what did you do today? (2008-2015) (closed)

[W2R]

This morning Home Depot came out and measured in preparation for replacing my carpet, that was soaked and had to be torn out after Hurricane Isaac.

It will be so nice to not be living in a construction zone type of decor, eventually!

That does wear thin after a while. It is reminiscent of the "early poverty" style of decor such as the bookcases made of plain pine boards and cinder blocks. Yup, I had a set of those!

Yes, me too! For more years than I would care to admit.

Walking on the bare slab is bad enough, but there are nails sticking up in the doorways and remnants of glue on the slab. It isn't pretty. Home Depot called me today and along with other information, told me that I'd be finding out the date that workmen will arrive, soon.

After the flooring is installed, just a few more repairs and expenditures before I envision being back to where I was pre-Isaac.

 

[M Paquette]

Refridgemugator shopping. The thingummy what coldifys is tending to warmify a bit, and the icecuberator don't icecuberate no more.

Sorry for all the technifying, but I wanted to let folks know what's driven us to this drastical measure.

Anywho, the nice salesman helped us out real good, and the new icebox will be here next week. Yay!

 

[Nodak]

I had several apartments furnished in early Salvation Army in the early 70s.

 

[Rustward]

I have been watching the Blue Angels practice over downtown San Francisco for tomorrow's Fleet Week air show - all from the comfort of my living room.

Yesterday we saw the Thunderbirds perform at the Alliance Air Show in Ft Worth. The Snowbirds (Canadian military demonstration team) also performed. The military demonstration teams are really awesome, but I go to see the aerobatic pilots, the likes of Jan Collmer, Mike Goulian and others . . .

And, and this is the first time in several years I saw the full Tora Tora Tora performance, which I first saw in 1979.

Planning to see Jan Collmer and Tora again next weekend.

 

[freebird5825]

I've had a busy few weeks...getting in a few more road trips to the lake before the blasted white stuff arrives. I just posted several fall foliage photos in the Fall Colors Yet? thread. The sumac trees that grow along the roads were brilliant. With a little wind blowing, they resembled the flames of a fire. Wow

I processed a lot of sweet red bell, jalapeno and banana peppers. I sauteed them and put them in pure olive oil in Mason jars in the refrigerator. I'm drying out some of the hotter peppers for eventual grinding up in my food processor. I'm going to try making my own hot sauce from scratch. I did a lot of seed saving, drying and packaging for next year. I received a pound of fresh garlic, 3 varieties of hardneck, gratis from a fellow gardener. I had given him some extra banana pepper plants this past spring.

This week will be dedicated to draining/turning off outside water faucets, mowing/mulching fallen leaves, putting away patio furniture, finishing up removing spent plants from my container farm and putting them in the compost tumbler, and moving tender plants indoors. Night-time temps are getting lower and lower.

In the meantime, Mr B continues to bang away at the books.

 

[Nords]

Another "boring" day wrestling with Google AdSense and Genesis/WordPress plugins on the blog. Nothing that's impossible, but several dead ends and lots of configuring & tweaking. Most of it is only one-time configuration, but I have six pages of one-time things that I want to work through.

Bought an iPad an hour ago. I'll update it on the iPad thread.

This morning Home Depot came out and measured in preparation for replacing my carpet, that was soaked and had to be torn out after Hurricane Isaac.
It will be so nice to not be living in a construction zone type of decor, eventually!

How many hurricane carpets have you had over the last couple decades? Would it be better to go with tile floors, or at least some sort of mud-room tile entryway by the front door?

This week will be dedicated to draining/turning off outside water faucets, mowing/mulching fallen leaves, putting away patio furniture, finishing up removing spent plants from my container farm and putting them in the compost tumbler, and moving tender plants indoors. Night-time temps are getting lower and lower.

Someday next spring, after everybody's thawed out their sense of humor again, I'll have to share our Hawaii winterizing checklist.

I certainly can't credit my Air Force experience (in some ways, that was like being a civilian without having to decide what to wear to work).

Here you go:

 

[W2R]

Bought an iPad an hour ago. I'll update it on the iPad thread.

Woo-hoo! I think/hope you'll have fun with it and find it useful as well.

How many hurricane carpets have you had over the last couple decades? Would it be better to go with tile floors, or at least some sort of mud-room tile entryway by the front door?

