homeimprovement
You are viewing stuff tagged with homeimprovement.
You are viewing stuff tagged with homeimprovement.
They’re re-roofing the house today. Ess was transfixed by the trucks coming and going and cranes lifting. She stood at the window and watched, the stillest I’ve seen her be while awake and healthy. “Beep beep” went the truck, “bach-up, bach-up” went Ess, shuffling backwards away from the window.
I’m drinking wine and watching a 29 minute YouTube video about how to install a garage door opener. AND AM HAVING THE TIME OF MY LIFE. Adulthood is different and better than I expected. Harder. But better.
Ceramic tile is probably not the first project for a homeowner do-it-yourselfer to attempt. I’ve spent the last two weeks investigating the feasibility of such a project. I had to figure out:
There is so much I have experienced but haven’t written down since I last posted here. Let’s get to it.
Ess had four shots (one in each limb) and we confirmed at her regularly scheduled doctor visit that she is a healthy young lady.
She took her first step on September 12, but still prefers crawling. She loves the letter “B” and when we change her she finds the two big “B”s on the wall of her room (they spell BABY) and says “buh.” She finds our belly buttons. She honks my nose and I say “hoooonk” like a fog horn. Then she honks her own. She knows “moon” and says “mooOOon” with the ‘n’ on the end dropped to near silence. She’s getting so much better at sitting in her high chair at meals and eating with us. She saw the beginning of the very rare super moon total solar eclipse! The next one will be when she is 19 years old. 19! I can’t even imagine. Ess still loves planes: she never misses the chance to search for and point at one when she hears it in the sky. As such, when she and Mykala came to visit me over lunch at Eagan today, she marveled at the veritable stream of airplanes lifting off from MSP into the air over our blanket in the park. She dances. She hugs the cat and rests her head on him, delighted to catch him before he trots off.
Essie learned to clap today. We clap clap at her and she clap claps in return. We painted the front door “brick red” and completed the installation of a new flat black lockset (this set, unlike the old brass one it replaces, actually works to do things like pull the latch clear of the faceplate so we can, you know, open the door), at which point we broke into applause. Essie joined us!
Today marks two months since moving day to our new place here in Woodbury; looking back, we have been working non-stop. We painted some 15 foot ceilings and installed a room and a half of engineered hardwood floor before move-in, but it turns out the home improvement sprint evolved into a marathon. You can imagine what it’s like to run the first 800 meters of a race flat-out before realizing that you’ve signed up for 26.2 miles.
Last night, Mykala and I watched the Academy Awards in glorious high definition. During her eloquent acceptance speech, I did notice that Lupita Nyong’o’s elocution is so refined that if she were a violinist, my own speech would be that of a rubber band stretched around a kleenex box
I’m filing my own bug report for tumbledry here. Has anyone noticed that when you mouseover Dan’s comments, there’s a thing that says “A partial iron” instead of loading an image? Well, that’s not the intended behavior of the comment code - it’s a rounding error that should never have made it past bug testing. Nevertheless, here we are, months after I recoded the ranking system… and this ugly bug pops up. I’m working on a fix, and more pictures. So that’s good.
Yesterday, I uninstalled my family’s old microwave from the wall on which it hung for over a decade. The darn thing weighed 90+ pounds. The thing is, though, I had help (and I needed help; I had no idea how to get the contraption off the wall). My grandpa Bup was there: he’s 81. The thing is, Bup is still downright sprightly - he brought over a bucket of tools appropriate for the job, and immediately set to work.