Frame job

I'm not sure how interesting people will find this post, but I won't mind if you just skip it. There are no people in these pictures, just lots of basement and lots of wood. I will give a good chunk of details, mostly for my own record keeping so I can remember what it looked like before I put the drywall up. I'll probably consult this post whenever I need to find a stud.

Anyway, ever since we bought this house I wanted to finish the basement. Now, I have zero construction experience, just small, odd jobs here and there and nothing using major power tools that can maim/kill you if mishandled. When I was in college, my mom had me redo a couple of the bathrooms in the house and I learned quite a lot by doing that. I look back at my work, and boy did it suck. I've also learned that most anybody can do this if they take their time and have the right tools.

I'm also not sure how to display this in any way that makes sense, but I'll do my best.

The Stairs


Looking down, pre-construction. You will notice the vapor barrier I've installed along the wall, and the floor plates which I put into the cement using a Ramset, which is a powder charged nailgun, using .22 bullets. It was pretty fun, and loud.
Anyway, we decided to take out the left wall along the stairs to open it up a little more. That was pretty fun, as I took the circular saw and just cut along the joist. So much dust kicked up from the drywall that it caused all of the smoke detectors to go off.

Here's a view of the wall that we took out. Don't use the couch as a point of reference, as I moved it a few times.


And, voila! The wall is gone. I think it really opened up the downstairs.
You can also notice all of the framing I put up next to the stairs. With the huge discharge pipe in the middle, it made it a tremendous pain. That took me a few days.
Here's a closeup of the stairs.

Here's the door frame leading to what will be the laundry/storage room.

Here is what will be the hallway leading from the stairs to the family room. You'll notice this is before I took out the wall.
This is actually looking from the bottom of the stairs down the hall, through the door and into the family room. The door in the picture leads to the outside, a steel exterior door. Burly Steve helped me put that in a few months ago.


Here's the family room, looking left from the outside door. This is the best pic I got pre-construction.
Starting framing

Finishing my first wall, framing around the window.

Second wall
I had to build a soffit (the box in the corner) to hide the various pipes. We'll have to put in a drop ceiling because of all the pipes/ducts.Looking through the bathroom door into the room.

The south wallWhere the couch sits is where the bathroom will be, but that won't be in this project.



I decided to frame underneath the stairs so that the little ones can play under there without boppin their heads on the steps.


My original goal was to have the basement framed out by the end of Spring 2010. However, I got the bug and enjoyed it so much that I just went down there every chance I could.

Next step: Wiring the basement!

Chompin' like Pac-Man

Where I sit at work is dubbed "the fishbowl" as it is this smallish room with windows all around it. There are about 9 desks and 3 offices in the room. Last month, 3 Indians, fresh off the boat, moved into the fishbowl for the next couple of months. They're all nice, great guys, who speak just enough English to get by and have perfected the art of quiet talking, so I have to ask them to repeat everything they say about 10 times:

"What hotel are you staying at?"

"The Langham."

"What?"

"The Langham"

"Which one?"

"The Langham"

"Where is that?"

"Just down the street."

"Where again?"

"That way, one block."

"What is it next to?"

"PO Square."

"Which square?"

"PO!!!"

"Oh, the LANGHAM! Why didn't you just say so?"

Anyway, they're dashed nice people and all, but every morning the dude to my right eats what has to be the crunchiest apple of all time, possibly made of iron. I can't overestimate the amount of chomping that goes on, for what seems to be 45 solid minutes. This is what it sounds like:

CRRRUUUUUNNNNCHHHH!!!!!

sluuuurrppp

(smack)

Chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp

(smack)

Chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp

(smack. lick. slurp.)

CRRRUUUUNNNCHHHH!!!

And so on. It's usually not an incredible deal because I can put my headphones on, but still.

