mike's web log

Apartment improvement/The old ways still work

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 11:49:57 GMT

We’re staying in San Francisco for a few months, so we’re in a rental. It’s nice enough, but there are little things here and there that feel like they could be improved. (For example, no rental I’ve ever been in has had enough lighting.) One such thing in this rental is the kitchen faucet:

I hand-wash dishes, so I like to have a sprayer attachment for the kitchen faucet. I reckoned that hey, they’re not expensive, I’ll just get one and attach it myself.

Well, not quite. I took the aerator off the existing faucet and went to a plumbing supply place, where I explained my quest to the woman. She got out one of those gauges that they use to determine size and thread count, but to her surprise, mine didn’t fit any of them.

Hmm. We went to find another guy who tried the same thing. At that point I mentioned that it’s possible that this faucet is from IKEA. Ah. “My condolences,” he said, adding that he couldn’t help me with metric sizes and threading.[1]

Being an old guy, I remembered that when I was a kid, we used to have a little shower-head-looking attachment for our kitchen sink. It just slipped over the end of the faucet. Did he have any of those? He did know what I was talking about but told me that those were long gone.

Well, not quite. I went online, and dang, there was the very thing I’d remembered:

[more]

La vida microwave-free

Sun, 14 Jun 2020 08:25:30 GMT

We've been without a microwave oven for about 9 months now.

This is not because we have some sort of philosophical objection to microwaves; the reason is much more practical. Before we remodeled the condo, there was a built-in microwave above the stove, which doubled as the no-vent/recirculating range hood. We knew that we didn't want this 1980s-era microwave, and we replaced it with a dedicated range hood:

Our initial idea was that we would get a countertop microwave. But once we'd moved in and sorted out the kitchen, there wasn't really an obvious place to put a microwave, because there's just limited counter space, alas.

So we've been doing without. This means we've had to explore substitutes for how we used to use the microwave. Like, how do you reheat leftovers without a microwave?

We use our oven or toaster oven. The room we might have given over to a microwave is taken up by a small toaster oven. That appliance is more useful than a microwave, I think, because it can heat and toast and broil. I make toast all the time, and we have no toaster-toaster, so this is a daily-use device for me.

One of the advantages of a microwave is that it's fast. But heating things in our little toaster oven doesn't take that much longer. It's a little oven, so it heats up pretty fast. It also has a convection setting (which I think just means it has a fan that blows the hot air around). All in all, what might have taken, say, 2 minutes in the microwave takes maybe 8 or 10 minutes in the little oven.

We heat things on the stovetop. Anything that's got liquid—soup, stew, whatever—we can throw in a pot and heat on the stovetop.

[more]

One final move-in task for 2019

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 21:33:39 GMT

One of our accomplishments for 2019 was to complete the next phase of our downsizing. In 2017 we sold our big house and moved into a nice urban apartment. In 2019 we had a small condo remodeled that I owned, and then moved into that. This involved initially making many decisions (cabinets, carpeting, fixtures) and then doing some work (painting), and then of course actually moving and arranging many things. So many things.

I decided recently that I was going to mentally declare this remodel-and-move-in phase done. From here on out, I decided, we weren't crossing off the last items on the remodel-and-move-in list; we were starting a new things-to-improve list. But there was one final thing I wanted to get done before I could do this.

Bear with me a sec while I explain the situation. A feature I like of our new place is what we call the "book nook." In the area that was originally designed to be a little dining room (emphasis on little) we put a wall of bookshelves:

As you can see, there's a corner bookcase. It turns out that a "corner bookcase," at least as conceived by IKEA, is not a bookcase that fits into a corner. It's a bookcase that's angled against the two bookcases to either side and held in place with some brackets. As a result, there's space behind the angled bookcase. The following schematic shows the arrangement, looking down from the top. The bookcases are outlined in blue, and the open space is shaded:

I didn't think much about this until one of the kids visited shortly after we moved in and asked "What if one of the cats gets trapped down there?"

[more]

Unpainting hinges

Sat, 29 Apr 2017 15:01:35 GMT

In the realm of home improvement, few things irritate me as much as people who paint over light switches and door hinges. One or more previous owners of our house engaged in this practice. Grrr. (<— see? I'm irritated) Since we're now doing some painting of our own, it seemed like it was time to deal with this.

