over the side, although sometimes J’s stories make it sound strikingly similar to such an endeavor). Unbeknownst to us, our first exposure to “Guitar Hero III” layed in wait for us after dinner, which was entertaining enough, but made my hands hurt after a while. Anyway, the point of this degression is that we came home to find Hemmy had jumped the fence/gate thingy at some point and was relaxing on the bed when Maya came up to give him his half-pill. As blind as he is, he did manage to find his old food dish on top of my dresser (there to keep Huxley out of it) and managed to knock it off the edge and all over the bedroom floor. Ahh, nothing like making a late night a bit later with messes to rectify upon arrival.

So, there you have a fairly pedestrian and likely boring overview of Sunday morning here at the B-Bar-Lazy-B. I have some work to do for the Danes today since they get into the office about midnight our time and I didn’t quite get it done on Friday since we were finally finishing the duct work that afternoon (the odyssey this became will eventually be documented here).

I should probably also go see what Maya is up to, she keeps coming in and out of the house…she’s in land clearing mode today and I had to beg and plead that she let the tomatillos run their course. We had several “volunteer” tomatillos this year (which was a lucky break with the cold spring we couldn’t find starts), and I maintain that the only reason they are there is because of our sluggish and delayed garden clearing of last year (which I’m pretty sure didn’t happen until well into November, and initiated my new “wear long underwear from November through March” policy (for those that know I’m originally from Montana, 3 short years in Honolulu drained me entirely of all tolerance for weather below 50F and now I get grouchy when my toes get cold, and the nasty wet cold we have out here in the soggy lands drills right down to my bones in a much more insidious and painful way than the dry frigid temps of the island of Montana).

The old man and the see…

This post is long overdue…

As you might recall, August started off with a bang, and not the bang for which we were hoping. I mentioned the middle of the night trip to the emergency vet with Hemingway in this earlier post. Well, he improved somewhat through August, but never regained vision in his left eye. The diagnosis was that he either suffered a head trauma or had a tumor. We could find out if he had a tumor by seeing a kitty nuerologist and having a kitty MRI which could conclude that he needed kitty brain surgery. We contemplated this deeply, and concluded that all of that misery to marginally extend Hemingway’s time with us would probably be motivated more by selfishness than by a genuine interest in his quality of life…debatable I admit, but this is our conclusion.

Then came September, which openned up with Hemingway disappearing. I had contemplated this possibility as well. Would he run off to die and leave a big gaping hole at the end of his story and many days of fretting in between? Hemingway at one time was an apartment cat, but once he got a taste of the inside/outside life he genuinely loved it. However, he almost never leaves the immediate vicinity of the house, so his disappearance did not bode well. Nin will often disappear for a couple of days if, for example, children are present. But, she doesn’t totally disappear, she sneaks in at night and then makes herself scarce during the day. Hemingway has never been more than a call of his name away, so we worried, and worried early. We took Huxley for a walk and didn’t see any signs of our poor old man. Two days passed…and we were pretty convinced he was curled up dead in shrub somewhere…I tried to hold out hope that someone took him in, or something, the open ended disappearance ached a dull and deep and frustrating ache…

On the second day of his disappearance, we got a call from the animal shelter, but the news wasn’t very good. They had been called to pick up Hemingway, but he was profoundly weak and seriously dehydrated. They were able to contact us because yes, we had microchips implanted in our animals. I have become a strong advocate of this, particularly for cats since keeping a collar on them is nearly impossible (and a bit dangerous). Admittedly, if Huxley had been chipped we wouldn’t have him now, but given his abandonment and the way he acts around the broom, his previous owners probably didn’t care much about (or possibly were even the architects of) his disappearance. Anyway, what I’m saying is, if you give a shit about your animal, get them chipped.

So, another of the many advantages of working for myself from home is that I was able to immediately take off for the animal shelter to transport him to our vet. The King County Animal Shelter is desperately under-funded and over-extended, which just amplifies my great appreciation for the fact that they administered sub-q fluids and drew blood for tests at no charge prior to my arrival to pick up Hemingway. We don’t know what caused him to disappear since aside from the blindness in one eye he had seemed to have recovered from his earlier issue, but it took a week at the vet to get him healthy enough to bring home. Profoundly weak, potassium poor, dehydrated and potentially suffering from both urinary and brain stem infections.

Hemingway is stronger now, but completely blind, after about 2 weeks at home. For the first time ever he is eating wet food (only took a couple of weeks of hand feeding with a syringe to get him accustomed to it). Because Nin decided she was queen of the roost, the stairs are still too dangerous for weakened cat, and don’t exactly know how the other two animals will behave with the blind old man…Hemingway is living primarily in my office. He is a little bit prone to getting trapped in tight spaces if left entirely to his own devices, so for the time being I put him in the very large dog crate at night. He’s not thrilled about the situation, but I wouldn’t be either if I suddenly went blind at about age 70. It would be very, very difficult to euthenize him at this point since aside from the blindness he does of some quality of life. We are still giving him antibiotics for about another week. One half a pill every twelve hours, and each day he gets a little bit better at fighting us and hiding it in his mouth only to spit it out after we are done. His claws are starting to get sharp again. In fact just today he started sharpening them on a cardboard box in my office again. Another sign he is returning to some level of normal. Still, I worry that he seems to be urinating more than he is drinking, but then, so do I…

An old picture of Camus the cat taking a nap on our dear old man...

An old picture of Camus the cat taking a nap on our dear old man...

I think I’m in love…

with flexible insulating ducting…

The splendor of the flexible insulated ducting...so beautiful...so charming

The splendor of the flexible insulated ducting...so beautiful...so charming

This project finally got started, as most do, fairly unintentionally and following lengthy internal debates about the relative merits of the project in contrast to the associated risks and hassles (which, as usual, were underestimated). I paid a routine visit to the crawlspace in the spring following the historic downpours experienced throughout western Washingtion over the winter (the brunt of the rain hit a couple hours south of here in the Centralia area, but the big sog didn’t spare us entirely). Although we suffered no where near the catastrophic rains that hit south of here, our neighbor 2 doors down has a basement and was forced to occupy a hotel for a while after the December storms caused flooding in her home.

