What the Duck #641

The craziness continues

I knew when I started this that a lack of material would never be the problem. The last three days have been so crazy I've barely had time to think, let alone write any of this down. To summarize - found out I would not be getting an extension and I am now officially self employed - because I will never be unemployed. Then my dad calls at 6 am to tell me that mom is in the hospital with a possible blood clot in her lung - turns out to be a gall bladder problem but a little surgery will clear that up. On the positive side, a friend called last minute with 4 extra, and best of all, free tickets to the UVA basketball game. Then today was Christmas photos (yes I know it is Christmas Eve) for the CEO of the company that just laid me off. Phew! I'm ready for a break.

Merry Christmas everyone.

More from PA

The second day of out two day trip to PA allowed us to celebrate Christmas with my mother's side of the family, which was something we hadn't done in several years. It was a nice visit, although short, but that seems to be about all my grandmother can take. It is really amazing (not in a good way) to see how fast her mental health is deteriorating. By two o'clock yesterday she was rushing us out the door. As frustrating as that was, I know she can't help it and the dementia is winning the battle.

Before we were encouraged to go, I had a chance to take some photos of my 16 month old nephew. Without a doubt, that is absolutely the hardest age to formally photograph. His new found mobility is too much to control for a photo sitting. I did my best and hopefully captured something of use. We'll see when I develop them this evening. I saw this cartoon this morning and wished I could have used it on him, but I don't think even a $100 would have made a difference to him. The really cool thing is I'll get to try the same thing with his newly announced sibling who will be the same age in two years!!! We were really excited to hear that I will be an uncle again in August!

From What the Duck -

Back from Pennsylvania

...For a day or two anyway. We braved the icy roads and made it to my aunt's funeral just in time to see everyone walking out of the church. I did make it inside before they closed the casket and got to see my uncle and cousins before they closed the casket.

The rest of this post would seem really inappropriate if you didn't know our family, which is completely nuts and absolutely nothing else should be surprising.

The burial was in a small country cemetery with one driveway in, and no other exit. You pull in and back out. So, with a foot of snow on the ground (I may be exaggerating a few inches), 15 cars pull into a driveway long enough for about 10. The 6th car in, then managed to lock both sets of keys in the vehicle. Yep - I said both sets. Now as you might have expected, with it being such a small cemetery, lots of people carpooled to get there. So we had six overloaded cars that couldn't get out. So there we are in 15 degree weather on snow covered ground with about 20 people stranded, including the hearse. My aunt must have been having a good laugh over that one.

But we did manage to load everyone back into the remaining cars (my kids rode in the trunk space of out Ford Escape), and about two hours later they had finally broke into the car.

I suppose it was a blessing as it really did take everyone's mind off the day. There were many tears that really pulled at my emotions. From the six and nine year old girls, with tears streaking down their cheeks, to seeing my tough as nails 80 year old grandfather break down and weep in a pew by himself after the service. The photographer in me wished he could have captured those moments, but some pictures are better left stored in one's memory.

It was good to see family that I hadn't seen in 15 years and to get to meet some of my cousins children. It was amazing to see how much they looked like their parents when they were that age. Molly made fast friends with my cousin's daughter and they quickly exchanged email addresses so that they could arrange a Webkinz play date. Who knew the power of the Webkinz? My dad joked that it was terrible that someone had to die for us all to get together and that he planned to fake someone's death next year so we could have a reunion. Someone else said that would just tick someone off and we'd end up needing a funeral anyway - yeah I told you we were nuts.

All in all, the 15 hours we spent int he car over the last two days weren't too bad. Even the dog traveled well. We'll see if Thursday's travels will be as fun. Hopefully there will be less snow and ice and the emotions will be a bit happier.

Buying Jewelry for the wife

Jingle Bell Jog

The local elementary school held the first annual Jingle Bell Jog on Saturday to collect canned food for the local food bank. About 30 kids came out for the fun run, decked out in their holiday best. Sarah demonstrated some of Dad's form as she raced around the track. I was so proud that even in the last 100m, she was still pressing on as hard as she could go. I caught this photo of her with both feet off the ground as she raced to the finish. Good Job Sarah!

Flooring - A work in progress

The amount of posting the last two days is inversely proportional to the difficulty of getting the floor down. We are now within 10 boards of completing the hardwood, but you guessed it, we ran out of wood. Those last 10 boards are going to be really expensive.

Just so there's no confusion

I'm not these guys:

http://www.nevermondays.de

But you can listen to them here: listen

Tiles are set

I finally finished setting the tiles. It was not my favorite part of the project so far. First, I prepared the mortar by pouring the MegaBond liquid into a 5 gallon bucket, followed by the 50 lbs of mortar mix I needed. One problem, yep that is exactly 5 gallons. There was no way to stir without spilling, as I quickly proved. So I asked the wife to run down to the basement and get one of our storage tubs and I poured in the mixture. Disaster averted, we're replacing the carpet anyway.

Then it was time to start lifting the tiles and putting the mortar down. I started in the back corner of the kitchen and lifted a tile that I made three cuts on the fit around the pantry door frame. Do you know what that piece sounds like when it tips over??

It's a large porcelain crack, followed by a string of mumbled expletives. Yeah I was ticked. Fortunately I had one extra piece of tile sitting on the porch that I could quickly cut and replace the broken tile.

After that, it was just a lot of crawling around and trying to refit the tiles into the spaces I had originally laid out. My knees are killing me, but I'm glad the hard part is done. Tomorrow I'll fill in the grout and move all the appliances back into the kitchen Friday morning.

The tiles are cut!

I'm finally done cutting all the tiles and fitting them in place. Next step - mixing up the mortar and setting them down.

My knees hurt just thinking about it.