I went looking online for non-toxic ways to remove paint from hinges. A technique that several people recommend seems promising: you throw the hinges, water to cover, and a little soap into an old crockpot and soak overnight. Alternatively, you can use an old pot on a low burner. That sounded fine, but our steady de-accummulation of stuff means we don't have old pots (let alone old crockpots) stashed in the garage.

So I improvised. I put the hinges in some empty cans with some dishsoap, and then poured boiling water over them and let them stand till cool, maybe 10 or 15 minutes.

It seems to have the desired effect, namely to soften the old paint:

I scraped a lot of this paint off with just my fingernails. You could use something else, but remember that brass is quite soft. A wooden scraper of some sort would be ideal.

For stubborn paint, I repeated the process, and when I got impatient with repeated soakings, I used a brush. You need something pretty stiff (not an old toothbrush), but again, not too hard (no steel brush). This brush worked great for me:

[more]

The Troublesome Door to the Man-Cave

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 23:04:11 GMT

For some Friday Fun today, I'll tell you the story of how I solved (I think) a problem in my home office. My office is in the bottom level of the house ("daylight basement"), in what's normally known as the "rec room" but around here is just the man-cave. It's a nice setup, except that it gets cold — sometimes 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the house.

When it's cold, I have a baseboard heater that I will sometimes use to prevent my hands from going numb. I can get the man-cave toasty, but in order to do that, I have to close the door to prevent all this nice heat from escaping.

And therewith is the problem: the damn door to the man-cave. First, you have to picture how the rec room/man-cave is configured:

Note the lengthy distance between my desk and the door.

I can close the door, but this introduces the following problems:

People come in and out to go to the laundry room, and they leave the man-cave door open.
The dog whimpers outside the door to come in.
The dog whimpers inside the door to go out.
The cat scratches on the door to come in.
The cat scratches on the door to go out.

So I find myself constantly getting up and opening the door or getting up and closing the door. (Did I mention the lengthy distance between the desk and the door?) You can see that this is going to cut deeply into the highly productive time I spend constantly sitting at my desk.

Not long ago I had a thought, so I scrounged around and got two cup hooks and some stretchy hair ties (rubber bands, basically) and rigged a little closing device on the outside of the door:

[more]

Roundup

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:48:36 GMT

It's Roundup (Mostly) Lite today, I guess.

Secret to Success. A short, clear list. I think the sticking point is that the list includes items that often require fundamental changes in thinking. Incidentally, the TED talks are great if you're inclined to watch a lecture on your monitor.

The sheep he rode his cattle back. A little homophonic fun has been sitting there in Windows in front of us all this time.

secretGeek's guide to selecting a cartoon to suit your chosen IT career. If you thought that only "Dilbert" is about working in the world of technology, here's a catalog for you, expertly matched to your job description by Leon Bambrick.

Dewey Decimal System Game. Bet you never thought you'd shelve books against the clock, eh? (Flash required.) I can't tell whether the cheesy music is, you know, intended ironically. [via Colleague Bruce]

A few small repairs

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 22:01:22 GMT

A brief follow-up to the continuing saga of the laundry room. I got a proper breaker for the water heater which puts a single switch on two branches, rather than the two separate breakers that had been in there, probably illegally, before. That cost about $15 and about 5 minutes, not counting Home Depot time.

I had also been concerned that the water heater seemed quite inefficient since I reinstalled it. It was producing hot water, but only enough for one shower, and not even a long one at that. I figured that all that manhandling I'd subjected it to had probably done something to one of the heating elements. I was thinking of pulling those and replacing them.

When I was researching that, I also ran across a suggestion that inefficient hot water can be caused by a broken dip tube, which carries the incoming cold water from the inlet (on the top of the water heater) to the bottom of the heater for heating. A broken dip tube lets cold water into the top of the heater, where the hot water is (since it rises). The article I was reading suggested: "A sign of this is just a few minutes of hot water before it turns cold."

That sounded suspiciously familiar. I went and had a look at the cold water inlet in my water heater to see how I might go about taking it off to get at the dip tube. While I was cogitating on the fact that the inlet appeared to have no obvious way to dismantle it, I noticed that the cold water inlet was connected to the outgoing hot water pipe. And the incoming cold water was connected to the hot water outlet.