During our neighbor’s hotel hiatus we had the pleasure of watching after Tex, her ancient Shitsu (I think he is about 2 or 3 hundred years old). I’ll avoid a lengthy digression into the entertainment value of Tex, but I happened to buy some brand new Car Harts around this time and evidently they were tasty since in the middle of a dinner party Tex decided the best thing in the world was feverishly licking my pant leg (and he would not stop, which our guests found hugely entertaining, where I did not so much after about an half an hour of continuously being licked and changed my trousers which strangely brought the licking to a halt).

Tex, the ancient manic pant licking shitsu

Tex, the ancient manic pant licking shitsu

Anyway, when I got down into the dingy hell hole that is our crawlspace during the aforementioned spring spelunking, I discovered (much to my dismay) a small pondish lake had formed just under the living room coalescing on top of the few solid portions of the mostly shredded vapor barrier.

PANIC!

We have fairly serious water fears around here, and someday I’ll relate the entire story about the household flood that occurred 4 days after we closed on the house (as a result of an overzealous water department ignoring a specific request to NOT turn on the water while we were out of town). Ok, so the question becomes, is this water here because our house sits in a hole and the earth around us is simply saturated OR is this somehow related to the replumbing that we had done back in October??? After calling upon Maya to run around the house and turn on every water fixture one at a time so I could listen and watch intently for any plumbing leaks (thinking the whole time, if this is a plumbing leak why is it under the living room, there is no plumbing here…grrr…hmmm….arggg).

Ok, as best as we could tell there is no plumbing issue, so this is most likely saturated earth acting in concert with the wholly inadequate vapor barrier and poor air circualtion resulting from the wholly inadequate crawlspace venting covered by stinking vinyl siding with silly little air louvres molded into the siding (and perhaps augmented by increased water volumes resulting from the curtailing of the roots of the 50 year old crimson maple that was required for the replacement of the water service from the street to the house). Well, that was my story, and I decided to hope for the best and stick to that assumption about the source of the water. I also decided to remove a significant portion of the remaining vapor barrier to allow the water to soak into the earth since I did not want to belly crawl across the pondish lake to check and clear the crawlspace vent at that exact moment. I also made the decision to return to the crawlspace later in the summer and assess the pondish lake again at that time (and to be fully prepared with some sort of water removal apparatus to clear the pond as needed so as to allow somewhat dry access over to the crawlspace vent if needed). Just another item to add to the list of about 18 things that need to be done in the crawlspace. And so I pulled myself out of that nasty underworld, covered the access with the beautiful hatch cover I had made the previous year to match the flooring (and to replace the piece of 3/4″ ply that didn’t really cover the access entirely anyway), and returned the entire contents of the closet under the stairs to its usual location immediately over and completely obstructing the access to the crawlspace.

Oooo pretty...with handles too...

Oooo pretty...with handles too...

This action (the clearing of the closet), in and of itself, is probably the greatest hinderance to activity in the crawlspace. Not to diminish the generally nastiness of the place, but the fact that in order to get down there we have to move this bevy of bizarre objects and shelving out of the closet under the stairs into the blue room just to get down there presents enough of an initial hassle to make my visits less frequent than perhaps they should be. And thus, summer became fall (or so Maya claims, I’ve been trying to hold out for summer until November, but the past couple of days have dashed my hopes), and I did not find a cheap enough sump pump close enough to home on Craig’s List throughout my summer searches.

The blue room full of crap from the closet...our primary obstacle to crawlspace visits

The blue room full of crap from the closet...our primary obstacle to crawlspace visits

However, a few weeks ago, J (of J&X, a friend of mine since High School that now lives only a few blocks away and fishes for salmon in Alaska during the summer) had come back from Alaska fishing and happened to be heading back up to Bellingham to work on the boat for the week prior to starting their fall fishing here in the Puget Sound. In a minor stroke of genius I remembered to ask if they happened to have a 110v sump I could borrow over the following weekend (which would at long last provide the required force to inspire me back into the crawlspace for the long overdue checkup on the pondish lake). Sweet victory! They did in fact have a 110v sump pump I could borrow (thereby avoiding some freakish car battery jumper cable Rube Goldberg style setup for a 12v marine pump). I spent the following week sizing up tough for the journey under the house…choosing a sacrificial shirt…contemplating the exact pumping strategy…hoping for the best…expecting the worst…and last, but of course not least, on Friday I cleared the closet in preparation for the descent…

Into the abyss...

Into the abyss...

 J. came through with the pump and all the pieces were in place to begin the crawlspace drainage and assessment initiative…I dutifully got the pump ready to go and Maya helped me get the hose strung from the pump at the crawlspace access out to one of the rain barrels by the back door. The pump didn’t have an on/off switch so I tied the cords together to keep the plugs in close proximity to each other to start it up once I got it into position in the center of the pondish lake and then I descended…

The heart of darkness...

The heart of darkness...

Low and behold the summer sunshine had done the job. No standing water at all, although the ground itself under the livingroom was still pretty damp. A plethora of factors converge to explain the semi-permanent dampness in this area. Several of these factors have already been mentioned above. Some other issues include the fact that this is the side of the house where the downspouts from the gutters are located. This side also borders the concrete driveway which sits about a foot above the ground (like I said, our house sits in a hole, I have no idea what they were thinking back in 1944 when they set us and our neighbor to the northeast below the street level). Well, hmmm…the anti-climax drove me into a momentary stupor (of a couple of hours) . What do I do now? We’ve moved all that crap into the blue room, the access is open, I’ve sullied my clothes…I decided to chain smoke for a while and mull over the potential items on the list of 18 or so that needed to be done down there.

More of the same...in the other direction...

More of the same...in the other direction...

First, I decided to inspect and clear (to the best of my ability) the crawlspace vents for improved airflow. I was able to immediately create a breeze by jamming a long screwdriver through the incredibly gappy loose wire mesh on the vent cover and then through the narrow louvre on the vinyl siding. Cleared all the cobwebs, but a lot of the obstruction was actually on the outside between the siding and the vent, so that became a project for another day to be approached from the exterior of the house now that I confirmed each of the louvred areas did in fact have a vent associated with it (I had my doubts since I hadn’t really previously tucked my head through the cobwebs into the space between the joists and above the concrete to see each of the vents). After that, I decided to chain smoke a little bit more and contemplate my next move (still a bit dumbfounded by the anti-climax, I set about putting away all the pumping supplies and coiled up the hose, acknowledging the end of any person powered watering requirements for the season). I started to contemplate the unthinkable, and tried some internet research to support my fretting, worrying, and strategizing…could we, should we…hmmm…better smoke another cigarette in the sun…

As I was soaking up the rays (well, not really, I was in full crawlspace battle regalia and only my face and hands could receive the goodness of the sun), another painful example of the stunning synergy of mind that occassionally happens around here was realized when Maya pre-emptively struck with the question: “Do you think we should try and replace the ducting?” NOTE: I had not mentioned this aspect of my contemplations out loud.

