Paint project begun

After escaping from the Big Orange Home Improvement store a couple days ago with my ostensibly unbagged TSP substitute concentrate and my Kilz2 primer, I actually mixed up some of the TSP the same day and scrubbed down not only the front door, which I've been fixing to repaint for a year now because it's ugly, but also the patio door that I had installed three years ago and never got around to painting at all (it was preprimed in white, I just never topcoated it).

And then yesterday, I dug out my painting clothes (the same ones I wore to paint the bathroom and part of the kitchen before I moved into the house six years ago). Suitably attired, I (1) put the first finish coat on the patio door and (2) primed the front door. That was all I was able to get done yesterday, but the process is finally started and with luck (aka decent weather) I should be able to finish both of them off next weekend.

One reason I didn't get more done was the amount of time I had to spend dismantling the locksets and deadbolts on both doors so I wouldn't get paint on them, and then reassembling them again when the paint/primer had dried enough, which was easier said than done until I dug out the instructions (and even then, they were a bit vague in places). But I did eventually get both doors buttoned back up, which is good because I don't think my project lead would buy it if I called in to say I had to stay home because I couldn't lock my front door until I figured out how to put the lock back together.

One good thing about taking the patio door lockset off is that the door installer originally assembled it with the levers upside down (they should have been swapped between the inside and the outside), so this was the perfect opportunity to reinstall them correctly. So what if they've been wrong for three years?

The bad thing about only getting one coat on each door is that next weekend I'll have to take the locksets and deadbolts off again. But at least uninstalling and reinstalling them should go quicker next time around. If nothing else, I won't have to hunt up the instructions this time.

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Poison ivy comes a-creepin' around

Last summer, I developed an inexplicable, very localized, highly uncomfortable, and long-lasting itchy rash on my left arm, right leg, and other random locations. When I eventually visited my doctor, I was pretty surprised to hear that it was poison ivy, because I drew a blank on how I could have gotten it. (Those of you who know me are probably aware that I don't spend much time outdoors in close contact with nature of the sort that might contain poison ivy.) Nevertheless, I started poking around the yard, and lo, next to my garage door was this small vine with leaves of three, and a bit of Googling produced a plethora of poisonous pictures verifying that this is, indeed, a fine specimen of Toxicodendron radicans (aka Rhus toxicodendron).

Well, that still didn't explain how I got my rash, because I certainly had not been messing with this vine, so I pressed on to the back yard, where I found the smoking gun, as it were – a larger stand of the weed under one end of my hammock stand – and suddenly it all became clear.


A few weeks before, I had hung up my hammock, on the stand which had been sitting out since the previous year. Now, hanging this hammock is really a two-person job, because it has to be strung tight as a drum to start with – it's cotton rope and it stretches a lot when you put weight in it, and then you have to take the slack up in the chains or else your butt drags on the ground. However, not having a second person handy at the time, I laid the hammock out on the ground across the base of the stand, hooked the chain onto the hook at one end (the end where the poison ivy is, as it turns out), then picked up the other end and hauled it as tight as I could before hooking it on that end of the stand.

So undoubtedly, I laid that end of the hammock right in the poison ivy, contaminating parts of the rope, which handily transferred a dose of urushiol to bare arms and legs when I lay down in the hammock. This explained the nature of the welts, which looked kinda like a rope burn. Duh.

Well, I got me some high-octane brush killer and tried it out on the vines next to the garage, and it worked, but somehow I never got around to spraying the hammock patch (actually, I think I can legitimately blame this particular piece of procrastination on the fact that I suddenly found a job and no longer had all the time in the world to do yard work). As a result, I never did get my hammock up this year, and the poison ivy has flourished mightily:


Would that my landscaping plants would do that well! Anyway, two weekends ago I was weed-whacking the hayfield back there and must have inadvertently clipped a few vines that have cropped up here and there away from the main mass, because I developed a few random blisters on my hands and arms that I'm pretty sure are poison ivy. So this past weekend I finally dug the brush killer out of the garage and went out and sprayed all I could find. The label says it's rain-proof after four hours, which is a good thing since it rained almost the whole next day. With any luck, the stuff should be dying by next weekend.

Of course, that's not the end of it, because dead poison ivy vines still contain plenty of active urushiol. Once the stuff has croaked, I'm still gonna have to pull up all the dead plants, seal'em in double trash bags for disposal, and then put my clothes through the laundry (twice, just to be on the safe side). Or maybe I should see if Home Depot carries Tyvek coveralls? Gaahh! I thought I was done with the hazmat business when I left chemistry behind.

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Can't win for losin'

So, a while back I took up playing the Win For Life lottery. No big investment here; a single $1 ticket, twice a week. Two bucks a week is pretty cheap entertainment – heck, I spend three times that on Coke every week. And my expectations are not high; while the overall chance of winning any prize in a drawing is 1 in 21, by far the bulk of that chance (roughly 1 in 23) involves matching three numbers out of seven drawn, for the somewhat underwhelming payoff of $2. (By contrast, the chance of actually hitting the jackpot, $1000 a week for life, is 1 in something over 5 million.)

