Kirtland, Oh!

I’d been to Kirtland before, but not actually inside the temple (the Reorganites close up shop pretty early IMHO). Fortunately, my aunt and cousin were heading through the Greater Cleveland area last weekend, which was a decent-enough pretense to head up there and check it out before closing time. It’s only about 2.5 hours from

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Cell Phone Photo Backlog Discharge

This is a bunch of photos I took on my cell phone (from December on) that I’ve never posted here. Seems like they usually have a different quality to them than my real-camera photos. I call that quality “graininess”. It’s a real word. Never saw the movie, but it was nice of them to get

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Removing Vinyl Tile: A True Story

Maybe it’s just factual, not so much true. Anyway: here’s a video of me removing a vinyl tile from the kitchen floor. I think the video captures 85 to 90 percent of the tension and raw emotion of the live event. The sound in the background is the fan in the living room. It’s 95

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Photos with American Flags in Them

Here are pictures I’ve taken in the last 12 months that include American flags. They’re not necessarily great photos, they just have American flags in them. There are 50. If you can name the location of all fifty of them, I’ll give you a quarter. No fair looking at the image file names. You can

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Kitchen Plan an IKEA Fan Made for Me

I think this is what I’m going with. Turns out my kitchen is small. I’m probably not going with the doors shown here, though. They cost extra. I’m probably going with these instead. Yep. Yeah, so I posted a question on ikeafans.com and a couple people responded with completed designs. Pretty cool. bkd

First of the Gang to Die

My greatest victory of the project so far: fixing the one bum circuit in the upstairs. I’ve had only occasional electrical in my living room and two big bedrooms. For some reason it took me a month to figure out that the problem might be caused by one bad connection at the start of the

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Cold Chisel, Warm Heart

For some reason I knocked all the tiles off before I demolished the walls. It was sort of fun chiseling them off, but just unnecessary. I suppose I did it that way because all the write-ups I found online talked about knocking tiles off so that they could be reused. In my case, no, I

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Meanwhile, Back in the Kitchen

The kitchen has been opened up. The new gaping hole isn’t finished off at all yet, but still: the kitchen has been opened up. Makes a much bigger difference than the photos can convey — a lot more light gets in there and the kitchen now feels like it’s sort of part of the same

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Red Roof On

Cost me $4,500 or something crazy, you’d think I’d be willing to take a real photograph of it. It’s probably raining outside though. Or it’s hot. Either way. The new roof is sort of a reddish brown. You can’t really see the color in the photo. Cell phone pic. It’s been weird having people come

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Some Painted Rooms, Whatever

Posting about Half Dome and Boundary Waters was a lot more engaging. Try it yourself, prove me wrong. (Or right.) Tape ball, before and after: Weight: 0. Weight: equivalent to three rolls of 1 1/2-inch masking tape, three spiders, and a gnat carcass. I kind of like sticking random bug bodies into tape balls. Or at

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