“Damn It!” I exclaimed, “I suppose so…” and so it began, since that is exactly what I was turning over like so much mental compost through all that chain smoking in the sun…I did a little more internet research to find some pricing on the flexible insulated ducting we wanted to use in our replacement efforts since the final 2 square feet of fiberglass that had once graced our metal ducting (and was mostly gone even before the big move in flood of ’04’) was quickly slipping into the earth beneath the house (which makes for an itchy belly crawl). It is pretty much impossible to find anything really useful on most hardware store sites, particularly those smaller locally owned independent or locally owned mini-chain stores, but even the big guys (like the ones that used to be Eagle and the ones with the big orange signs) don’t share much of the nitty gritty of construction supplies on their site. Sure, if you want a ten foot garden hose, or a Weber Gas Grille, or rat poison (stuff we don’t usually shop for), you can find it pretty easily and even pick it up in the store. If you want something like 6″ flexible insulated ducting you have to research the pricing in far off lands at sites that specialize in, well, flexible instulated ducting, and then visit the hardware store to see if they actually have that which you seek…and so we did…

 If at all possible, we try to meet our hardware needs at McLendon’s. They are a chain, but a local one, and good luck finding a small independent hardware store in the south of Seattle (the posh North of the city still has some of the old storefront independents, but then the ultra-hip and wealthy can afford such luxuries). McLendon’s had the ducting, so we loaded up the cart (overloaded I should say), and I grabbed a couple pieces of pipe insulation since I knew the PEX on the far wall near the new on-demand water heater had not been covered by the plumbers (I’m not 100% certain they ran out of insulation so much as they ran out of patience for the crawlspace, the job took longer than they expected as a result of some of the minor peculiarities of our install). Then we grabbed the connectors…all of them…they only had three, but I thought that would do since we only had two runs that needed connectors for certain, and one potential spot where we might need to go beyond the 25ft length of a single piece of ducting. These connectors are a pretty crucial piece of gear for installing flexible insultated ducting, 6 inch diameter aluminum connectors about 6 inches long and crimped on each side for joining two pieces of ducting (since unlike the metal ducting, the flexible insulated isn’t “gendered” such that you can insert one end of the piece you’re installing into the end of the piece that preceded it, etc).

The magic piece of the puzzle...so simple, yet so rare

The magic piece of the puzzle...so simple, yet so rare

Gross error on my part…I failed to realize that at each of the registers we would also need a connector to insert into the existing boot. We discovered this tidbit as I was removing the very first piece of metal ducting from the register boot below the blue room. Ok, that’s alright I thought, we bought McLendon’s out of the stuff, but certainly we could run out the next day and get the 4 additional connectors we needed. Progress, let’s make progress, we decided. So we continued the removal effort to completion (no small task, all told I think it took as long to remove all those sheet metal screws as it did to actually install and hang the new ducting). The plan was to get this part done, perhaps get a start on installing the new ducting with the parts we had on hand. I could get the pipe insulation in place. Maya started the run from the blue room, which we knew would require more than a single length. I could eventually do the very short run from the Kitchen to the plenum. Everything would be ok…the weather was still nice…no worries.

The Horror...The Horror...

The Horror...The Horror...

We spent the better part of Sunday visiting every hardware store and home improvement mega store in our immediate area to no avail. Every single one of these bastards were bursting at the seams with box after box of the flexible insulated ducting, and yet, no connectors. You see, my theory on this goes something like this… somewhere at headquarters the corporate comptroller who doesn’t know ducting from a hole in the ground from their own ass decides what gets stocked on the shelves. Add to that the fact that most mega-stores choose to pay their employees too little to really develop any concern about what is stocked on the shelves, and there certainly isn’t any incentive for knowledgable staff to apply for a job at the big orange sign when they could be making a much better living actually plying their trade. I would also lay odds that there are institutional and systemic structures in place that discourage employees from taking an active role in improving the stocking strategy (this is just a guess, in many ways I’m probably talking out my ass right now, but you get the picture).

 (IMPORTANT NOTE: I do not blame the employees for not giving a shit, neither would I at $9 an hour for the second or third job most people need just to pay the crazy mortgage payment that arises from the tiniest one bedroom on a 16th of an acre being priced right around a quarter of a million dollars).

When at long last we get home from the Odyssey of the 6″ connectors, empty handed and discouraged, there isn’t a lot of vibrance or vim available to us for tackling the task at hand (and not a whole lot we can do at this point since without the parts the labor that can be completed can’t very effectively be carried out as a team due to the cramped spaces involved). In a moment of desperation I decided to check Amazon.com for the Connector. The thought that drove this search ran something like…in the worst case scenario we could just order some and complete the project when they arrived. I almost fell right out of my chair…who supplied Amazon with this mission critical part for our project…you guessed it, McLendon’s. At the McLendon’s in Renton we were told “this item comes from Ace, so we can’t get it from the warehouse” and no other help was offered. I decided to give the McLendon’s in White Center a ring and see if they had any on hand. We could drive over there the next day and get them (they could be had in Maya’s Civic, where getting the ducting itself was a job for my F250), and then we would be well on our way to completing our project. McLendon’s in White Center only had one, uno, ein, single lonely connector…BUT, they offered to see if the other stores had any and could do a store transfer (which would take a couple days, ended up being three), and they were most helpful in securing the promise of connectors to be had in the future. We would get the connectors on Wednesday and finish up the project on Thursday afternoon (Wednesday was Maya’s Mom’s birthday and we were having her parents over for dinner, so crawlspace activity was banned for Wednesday).

We didn’t get the connectors until Thursday. Apparently they had a metric butt load of stuff come in on Wednesday and didn’t find the connectors in the huge stack until late in the afternoon (at which point I was in Auburn, WA loading a cord of wood to help J (of J&X, the aforementioned fisherman with the sump pump) keep his house warm this winter in lieu of getting central heating other than the old wood stove on which they relied last year. ‘Tis the season for heating preparations I suppose.