Still, two bucks is two bucks, and a $2 winner now and then would help to further cut the cost of my cheap entertainment. So it was somewhat frustrating to realize that 26 weeks of a $2 a week subscription ticket – that's 52 drawings – were drawing to a close without returning a single $2 winner; statistically speaking, 52 drawings might be expected to produce at least a couple of those 3-matches-out-of-7 deals. But no; I had seen a bare handful of 2-out-of-7 matches, a few more 1-out-of-7s, nothing more.

So last Sunday I was gratified to note, when I checked Saturday night's numbers, that I had finally gotten 3 out of 7 and would get a measly two bucks back.

There was just one catch: with impeccable timing, my subscription ticket had expired with last Wednesday's drawing. I had gotten a renewal notice from the Virginia Lottery three weeks before, but with my usual procrastination had neglected to renew it.

My only consolation is that it was only $2 I missed out on. Just imagine how I would feel right now if it had been The Big One...

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Landscaping procrastination

As usual, I began the landscaping season with good intentions, not all of which have come to fruition. The area behind the mailbox (you know, the one that attracts ants) had a low-growing juniper (or some such evergreen, I forget) that I planted last year, but it had mostly died back, and then the nice retired neighbor, who mows my lawn because "it's really no trouble" when he does his, apparently missed seeing the miniscule remaining green portion (not surprising, considering how dead the whole thing looked) and mowed over it, effectively eliminating any possibility of it recovering.

So I bought a bunch of annuals for the little plot – bright red salvia, plus white and deep blue/purple petunias (because I missed the pansy season) – and actually got them in the ground within a couple of weeks, which is pretty good for me; my annuals have been known to sit there in their flimsy plastic Home Depot containers right through the summer or until they die, which is their likely fate when I fail to keep them sufficiently watered in the typical scorching Hampton Roads July weather. And then I arranged a border of small retaining wall blocks around them and dumped a few inches of mulch into the bed.

With the block border ensuring (well, at least I hope so) that neighbors wielding errant lawn mowers won't just inadvertently mow down the greenery, I picked up a new juniper that's a little more upright/mounded than the previous incumbent, and stashed it (in the pot) temporarily behind the Cryptomeria I planted by the corner of the garage a couple of years back (which is doing pretty nicely, by the way). You can see the juniper in the photo at left, the little lighter green one in the pot with the tag still attached, peeking out from behind the cryptomeria.

That was, oh, a couple of months ago. And then it suddenly got too hot for me to have any ambition to work in the yard. The juniper's still sitting in the pot behind the cryptomeria. Despite watering, the petunias died off, first the blue/purple ones, then the white ones. (As you can see from the photos, I didn't get a shot of them before they croaked.) The salvia's hanging on, but it's now surrounded by a wild assortment of weeds that are doing very well, thank you very much (why couldn't the petunias have done so well?).

Got to get out there and take out that unidentified "volunteer" shrub before it shades out the salvia. Yes, it really is about twice the size of the salvia clump. Since my post two days ago, the first I tagged "procrastination", I'm discovering that I should have had that tag long ago. In fact, one of these days, I may even get around to going back and tagging some old posts as "procrastination" posts.

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Once more, with feeling

OK, having been extremely remiss for the past, er, nine months or so, I'm going to once again make a stab at reviving this blog. You'd think I could manage at least a few lines a day, wouldn't you? It's not like I don't have anything to write about; I frequently think of things I could blog about, but procrastination wins out.

For those of you who only ever hear any news about me from my blog (assuming there's anyone out there who hasn't long since given up checking it, which is a pretty wild assumption on my part, I know), here's a smattering of the events (if you can call them that) in my life since that last long-ago post, in no particular order:

• Managed to keep working at that job I finally landed last October – hey, I made it past that hell week in January when I keep getting laid off!
• Completed my ASP.NET class in the fall; went on to take Web Server Administration in the spring; and just registered for Systems Design & Analysis for the fall.
  
• Put some extra shelves (which have been cluttering up the garage for, oh, nearly six years now) in some of my kitchen cabinets.
• Replaced the GFCI outlet out on my deck (its failure is a small story in itself).
• Ended up having to get a rental car for a week after all when the collision repairs took a wee bit longer than anticipated (another story there worthy of a blog post, even nine months later).
• Sold a few hundred dollars worth of stuff on eBay.
• Bought a few hundred dollars worth of stuff on eBay.
• Finally got that damned colonoscopy, only seven months late.
• Got two teeth crowned that the dentist has been badgering me about for the last three years.
  
• Added two more dietary supplements, on doctor's orders, to my already extensive list of prescription and OTC drugs.
  
• Lost two years worth of email and other stuff when my hard drive decided to lie down and die.
• Had to have major work done on my car (steering/suspension/front brake repairs) so it'd pass inspection.
• Had to call Roto-Rooter when my washing machine's drain cycle backed up into the bathroom instead of going down the drain.
  

