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).

Lowes 10% payoff

Here's my first exploitataion of the lowes 10% off coupons - a Dewalt DW716 Dual Bevel 12" Miter Saw - truly a manly machine if there ever was one. I was looking at a similar Hitachi with a laser guide that also had great reviews (and a $100 cheaper price tag), but I wanted to see if these Dewalt tools are all they've cracked up to be. This will be a tool that will hopefully be with me a long time through a lot of projects, so I think the higher initial investment will be a smart choice in the end.

In other news, it appears that AES has finally mailed out our refund check for overpaying our student loan payoff so we should be getting our money back soon. The peasants rejoice!

Next up on the agenda is to whine about the ridiculous amount of leaves in our yard. When I say we have 40+ trees in our yard alone is, unfortunately for us, not an exageration. I spent the better part of 2 hours leaf blowing about half of one side of our yard over the weekend and there are already enough leaves on the ground to do it again. If I were a wealthy man you can bet your sweet rearend I'd have a leaf vacuum in my shed. Someday leaf vacuum, someday!