I had some work to do, and so did Maya, so we didn’t get to McLendon’s in White Center until about 3pm (we wrapped it with a trip to a post office box in the University District that Maya has to visit now and again and which constitutes a lengthy story unto itself that Maya probably won’t tell for some time to come). We didn’t leave McLendon’s in White Center until after 4pm and got home around 4:30pm, or roughly one thousand hours later as I recollect it. This brings us to the one narrow area where the big home improvement outlets kind of have it over the small guy, policies and procedures. Sometimes these little nuggets (policies and procedures) can have an advantage, such as knowing where to put items that came in as a store transfer for a customer so that anyone can find them when said customer (us in this case) arrives to retrieve the items. Now, on the other hand, more often than not, policies and procedures are actually designed to hinder the employee from being too helpful to the customer (and thus increasing the total cost of serving said customer which just might impinge upon the multi-bazillion dollar bonus of the executives of some home improvement chains that just might have a big orange sign). Fortunately, despite having no idea where the items were located, the folks at McLendon’s in White Center were not impeded in their dilligent efforts to find the items, and so, three of the four connectors we needed were found.

DOH! I needed 4, but only needed 3 tranferred from other stores since McLendon’s in White Center had one on hand, BUT the one on hand could not be found (and was not in the box on the shelf where it belonged, so initially everyone presumed it had been purchased). The very helpful man with the unusually pointy hair piece did check the computer to see how many they were supposed to have in stock. ELEVEN! Somewhere in the store we had been scouring at length there hid a box or boxes of ELEVEN FX0225 6″ Flex ducting adapters. So, the search continued. You’ll note that by this time I knew the Manufacturer’s part number by heart and started closely examining the writing on the unpacked boxes at the tops of the shelves and in the aisles (the previous day’s delivery actually did consist of a metric butt load of stuff and much of it remained unpacked). Eventually, I did find a box marked FX0225, and we considered at length whether or not to buy extras. We chose not to with the rationale that there were supposed to be 10 others there somewhere in the store and that perhaps they would be easier to find if we did indeed need to return for an unexpected extra.

By the time we got home, the aggressive vigor to pursue the project deep into the night to completion had completely vanished. The project would have to be completed the following day. I had some work to do on Friday, and so did Maya, but we did get the project started and completed that afternoon with relative ease. This is why, despite all of the above, I have developed a deep emotional bond with flexible insulated ducting. For a few hundred dollars, with duct tape, wire cutters, a hammer and some nails, we were able to replace all the ducting under the house (and hopefully we’ll save a buck or two this winter by not heating the crawlspace as we did with the old broken down crushed in places pouring hot air all over the place galvanized ducting that was down there before). 

Aside from the fiberglass left over from the old ducting that now resides in our lungs and nose and deep beneath the surface of our skin (along with big dirt clods in our nose and lungs), the project left very little permanent damage on our souls. There was the embarassing event at the very end while I attempted to move some of the older abandoned flexible copper piping out of the way of the final join of the flexible insulated ducting and proceded to dump any and all of the remaining water in the pipe directly into my lap, but that also could have been worse (for example, had I chosen to dump said stale old water on my face, up my nose, or in my mouth along with all the dirt that fell out of the joists into these orifices). The closet stuff is still in the blue room, and I really need to go back down there with a big can of Great Stuff to plug up the plumbing and wiring holes (particularly since the crawlspace vents are not keeping rodents out of there, and last year one decided to periodically visit our trash can by coming up through said plumbing and wiring holes…I killed him, and I’m glad I did, we can discuss all the philosophical details of this at some later date). I know I’ll be returning to the heart of darkness again in the future, but ideally not until next spring when I hope to run speaker wire out to the patio (a project for which I’ve had the speakers for about two years). I’ll probably lay new vapor barrier at that time as well, although I’m loathe to do it until I better understand the hydrodynanmics of the crawlspace, and get the vents replaced, since once water is on top of the plastic it seems to go nowhere.

If you’ve actually read this entire entry, then I suppose you deserve a reward of some sort. All I’ve got is this super cute picture of Hemingway and Huxley on the couch together…I hope you feel it is a fitting reward for your diligence in the face of overwhelming domesticity…

Your reward...a single dose of ultra-cute...

Your reward...a single dose of ultra-cute...

 

Battle Dishwasher…won at last???

In short, I consider it the most important appliance in the house (well, maybe the furnace is more important, but bear with me for a moment). The dishwasher actually fulfills the promise of modernity. Technology that saves us labor without the technology itself creating much of a hassle. We should have 20 hour work weeks at this point if it weren’t for capitalism’s thirst for blood and wealth, but alas, every technological advance just results in more work to be done and lower pay for the work that we do. In the 21st century, the dear sweet dishwasher (and maybe the microwave) saves us hours and hours of menial labor, and liberates us to do things like write this seemingly pointless blog post. This tried and true piece of machinery can now be had for low enough initial outlay that the ROI (return on investment) can be realized within a year (particularly, if you refuse to buy a new one and find one on Craig’s List that was thoughtlessly discarded as part of the feverish desire of our country men and women to drive themselves ever deeper in home equity debt to “update” their kitchen). We bought the first dishwasher from Craig’s List for a song (either $75 or $100, can’t recall exactly) when we first bought the house. It remained faithful and steadfast for 4 years, so at $25 a year I think we did alright.

Well, this post wouldn’t be here if the poor old bastard hadn’t died on us. Pretty common failure…no longer draining completely at the end of the wash.

So I cleared the drain (again)…no luck

Pulled the dishwasher out, removed obstructions from the hoses…reinstalled it…no luck

Diagnosis…drain pump failure…I’m not really set up here to physically apply 110v to the motor to test it, so I arrived at this conclusion purely by deduction (tried listening, but couldn’t recall how the thing sounded when it worked, which would have been crucial to determining a failure). A new drain pump motor would have cost about what we paid for it initially, so back to Craig’s List I went.

Faced with the necessity (and I mean necessity) to replace the dishwasher, why not get stainless to match the stove (and who knows, maybe someday the fridge could be stainless as well, instead of black, but only if it fails or an unbeatable deal on Craig’s List is encountered by accident). And thus the search began. I added a feed to my blertsfor it (using only “dishwasher” as the search term to make sure I didn’t miss any misspellings of stainless which happen frequently for some reason). Having gone a couple of days without a fully operable dishwasher, I was willing to spend up to about $150 for a decent used one. Fortunately, a decent stainless GE came up within 24 hours for $100…. woo hoo….

