Halloween

The Kindergarten class led the parade at Hillside Elementary School.


Anna and Mommy are witches.


It's hard to get a good picture of a glowing purple spider crawling up the side of an orange house in the dark with a fog machine blowing smoke everywhere.


Grr! I am Jack! The Pumpkin King!

Henry Hikes to Fitchburg

Today I read a book to Anna's class.


The story, if you're not familiar with it, is based on a passage from Walden. Henry challenges his friend to a "race" from Concord to Fitchburg. Henry will walk while his friend takes the train. The catch is that his friend must earn his fare by working all day. The story juxtaposes images of Henry enjoying his walk while his friend toils at various menial tasks for Mr. Hawthorne or Mr. Emerson. In the end, Henry's friend "wins" the race by a few minutes because Henry stopped for blackberries.

I actually bought this book for myself several years before Anna was born.

Wah!

Wah, nobody liked my rant.

OK, I'll go back to house-blogging and updates about Anna. She's sick, by the way. And I did a bunch of stuff, which I may or may not talk about. And I watched a movie. And then I went to bed.

The end.

Final Presidential Debate

That was my kind of debate. There was the usual "eloquence" from Senator Obama, but also quite a bit of substance from both candidates. (Probably too much substance. Apparently, "perception" is everything.)

Even though John McCain is "not President Bush", he hasn't argued his case persuasively. (Although I thought he did pretty well tonight.) Note to Republicans: Next time, try to nominate someone with better communication skills.

That said, I loved this Freudian slip: "Senator Government"

I think that about sums things up. With Obama as president, and Reid and Pelosi leading their respective houses of Congress, the government will fix everything.

I could go on and on, but just one more thing before I go to bed. Why do politicians insist on using numbers and "facts" that have no basis in reality?

For example: How can 95% of Americans get a tax cut if more than a third don't pay any federal income tax at all?

Or (to maintain my bipartisan veneer) what about the $3 million dollar "overhead projector" for the Chicago Planetarium? First of all, the money was never appropriated. Second, it was not an "overhead projector" — it was a Zeiss projector, the enormously complicated device used to project a star field in a planetarium. Third, this talking point has already been widely ridiculed — at least among the group of people who fact check every word the candidates say. I happen to agree that this sort of thing shouldn't be funded by the federal government (don't they have any money of their own in Chicago?), but trivializing the request doesn't help the argument.

Oh, and what about "Eliminate our dependence on Middle Eastern oil and Venezuelan oil. Canadian oil is fine." Huh? what part of "fungible commodity" don't you understand?

One more thing. Why does Obama think he has a line item veto? Bill Clinton had it briefly before it was ruled unconstitutional. (McCain recently cosponsored a new version, but it hasn't gone anywhere.)

I'm not even trying to string this stuff together anymore, but I have to mention one more thing that I haven't heard from any mainstream politician: Corporations don't pay taxes — people do. It's called tax incidence.

OK, I'll stop now.

Driveway Repair

Our driveway is not in very good condition. Every year I think, this year I'm going to seal the driveway, but I never do. Also, it seems to be just a thin layer of asphalt poured directly onto the dirt.

There's one really bad spot where the driveway is crumbling, and the weeds are thriving. Anna and I removed all the loose aggregate, then headed to Home Depot for some driveway patching material. I couldn't find it right away, so I asked someone who looked like he spends a lot of time there.


He said they ran out of petroleum byproducts. Don't I know that the US has only 3% of the world's oil reserves, while we consume 25% of the oil in the world?

Um, OK.

Because we didn't want to leave empty handed, we bought some daffodils. There seems to be a very limited selection of bulbs available, compared with previous years. I wonder what's up with that?

Lowe's had 50-lb bags of something called QPR from Lafarge. Quality Pavement Repair? The directions say to remove all loose material from the pothole, but this stuff is not cheap, and besides, what am I going to do with all that debris? Let's just put it back into the hole.


You can buy a special tamping tool, but who needs that?


Perhaps Jamie can comment on how this repair compares with the work done by PennDOT?

Gourds

Tina has been clamoring for an update to the fate of the "pumpkins" I wrote about in an earlier post.

The "pumpkins" were completely out of control by the end of August. Anna was insisting that I needed to build a bridge over the vines that were snaking across the concrete walkway. Immediate action was required, so on August 28, even though they weren't completely ready, Anna and I harvested the crop, and pulled up all the vines.


Did I mention that they turned out not to be pumpkins? Somehow, we ended up with a collection of ornamental gourds. After drying them for one month, today we put them on top of the kitchen cabinets. (Note that I could only get a fraction of them in the picture.)


Another exciting bit of news is that the flashlight that Dad and I were convinced was thrown out with all the debris from the living room bookshelf deconstruction was discovered, by Anna, nestled between two sofa cushions.


