I always feel bad when I say I will do something and don’t actually get around to doing it (I’m probably worse then most). Take for instance the scaffolding that still is wrapped around the front of the house. Some quick background info: as you may remember, the money grubbing largely incompetent painters walked off the job about three weeks ago. A cold war ensued for six days when two of them came back for a few afternoons and were able to get a bit more done. Since last Sunday though, not a damn thing has been done and the scaffolding needs to get out of here before the snow flies more then it has already. In fact, the rental company is concerned about the status of the job though the lady said the house looks better then it ever has in her entire lifetime.
Anyway back to the story, I told her I would strike the scaffolding this past weekend and get the rest of it back to them on Monday (I’ve already dropped off about half of it a week ago). What I didn’t count on though was essentially a straight-line wind storm lasting from Friday all the way to god only knows how much longer. I’m not a huge fan of heights to begin with so talking scaffolding apart 6 rings up in 30-50 mph wind is not real high on my list of things I would enjoy doing on a sunny afternoon. Add to the fun of course and consider that it isn’t really sunny, rather some bastard mix of rain, sleet and branches is falling sideways attempting to depose me from my ill begotten perch. So even as of right now, there are still 11 rings of scaffolding waiting to be taken down but can’t be since I’ve maintained a zero body count this far, and I’d like to keep it that way. Maybe tomorrow it will be better.
On the subject of wind, last night and all of today has been especially windy. I’m not sure if many have you have ever been on the top floor of a very tall house on a very windy day, but it sways. Well, sways is a bit of a misnomer since it implies some graceful deviation moving this way a bit, then back the other way. This is more like shaking. I’d estimate the maximum horizontal translation of the floor I’m sitting on to be about and inch. That coupled with the loose piece of sheet metal on the roof banging around (that the painters were supposed to fix) means you can pretty much guess what I’ve been dreaming about. Yep. Earthquakes. I’m pretty sure in my unconscious travels last night I leveled pretty much any place worth visiting. Sorry. Wind shouldn’t be as strong tonight so maybe the solar system will survive.
I’ve been trapped at home the last two days with some life sucking illness which has left me under a pile of blankets with a blast radius of puzzles, drugs and food around my Lazy-Boy. Rather then just wasting away in front of CNN getting filled in on the latest “scandals†I figured it was high time to improve this site since it has fallen into some serious disrepair. One of the principal reasons for my lack of postings recently has been to overwhelming amount of spam I was getting on the posts. Those rat bastards were polluting everything I was doing which makes it very hard to get motivated to create anything. I think I deleted about 67,000 comments that were spam this afternoon. The solution to this problem is takes one of two forms: first, just hang up, quit, let them win – which is sort of what I was doing in slow motion. The second option was to upgrade to some more modern software and clean house. So that’s what I did. I pitched Movable Type, which don’t get me wrong has served me well since 2003, but is vastly inferior to Wordpress in many areas.
Obviously, things look different and many things are currently missing or broken. I’ll slowly chip away at and get things back to normal.  As a side effect of cleaning out much of the spam, some of the comments that were posted may have accidentally been deleted. Sorry about that.
Oh, there are some changes with the way comments go . . . if you comment regularly, it is best to just create an account that way your comments don’t need to go through moderation (spam prevention measure).
Helder and Soland should be here at the house any minute now - I love visitors from Back Home Long Ago. Under some mild protest from the boss, I’m punking out on work from work on Thursday and Friday to hang out and give the guys a tour of the Keeweenaw plus a bonus rally race (LSPR) this weekend. Awsome. Been looking forward to this for a while.
Just a quick update here – Lindsey and I tore out to the breakers on Saturday in the hope we’d see some huge waves coming over the break wall. That we certainly saw. What I didn’t expect to see though, was someone out there surfing. Solo surfing in Lake Superior in mid October? Suddenly I feel like all my hobbies are really boring and safe.