The catch, it was in Mountlake Terrace which is about a thousand miles north of here (well, 20 miles, but I-5 south bound into Seattle from the north is a trip with a permanent time multiplier of at least 3, and in my special driving in traffic mathematics 3×20 = 1000 because nothing drives me quite as nuts as going 35 mph on the interstates). Ok, the additional $10-15 in bio-diesel is worth it for a dishwasher. The F250 is only getting about 12-14 mpg in city right now, down from a solid 15 plus last year, and I’m not sure why (working from home, the truck is used sparingly, and hey it is basically carbon neutral when running on B99.9). We made the trip up to Mountlake Terrace (and discovered that the person selling it seems to be in the business of refurbing dishwashers, or he owns multiple properties he’s upgrading, or something neferious was going on based on the garage full of dishwashers we found there). I should note that even though we “took the map” we got lost because I heard the wrong house number and ended up about a mile away from where we needed to be. We loaded up the shiny new used dishwasher and we headed home. Upon arrival I immediately set about installing the new dishwasher and running it through a test run…

4 hours later it had not completed the entire wash cycle. Conducted some diagnostics, the dishwasher ran through the self test fine, but the self test can’t really test the thermistor since it doesn’t bring the water to full temp. So I did a little experiment with the meat thermometer and decided the heating element was not getting hot enough. The benefit of whatever strange dishwasher dealings were afoot in Mountlake Terrace was the fact the guy said to just give a call if we encountered any problems, so I did. The guy was great, said he would “find another stainless one” (at this point I’m not asking any questions) and to give him a call the next day to make sure he had one ready and we could switch out the bad one (having already run my tests and describing them to him when he asked about the behavior helped smooth the way I think). Quick thinking and I asked if he would be interested in taking the one with the bad drain pump off our hands (saves me the hassle of finding and paying a recycler to take it, and he seems to be a recycler, so might as well give it a shot). SCORE, he asks the model and says sure he’ll take it (it was a black GE Profile Performance and was pretty quiet and a good machine while it was working). So, the next day we go up to claim our mysterious replacement dishwasher…

On the way up I-5 south bound is looking horrible. It was a Saturday I think, so we didn’t concern ourselves that much with the fact we were headed up there around 4pm (you do not want to get into the mess around here at drive time, particularly if you have worked at home for over 8 years, drive an F250, and detest going under 35 mph on the great american interstates). When we arrive at the blessed garage of dishwashers, our patron saint of dishwashers is not present. Not realizing that the house we are at is actually a duplex, I knock on the door, the wrong door, and a weary young man seemingly accustomed to this “wrong door” error points out the correct door (sneakily tucked around the corner from the garage) and tells me it doesn’t look like our patron saint of dishwashers is home because his big white truck is not present in the cul-de-sac.  At about the moment I leave the door, the wrong door, a car drives up and stops in front of the driveway. It becomes immediately evident that my truck is blocking the side of the driveway that belongs to the wrong door, so I scramble to move it over to the side of the driveway that belongs to the correct door of the duplex. As the driver parks in their now accessible parking space, they see fit to mention it doesn’t look like our saint of dishwashers is home since his big white truck is not in the cul-de-sac. I thank the person that heads to the wrong door with an arm full of fodder from the golden arches. Oh how the blood boils at this moment, I curse the freeway, the traffic, the decision to go to Mountlake Terrace for a dishwasher, the ground I stand on..etc…but optimistically attempt to give the saint a ring before abandoning all hope and returning to the fiery hell of I-5 southbound at 4:30pm on a Saturday.

Our saint, saint Maurice as happens to be the case, answers the phone and says he’s just around the corner and will be there momentarily. REJOICE! Our saint of dishwashers has not abandoned us, he is only running late (a condition I generally suffer from in perpetuity, so I understand being off the mark by a few minutes here and there, and I have come back into the fold and eagerly await my personal blessing from the dishwasher shrine that lays behind the garage door). Maya and I have already unloaded the two faulty dishwashers in anticipation of our blessing, and when the garage door goes up we catch a vision of glory on the workbench with the makeshift water feed dangling from the ceiling of the garage and attached with wire nuts to the open 110v wire that accompanies the dishwasher rehabilitation center Maurice has fashioned here in the garage. Our blessing as it turns out is a sweet ass Kitchen Aid (even the same brand as our stove) with (and this is just like 2 toy surprises in a cracker jack box) stainless steel interior tub. We do have to make a sacrifice to the dishwasher deities as this model doesn’t have quite as many buttons on the front, BUT it does have buttons (which I love, I have an inherent distrust for rotary knobs on appliances with the distinct exception of those for stove tops…any knob upon which the appliance timing is dependent is a nearly guaranteed first failure in my assessment). I try to hold my emotions in check though, we still need to install it and confirm it is working…I take major ground streets for the north of Seattle half of the trip, if I’m going to go 35 mph, I might as well see some new parts of the city as I go (and we did see some new parts, including Frank’s Door Store which Maya’s Dad has mentioned is a great place to get…well, doors).

We don’t stop at the door store though, important mission ahead and no time for lolly gagging about looking at doors we don’t need…

The install goes relatively smoothly (I have to do it twice, but I always have to do it twice and I can’t quite recall the exact reason I had to do it twice this time). In the first run I encountered a slight drip from the drainage hoses, but I believe that was related to a moment during the first install when the dishwasher kind of slipped off it’s special platform (Maya is 6’2″, and 36″ counters just don’t cut it, so in complete violation of all universal design principles we have 42″ counters and I love them because not only do they save my love’s backfrom stooping while she does her magic, but I find it a more convenient height as well) and took a hit on the under-side. I little wiggling here and there of the rubber connectors in the drain system seemed to fix up the minor drip. At some point I need to pull off the kick plate again and triple check that this situation has been completely remedied.

Parenthetically, as I’m prone to do, I should mention that we have serious water fears, it is a long story, but the short of it is that we had MAJOR flooding 4 days after we closed on the house as a result of the water company ignoring my request to ONLY turn on the water on or after a certain date since we were both out of town for the weekend. The request was in writing, so we were meagerly compensated (at the depreciated rate) for the damage and recovery, but a lot of stuff we had intended to do much slower and much later ended up having to happen right away.