Exciting news indeed.

Heard on the Radio

Have you ever wondered what happens if you put two CDs into the CD player? It plays the bottom one.

Oh, and I have some other posts that were stuck in the queue.

Second Presidential Debate

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

What? Oh, sorry. I must have fallen asleep.

Worst. Debate. Ever.

Town Hall? Half the questions were straight from Tom Brokaw.

Debate? The best moment was when the two candidates briefly wrestled control from the moderator and actually, you know, debated with each other. If only the entire debate could have been like that.

One hilarious thing happened at the end. McCain and Obama were were doing the post event handshake and they got in the way of Tom Brokaw's teleprompter. That was funny. But, you know? These debates aren't supposed to be funny. They're supposed to give voters a glimpse at how the candidates would handle things. And this debate was a miserable failure in that respect. At least in the first debate it seemed that Jim Lehrer was asking questions because he wanted to hear the answers. He tried to get the candidates to respond to each other. I don't want to be too hard on Tom Brokaw — because apparently the campaigns agreed to the completely stupid restrictions he was just trying to enforce — but it makes me angry that time limits seemed to be his biggest concern.

I have to agree with the pundits who say that Obama was the clear winner of this debate. But do voters even care about this stuff? My guess is that most people made up their minds a long time ago.

I was completely surprised by one idea from John McCain: Let's give everyone a house!

I would order the secretary of the treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes...

What? Are you kidding me? It reminded me of something that Joe Biden said in the vice presidential debate:

...we should be allowing bankruptcy courts to be able to re-adjust not just the interest rate you're paying on your mortgage to be able to stay in your home, but be able to adjust the principal that you owe, the principal that you owe.

[my emphasis]

Oh, and I finally managed to catch Wolf Blitzer's explanation of the audience response meter. It's dials. (It would have been really cool to have the focus group sit in an MRI and watch different parts of their brains light up during the debate. Although the pattern would probably mimic that of a narcoleptic patient.)

Bye Bye Bookshelves

We have two bookshelves flanking the fireplace in the living room.


While I'm a big fan of built in furniture, and we obviously need lots of space to shelve our books, these particular bookshelves have a few problems.

• They significantly impede furniture arrangement. One entire wall is eaten up by the fireplace, bookshelves, and door. (And the other walls aren't much better.)
• They're not deep enough for most books. (This, despite being recessed into the wall.)
• The construction isn't very good. (You can't tell from the photo, but the bookshelves are sagging on either side of the fireplace. Although, to be fair, it's actually the house that's doing most of the sagging.)
• The aesthetics aren't that good. (Subjective, I know, but I've never liked the design of the shelves, and the proportions seem wrong.)

Tina's objection to removing them is that it will be a can of worms. I tell her that I have a plan, and I can get it done. Dad has long been an advocate for removing them, and today he got his wish.

Here's one final look, after all the books have been removed.


Demolition is not really the correct word for what needs to happen next. I like deconstruction, although the English majors have ruined it.

First we removed the face frame. Then we pried up the bottom shelf. I'm happy to see that the hardwood floor continues under the bookshelves.


With the face frame removed, we could collapse the two sides, then push down on the top.


Most people would just cover up this hole and be done with it. But wait! See how the back of the bookshelf is recessed into the wall? A bit of exploratory poking through the plaster confirmed my fear: homebuilders from 90 years ago did stupid things just like they do today.

The wall into which the bookshelves were recessed is a bearing wall that supports the two south bedrooms. Notching the studs without providing a way for the load to redistribute is a Bad Idea. Although the fact that the house is still standing is a pretty compelling argument that this sort of thing is actually not too bad, it makes me queasy to think of those little scraps of wood holding up the house, so it needs to be fixed, or at least improved.

In order to put in a header to redistribute the load, all that plaster and lath has to come out. It's messy work, but not nearly as bad as trying to pull down a crumbling ceiling.


Here's a closeup of the stud. Does that look like a 2x4? (rhetorical question)


I should mention that the wall between the living room and the kitchen has a quirk that I discovered while working on the kitchen ceiling. The wall needs to be thicker than usual to accommodate the waste pipe. I would have used 2x6s. The original builders used 2x4s and stacked up a half dozen pieces of lath to make up the difference. (That brittle lath is what the kitchen cabinets are attached to. Shudder.)

This is what should have been done in the first place: put in a header with jack studs on either side. Since we're filling in the hole, I added the studs in the middle.


The next step is to put up some sheetrock and plaster over the whole thing, but I don't have any scraps big enough. Since sheetrock is pretty cumbersome (and I'll need two sheets — one for each book shelf) I'll have to wait for Dad's next visit.

to be continued...

Sun Room

Before fixing the living room, I thought I would quickly paint the sun room and redo the floor.