Just wrapped up another good evening of work on the house with some substantially visible results. Today’s efforts were focused on first floor electrical systems, more specifically the lights. Until tonight, the pool room, front room and entry way have been without switched lights since I bought the place. Finally that situation was fixed. It is pretty amazing to see the entry lit with a nice soft light. Even despite all the dust and debris, it looks and feels really inviting. I can’t wait until that finally gets wrapped up.
Day two of the schedule went pretty well. It is an interesting thing to sort of dictate your own life – if that makes any sense. I managed to keep pretty well on to my times today though I ended up getting home about an hour later then I wanted. Not a big deal since I’m certainly not trying to live and die by this rather it is more of a set of guidelines.
In any case it was a productive day. At work today (notice how I call it work now not school . . . strange), I filled out a bunch of paperwork so I can finally graduate one last time. Not gonna lie, it was really strange working on some of these documents since they are the last few steps in the process. The strangest part though was selecting my PhD thesis committee. That whole process is outlined quite well on wikipedia. I attempted, and in my mind, very much succeeded in drafting some of MTU’s heaviest hitters to evaluate my worth as a PhD candidate. So here’s the roll call:
So that should be an interesting group to work with and I’m absolutely certain that I will learn a lot from them.
When I got out of the gym today after a pathetic workout (yesterday’s kicked ass though) it was very hard to get the motivation to work on the house. However, I stuck it out since there is snow and cold, nasty on the docket for tomorrow so I needed to install the thermostat so the heat could be turned on. Yeah, what a pain in the ass. In order to install the stat, a bunch of crappy, time consuming wiring had to completed and a hunk of drywall with not a single square corner had to be cut and pried in to place. The whole process took about 3 hours and that was only possible with the help of Marc who jumped in and pulled wire for me. With any luck, during tomorrow’s blizzard, I should be able to wrap up all the drywall in the dining room as well as heat up all the electrical outlets in there.
Ahhh yes, the site. I know I should have written more lately, but it has been hard to sit down and actually write something. I’ve really been trying to get into some routine that I follow most of the time. What I’m shooting for is a little bit more regular schedule that doesn’t include quite some much time at work (hah sorry Brad). In the last crazy marathon that ended about a week ago, I worked 6-7 days a week for about 50 days. As always, there was a lot of great research that was done, and it certainly solidified my May graduation.
Back to the routine though . . . so this is sort of how I’d like to have things work out:
8:30am – drag up out of bed.
9:30am – into work
4:00pm – out of work and to the gym
5:00pm – out of the gym and back to the house
6:00pm – done with dinner and tinkering on something to do with the house
10:00pm – relax on my couch and sip a few Jack and Coke’s while stretching
11:00pm – update the website and watch the daily show (yay!)
12:00am – sleep
Hahahah, in the perfect world I’m sure I’ll actually execute that sequence at most once. For instance, today I didn’t leave the lab until about 5:30 and didn’t get out of the gym until 7. Once home, I got some food, fixed a couple of things in the house (though I spent most of the time looking for tools) and cleaned my hole of a room. We’ll see how the rest goes.
On the painting front . . . what a mess. The painters walked off the job on Friday sighting my lack of desire to pay them any more. Get this: I’ve already paid them $25,500 in labor (not even including supplies) so I believe I am 100% in my right to not pay them any more. The funny thing is, there is so little left (only above the front entry way) that is stupid for them to not finish and sacrifice anything positive I have to say about the job. Sure it has been a large job, but that is not why it has taken so long. Instead, it is his inability to hire decent employees, which is hardly my problem. For instance, every week I’d see new people out there – I’m not sure if anyone who started the job, was actually still working when they opted to bail. I know I went through at least three carpenters. In any case, I talked with him and have yet to hear back. Essentially I put a well structured and very logical guilt trip on him and left the door open for him to come back and finish the job he’s already been over paid for. If he refuses then I’m going after him in small claims court to recover some money.
I was waiting for some Matlab code to finish blowing up, so I figured I’d check out Wikipedia and do my usual wikipedia crawl. Today I just typed in my birthday to see what happened on the date I was born. Notable events include Winston Churchill introducing the term “Iron Curtain” and of course the Boston Massacre.
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"Well, I think we have enough rope, beer and chainsaws to get the job done"
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