Oops. I guess that I hooked them up backward last time. Gee, could this have anything to do with small quantity of hot water I was getting out of the beast?

[more]

Time off

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 00:48:44 GMT

In the wake of finishing a multi-year project, our beneficent employer gave us some days off last week. A really lo-o-o-ong weekend! What should I do? Should I lie on the couch and read? Should I go away for the weekend? My mind reeled with possibilities. So much so, in fact, that I became confused and anxious. In the end, therefore, I went with that old stand-by for time off work: home improvement.

This time it was the laundry room. When I moved in, the floor was covered with these sort of vinyl-y tiles. But soon enough they cracked and pieces of them came loose, exposing the bare concrete floor underneath, along with a layer of black mastic. Ugly. Plus the room smelled like cat pee, having been one stop among many for a now ex-cat whose senility confused her about where the catbox was.

The job was straightforward enough on paper. Remove washer and dryer, remove laundry sink, remove water heater. That last gave me pause, but I suppressed my doubts. Once the room had been depopulated of appliances, I needed to take up what remained of the tiles. Then I had to scrape or otherwise remove the old mastic. Then put down new vinyl floor. Then reassemble.

I knew that I would be without hot water for the duration, which, er, incentivized me -- once started, I had to get the job done. I figured a long weekend would do it.

Which it did, but barely. All the usual home-improvement imperatives applied: unexpected difficulties; more ambition than time, talent, or energy; Hofstader's Law[1]; a sudden and debilitating loss of energy (mine, I mean) about 3/4 of the way through; and way, way too many trips to Home Depot. As I say, the usual.

A few notes, then.

Wiring [more]

Water pressure

Sun, 26 Dec 2004 22:12:19 GMT

I had an addition put on my house a couple of years ago, which included a master bath with a stand-up shower. (No tub for me! :-) ) Ever since the thing was finished, the water pressure in the new shower has never been so great, and over time it's gotten worse. I tested the supply to the bathroom itself, and that seemed ok, so the problem seemed to be with the shower itself.

So, ok, holiday's done, back to fun. Today I dismantled the shower from the back, going through my closet. I wanted to get the valve body out so I could see if there were blockage or something. The removal took some doing, as it was not installed with the idea of being removed. But I managed to get it out. I disassembled the valve body, and sure enough, the thing had a stupid restrictor valve in it that moreover had gotten silted up or something.

So I took the restrictor valve clean out, since I'd never had decent pressure with it in place. Then I spent some time reconstructing the shower, which gave me a chance to do some soldering. (Fire! Melting things!) I was pleased that I got everything back together and could turn the water on again by mid-afternoon. Here's where the backend of it stands now:

Fixing up the wallboard is not critical to having a working shower, so I'll get around to doing that patch Real Soon Now.

As with most home improvement projects, there were delays with bits I thought would be easy, and the job did not go quite as I thought. But it wasn't unenjoyable, and it works, and I now have a most excellent blast-o shower, which is what I'd wanted all along.

Old saw

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 22:45:51 GMT

As part of my garage cleanup, I need to Do Something with an old Sears radial-arm saw I have. I got it years ago from a friend who didn't want it any more. I've actually used it only a couple of times. Frankly, the thing kind of scares me. Not only do all the lights in the house dim when you flip the switch and start that big 10" blade to spinning, but there's something a little nerve-wracking about pulling a blade on a 1 HP motor toward your midsection.

A more practical reason I haven't used it much is that I don't have a proper table and fence. (If you don't know what that is, it's not important ... it's just missing some stuff.) I got onto the Web today to see what I might do to find or make a table for it. Not much luck on the table front, but I did stumble across this: "CPSC, Emerson Tool Co. Announce Recall of Craftsman® Radial Arm Saws Sold by Sears, Roebuck and Co." They continue:

CPSC and Emerson have received about 300 reports of injuries while using these saws. Injuries include hand and finger amputations; lacerated hands, arms and fingers; fractured hands and fingers; and facial injuries.

"Hand and finger amputations"!? "Facial injuries"!? Ok, so the notion of doing something with the saw takes on, mmm, a new dimension.

