Projectus Maximus

Today, I am humbly blogging from the bottom of a figurative avalanche of projects that are threatening to snuff me out and/or force me into making a decision of who to eat first. It seems every time I start on something I want to do, it involves fixing something else along the way, not to mention taking away time from squishing Adam's cheeks.

Last weekend I tasked myself with installing our new(er) dishwasher we bought from some friends to replace our old-but-still-working dishwasher. Immediately you can see the problem in this, there wasn't anything technically wrong, and yet I thought it would be a good idea to fix it. I've been petitioning the Oxford people to reconsider the new definition for "fix"

fix [fiks] verb, fixed or fixt, fix·ing, noun  To make things worse in every way, you big dumb fat dumby face

First of all, removing the old dishwasher was much harder than I thought it would be, it eventually took a large crow-bar to pry the one side up enough to free it from it's wooden tomb. Unfortuantely that was just the beginning.  The old unit ran off a standard oulet plug, the newer unit was hard wired. Not wanting to smash up the wall to hard wire it I bought an electrical cord to wire it up. Inconvenient, but not a day-ender.

Where I'm stuck now is the plumbing, after the shutoff for the supply line there are a bunch of weird adapters, where I thought it was going to hook up was incorrect, so I now need to find a very specialized fitting, or man up and do some cutting and torching and soldering. I've hit my comfort limit so that's where it currently sits.

Last night, finding a bit of free time, I thought I'd try and mow the lawn. Our tractor has had a hard time starting lately but I figured I could eventually coax it to life as I have in the past. Once my coaxing skills ran out, I pushed it from our shed over to the garage where I worked on it for the next hour and a half, eventually finding the problem.  Seems that some of my furry rodent friends made a nest underneath one of the engine covers and ate half of the ignition wire.  Since I can't replace just the wire, I "fabricated up" (whenever I refer to something like this, run) a healthy portion of electrical tape to temporarily solve the problem.

As luck would have it, by the time I finished up it was too dark to mow. While it's great the tractor is now running, the real work has just begun since I still need to mount up my mower deck to the leaf vacuum I bought last month.  That is the most important project I need to work on this weekend by far because

The leaves: they are coming.

My tentative project list for the moment:

• Get the riding mower and leaf vacuum to make sweet leaf-mulching love so I can:
• "Prepare my anus" for the upcoming leafocaust and general yard work that should be done.  
• Get the plumbing sorted for the dishwasher, cut some scrap wood to get the dishwasher to the proper height (it sits a bit low).  Pray to Cascade, the dishwashing god, that I haven't messed anything else up.
• Leaf-blow the gutters out at least every other week until it stops raining.
• Speaking of gutters, I really need to install two more downspouts.  You know, another thing I don't know how to do.
• Wrangle up a large number of able-bodied men to help me remove my wood burning insert from our fireplace.  This weighs many hundreds of ell bee esses.  
• Get the pellet stove mostly in place, figure out what I need to connect it to my chimney.
• Install new top on the Miata (I've only been putting this off for almost two years).