It’s been about a month, no evidence of leakage (though I haven’t removed the kickplate yet), and excepting the fact that we realized too late that the dishwasher lacked a silverware basket (and I accidentally purchased two of them due to an internet connection freak out and slow order confirmation emails from the online store from which I bought them), the new dishwasher is working out alright and it sure is pretty (even on the inside).

The house of representatives…

is a gaggle of ignorant pidgeon heads…

That’s all I have right now, what a missed opportunity to both salvage the economy and make some progress in the regulation and oversight of the country’s major banking institutions all at once…

Well, we had a second world war…I guess it is time for the second great depression…

Someone on another blog responded to a post of mine asking what I liked about the bill…of course, the whole situation sucks, but compared to what the administration was asking for, here are my pleasures:

1) Equity Stake
2) Restrictions on executive pay
3) Oversight (double if not triple, congress and an independent body)
4) not a single lump sum with congressional option to cancel the second half if the initial injection doesn’t work.
5) part of 1, but worth mentioning and not all would agree, but I like the idea of taxpayers getting a direct return from the profits of the banks that form the fundemental structure of our economy. Their wealth is built on the backs of all of us, and since we can’t seem to tax them effectively (and the republican’s continue to try and kill capital gains) at least we could own part of them (more of a door opener than a significant stake, but I’m left leaning enough to take what I can get in the line of broad public ownership of financial infrastructure.

Plus I should probably admit I kind of like the idea of being on the slippery slope to socialism… 🙂

Always take the map…

So, it would be inaccurate to say we were lost…

At any given moment, we knew the way home, we just didn’t know how to get where we wanted to go. As I mentioned previously some horrible crap happened to Maya’s car during a middle of the night hit-and-run (it was parked curbside, more on that at Eighth Acre Bounty). One of the results of the  glancing impact which terminated at Maya’s driver’s side rim (based on the available evidence), was of course, the bending of the rim (and an arm and a knuckle, on the car, we were in bed, so don’t get confused with all those anatomical terms referring to car parts). Maya called a wrecking yard not terribly far away and found out they have more rims than they knew what to do with and would be happy to sell her one that would fit her car perfectly for a relatively reasonable amount of money. All we had to do was get there…in the truck, which was well into the last quarter of the second tank…shouldn’t be a problem, the yard isn’t far, we’re going right there and coming right back (maybe stop by the big box wholesale to the public membership joint that happens to have their headquarters here in Washinton and is not at all affiliated with Sam Walton and his crew to get a tire put on the shiny new used rim we were picking up).

Here is the path from the 167 that we should have taken to get to the wrecking yard (here forward we will refer to this as the “Ideal” path):

what an elegant path it would have been

what an elegant path it would have been

As we were gathering ourselves together to walk out the door I asked “Do you have a map?” Maya responded with strength and confidence, “No, we shouldn’t need it, it is just off the 167 and I have some directions.” We were running a bit behind schedule (most likely my fault), so I bit hard and deep into my tongue to keep it quiet and sized myself up tough for the inevitable mild confusion that usually occurs when we try and give eachother directions while driving.

Brief digression…I’ve been driving off and on now for about 2 decades, but I still don’t like not knowing where I’m going if I have to actually get somewhere. I like maps, I like to look at them and at least get the false sense of security they can grant you with their magical bird’s eye view of the intrepid landscape of the region into which you are about to journey. If I don’t have to be anywhere, then I don’t care so much. If the only requirement is that I make it home sometime and I don’t have to worry about anyone in the passenger seat getting impatient about the destination, then I can wander aimlessly without end and actually be mildly entertained by the journey. This was not one of those trips, particular with some concerns about the fuel level lingering in the background.

Nonetheless, having been assured of our success by Maya’s strong and confident utternce indicating that a map would be a frivolous and worthless additional effort and delay of departure for which she would have no tolerance, we pointed the truck south and began our “quick errand” to the wrecking yard and perhaps the big box wholesale to the public place that happens to be headquartered here in Washington and has no affiliation with Sam Walton where Maya had fairly recently bought an entire set of new tires, where we could find a perfect replacement for the now seriously damaged front driver’s side tire and they would enthusiastically put the single tire on our brand new used rim.

We accomplished all these goals that day…I believe we left the house about 2pm and no reason to expect to be gone more than say, oh an hour and a half, perhaps 2 if we ran up against a long line to get the new tire. It was almost 6pm when we did get home…

The path less traveled, less elegant, and rather frustrating as well...

The path less traveled, less elegant, and rather frustrating as well...

Parenthetically I should mention that I have made almost this exact same trip several times in several different neighborhoods around and about the Seattle area, so Maya’s culpability here is minimal at best. Even with the map, there are times when one wrong turn in the earliest moments of the process of retrieving some item listed on Craig’s List will result in a doubling or tripling of the length and time of the estimated duration and mileage of that particular retrieval…that being said…

To this point I have failed to mention another variable in this equation of doom that I only fully began to appreciate toward the end of our trip after seeing the needle of my fuel gauge dipping very close to the bottom of the red area (keep in mind, of course, that despite the extraordinary use of fuel and energy involved in driving the F-250 all over the greater Kent, WA region, the trip was carbon nuetral since I’m running the ol’ summertime B99.9 or 99.9% biodiesel for the uninitiated). That night we also needed to pick up a friend from the airport that night. Maya had taken this friend, who we will call W., to the airport a few days earlier in W’s little Ford Ranger which is infinitely more agile and fuel efficient than my F-250.

So, taking the Ranger to the airport would have been the best thing to do (and taking the Ranger on this trip might have been wise as well), if it weren’t for the fact that Maya was suffering some sort of pervasive automotive curse that week and noticed as she left the airport that W’s “check engine” light was lit. Since they made the first trip to the airport at some unholy hour prior to 8pm (or Gary’s dawn as I sometimes call it, afterall, does the sun really rise if I’m not there to see it?), Maya didn’t know whether the light had been on the entire time or if it had just come on that morning. Since the automotive curse seemed to be looming large, my truck appeared to be the best option despite the imminent close shave indicated by the fuel gauge (I pretty much always push my luck in a continuing effort to discover just how far I can go on a couple tanks of fuel, even though I really, really shouldn’t given that running a diesel dry is a lot more difficult to recover from than running a gas engine dry, from what I’ve read). What I have discovered about the truck, is that it has a very, very deep empty (which I was kind of able to ascertain fairly early on by comparing the amount of fuel I could stuff into it against the advertised tank sizes).