Options? Emerson, the manufacturer, makes a blade guard that can be retrofitted. Enter your model number, please ... <think, think> ... nope, not for the model I have. Further options? Well, it looks like you can send in the "carriage" -- the motor with the blade assembly -- and get $100 from the company.

Shoot, that actually sounds like an ok deal. It's more than the saw is probably worth on the open market. I'll give them a call tomorrow to see if this offer is still good. The recall was in 2000, but the website (http://radialarmsawrecall.com/ [more]

Vacation, sort of

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 02:33:39 GMT

Somehow it doesn't feel like vacation time if it's really just a long weekend. But I guess it's Tuesday, and I ain't going to work, so now I really am on vacation.

I've spent comparatively little time at the computer; I believe that three days without a blog post is a kind of record. I did play a little with my relatively new copy of Adobe Audition, which I intend to use to clean up the recordings of school concerts that I make with my Sony MiniDisc recorder. In some distant ideal future, I also hope to digitize some old LPs (those for which I can't find replacement CDs), and Audition promises to help clean up the sound from those old and undoubtedly well-worn records. That's the kind of project that I'll do "someday" in my "spare time." Audition has many other cool features, which I have no immediate need for, most notably, working with multitrack recordings. It's sort of like PhotoShop -- a professional-grade tool in the hands of an amateur.

I'm also screwing around with trackback auto-discovery. If I understand the concept correctly, I do this. When I save a new entry in my blog, I walk it looking for links. For each link, I scrape the page pointed to by the link and look for a trackback ping URL. If I find a trackback URL, I send the ping to that URL. Presto, no need to manually enter URLs and the like. (But lots of activity, golly.) I got out my Friedl and practiced using RegEx to find links in an arbitrary hunk of HTML. Fun. I'll also use regex to get trackback URLs out of the scraped pages. That process is simplified if the target blog "registers" its trackback URL in a little hunk of rdf, as explained in the MT spec.

[more]

Handy tool for homeowners

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 09:18:04 GMT

From a publisher's description:

Once you have followed the instructions in this book and build your own catapult, you'll wonder how you managed to get along without one.

Off to a shaky start

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 09:45:39 GMT

Mr. Furnace was supposed to come this morning to vacuum out the ductwork around here. The house is well-nigh 50 years old plus I have, lessee, one, two, three ... well, a lot of cats and two hairy dogs. I'm looking forward, in that ghoulish way one does, to how many bags off stuff he'll be able to suck out of the piping.

But not today, apparently. I got a call from the dispatcher telling me he couldn't come today because "he'd been in a traffic accident." Ooh, that's bad. However, I'd be slightly more sympathetic if I hadn't actually heard this exact same story before. (Well, and if it hadn't been my furnace that they weren't coming to clean.) I have a sneaking hunch that "had a traffic accident" is the dog-ate-my-homework of the repair industry. As opposed to "oops, we overbooked," say. But they'll give me discount when they do finally show up sometime later this summer. Assuming they don't have a traffic accident.

Since I'm already home I logged on to work. Ack. Normally I connect to the corpnet late at night, when most of the overachieving early risers have gone to bed, so response time is reasonable. At 9:00, though, things are hoppin', bandwidth-wise, and it felt like I'd connected at 14.4. It's not often that you get to watch Outlook paint the screen in stripes.

Nothing for it but to head into work.

While I'm sitting at my desk waiting and waiting for the slow connection, Sabrina is out in the living room. She's taking drivers ed, so she's waiting for her brother to come pick her up. When Zack got his license a year ago, that seemed normal, but there's something odd to me about Sabrina being old enough to drive soon.

[more]

Clean sweep

Mon, 31 May 2004 22:12:19 GMT

Article in Newsweek on the booming business of professional organization for homeowners. Some interesting quotations:

Home-storage products have become a $4.36 billion industry, with sales of objects like wire shelving and acrylic Q-tip holders up a prodigious 10 percent a year since 1998.

[...]

[I]n 1970 the average new single-family house measured 1,400 square feet; today it's around 2,300. But that's still not enough space for the ever-expanding detritus of daily life. According to a study conducted by a Boston marketing firm, the average American burns 55 minutes a day—roughly 12 weeks a year—looking for things they know they own but can't find.