Last week, at one of Mel's appointments, we were in the waiting room. Now, Mel's hospital (and work) is smack dab in the middle of Chinatown, so there is no lack of Chinese and other miscellaneous riff-raff on some government subsidized health care plan. This Chinese couple sat across from us, and the dude had a piece of gum that he refused to chew with his mouth closed. We sat there and tried to read some "Family Fun"-type magazine together, but neither of us could focus on the book with Mr. Chomper McChompathon chomping across the way from us. Then Mel proceeded to tell me of various accounts of people in Chinatown hawking loogies and doing farmer blows just out on the sidewalk. I'm sorry for grossing you all out, it's awful.

It reminds me of the time I was in Nepal, where I couldn't walk 5 seconds without either stepping on a loog or hearing one being hawked. Here is an excerpt from my travelogue:

"The national pastime in Nepal seems to be hawking logeys. It's quite thoroughly disgusting. Walking down the street, you'll hear Nepalis of all ages and genders clearing their throats, hawking up something juicy, and spitting in a conspicuous spot, to be later seen or stepped upon by me, both experiences causing me no great joy."

And then, from the same travelogue, when I was in Tibet, sharing a bus with about 15 other tourists:

"Many people call Americans and Westerners barbarians, but I strongly object to that. For example, take the infamous nose wad story. The Mongol opposite me asked me for a few squares of my toilet paper while I was clearing the nostrils. I had squares to spare. So I ripped her off a chunk. She rolled it up like a cigarette and shoved in both nostrils like the nose-ring of a yak. Fitting, I suppose."

"I didn't find that particularly barbaric. A little odd, perhaps, but not uncouth. But an hour later Ms. Kahn decided she'd had enough of the nose-ring, plucked it out, and tossed it to the floor in disgust as if she had barely noticed it was there and flung it off as if it would explode in seconds. The thing landed right in front of me, no more than 2 inches from my left foot. Well, there was no way I was going to stare at that thing until Lhasa, so I kicked it under the next seat like it was a hot rock. I shuddered and shot the Mongol the stinkeye. In vain, however, as she was too busy applying her next nose ring. This time using her own toilet paper."

I try not to be "foreignist", but it's very hard to deal with some of these obnoxious and disgusting habits that may not be frowned upon in their country. Of course, Americans have their obnoxious habits, but it seems a lot more prevalent among foreigners. So, no, I'm not apologizing for this post.

Flood

The Sunday before Memorial Day we had a torrential downpour for about 3 hours. I estimated it dumped about 2 to 3 inches on us. I went out and took some pictures after it moved on.











This is the neighbor's backyard, they have a really low section that turns into a lake every time we get a heavy rain.

Picket Fence

You may recall that we put up an arbor at the beginning of the brick pathway:
We decided to put up a picket fence on both sides. I installed the posts 8 feet apart, digging a 24 inch hole and adding cement. This was no picnic, as the ground turns into rock after about 6 inches. You will also see the trench that I dug around the garden to install the rabbit fence underground.
More trench.
Trench on the south side.
The back side:
And the north side.
Melanie and I put up the picket fence one morning, it took around 3 hours.


Over the "river" leading to Lake Hansen.

While Mel planted the garden, I put up the rabbit fence and filled in the trenches.




Then we painted the fence to match the arbor.
The finished product...

Cleveland Rocks, apparently

Mel and I have both been very apathetic about our blog lately. Maybe it's because our life is so exciting. Maybe it's because we're lazy. Maybe it's because our Mac died.

(Warning: Entering Blasting Zone. For those of you who have heard my "Mac tirade", you can skip down to where it says "End of tirade")

I have had mucho experience with 2 Macs now, and I am less than impressed. My first Mac I bought in 2003, the iMac. I had heard from a trusted buddy that Macs were faster, better, and in all ways superior to PCs. Well, they'd better be, judging from the price tag. I fell for it, and I bought one. I remember opening up Safari for the first time. It wasn't faster than IE at all. Then some of my programs, like iMovie, GarageBand, and ProTools, froze constantly. I frequently lost hours of work because of this. Is it my fault for not saving often enough? Maybe, but you can't blame me when saving takes like 3 minutes, which is CENTURIES in computer time.