As harrowing as all that sounds, it worked out. We did get Maya’s rim, and her tire, and found out that her warranty would cover the damage to the tire and that we would get to come back with the damaged tire for a partial refund from the big box wholesale to the public store with their headquarters here in Washington that is not affiliated with Sam Walton and has become somewhat famous for the delicious polish dogs you can eat after you’ve wiped yourself out buying 32 gallons of mayonaise and a metric butt-load of triscuits. We also learned from W that the check engine light itself had been diagnosed as problematicly stuck on despite no actual condition to check (I didn’t mention the check engine light on the way back from the airport, I figured Maya saw it, she could report it, and I’m still a bit suspicious of the bad check engine light diagnosis that W was given, but it’s not my truck and not exactly my place to say so…not that that usually stops me, but it did that night, probably because I was tired).

Maya’s car is all fixed and aside from a little bit of a catch in her steering and us losing positive control over Maya’s tire and allowing it to sneak away from us rolling about a block down the street toward a busy intersection where an electrical crew working for the county to change out the traffic signals has been parking their vehicles and where by good fortune they happened to have finished parking the vehicles at the time of the tire incident which left them available to intercept the rolling menace prior to any gory traffic disaster it may have exacted at the end of our street (I had leaned it into the wheel well while we were rotating the old one in the back to the front to replace the donut spare and then put the brand new one on the back, this worked alright until we jacked the car up and it evidently jumped out of the wheel well of its own volition), this story has come to an end and depite how confident, strong, or irritated Maya may be when she says “we shouldn’t need the map”, I will insist that we print the map prior to departure unless I absolutely know exactly where we are going (or she is driving, in which case she can skip the map if she wishes and I’ll enjoy the ride)…

We’re Up! We’re Down! We’re In! We’re Out!

We were so looking forward to August. The hope being that some assemblance of the normal order would be returned, and that a blanket of calm would settle over the B-Bar-Lazy-B. Since I am the crappiest blogger known to the entire cyber-universe, I’ll have to give you some background before we get into the details of how August hasn’t yet delivered on the promise we thought it held back in Mid-July…

From late June through July we were dog-sitting Maya’s parent’s dog while they were on an extended vacation. Before we embarked on this little adventure, my greatest concern was how Jake would climatize to the cats, since he didn’t really have any direct experience with them. Hold on…

Let me introduce Jake…Jake is a yellow lab, I think he is about 8 years old, and has the longest nose in the world…

Miles and Miles of Nose

Miles and Miles of Nose

Well, ok, so maybe it isn’t the longest nose in the world, but if you live with Huxley for a while, most dogs begin to look like their noses are inappropriately long, Witness exhibit B, Huxley’s comparatively truncated snout…

A comfortably proportioned snout

A comfortably proportioned snout

Anyway…Huxley and Jake have played together pretty regularly (although always quite rambunctiously) both at Maya’s folk’s place and here at the house on occassion, so the least of our concerns was how Huxley and Jake would interact (particularly given our good luck at dog sitting other dogs in the past, etc.).

As one should come to expect, my expectations were wholly inaccurate. Jake on the whole couldn’t care less about the cats. He even seemed a bit shy and confused by them. He almost failed to notice the chickens for the entire month and a half. Jake’s sole concerns in the world are food, people, tennis balls, sticks, and of course, water. There is absolutely nothing else going on behind his stare besides a continuous inventory of the presence or absence of these five objects of his desire. His entire being is tied to these five concerns, and he can’t help but excitedly acknowledge the introduction of any one of them with fierce tail waging and some disconcerting bouncing. (Maybe there is one other thing on his mind…his bed…which he humps…which is also disconcerting and not the topic of this post, but worth mentioning nonetheless).

Our problem, surprisingly, throughout the month of July was our own sweet boy, Huxley. And the problem, he was not very sweet. After a few days, the novelty of the visitor wore thin, and the “bad Huxley” traits started to come out. These “bad Huxley” traits are few and far between, but at 104lbs, 98 of which are muscle, and 80 of those are located squarely on the top of his head to operate his jaws, any bad traits are a cause for concern. Huxley is intense. He is intensely protective and on occassion intensely possesive (we know this and prior to Jake’s arrival we removed all of the toys, bones and sticks that usually lay around the yard awaiting Huxley’s whim).

The first incident occurred while Maya was scruffing Huxley’s belly in the yard, and Jake bounded over to get a piece of the action. Maya is central to Huxley’s possessiveness tendencies, and there was an erruption that culminated in trip to the Vet to get a single staple put in a gash in Jake’s long pointy head. Maya suffered some scrapes and torn trousers in her effort to remove Huxley from Jake. Ok, historically, there was one other incident between Jake and Huxley involving a toy, so this second incident gave pause, but not panic. We proceeded by being very mindful of how and when attentions were lavished and just put a lot of effort into keeping everything very mellow around the B-Bar-Lazy-B.

I think we made it about another week, until the evening I decided I should bring the second dog bed out to the living room right before dinner so that we could all settle in for the evening. I thought I could accomplish this fairly smoothly despite both boys being in the living room at the time since Huxley was already settled on the bed that is permanently present in the living room and Jake was pretty well settled on the floor at the outset. I was wrong. Both boys took an immediate co-interest in the newly introduced bed, and our efforts to distract them in opposite directions seemed to incite conflict. Once Huxley has a grip, the only hope is for Maya to shove her hand in his mouth and break his grip whilst I’m pulling and then holding Huxley away from the site of conflict. The unfortunate consequence of Maya being so quick to shove her hand in Huxley’s mouth, is she sustains the injuries, while I generally walk away shaken but unscathed (I can’t even begin to go into how much I hate a dog conflict, but suffice to say this concern was central to my reluctance to get a dog in the first place). Maya suffered several puncture wounds to here index finger and serious bruising under her thumbnail (which now matches the other thumbnail which was bruised some time ago during the aforementioned initial conflict over a toy which occurred before Jake was actually staying with us).