[...]

Cheryl Mendelson, author of the best-selling homemaking compendium "Home Comforts," cautions against what she calls "organizing porn." A one-time cleanup won't solve the problem—any more than a crash diet will cure lifelong bad eating habits. Keeping an orderly house requires constant vigilance. "You have to develop good, efficient habits," says Mendelson, "in order to maintain the foundations for a comfortable life."

Lighten up

Sun, 23 May 2004 20:44:24 GMT

Moved the track lights to the center of the kitchen. That seems to work well. Today I put in a dimmer switch as well in case we decide they're too intense. I've also installed some under-cabinet lights. The switch is in and the wire has been run up to the attic. All I need, in theory, is another hour to put the wiring together with the power. I'd like to do that tonight still, so I can see what the lights look like, you know, at night.

At the supermarket yesterday, a young woman was spinning a toddler around in a grocery cart, and the toddler was shrieking with delight. The checker said to me "Wouldn't it be great to be that giddy?"

Let there be (new) light(s)

Mon, 17 May 2004 00:11:02 GMT

First weekend in a while that I haven't had work things to worry about, so it was time to think about home improvement again. Erica has a long list of projects at her house, but she needs to make decisions about things -- colors, styles, location, whatever -- so I gave some thought to my house. There's no end of work to be done here, either, but I wanted to do a project that would be fun and could be accomplished in a short period.

We decided on kitchen lighting. My house was built in 1958 and the kitchen was remodeled sometime in the 70s, we believe. (Oak cabinets, strange epoxy floor.) The lighting was classic 50s: a single double-bulb fixture in the center of the ceiling. It works, of course, but there have been a few innovations in lighting technology since then. A quick call to my friend Ken confirmed that track lighting was probably the way to go -- easy, flexible, comparatively cheap.

Off we went to Home Depot, for the first time. We got track-lighting stuff, which included a track, duh, and a junction to the power supply. Then our first dilemma: which of the many styles of track lights did we want? Spots or floods, halogen or normal, there was no lack of choice. I am driven in these situations by two factors: price and let's-decide-now. So we got three different styles of lamps, all $10, and bulbs to match. Hey, those halogen bulbs aren't cheap.

As a kind of afterthought, we decided to look at range hoods. For some inexplicable reason, my kitchen does not have one. Oddly, at some point they installed an exhaust fan in the ceiling kind of close to the stove. That fan is powerful, eventually; it takes about 90 seconds for it to cut through 50 years of accumulated grease and get spinning. What I really missed, though, was having a light over the stove.

[more]

Home stuff

Mon, 01 Mar 2004 00:00:05 GMT

On my list of things to do today was to write up an entry on exciting new commercial transactions in my life, since we, um, achieved some closure on the car dealer thing. But other things have come up, including some actual work-work (documenting what our story is, I think, on supporting XTHML in Whidbey). Plus some familial stuff -- I wrote an actual letter to one of my cousins. (Well, it was an email, but it was a letter.) And helping Saul with an ASP.NET thing he's writing.

And some home repair, which I will talk about. My two favorite types of home repair, too, plumbing and electrical. Plumbing. First, a story. Several years ago we were doing work on Erica's bathroom, and she noticed one day that her kitchen faucet seemed to have lost a lot of pressure. She asked Saul whether the plumbing work we were doing in the bathroom had somehow affected the kitchen. Well, sort of. Saul unscrewed the aerator in the kitchen faucet and out gushed a glob of wet rusty goo. Our work in the bathroom had upset the delicate equilibrium of rust inside the galvanized plumbing that still remained.

This last spring I redid the main bathroom in my house, part of which consisted of taking out the old galvanized iron pipe and replacing it with copper. A while later I noticed the shower in my second bathroom had lost pressure. So, yes, I eventually took it apart and there was wet rusty goo there, too. (I did not have the benefit of literary prefacing when debugging that one, tho.)

Lately the hand-held sprayer in my kitchen sink had lost pressure, too.[1 [more]

Reddy Kilowatt

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 21:45:24 GMT

(For those not of sufficient vintage to recognize the title, see here.)

