Cutting Slate Tile with a Wet Saw
This was kind of fun.
And now I have a power tool that shoots muddy water at me. Finally.
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Injury Update: Trigger Finger(s)
There’s nothing like a medical condition that makes you feel old while at the same time emasculating you. Because it’s most common in women over 40. Anyway.
- Basically the tendons are swollen, such that if my left ring finger or right pinky is curled up, the middle knuckle “catches” when trying to extend the finger out straight.
- It’s like that when I first wake up, but as things warm up during the day, the fingers act normal.
- It started coming on back when I was doing the floor. Apparently it’s a bad thing when, after finishing sanding, your hands feel like they’re full of springs.
- Working with my hands every day since then apparently exacerbated the situation, until maybe three weeks ago when the “catching” started.
- It doesn’t hurt (all my fingers have been a little stiff and sore since mid-May), it’s just disconcerting and likely to progressively worsen without measures being taken.
- Recommended course of action is to (a) stop doing things that require me to grab stuff, especially power tools that oscillate or vibrate; (b) splint the affected fingers, especially at night; and (c) maybe pop some “anti-inflammatories” (ibuprofen). Should heal itself in four to six weeks.
- If that doesn’t work, then I can go in and get some cortisone injections. I’ll feel like a professional athlete! Like an old, emasculated professional athlete.
Not sure whether this means I just stop doing anything with the house or what. It’s going to be hard to be here without trying to do stuff, since:
- All that’s left to do in the kitchen is install the cabinets (and sink and dishwasher and disposal).
- The den is looking good, but needs bookshelves that I’d need to build.
- I ordered five sets of slat blinds that should arrive next week some time; it might be hard to avoid hanging them once they get here.
- Now that the master bedroom is basically ready to go, it’d be cool to put a door on the room — but the door needs to be painted and hung, which require grabbing and tool-use.
- With the kitchen floor done, I can start moving stuff from the basement into the living room, but carrying all that stuff might be proscribed.
- The upstairs bathroom is still a no-mans land and it sucks having to go downstairs to use the toilet.
- Plus the whole rest of the house and all.
Guess I should’ve gone to Oregon for the family reunion. It’s amazing how pretty much everything I sort of am interested in doing requires me to grab stuff. I’m not sure I should even consider hiking in WVa, since all the interesting hikes there have river crossings and I’d be mad trying to do them without poles. Also unsure about fishing, since it’d require me to have my hands in curled-up positions.
Instead I’m heading to Southern Virginia — it’s cheaper than Oregon on short notice and most of what there is to do there is passive (read: a lot of looking). It’ll keep me off my hands for a few days and then when I get back I can maybe re-evaluate. Also, in case you were wondering, it doesn’t make sense to visit a doctor until September when I have real insurance and not the kind with the $5,000 deductible.
I dunno. Maybe this is the blown transmission of the house renovation months. I swear I’m not just trying to find excuses to avoid painting doors.
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PNC Park: Pirates Win!
Went to PNC for a couple of Pirates games on their last homestand (they lost the second game — stupid Padres). Great park, great atmosphere, seems really well run and their aren’t any potholes in the concourses, which makes it feel like you’re not in Pittsburgh.
Coming in from the east (or south), the recommended parking is all downtown. Works out pretty well — $5 parking and a 10-15 minute walk, depending on what garage you ended up in. The walk is also cool as the closer you get to the park, the more fans you’re walking with and then crossing the (pedestrian-only on gameday) Roberto Clemente Bridge makes for a pretty dramatic final leg of the journey.
The views from the park side of the Allegheny River are also pretty good.
Otherwise:
- They really play up the pirate theme on the big screen; it’s kind of cool.
- They have this big animation sequence before every game wherein a Pirates-themed galleon is taking on a galleon flying the colors of the day’s opponent. You’d think that should be no contest — pirates should be better seamen than, for instance, Franciscan friars — but it’s still pretty satisfying when the statue of Roberto Clemente hits a flaming cannonball out of the park and drops it right on the bad guys’ deck, sending them and their crew to the bottom of the Allegheny.
- It’s as nice a ballpark as I’ve been to. Destroys the Big A and Dodgers easily, more interesting than Petco or Camden Yards, probably on par with Safeco.
- Most of the fans there seem to think that “Willie Stargell” is the answer to every Pirates trivia question.
- As losing teams go, the Pirates are easy to pull for — they’re bad because management is cheap, not because it’s incompetent.
- And it’s fun watching some of their young guys just starting to get established (Alvarez, Walker, Tabata), not to mention guys who weren’t going to get a chance elsewhere seizing the opportunity (Jones). If they sign Cliff Lee in the off-season, they could win as many as 70 games next year!
- It’s surprising how many fans the Pirates have given that they’ve been “re-building” since 1992. They probably deserve better.
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Light Switch Replacement: 15 Photos
Nine switches down, four to go — upstairs. Then I can hit the basement! Good times, good times.