As you may have noted, a number of these "events" were of the expensive sort, so the fact that I still have my job (and my paycheck) is rather a good thing. Though I have to say, working as a government contractor has been quite a new and different experience for me. It ain't nothing like working in industry, academia, or what I'll call "normal" (for lack of a better term) small business, which up until last October had been the extent of my career.

So. Let's see if I can manage to keep blogging with some semblance of regularity. A daily post is probably to much to hope for, but surely I can find some happy medium between "daily" and "every few months".

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The art of procrastination

I hereby declare Rakal's First Law of Procrastination:

Procrastination time for a household task is inversely proportional to the amount of time the task will actually take.

Case in point: Some time ago, a bird tried to set up housekeeping in my bathroom exhaust fan vent. This came to my attention when I was startled out of a sound sleep one morning by the sound of something scrabbling around in (apparently) the ceiling. I finally traced the racket to the exhaust fan in the bathroom; the "something" was evidently in the exhaust duct.

By dint of banging on the fan housing and turning the fan on and off a few times, I got the something to leave -- temporarily. Over the next few days, it returned, and I drove it off, several times. I decided it had to be a bird, since the position of the vent on the back wall of the house, eight feet off the ground and about four feet in from the corner, didn't appear to be accessible to anything that couldn't fly. Sure enough, a little backyard reconnaisance revealed the bugger slipping out of the vent when it thought I wasn't looking. Time to take action.

I planted my stepladder under the vent, climbed up, and removed the typical aluminum flapper under an overhanging hood, with no screening to keep critters out; it was so beat up, the flapper didn't even close right. The duct was loaded with pieces of gras, pine straw, and other crap. It was evident that the original vent had been reinstalled -- badly -- after the house was vinyl-sided (shortly before I bought it). It was even more evident that it needed to be replaced with something that (a) closed properly and (b) had a critter guard.

So I pulled out as much of the crap as I could, and slapped a few strips of that old standby, duct tape, across the opening. Then I made the rounds of Lowes and Home Depot, and eventually bought a new louvered vent cover (seen at left) and a genuine Deflecto vent guard (above).

That was at least three years ago. Three years during which the louvered cover and the bird guard kicked around in the garage. Three years of not using the bathroom exhaust fan. Until finally, a few weeks ago, I noticed how much the duct tape had deteriorated, to the point of starting to peel off. Clearly, I had to do something before the birds again took up residence in the ductwork. I could either replace the duct tape with a fresh layer, or -- how's this for a radical idea? -- install the vent cover and guard. Either way, I'd have to haul the damned stepladder out there. So I bit the bullet and installed the three-year-old hardware. And ya know, even with having to enlarge the opening in the siding to get the vent cover in place, the whole thing took me all of three quarters of an hour.

After procrastinating for three years!

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The art of home improvement procrastination

When my dear departed father received clothing as a gift -- say, a new sports shirt -- he would never wear it right away. No, it went into the closet for weeks or months, until he considered it was properly "aged".

I have embraced that same principle for home improvement projects. Three months ago, in a post about my new patio door, I mentioned that I had bought a new lockset for the front door in the same oil-rubbed bronze finish as the hardware for the patio door, but hadn't installed it yet. Lord knows the front door was in sad need of an upgrade from the El Cheapo brass key-in-knob lockset with no deadbolt, but you can't rush these things. Last weekend I finally decided the new lockset had aged long enough, so on Saturday I pulled out the instructions and set to work.

Three days, two trips to Home Depot (to buy (1) chisels and (2) a drill bit in a size my set didn't include), one pile of debris, and a lot of cussing later, I finally have a not-shiny but new handleset and deadbolt on my front door, as you can see in the inside and outside views below.



Like all such endeavors, it wasn't quite as straightforward as it might have seemed. The front side of the instruction sheet, in three languages and with line drawings, informed me that the Required tools (Outils nécessaires, Herramientas requeridas) were a straight screwdriver, a Phillips screwdriver, and a tape measure.

Ha. I can only assume that the people who wrote the front of the sheet (which addressed the actual installation) didn't talk to the people who wrote the back of the sheet (which covered marking and preparing the door and jamb), because they somehow failed to list -- on either side -- the cordless drill, two battery packs, two hole saw bits (one of which did not fit the mandrel in the kit), Crescent wrench (to remove the mandrel that was stuck in the hole saw that did fit), spade bit (substitute for the hole saw that didn't fit), two regular drill bits, hammer, two chisels, utility knife, ruler, carpenter's pencil, one two-inch nail, and hunk of 2x4 that also proved to be nécessaires (or if you prefer, requeridas).


And then, when I start to gather up the plethora of tools and old parts to deposit them in the garage, I discover a leftover part. Oops. That can't be good. Back to the instruction sheet... where I eventually track down where the damned thing belongs and then have to disassemble the deadbolt again to install it.

Anyway, it's done, and looks so nice that now I'm going to have to paint the door because it looks pretty crappy in comparison. And then I need to install the new weatherstripping that's been aging since I bought it last summer. But first I need to get out the vacuum cleaner to clean the sawdust and metal shavings out of the rug.

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