When Erica moved into her house a couple of years ago, we did a fair bit of work to it, including some electrical stuff. This fell to me, so I was the guy who got to deal with the electrical panel. At some point I took the cover off and looked around. Mouse turds, corrosion. Hmm.

We wanted to put in a new circuit, but I had some trouble finding a breaker for that panel. Finally I went to McLendon, our local big hardware store (as opposed to big home center) and talked to the guy at the electrical desk. "Oh, those," he said, when I described the panel. "You have corrosion, right? They're bad quality. In fact, the company went out of business." But he found some breakers, which were holy-cow-expensive.

Ever since, I've been thinking about that panel. Now, we never lack for a list of home-improvement jobs to do at either of our houses, and among them is some wiring in Erica's kitchen. But really, the right thing to do here is to replace that darn panel before running even more circuits to it and not incidentally, having to buy more of those expensive breakers. Recently we were putting up Christmas lights at Erica's, and golly, it would have been handy to have an outdoor outlet. But no way till that panel was replaced.

So I, um, prodded things along a bit by calling the electrician and arranging for them to have a look and give Erica an estimate.[1] I talked to the electrician Thursday; they showed up Friday morning to scope out the job. It took the guy just a few minutes to render judgement. To reinforce our already bad opinion of the old panel, he noted that the breakers in those boxes also sometimes fail to trip. Jeez, a fire just waiting to happen.

[more]

Wash machine repair

Thu, 09 Oct 2003 09:59:51 GMT

Scheduled repair today on my not-quite-broken wash machine. Sometime "between 7 and 12." I'm at my desk at home and around 9:00 get up to make some coffee. Hey, there's the Sears truck! Dogs go outside and I meet Mr. Sears at the door. Oh, hello. He's a drinker. He brings in ... a laptop.

I describe the problem -- the machine works, but it will only fill about 1/3 full -- and he says "bad water level switch." Sounds reasonable. On the front of the machine is a switch that says Extra Small - Small - Medium - Large - Extra Large. He sets it to Extra Small and starts the washer. We watch it fill 1/4 full. He switches it to Small. Another inch. Medium, another inch. ("That doesn't look like a medium load to me," he says.) All the way through Extra Large, and still not very full.

He unscrews the panel and contorts himself to read the part number on the back of the switch. Then he plunks away on his laptop, which I note has a wireless connection on it. Apparently he's talking to his truck in front of my house, which has a little satellite link on the top. "Looks like I have one of those in the truck," he says. I suppose he could also have walked out and looked, but ok. The switch is connected to a plastic tube that runs down into the guts of the machine. Apparently water pressure causes the air pressure in the tube to rise, which in turn is read by the switch. I theorize that the problem is in fact that the bottom of the tube is blocked by a piece of Friskies Ocean Fish Flavor, but he doesn't think so.

[more]

Motivation

Thu, 09 Oct 2003 00:11:19 GMT

What would motivate a person to mop their laundry room floor? Let's see ...

Hasn't been done in a long time?
No.

Dog hair in the corners and rings underneath the doggies' water bowls?
Nope.

Muddy footprints and some sort of dried-up spill?
Nuh-uh.

Sears guy coming tomorrow morning to look at the wash machine?
Bingo.

Rearranging the computers

Sat, 27 Sep 2003 13:16:36 GMT

One of today's chores: rearrange my office a bit to, among other things, consolidate all the computers in one place and get rid of some clutter. Basically, I take the whole system down and remove all the wires and cords so that I can start my configuration over.

While I've got things all dismantled, I decide that I should pop the covers of the boxes and vacuum out the innards. It's unbelievable how filthy it gets inside a computer (although perhaps not quite so unbelieveable around here, given how many animals I have). For that matter, it's unbelievable that computers continue to function under such a cover a dust on all their components.

After rearranging everything and re-hooking things up, time to bring the whole system back online. Everything works great except that I cannot get mikepope.com to work. Localhost works fine on the server. Hmmm. Hmmm.

Aha ... router and modem were down. I do a quick ipconfig and discover, sure enough, the server has been assigned a new IP address in the NAT config. So I need to go into router config and change port 80 forwarding to the new IP. That done, everything works again. Sheesh, there's a lot to keep track about just for moving my boxes around.