The sun room has 12 old, double-hung windows, and lots of trim. We wanted the parts not covered by trim to be yellow, but the correct shade was elusive, so there are at least three different shades of yellow, along with a kind of salmony pink that I never painted over because the two radiators were blocking me. The radiators were pretty well stuck. Fortunately, I have lots of WD-40, and some very large pipe wrenches that were originally used to assemble battleships at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The ceiling is beadboard, and I just read somewhere that porch ceilings are often painted blue; specifically, haint blue, a light blue green color that supposedly wards off evil spirits. As much as I like that idea, I'm just going to give it a fresh coat of ceiling white paint.

The trim throughout the entire house is pure white, and that's what I'm painting the trim in the sun room. In many parts of the lower section, it looked like the previous owners had simply painted over whatever dirt happened to be in the way, but that's not how I do things. I sanded the rough spots and discovered that at one point the trim in the sun room had been painted red! Yikes!

One thing I've been doing, which is exactly the opposite of what the painting books tell you to do, is to paint the trim first, then paint the walls. There are several reasons why I think this is the better method.

• When painting trim with semi-gloss paint, the brush strokes are more noticeable, so applying it first allows more degrees of freedom. (Flat paint is less fussy.)
• It's much easier to cut in against the trim because it sticks out from the wall.
• If you overlap some of the trim paint onto the wall it forms a seal, which makes the trim easier to clean.

The only reason I can think of for painting the trim last is concern that a roller used on the wall might spatter paint onto the trim, but in practice, I haven't found this to be a problem.

I haven't gotten to the floor yet, and I might get sidetracked into painting the sashes. (They just look so dinghy next to the freshly painted trim.)

And pictures! Well, maybe I'll save that for the LEGO post.

Luke's Christening

We got back from Luke's Christening around 11 PM. Anna fell asleep, so we made pretty good time. We only stopped once, at New Baltimore, because I had to stretch my legs. I had already decided not to get coffee, but I was still bummed out to see the gates pulled down at Starbucks.

It was nice to see all the cousins and aunts and uncles. As usual, I didn't feel like I was warmed up until it was time to go. I should work on that, except, who am I kidding? I'm almost forty years old: I'm not going to change.

I was thinking that Cate and Jamie have it so easy with Luke. He never cries, and he sleeps all day. But then night arrives, and things change. Never assume that other people have it easy!

Vice Presidential Debate

Much more interesting than the first presidential debate.

I thought Biden won the debate on points, but Palin beat the spread.

CNN has a cute audience response meter. Twice now I've missed the explanation of how it works, but presumably each member of the studio audience has a button or dial they can use to indicate positive or negative feelings, which are integrated to give real time feedback about whatever the candidates are saying. Or something. Anyway, even though it's nonsense, I can't keep my eyes off the meter.

There was some controversy about Gwen Ifill moderating the debate, because she has written a book called Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, which is scheduled to be released on Inauguration Day. I didn't notice any bias on her part, and I thought she had some good questions, although the candidates mostly just seemed to talk about whatever popped into their heads at the moment.

Musical Rooms, Again

It's week 32. We're getting close to our estimated due date of Nov 23. Based on one data point — Anna — we predict that Sophie will be early. I am therefore required to cease all "home improvement" by Halloween to ensure an ample cushion of time. (If I need to work on something after that date I can go over to Mom and Dad's new house.)

What would I like to finish before then? Obviously, working on the kitchen is out of the question. Fixing up the living room — and maybe the sun room — seems more reasonable.

The problem is that these rooms are filled with stuff. The sun room is knee deep in Anna's toys, and the living room has sofas, chairs, tables, TV, computer, bookshelves, and books, books, books.

We've played this game before. It's called Musical Rooms.

1. Gather Anna's toys. done
2. Temporarily store Anna's toys in the nursery. almost done
3. Bring the wicker furniture to the SE bedroom. (Tina's office, guest room, and now: sitting room.) done
4. Move the living room into the dining room and vice versa. almost done

Whoa, wait a minute. What was that last item?

The living room floor needs to be sanded and refinished. The carpet in the sun room needs to go. (We still haven't decided whether to replace the carpet or put in a Pergo floor.) Working on the floors requires that the room be completely empty. The original idea was to pile everything into the sun room while working on the living room, and then switch everything around. But that meant all the furniture would be unusable.

How could we set things up so we could have a comfortable arrangement while I work on those two rooms? The answer was inspired by an idea Mom had for her new house: make the dining room into a sitting room, and move the dining table into the living room. (There's more to Mom's idea, and it doesn't work nearly as well in our house as it might in hers, but it will be OK for one month.)

Although moving the dining table into the living room was a tricky, two-person job (thanks, Dad!), it can easily be moved into the sun room when necessary because the wide French doors obviate the need for maneuvering.