I seriously thought of putting tile in! I even picked one out, tentatively. Another advantage of tile near the entry is that it is easier to keep clean than carpet. But when push came to shove, I was offered such a great deal on the carpet that I decided to go with it. Sometimes the cheapskate within wins out.

This is my only hurricane carpet, since my 40-year-old house actually has never flooded. The carpet got wet because my double front doors failed and the winds blew a tremendous quantity of rain inside.

 

[freebird5825]

...Someday next spring, after everybody's thawed out their sense of humor again, I'll have to share our Hawaii winterizing checklist.

Go ahead, make me cringe.

Nothing is difficult, it's more a case of DON"T FORGET TO [insert task] before the temps go to freezing.
We have a frost warning for tonight, so I did all of the moving inside of the tenderer plants in my little container farm. I will cover the rest with a light sheet and they will be fine.

 

[Nords]

Go ahead, make me cringe.

OK, OK, enough with everyone's PMs & e-mails, here's our list:
1. Locate all windows in the house and be ready to shut them-- especially the west-facing one in the stairwell that needs a stepladder for those two days a year when the rain comes from the west instead of from the northeast. This year you should probably shut them all in January whether you think it's necessary or not.
2. Look for your socks. They're probably wherever you put them last February. Or maybe they're still in the laundry basket, waiting until you have an entire load of socks.
3. Look for your long-sleeve t-shirt. You pulled it out of your t-shirt drawer last May to make more room for your tank tops.
4. Make sure you have a good drawstring tie in the waistband of your sweatpants. (They're 25 years old and the elastic waistband is no longer elastic.) They're only used once or twice a year, so the drawstring may have rotted again like that unfortunate incident in the winter of '06.
5. Buy a box of hot chocolate mix. Check the long-range weather forecast-- we might need two boxes.
6. Get the Vellux "blanket" out of the closet and put it by the foot of the bed for easy access.
7. Put the drywall cover back in the bedroom ceiling access hatch to the attic-- the cover you pulled out last April to let the hot air rise into the attic for a chimney cooling effect.
8. Remember to take your camera to Costco this week for a photo of those new decorative LED icicle lights that everyone's buying for the "cool" Christmas look.
9. Get out the car manuals and figure out where the dashboard defroster buttons are. You know, those switches with the wavy things on them. See if they work. Try to figure out how you can tell whether they're working.
10. Run the car's A/C thermostat up to 82 degrees to burn the dust off the heating coils.
11. Get both cotton/poly blankets out of the guest bedroom closet and lay them on the bed for those cold winter mornings when the recliner is just too breezy for watching TV.

We had one morning last year where the temperature hit the dew point at 55 degrees. I had my feet propped up on my desktop computer tower to keep the blood circulating.

We used to have a 1980 Plymouth Champ with an automatic choke that failed shut. A new choke was something obscene like $600, so we just ran it without the choke. It would start rough on one or two January mornings, but it was fine the rest of the year.

Now that I'm getting older, I appear to be losing my thermal insulation. That first dive into the shorebreak is physically painful until my core temperature drops to match the surface temp. I still need to buy a long-sleeve high-neck 3mm neoprene wetsuit jacket for surfing. My rash guards and neoprene tank top just aren't going to cut it when the surf dips down into the low 70s. In another couple years I might buy those five-toed reef socks to keep my feet warmer, too...

 

[rodi]

Nords -
I could have posted a similar list for San Diego. It gets down to the 40s overnight sometimes... but we rarely even use the heater on the house.

 

[freebird5825]

Today was a fun day...Mr B took a well deserved study break and we spent the whole day together.
I was supposed to get some outdoor things done, but his declaration of taking a day off from the books sent those chores right over to tomorrow's list.
We returned cans and bottles to recover the 5 cent deposit, and then went to lunch at Giovanni's Pizzeria in a nearby college town. We split a small sausage, pepperoni and mushroom pizza. On the way home, I did a little grocery shopping while he snoozed in the car.
I scored a 19 pound turkey for $1.59 per pound, a pretty good price for this part of the country before the holiday Tbird glut. That monster will go into the oven tomorrow. I will power-slice the breast thinly for sandwich meat, and chunk the dark meat for homemade pot pies and turkey as a main course for dinner. Little by little I am eliminating red meat from his diet. Sssshhhhhh

He had to go downtown to do a quick volunteer gig. I am holding down the fort, goofing off as usual.