Mel bought a MacBook a couple of years ago. We've been using it mostly for photo storage, Internet browsing, and so forth. It plugged along pretty well, and Mel was always diligent about downloading the most recent updates that Mac throws out pretty much on the hour. However, iPhoto has never really worked well. It always froze up the computer and required a hard reset. We've been using Kodak PhotoShare instead, and that's been a pretty good application for photos.

A few months ago, it started crashing when we were using Firefox. Okay, let's use Safari. Same result. You couldn't use the computer for more than 30 minutes before it would crash. We backed up all our pictures in case it died. Finally, in July, it died. It would try to boot up but it would fail every time and I couldn't even get to the desktop. I was about to take it to the Apple Store to see if the "geniuses" could help me, but I decided to look up the problem. The solution was to reinstall the OS. So I did that, and it worked. It's up and running again. We'll see how long that lasts.

Now this whole spiel wasn't to say that PCs are BETTER than Macs. We all know that PCs have their share of problems. In fact, computers, Mac or PC, will ALWAYS have problems and bugs because there are simply too many things that can go wrong with these complex operating systems. That's why those Mac commercials bug me so bad. "Oh, we've never EVER had a problem!" they pretty much say.

What I'm saying is that PCs are a better buy. You get more for your money. Both PCs and Macs will diminish in performance (in my experience, the Macs diminished faster, but maybe I'm just not cool enough) as time goes by, so you might as well spend less money. Spend some good money on a ridiculously capacious external hard drive so you can back up your precious files and move them over to your new computer you'll have to buy every few years.

That said, I'm still considering a Mac for my next purchase. Why? Because I have a ton of files in a Mac-only format and I will always have a PC for work. I would rather spend a few hundred dollars than hours upon hours converting those files into universally accepted files. Of course, if I wouldn't have ever bought the Mac, I wouldn't have this problem. But also, did PCs have the capability and software to run ProTools and such back in 2003? I'm not too sure, but I don't think so. PCs have come a long way in the last few years to be able to compete with Macs. Competition is a good thing, because without the PC/Mac battle, computers wouldn't improve at such a high rate.

End of Tirade

Okay, so that's why I haven't blogged in a while. You'll start to see many more picture-laden posts in the near future, and maybe some Terrence episodes if my ego gets stroked enough. This first one is my trip to Cleveland with Baldwin.

Baldwin is a huge Cincinatti Reds fan, in every meaning of the phrase. I have never seen anybody so faithful to a crappy team, it's quite impressive, and I hope that I am still a loyal Cards fan when they are 0-162. He was desperate to get away for a few days to watch his beloved Reds play. So he called me and asked me if I wanted to go. Since our last baseball trek was to Arizona to watch the D-Backs play the Reds, I suggested that I didn't really want to go to a Reds series unless the Cardinals, and more specifically Albert Pujols, were involved. As many of you know, I have a tremendous man-crush on Albert.

Anyway, none of the Reds-Cards series were at convenient times, so Baldwin gave in and we decided to go to a Indians-Cards series in Cleveland. This was also influenced by my quest to see all 30 of the MLB franchises at their home field. Below I have ranked the stadiums based on my personal preferences (ticket prices, parking, comfort, fan demeanor, ease of sneaking down, stadium aesthetics). Obviously, I am biased, and I think that old stadiums are overrated. They are like old houses: Cool to look at, uncomfortable to live in, and way too small.