Crouching Tiler, Shrinking Pattern

Laying out the tiles, we (ok really it was the wife) noticed that the rectangle of fancy listello


was going to be much larger than we I had anticipated. It would have been partially covered by the refrigerator and too close to the cabinets around the outside. So I pulled back some of the tile and have now decreased the dimensions of the inner pattern. I think in the long run this will be a good thing and require less overall cuts with the tile saw. We'll see.

First trip back to Lowes

Well, it was inevitable. I realized this morning that Canyon Slate and Canyon Beige are not the same colors - guess that's why they put that on the outside of the box. I was a bit concerned because they don't do a traditional exchange. You have to return the item, get a credit on your account, and then repurchase the item you want. I was afraid that they wouldn't honor the sales price and I'd be out about $20. But I simply explained the situation and they worked their magic with the computer and made it look as if nothing ever changed. Thank you Lowes for a painless process.



While I was there, I also realized that I had bought grout, but no mortar for laying the tiles down. That would have been interesting. But I bought what I needed and probably a few that I didn't and am no ready to continue on with the project.

First rant - economic bailout

So, while working on the floor, I was thinking about the economy and how it really sucks that my company that is small is going under, but large companies who really mismanaged their finances and were sucked in by greed are going to get a free pass and I, as a taxpayer, have to pay for it.

It just isn't right. But not wanting to be one who complains without a solution, I have come up with an idea that I hope will catch on.

I say we LOAN money to all the companies that need the money because they now realize that they shouldn't have given loans to people who couldn't afford to pay 120% of their take home pay on a mortgage or who continued to build cars that get 4 MPG with $4 dollar gas. But, let's give them the same terms we get when we need emergency cash - like with a credit card. Let's immediately charge them 3% finance charge for the cash advance, but we'll give them 6 months at a lower rate, let's say 2.99%. Fair enough. Should they make all their payments on time - great!

But, when they are 10 minutes late on that first payment, let's give them the same 31% interest rate they would give to someone with bad credit. Let's see how they like those terms. when they need more money, we can raise their credit limit, but we'll keep them at 31% APR. I would think they would go for it - I mean they did that to thousands of people for years.

If you like the idea, write your senators and congressman today (cut and paste this post if you like). Let's get this in place before we give them anymore handouts.

Back to the flooring.

The New Floor

Recently, I found out I was losing my job. Nice way to start a new blog huh!?!? I'll post more on that later, but skipping ahead in the story, one of the contingency plans is that we may have to sell our house. Well, as you might imagine, after 12 kid years of spilled drinks and 1.5 years of dog (does that equate to 10.5 years), the carpet is a mess and needs to be replaced. So, as you might have guessed, that means we need to replace the flooring in the kitchen.

No we didn't have carpet in the kitchen and I'm not really nuts. It actually is quite logical. see we want to replace the carpet with hardwood floors. Well, the kitchen has a very nice laminate hardwood, that has held up extremely well, but we thought it would look dumb to have real hardwood next to laminate. So it had to go.


So, first thing to do was to go the the new LOWES hardware and check out our flooring options. Now, before anyone blasts me for supporting the big box store, I did try and visit some local flooring dealers. Problem was they were never open. If you own a store, you might want to try staying open after 5pm so that people who work can come and shop. Why you cater to those who don't work and close before those of us with a paycheck can come in - I don't get it.

After exploring all our options, we decided that tile in the kitchen would work well and we found this pattern here.It looked really cool and I can handle the pattern - right?

Next, I actually took the time to sketch it all out and then graphically make sure I wasn't missing anything using Google SketchUp, a cool free program. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to make the software do what I wanted, but eventually I was able to draw the living room, dining room, hallway, and kitchen with the tile pattern. The made it really easy to count up how many tiles I would need. Please don't tell Mrs. Baxter I didn't use my algebra, cause I'm pretty sure this was one of those examples she would give whenever anyone asked "when am I ever going to need to use algebra"!

Then, as luck would have it, Lowes was having their grand opening sale and it was 10% of your entire purchase. Yeah! And, if you opened a Lowes Credit account, 0% interest for 12 months - double Yeaah! And, if you screw up and open the wrong kind of account, you can opena second account and get twice as much credit - YIKES! Somehow I ended up with $17,000 credit limit for a $2000 floor.

Anyway, I was able to get everything I needed (at least for the first trip), and the Escape was able to haul it all. I'm sure it looked ridiculous with the back end dragging from all the weight in the back.

Now, the time has come to start the project. Last night I started by getting the refridgerator and stove out of the kitchen (they look mighty nice sitting inthe dining room) and start pulling up the floor.

The lock and fold laminate came up with ease and it probably took less than half an hour to have the kitchen floor bare. If only it had gone down that easy.

After a quick sweep, the kitchen was ready for the new tile. But first, I had to find the center of the room. For this, I got out my laser level and placed it in the corner of the room and pointed it to the opposite corner. I traced the line with a sharpie and then repeated with the other corner.

I guess the line is hard to see on the blog, but if you click the photo to see a larger version and it will be there. I then droped the first 13" tile in the center and started working out from there. Once I had the pattern started and the spacers in place, I decided that was enough for the day and decided to got to bed. All in all a good start to the day.

Good Morning

Welcome to Never Mondays, a blog, like many, many others about nothing. No, I'm not trying to be the next Sienfeld, just sharing the craziness that seems to pop up when I least expect it. So, what you can expect here at Never Mondays are posts about the projects I start (and how they go wrong), cool stuff I find when I'm reading or surfing, and me ranting when I find something outrageous or ridiculously stupid (I'll save my posts about corporate bailouts for another day).

The posts will come randomly, you can expect many over the next few days. I'll be starting with a flooring project that I am in the middle of - it should be fun.

So check back often or better yet, add me to your RSS feeds or Google Reader. It should be fun.