UPDATE: I almost forgot. I've been invited to go to the Meadowlands for a JETS game on Sunday. A former colleague has season tickets. The seats are fabulous, on a rounded corner of the stadium near an end zone. Mr B has 2 midterms next week, so he is glad I will be gone for a day or two.
I CAN'T WAIT!

 

[Nords]

Lots of blog work today. I set up the three Google AdSense positions for each page, so hopefully Google will start running those by the weekend. (AdSense's "rules" are mind-numbing. I've read reactor plant manuals that were more interesting.) I hope I can leave all that in autopilot for a while.

I tweaked the blog header and the photo, and I think I'm finally happy with the changes. There's something "wrong" about the photo, but you'd only recognize the "problem" if you've surfed with me. (I'm waiting for my daughter to call me on it.) In any case it sends the right message to military readers.

We've been tangling with the wildlife. Over the last month we've had several java sparrows fluttering under the eves outside our bathroom windows. Cute little birds, attracted to the easy perch on the gutter downspout or clinging to the birdholes for the attic ventilation. They hover like little radio-controlled helicopters.

Birdholes. Oops. Better check those. So we crawled out of the 2nd story window and went around the roof checking the screens over those holes. 23-year-old metal, not in the best shape, but strong enough to hold back a tiny little bird.

Or so we thought.

Spouse swears that they got into the attic yesterday and that she heard them on the ceiling today. I suspect that they've been in there longer and just accidentally made a noise today ("Hey you klutz, shhhhh! Do you want those humans to start poking around up here?!?") I climbed up into the (95-degree warm) attic and inchwormed over to the corner, strung out over the rafter trusses, hoping not to fall through the drywall ceiling. I was greeted with a solid mass of nesting material (enough to fill a five-gallon paint bucket) and eight little eggs. I stuck the nest & eggs outside in a palm tree but I doubt the birds are going to re-nest there.

We don't have any aluminum screen or wirecloth, so I stapled fiberglass screen over the holes. Now it's a race to the home-improvement store to get the little aluminum slatted soffit vents to hammer into the holes. Between our two stories of eves we have 200 of those stupid little holes. Or, as the birds call them, "condo doors".

I'm ticked at having missed the chance to figure out what they were up to and to stop this last month. But I never expected them to be such persistent little fu-, er, peckers.

Nords -
I could have posted a similar list for San Diego. It gets down to the 40s overnight sometimes... but we rarely even use the heater on the house.

We were stationed there (Kensington) from '94-'97. If I couldn't live in Hawaii then San Diego would be a good consolation prize...

 

[NW-Bound]

I'm ticked at having missed the chance to figure out what they were up to and to stop this last month. But I never expected them to be such persistent little fu-, er, peckers...

Ah, you don't know what true peckers can do to your home siding. And how loud a noise they can make, banging on the chimney flashing or its cap.

As I was sitting there on my sofa, sipping my morning coffee, closing my eyes to savor the sweet lyrics of "The Windmills of Your Mind" coming from the stereo

Lovers walk along a shore
And leave their footprints in the sand
Is the sound of distant drumming
Just the fingers of your hand?
​

"Bang bang bang bang...
Bang bang bang bang..."

What the hell, I told my wife. We looked at each other in bewilderment. "A neighbor is banging on a metal drum or doing some metal work", she said. But my nearest neighbor was quite a few hundred feet away. I listened some more, and said, "No, it reverberates through the house, so I don't think it's coming from outside". Well, what happened was that the sound transmitted through the metal chimney and came out of the fireplace, which really threw me off.

So, it was when I went outside looking up that I saw this woodpecker busy going at it. What was there to eat out of the metal flashing? That woodpecker was going mad, and took my sanity with it too. I yelled "Cut it out", and threw some rocks at it, but as the chimney top was perhaps 30ft up, and my throw was never that good, that did not faze the bird at all. So, I just had to wait for it to get tired and quit.

It came back the next day. Good lord! I came out and saw two birds up there this time, pecking at about the same spot. OMG!

Luckily, they quit after a while. Have not seen any lately. Actually, I thought it was pretty funny and would not kill the birds. I have seen some homes with holes in the siding, and one can even see tufts of insulation being pulled out through the holes too.