1. St. Louis (4 games, 2 Albert homers)
2. Florida (3 games, 1 Albert homer)
3. Toronto (1 game, 1 Albert homer)
4. LA (1 game)
5. Cleveland (2 games, 3 Albert homers)
6. Texas (1 game)
7. Warshington (1 game)
8. Milwaukee (1 game)
9. San Diego (4 games, 1 Albert homer)
10. Arizona (3 games)
11. Anaheim (1 game)
12. Atlanta (1 game)
13. San Francisco (1 game)
14. Mets (1 game)
15. Philly (1 game, 2 Albert homers)
16. Red Sox (3 games)
17. Yankees (1 game vs the Red Sox no less. And the Yankees lost!! Good times.)
18. Cubs (5 games, no Albert homers! He was 1-13 in a 4-game series)

Notable chokes:
1. Baltimore: All the Hansen boys went all the way to Camden but it was sold out. (Hey Dad, haven't you ever heard of scalped tickets?)
2. Oakland: A bunch of cousins went to a game during the family reunion in the Sierras, but I was too interested in swimming
3. Houston: I was there for one night a month ago, but I had woken up at 4:30 AM two mornings in a row and wouldn't have been able to stay awake, but I certainly had the chance.

Anyway, we went to Cleveland. Here are some pics:


We went golfing not once, not thrice, but twice. Considering I hadn't gone in over 2 years, I did pretty well. Baldwin's a lot better than me, though, and walloped me good.

Baldwin putting. We shared a foursome with 2 oldies who schooled us both. Well, the old dude did, not so much his wife who couldn't hit it more than 50 yards. Don't worry, I talked plenty of smack in her direction.

Maybe it's because I grew up near Geneva Steel, maybe it's because I served in the "Triangle of Death" industrial region of Poland for over a year, maybe it's because I live in an old shoe-factory town, but I love old industrial centers and other pictures like this.

It was Shin-soo Choo bobblehead day on Saturday, that's what I'm holding there. Also, Lebron James plays basketball in Cleveland, I think.

No, my hairline's not receding, why do you ask?

We were treated to a fireworks show after the first game. All for no extra charge!
This is Baldwin, who may look retarded in this picture because he IS retarded. I met him at the Special Olympics and he's been my project ever since.

In summary, White Cheddar Cheez-its are the BEST CRACKERS OF ALL TIME.

Borrow vs. Buy

When we first moved into our house, we didn't have very much, especially in the way of tools. As anybody moving into their first house knows, the list of schtuff you have to buy is longer than a General Conference talk. You've moved into this new place with more space than you've ever had and you need to buy furniture, appliances, tools, etc. Naturally, you get pretty sick of going to Lowe's and Target, getting your credit card out and wondering if it will ever stop. Of course, you start to borrow things from your neighbors so you don't have to keep spending.

This worked out nicely for a while, but then once my neighbor (Burly Steve) started teasing me about borrowing his lawn mower. For those of you who borrow frequently, there's nothing worse than thinking that it's completely okay with the lender, and then you find out it's been bugging them this whole time. That's just something you don't even joke about. So I went out and bought a lawn mower the next week.

Not only that, but it affected my attitude towards borrowing anything from Burly. Originally, I was planning on borrowing his miter saw and framing nailer, both very expensive tools, but instead I'm buying them both (I already bought the saw, I'll buy the nailer in the next couple of weeks).

But you can't, and shouldn't, buy EVERYTHING you'll ever need, especially those tools that you only need once or twice. One of those tools was a Ramset, a powder charged nailgun, which is used mostly to nail 2x4s to concrete. I needed it to lay out the walls of my basement, so I borrowed Burly's old Ramset. Unfortunately, after the first nail, the thing busted. Now I have to buy Burly a new Ramset! I know it's not just me because the new one I bought (which I'm using to finish the job before I give it to Burly) is working splendidly and I'm not doing anything different.