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Installing the Kitchen Sub-Floor
And underlayment. The problem with this overall house renovation project is that it’s mostly finish work, which is no fun. Finally got to do something that wasn’t finish work. Now I want to go and frame something or shoot some .22 rounds into concrete maybe. Next house.
Not pictured that should’ve been:
- Dremeling the underlayment to fit.
- Applying the latex underlayment putty to a couple uneven spots.
It was just the area where the old cabinets used to be and the floor exposed by taking out the wall that needed new sub-floor and underlayment. Took a few tries to figure out what thickness both of those needed to be (19/32 for the subfloor, 5 mm for the underlayment). Learned that all wood screws aren’t the same and that just because two boxes of nails have the exact same description on them, that doesn’t mean they’re the same quality of nail.
And if anyone in the Pgh area needs help installing a new plywood sub-floor, I’d be happy to help.
bkd
Screen Shots Educate, Inform
Wanted to share these so I can go ahead and throw them away and clear up valuable hard drive space. Plus my special-order tiles are waiting for me at Home Depot right now and this way I can put off picking them up. These are Actual Screen Shots, captured in the wild on my laptop because I found them to be awesome.
Amazon is proud of its European-American heritage.
I think they meant that the love seat is just comfortable with itself. Maybe too comfortable with itself.
Will it be sneezing or how will I know?
This one’s just about the audacity of Major League Baseball — selling multiple ad units within their own advertising. Play ball indeed. And seriously, how big could the overlap possibly be between baseball fans and Evony aficionados?
So that’s it. Now I can drag and drop into the trash can.
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Movie Review: The Road
So I’m not doing the old version any more. It was too hard coming up with haikus for every movie I saw. Not that I see a lot of movies, but still — writing haiku for The Dark Knight et al gets irritating.
The Road, then:
- I liked the book a lot better. I don’t think the movie did anything wrong per se, but it didn’t really do anything right, either. Just came off as dim and lifeless.
- Liked when Viggo Mortensen lost control of his accent, especially on the word “food”, where he sounded like an owl. Hi-larious. To me.
- The movie plays like a revue of post-apocalyptic fiction cliches — cannibalism, scrounging for ammo, pushing grocery carts, bloody-thirsty gangs, people kept in pens for food, etc.
- You’d think that a kid who was born at the onset of the apocalypse would be used to it by the time he was 11 (or whatever). This kid was freaked out by everything. Defied credibility.
- Plus his dad babied him too much.
- And there was no credible sense in which the kid’s degree of worrying about everything was equal to his dad’s.
- Why can’t a movie show characters eating without showing them eating with their mouths open?
- If it’s after the apocalypse and roving gangs driving around in trucks are a major threat, wouldn’t you probably STAY OFF THE ROAD?
- It doesn’t seem like ammo should be harder to find than food.
- And what kind of apocalypse is it where humans survive but cockroaches don’t?
- And given that there’s still plenty of water on the planet, how is it that nothing can grow?
- Also liked seeing Guy Pearce dressed up like Eddie Vedder at the end.
Etc. A lot of those problems derive from the source material — but they’re a lot easier to ignore in book-form in that the book doesn’t really call that much attention to them. When they’re shown in moving pictures, though, it’s hard to not notice.
I like post-apocalyptic and bleak in itself isn’t a turnoff, but yeah: no.
Final score: 5/10.
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National Museum of the Marine Corps: New Addition
Went back to the Marine Corps museum when I was in NoVa a couple weeks ago. They added a couple new areas to it since I went there last year, one on “the early days” (pre WWI) and one on World War I. Now that those areas are open, it’s hard to imagine the museum without them.
Of those two areas, I think I dug the early years part the most, maybe just because it’s a more-forgotten time. It covered a lot of “expansion era” Marine Corps activities, where the Corps acted as an expeditionary force in securing colonies in, frex, the Philippines.
Like the rest of the museum, these new areas do some cool stuff to help the visitor experience the history they’re viewing. Like in the Philippines occupation area, you walk through this “tent” and through one “wall” of the tent, you can see shadows of marines hanging out by the fire, wearing expedition hats, whittling sticks, and smoking pipes. It’s simple and not very data-rich, but it’s ingenious in its ability to convey how it might have felt to actually be a marine stationed in the Philippines at the turn of the century (minus the heat and humidity). No plaque could have conveyed that.
Photo:
The World War I exhibit was also strong, although it started off with a short, made-for-museum video loop of a kid dressed up like in the old days hawking newspapers on an in-studio streetcorner. Hated that. The kid actor was terrible, like he was trying to channel Meeno Peluce. Children should *never* be allowed to act. I don’t know why I’m the only person who seems to have realized this universal truth. I guess this kind of intro might appeal to blue-hairs, but man it was tacky and over-the-top. To me.
