Slow thy role

Do you remember that time that I told you a story about my lawn mower not working and I heroically wrestled it back from death's cruel grasp (and dude, my arms look so cut while I was doing it)?  Yea, well this time, the next day, I was the cruel mistress raining down misfortune upon it - what a whacky turn of events, reader!  This is why I can't have nice things.

Last Friday we (Adam) had some company at the house after I got home from work so I thought it would be an excellent time to start being a doer and do some stuff that required doing in regards to my leaf vacuum or "leafpocalypse" setup.  Really, the last piece of the puzzle was that I needed to cut the mower deck boot to fit on, well, the mower deck (duh).  In some startling turn of events, I cut it and got it properly mounted exactly as planned without any major problems.  Surely I should have should have had some alarms of This is going way too easy, Mr. Guy going off in my head, but instead I felt smugly smug with myself and rode off back to the shed where the second half to this project was waiting for me.

I got the hose mounted up to the mower deck, the hose clamp all clamped down, and I was ready to go.  I hooked up the trailer to the hitch point, and slowly crept forward mowing and sucking and mulching leaves for a solid 10 minutes.  Amber can attest my next mistake:  Grinning, bouncing, and other outward acts of joy and pride only a father (of a leaf vacuum project) can feel in his heart.  That heart, ladies and gentleman, was about to be broken just like my mower.  It was a young and foolish early-fall romance, if we're assigning labels here, it wasn't meant to be.

Needless to say the mower came to a slow crawl and refused to move forward or backward.  The engine was still running, but it strained as it tried to move.  "Well, shit" said the author of this blog.  In my haste to mow/suck/mulch, I foolishly put the brake on, that I never use no less, and I had been riding around the yard for 10 minutes riding the brake.  "Double shit" soon followed as well as feeling like an enormous dumb guy.

To make things as entertaining as possible for everyone who isn't me, I had to drag the tractor back to the shed with the four wheeler, stopping every 5 feet or so to adjust the steering wheel on the tractor to dodge the mine fields of trees and other solid objects.  And when I say drag, I mean that word that I said I meant.  The rear wheels were locked up even with the transmission disengaged it wouldn't budge.  By the time I got it in the shed it was dark so feeling defeated, I packed it in for the evening.

Now that I have you on the edge of your seat Imma ruin it for you:  The brake was just locked up, no catastrophic transmission failure that I was worried about.  I've since disconnected the brake, as I've said, I never use it other than to try and ruin my life, and we were once again in business.  I made a few passes in the back yard and booyah, leaf and grass all up ins:

Important life lesson:  Never be happy or excited about any project you take on, because you already made a whole lot of mistakes that will come back to Wanye-Brady-Choke-a-Bitch you.  With that in mind, this is a close approximation of my emotion level having my leaf cleanup infinitely easier this season:

Let's be honest, you only come here for my impeccable taste in animated .gifs anyway.

In other updates, I got the dishwasher project finished up last night and spent a lot of money on a new snowblower which will virtually guarantee that we don't get any snow this year.  So either way, probably a good buy!

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).

The room, ya'll

The past month or so I've been absent from the website, but calm down, I've had good reason.  Last month I was on a lovely vacation lounging with the Dreese SASO squad and upon returning I've jumped right back into super productivity mode working on the baby's room.  In the past few weeks we've gone from the final stages of drywall finishing, to priming, to painting, to flooring.  Behold, by the power of the internet and digital photographs you can take the journey with me.  Come on, friend!

So far all we have left is the trim-work, adding doors to the closet and swapping out the bedroom door for one of the six-paneled variety (along with painting all said trim and door items).  Once that's taken care of I'll get to have a lot of fun assembling furniture type items and getting everything set up.  As long as it's taken I'm surprised it's turning out as well as it is, even though the bulk of the thanks can go to my drywall finishing teacher.  As a first timer I'm unbelievably happy with the results so far, unfortunately it's not reminded me that all the remaining rooms in our house are even uglier than before, if that was somehow possible.

Lastly, Amber reminded me yesterday that we only really have about 10 weeks left of baby-free living, which is fairly terrifying.  So yea, holy crap.

Drywall? More like took-you-long-enough-wall.

Contrary to my best efforts of dragging out the bedroom remodel as long as I can, I am one stinking piece away from being done hanging the drywall in what will be the baby's room.  All in all I'm pretty happy with how it turned out as a first timer.  Buddy Brian helped me with the ceiling and starting one of the walls, but since then I think I've done an adequate job not screwing it up too much.

Working by myself wasn't too bad though I could not have done it without one of these or these, I'd highly recommend them for anyone doing the work themselves.  My harbor freight multifunction tool also made cutting holes for the drywall super easy.  Maybe a little too easy, especially if you can't measure all that super good.

Tonight or tomorrow I should be getting the last piece of drywall I need and hanging it, then it's just a matter of time to get my finishing expert guy to help me out and curse me for doing such a lousy job hanging it.

Still to do:

1. Drywall finishing/sanding
2. Priming/paint
3. New pre-hung door
4. Closet jambs
5. Flooring
6. Wiring baseboard heater and thermostat
7. Hang closet doors
8. Fancy closet organizer
9. Trim, lots and lot of trim

Destination: IKEA

This weekend we went to visit Julie and Tim and take our very first ever trip to IKEA.  We had a good time checking out all the staged "rooms" in the showroom and didn't get enough time in the 1st floor that we decided to go back after we ate lunch.  At the end of the day we bought a dresser for the baby's room, a desk for the office, two lamps and some picture frames.  In contrast to the ride down to IKEA, we were all silently comatose on the way back, tired from mere hours of shopping.  Super rough life, I know.

After a long drive home Saturday night I was determined to assemble the desk while Amber played with the stroller and carseat that arrived on Thursday.  As you can see above Amos "the Shmameos" Dreese was trying out his best "I'm a baby, I swear" shtick that was oddly convincing given our levels of exhaustion.

As if disassembly of the old desk and assembly of the new desk wasn't painful enough, I bought a dump cart at harbor freight on Sunday and spent 2.5 hours assembling it.  In hindsight I really wish I would have just bought a used one that was already assembled, but at least it's done and now I shouldn't have to worry about it anymore. I was then able to slowly putt around the yard while the cart made a terrible racket bumping around over our uneven terrain, at least I know no one will be able to steal it and make a silent getaway.

Edgar Allan Bro

I was looking through my folder of funny internet pictures and I was totally like "LAWL - Edgar Allan Bro - I am heeelarious" and then I did a google search and realized I was not the first to make that joke and I was a bit put off. Luckily the large amount of other amusing pictures soon lifted my spirits.

Not much new to report going on in life, hence the lack of blog posts. AES still remains a colossal smelly face in regards to holding $1500 of our monetary units hostage, but we're assured that the matter will be wrapped up soon.

Amber's final volleyball coaching season will soon be coming to an end, I think she'll appreciate the extra time she's going to have. We still haven't started any major work on the house, though a few weeks ago I installed a ridge vent to help ventilate the attic. I still need to pull the insulation out of the soffets on one side of the house, I got sick after I did the first side. Let's hope it was coincidence.