 

[freebird5825]

This is what I did today...

What better way to spend a cold rainy windy day than to fire up the big oven and make a roast turkey bird. It smelled so good, Mr B had trouble concentrating on his homework.

It is cooling now, awaiting surgery.

 

[W2R]

Definitely an improvement IMO... Before and After.

Still have a few things to move back in but got most of the heavy stuff.

 

[M Paquette]

We did our annual run to Apple Hill today. BBQ tri-tip sandwiches for lunch, and apple pie, apple turnovers, and apple donuts for dessert. Oh, and there's now a big ole apple pie in the freezer to be baked for Thanksgiving.

 

[Walt34]

Definitely an improvement IMO... Before and After.

I dunno. It kinda had a more "down-to-the-basics" look to it without that there fancy rug.

 

[W2R]

I dunno. It kinda had a more "down-to-the-basics" look to it without that there fancy rug.

That it did! Still, for some reason I prefer the new carpet....

 

[Ronstar]

That it did! Still, for some reason I prefer the new carpet....

But I'll bet that concrete tends to keep the room cooler. And I kinda like the concrete look too.

 

[W2R]

But I'll bet that concrete tends to keep the room cooler. And I kinda like the concrete look too.

Ewww!!

I didn't really notice any temperature difference, but then the AC is pumping out cold air all the time. It's amazing how much quieter it is now. Every little noise would echo in there endlessly when there was no carpet but the carpet apparently damps and absorbs sounds.

I also notice another big difference - - when I walk through it now, my face no longer automatically contracts into a rigid expression of intense horror like this: Now, my face feels relaxed and looks more like this: Much better suited to a happy retiree.

 

[Walt34]

Well then, that makes it a good investment for you regardless of what the others think.

 

[grasshopper]

Ms G and I, an 4 dogs went on a back canyon hike in the backyard. I think it is about time for me to think about hearing aids. The dogs alerted Ms G to a Black-tailed rattlesnake on the path I was cruising down, never heard it. I have BT rattlers on the higher places on the homestead, that's just rocks and rattlesnakes, so I don't get out there much. These snakes are much better camouflaged then Diamond-backs which are down around the house. Most folks say that BT are tamer than DB, tame like a land mine, I think they mean. We picked another way around as to not disturb government property, since the snake was in a designated wilderness and we were the interlopers.

Happy trails, grasshopper

 

[Gumby]

I had an unexpected day off from w*rk today, since my office is being moved -- a dry run for retirement, if you will.

I slept late, went to get my hair cut, took my clothes to the drycleaner (which I usually do on Saturday morning), scrubbed down the bathroom, did a load of laundry, ate lunch at McDonalds, shopped at Goodwill (bought a new stereo receiver for $10), putzed around on the computer, planned dinner, went to the grocery and wine store, came home and made dinner for the young wife -- veal saltimbocca with oven roasted potatoes and the last of the green beans from our garden.

 

[MBAustin]

Today was a perfect ER day. Went to a breakfast retirement party for the CFO at United Way where I'm on the board (it's actually his 2nd retirement, he's a good bit older than I am). Then on to our first session of a local university's continuing ed program for folks like us - my first lecture was on the history of photography, DH went to one on the Dead Sea Scrolls, then both of us went to one about historic elections in the USA. We skipped the afternoon lecture and I used the time productively for a long nap. DH wanted to check out iPhone5 cases at the local big box store (his phone arrived on Wednesday but he hasn't yet activated it) and I wanted to pick up something at the mall, so we headed out for a quick trip. When we got back, called to check in with my Mom since my sister is away this week, she's doing great and turned off the veep debate last night about the same time I did. (Much better to watch the Orioles beat the Yankees!) DS just texted us that he had a good job interview trip today (he's a college senior) and we are heading out to dinner with several other couples from our church in a few minutes. ER Rocks!

 

[NW-Bound]

Yesterday, we went to visit my daughter at her work place and to see her office, then to go with her to lunch.

Today, my daughter had a day off, and asked me to go with her to Home Depot to help her with some ideas for planting and re-landscaping the courtyard of her townhome. I also needed to get some mortar to fix up a section of the block fence in my backyard. It was good to see my daughter getting "domesticated", so I was glad to help.