The rest of World War I was good, though. They had a short Belleau Wood reenactment video (yes, made-for-museum) that I liked a lot. They did with it what I always thought every war movie always should have done (but did the opposite instead) in that I think they saturated the colors on the film. Most (recent) war movies (e.g., Private Ryan, Band of Brothers) have de-saturated the color (= made the colors less vibrant) in order to give them an “authentic”, sentimental, old feel. OTOH, every first-hand account of front-line warfare that I’ve read has expressed that, in battle, combatants’ senses have been in overdrive. In that sense, it seems to me like an over-saturated color palette would best convey the image of warfare and I think that’s what they did here. (I can’t prove that they saturated the colors, but they definitely didn’t de-saturate.)
They might have shifted things a little to the blue, too.
And for the sake of playing copy editor (how fun!), they had a sign there that referred to German soldiers calling the marines “teufelhunden” (sic). That’d be capitalized in German and pretty sure it should’ve been on the sign, too.
Also watched the museum movie this time (I guess I didn’t last time — it was totally new to me). It’s a great, engaging, and moving ten-minute branding video that hits everything it should and does it without feeling too sentimental, although it did include senators John Glenn and John Warner saying (in effect) that without the Marine Corps, they wouldn’t have become senators, which to me seems like a case *against* the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps: we make politicians! Yikesnothankyou, etc. IMHO. Perhaps Sens. Warner and Glenn also appropriate(d) funds for museums, which doesn’t lessen the problem.
The Marines are still really good at telling stories and this is still very possibly the most cogent, most nailed-it museum I’ve been to. With the new galleries, it’d be kind of a long day to go all the way through in one shot. I’m not sure who my audience is for this post.
Ending so with,
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Bedroom Getting on Toward Done-ish
Befores and currents:
Other direction.
Done:
- Floor stripped, sanded, and re-finished.
- Closet hardware removed.
- Closet wall and ceiling replaced.
- Ceiling primed and painted.
- Walls primed and painted (“Barraud House Blue” and “Tyler Stone Medium”).
- Trim primed and painted.
- Baseboards cut to fit modern registers.
- New registers installed.
- New light fixture installed.
- New three-prong outlets installed (x3).
- New light switch.
- New closet organizer installed.
That’s really not much of a list. It really shouldn’t have taken so long.
Still to Come:
- Window coverings (x2).
- Ceiling vent replacement.
- Door painted and replaced.
Really looking forward to it.
bkd
National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center
The best thing about the Udvar-Hazy Center and the one thing that they do that no other flight museum has yet accomplished is that they give the airplanes enough room and enough light and provide visitors multiple viewing angles. There, I said it.
I can’t go to an aerospace museum without trying to rank it within the pantheon of aerospace museums and there were some times walking through Udvar-Hazy that I was thinking yeah, this is the best flight museum there is and that was based in large part on how easy they make it to see and photograph the planes. The USAF Museum in Dayton, for instance, is really dark so in order to take photos without a tripod, you have to do flash-fill and be happy with taking a photo of one small part of the plane. And in most flight museums, including Dayton, it seems like they looked at the arrangement of displays as a Tetris variant. Udvar-Hazy gives the planes their due space. Well, except for in the commercial airplanes area, but those planes are kind of big, so I suppose it makes sense.
And if you could combine the National Air and Space Museum component on the mall in DC with the Udvar-Hazy Center, you definitely would have the greatest flight museum in the world. But they’re too far away, so you can’t. It’s like saying if you combined Seattle and Portland, you’d have the second largest city on the west coast. True but moot. Like most of life.
Enterprise, the real fake space shuttle.
The Concorde sees you.
A B-29.
Wouldn’t dream of it.
A galaxy of satellites. Maybe just a cluster.
It couldn’t fly very fast because the propeller was so small.
Hey look, an airplane!
The F-22 is a better value. (This is an X-35.)
A Ju-52.
The well-stocked commercial wing.
Which leaves only bullet points:
- I think the Top Tier of aerospace museums is this one, the one on the mall, the USAF, and probably Pima/AMARG.
- It’s interesting how they don’t tell many stories in this museum — they mostly let the plane speak for itself. There are no big panels explaining the Wright Bros. or anything like that — I think most of that is on the mall.
- Without a doubt the least impressive gift shop of any top-flite aerospace museum.
- Walking through the museum, you start feeling like there are planes that should be there but aren’t, and then you remember that the other half of the collection is an hour away, which is sort of comforting in that you know that they know that this isn’t a complete something.
- They have a bunch of “last one like this that still exists” planes there, including some bizarre-awesome German WWII examples, like the late-war gigantic fighter plane with fore and aft props. Too bad those airplanes are evil.
- For some reason the only planes missing their wings were German WWII planes. There was no explanation.
- They put plexi-glass up around the Enola Gay so no one could throw stuff at it. Apparently that’s happened before.
- Hooray for flight.
So yeah. ICYDK, the Udvar-Hazy Center is located right by Dulles Airport in Virginia. The Smithsonian (or whoever) built it in order to house planes that wouldn’t fit in the regular museum on the mall. They have elevated walkways along parts of the perimeter that afford the top-down views. The museum is free, but parking is $15. The only food inside is McDonalds. There’s very little to buy in the gift shop.
bkd
PS, If you combined Seattle and Portland, it would still only be the third largest city on the west coast.