Old paint

Sat, 27 Sep 2003 11:19:03 GMT

A somewhat delayed task from my garage cleanout was that I had some old cans of paint to deal with. This is paint left over from the previous owner, for the most part, and no good to me. I'm already on my second color since this paint was last used.

The city is strict about throwing paint and such into the garbage. However, they do offer a household hazardous waste service where you can drop off toxic substances at a facility next to the transfer station aka dump. The problem, and the reason it's taken me so long to get around to this errand, is that the HHW facility is open only from 10-4 Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. So basically Saturdays, and holy cow, you don't want to get to the transfer station late on a nice Saturday unless you have a lot of time to stand in line.

We went first thing this morning. One surprise is that although you pay to dump garbage, HHW is free. Odd, but hey, so much the better for me. Perhaps one reason is that they actually reuse some of the substances you drop off. For example, paint. We talked briefly to the guy who took our 10 or so cans. They sort the paint into oil and latex, good latex and bad latex, and then more-or-less by color. Then they blend the paint and filter it into five-gallon buckets. Finally, they deliver it to some separate location where the paint is just given away for free to anyone who wants it. If you want paint and aren't choosy about color, it would be quite a bargain.

The Inadvertent Gardener

Sun, 14 Sep 2003 14:44:18 GMT

I'm not much of a gardener -- my interest in gardening mostly centers around power tools, I suppose, such as the lawnmower. But I do keep a compost heap. I don't really use it to make compost for the garden (see previous sentence), but it has come in handy when, for example, Erica does some work in my flower beds. It also just seems a shame to throw away garbage that has some potential for reuse. Even if I won't necessarily use the compost, I know that there are a bunch of happy worms toward the bottom of the heap.

Given all this, I don't disturb my pile much. Serious composters turn their piles frequently and aerate them and water them and such. I subscribe instead to the theory that eventually the stuff will turn into compost. It just might take a couple years. Or more.

Today I went to throw some more table scraps on top of the heap and noticed again that there were plants growing out of the pile.

It's not unusual to see weeds growing out of the super-rich soil. This plant did not look weedy, though. I thought it might be a tomato, but a closer look made it clear that I had a pepper plant growing. Every weekend we make tacos and some salsa cruda to go with them, and the remnants of the chopped-up jalapeños have apparently taken root, literally. In fact, the plant has been growing so long and so vigorously that it even has fruit:

It seems a shame to rip out a plant that has done so much better than my other attempts to ever grow edibles. Perhaps I'll see about transplanting it to a container. I doubt the plant would be much happier than where it is now, though.

More deck sanding

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 22:51:27 GMT

Since my last deck beautification effort came out so well, I thought I'd carry on. The stairs leading down to the yard were just as weathered as the railings had been:

So I sanded them:

and re-stained them:

using the full complement of sanding equipment I've acquired. Even with belt sanders and such, I find that a sanding disk on the end of the drill is still the best all-around sanding tool. It does a good job and can get to areas that no other sander can.

Next year (unless I get ambitious this fall) I'll redo the rest of the deck part of the deck.

Be nice to be able to do this to oneself. Looking a little worn? Just sand things down a little and refinish. Heh.

Deck the ... deck

Sun, 17 Aug 2003 15:18:32 GMT

I was talking with my colleague Doug about home improvement, and he noted that last summer he'd spent way more time sprucing up his deck than he'd intended to. This made me go home and cast a critical eye on the porch-deck that's behind my office and bedroom. It's only a year old, but I could see that the areas that get the most sunlight had already started looking quite worn. The worst was the top of the railing, presumably the result of direct sunlight and standing water in the winter.

I got out my sander (an orbital number) and took a pass. It worked, but it was slow going ... the sander wasn't really the right tool. But I knew what was, so I took a little trip to Home Depot to get myself a belt sander. Predictably, there were models ranging from $35 to $250. I took the middle path with a Ryobi, a brand I trust for no particular reason.

Worked great. I sanded off the tops of the railings in 20 minutes, then used the orbital and a touch of hand sanding to get ino the areas I couldn't reach with the belt sander. Then was the real fun. I got out the can of finish and used a sponge brush to put on two coats of finish. Much better.