This isn't the first time this has happened. I also borrowed my other neighbor's sledgehammer, which had been sitting unused in his shed for about 200 years, and the head snapped off after like the 3rd swing, so I had to buy him a new one. So now I have to shift my borrowing algorithm:

1. If you're going to use the tool often or for extended periods of time, you should buy.
2. If the tool you're borrowing from your neighbor is old, you should probably buy, because it might break and then you have to pay for a new tool AND you don't even get to keep it.
3. So you should only borrow little tools (which usually are cheap and easy to buy) that have little chance of breaking and you only use once every 4 years, like a sharpener for garden tools, that costs $8.96 at Lowe's.

I'm preparing myself mentally to buy a ridiculous amount of tools.

Don't call it a comeback

I know I haven't blogged in a while. It's not like I have nothing to say or report, there are tons of events that I have pictures of, but it's Bloggers fault for making it such a pain. I'm waiting for the right motivation to post about those things, as it is not always enjoyable to write those posts. Instead, I'm going to post about sports, which seems less like work and more like fun.

Today, I was watching the top 10 comebacks of all time on the NFL network. The first one they show, Number 10, was Joe Montana versus the Eagles in 1989. I was prepared to see some awesome game where they were down 20 with 5 minutes left in a crucial season-changing game. After all, it's number 10 of the top 10 comebacks of ALL TIME.

They first showed Montana getting sacked, again and again, and it looked like the Eagles were probably up 93-0 at half time. But they refused to show or even tell me the score! They said, "Seifert should've taken Joe out of the game, but Joe said, 'We're going to win this game' at halftime." Then they proceeded to show Joe throwing touchdown after touchdown to win the game 96-93. Well, that's what it seemed like. They didn't even mention the score, they just went to commercial. So I googled the game and this is what I found:

1. It was the 3rd game of the season. The third. Games in September are next to meaningless in the context of the greatest comebacks of ALL TIME. If you're going to show some borderline meaningless game, it had better be an AWESOME comeback. You don't see Cornell versus Mediocre St highlights on SportsCenter unless Mediocre St scored 28 points in 30 seconds to win the game. Anything less than 28 points in 30 seconds and the general population can't be bothered.

2. The score at halftime was 12-10, Eagles. TWELVE to FREAKING TEN! "Hey, Joe, how do you think your team can overcome this massive 2 point deficit?" "I'm not sure, Jimbob, it seems pretty insurmountable. I'm already thinking about my steak dinner tonight." What gumption did this Joe Montana have! When the odds were against him, when the world was crashing down on him, when the nay-sayers were nay-saying, Joe looked into Coach Seifert's eyes and said, "We're going to win this game, George." Incredible.

3. The Eagles scored a TD to go up by 11 with 8 minutes left in the game. 8 short minutes! Down by 11! Head for the exits, this game's over! This wasn't a comeback, this was a hard-fought game where they got more than 1 possession behind. There needs to be a comeback rule, where you can't say it's a comeback unless you're more than 2 possessions behind with less than 5 minutes left. Or maybe a possession every 3 minutes. So if you're down by 2 possessions with 4 minutes left, it's not a comeback. If you're down by 1 possession with 2 minutes left, it's not a comeback. But if you're down by 3 possessions with 5 minutes left, it's a comeback. And anything greater than 20 points is a comeback. Or, if you're Pete, you give up. (Zing!)

4. The 49ers, down 28-17, scored 3 TD's in the final 8 minutes to win the game 38-28. How anticlimatic. Leave it to the NFL network to take a run of the mill game with lots of 4th quarter scoring to make it into something great.

I watched the rest of the top 10. There were a couple of suspect games, but none as bad as this one. Number 1 was the classic Bills comeback against the Oilers, deservedly so.

So how did this make the top 10? The guy that picked these top 10 was either:
a. drunk
b. in love with Joe Montana
c. a die-hard 49ers fan
d. unwilling to do much research
e. all of the above.

Maybe I'm just biased because they didn't show my personal favorite comeback: Peyton bringing the Colts back from 21-3 against the Pats in the AFC Championship. This was great on a number of levels, but my favorite was going to work the next day with all these Pats fans that know I love the Colts. Nobody mentioned the game. I loved it.