Maya really needs her hands to do her job. Since the definition of insanity is trying the same things over and over again expecting different results, and with part of our livelihood now at stake, we had to take action. For the remainder of July we had to implement emergency dog separation measures. Thankfully the weather favored our efforts throughout the ordeal, and the lay out of our house accommodated keeping one dog upstairs with me while the other roamed free or stayed downstairs in Maya’s office with frequent trade offs throughout the day. If we didn’t both work from home now, this would have been a lot worse, but the continuity of our presence, and a little help from instant messaging technology, enabled us to rapidly develop policies, systems, and procedures appropriate to the task of regular dog rotation. Our strategy hinged heavily on utilization of the Blue Room as a sort of doggie air lock for performing rotations upstairs and down, inside and outside. Communication also plays as an essential component of any effective set of policies, systems and procedures for a management task as daunting as total dog separation. So, for the remainder of July the B-Bar-Lazy-B sounded not unlike a naval vessel from days of old. Aside from IM, we leveraged call and response to coordinate dog movement for locale to locale. Hence the title of this entry. At the completion of each dog movement, the party responsible for the dog in motion would call out to the party responsible for the dog at rest (usually waiting in or near the Blue Room with the dog at rest momentarily sequestered therein) to finalize the pooch transfer activity.

Let me walk you through the process of a relatively simple move, though more complicated moves were enacted in a similar fashion, just to clarify exactly how eagerly we were awaiting August. If Jake needed to move from my office upstairs to outside while Huxley was in a “free roam” period wherein the back door was open and the child gate at the foot of the stairs was closed, initiation of the movement would be either called out (if Maya was in the kitchen for example) or IM’d from upstairs to down (if Maya was in her office for example).

So, maybe I would yell “Should we do a switch?!”

Maya would respond “Sure it has been a while since Jake has been out!”

Then I would yell “Ok! Let’s do it!”

Maya would yell back “Ok! I’m taking Hux into the Blue Room!”

I would respond “Ok!”

As Maya took Hux into the Blue Room, she would call out “Ok, We’re In!”

At that point I would know I could safely open the gate and guide Jake to the out of doors, as I closed the door behind me I would call out “Ok, We’re Out!”

That final call indicated that Maya and Hux could emerge without incident from the Blue Room, and ordinary activities could resume until the next sequence of calls and moves was initiated.

This process dominated the month of July. Jake is an absolutely sweetheart, but when the sun rose on August 5th with the termination of this procedural sequence (Jake had gone home on the night of August 4th after Maya’s folk’s got back in town), a definite sense of relief gracefully settled across the entire eighth of an acre we call home. It did take a while to shake the habit of calling out to each other during each of our movements through the house. On several occassions I had to stop myself from closing the gate at the foot of the stairs and yelling out “We’re up!”

Unfortunately, the obliteration of the promise of a peaceful August came upon us that night with a midnight run to the 24 hour emergency Vet. But, I guess I’ll save that story for the next entry…suffice it to say we are all still here, so that is the good news. Our dear old man Hemingway isn’t seeing out of one eye and might be facing numbered days however, and that lays a thick viel of sorrow over the entire month. And then, just to keep us on our toes, someone decided to run into Maya’s car in the middle of the night sometime and drive off leaving it sans 1 side view mirror with a flat tire, a bent rim, and untold damage to the front end suspension, drive train, and who know what else. The precision with which they had to have scraped by her car to catch the mirror and the front tire without really denting the body is difficult to conceptualize, but alas, somehow they accomplished just such a feat and we still need to figure out how serious the damage is.

Extravagance…with a little help from my friends…

So…our friend Y. who goes by many nicknames…none of which he would want posted online…gave me a pair of gloves for my birthday this year with a pack of M&M’s stuffed in them. In the flurry of activity (mostly me showing our guests the chickens) I failed to try them on while he was here for the birthday pork butt smoking event that Maya kindly orchestrated to celebrate my ever increasing age.

Low and behold…a week later I cut my finger chasing Morning Glory (bindweed) bare handed (like an idiot) through the raised bed with the Rhubard, Rosemary, Sage, Oregano, and horrificly tenacious Yarrow in it (don’t ask me why I capitalized the plant names). Well, after I stopped the bleeding and cleared the dirt from the wound, I said “Hey! This would be a great time to try on those snazzy gloves that Y. (with all those nicknames) gave me for my birthday.” Such a sneaky, sneaky man is Y. that deep inside the glove was a gift card for a very large home improvement store with orange signs and a kind of comical “green” campaign that is probably worthy of a post unto itself.

I almost never buy new stuff, so a gift card is one of those moments that give me a good excuse to troll the aisles and find something I either wouldn’t ordinarily buy (thinking it an extravagance) or for which I would spend 3 months searching craigslist and researching pricing throughout the northwest until I found the exactly correct one at exactly the correct price somewhere in the region. At which point I would drive 15 miles in traffic, get lost 3 times, and arrive only to find it is not really quite the correct one, or that it is defective in some manner, and still buy anyway feeling compelled to justify the drive (and the getting lost).

So, with this particular gift card that Y. (with all the nicknames) gave me, we went trundling to the large home improvement store with the orange signs so I could troll the aisles of the tool area at a pace that inevitably irritates Maya a little bit (I’m kind of a slow, and deliberate person when trolling aisles at any store since I don’t get out of the house much and see it all as a research opportunity).

I had a little something in mind when we arrived. Something I had been toying with buying for a couple of years, and in fact, almost bought last year at a liquidation store (but realized that it was there because of obvious inconsistencies in the specifications listed on the box and couldn’t be certain it would meet my wants, needs, and desires). It is the kind of tool you can do without for a long while (and I have), but every now and again when I’m doing something I think to myself, “Gee, that tool sure would be handy right now.” And, with a little help from Maya to cover the taxes and accessories, I am now the proud owner of:

 

Electric Brad Nailer (capable of brads up to 1.25")
Electric Brad Nailer (capable of brads up to 1.25″)

 I have yet to use it, but there are already projects in the pipeline aching for the application of some super modern electrically driven brads. Sometimes (and this probably isn’t advisable) the tool drives the project, and in this case the tool has forced a complete re-imagining of the bird block for the shed (which has been waiting a year for bird block while I figure out just how I want to do it). Anyway, the primary purpose of this post is to extend a GIGANTIC THANK YOU to Y. (with all his many nicknames) and show him what the gift card added to our little arsenal of hand tools that get us through the day…