Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
As I type this, I'm sitting on a ferry
It's been an eventful week. I haven't posted much because I've been doing so much. Let's catch up.
Monday and Tuesday were spent working on the house, primarily getting trim sorted out. I had it cut to fit by Saturday, but couldn't get to the store to buy the stain until Monday. That was fine, since Sunday was the day I applied the pre-treatment (Benite) to the wood, getting it ready for stain, and it needed a day to dry. Monday saw the stain all trimmed, and Tuesday saw it all installed. Installing baseboard trim isn't as difficult as I would have thought, but I definitely took shortcuts -- for instance, I really should have shaved the trim so it matched all the waves and whoop-de-doos in the floor... Ah well, it still looks a whole lot better than it did.
Wednesday was the really notable day. I had this great plan in mind: I would ride up on the motorcycle (I'd been bicycling previously), so I'd have my riding gear with me, and I'd take the sidecar rig out for a ride. So I got myself all dressed up for motorcycling, and went out to the bike. Set my stuff down, and started to get ready, when I noticed a glob of something on the ignition switch. "What's that? Caulk?" I thought to myself, apparently having home-repair materials on the brain. On closer inspection, I realized that no, it wasn't caulk, it was mangled metal. Yep, someone tried to steal my bike using the old standard "hammer and screwdriver" method. It still doesn't work. I swore under my breath and tried my key. No go.
After some investigation, it turns out that they mangled the first wafer of the lock, which completely prevents the key from going in, or the lock from ever turning again. This is a bad thing in two ways. First, and most obviously, it means the bike is unrideable. Secondly, and less obviously, the forks were locked (the ignition switch drops a pin into the frame, which prevents the handlebars from turning); this was good in that it prevented the idiot with the screwdriver from simply rolling the bike away, but bad in the sense that fixing the busted lock is considerably more complicated when the forks are locked. It looks like I can plan on spending about 4 hours on the job, once the new lock comes in....
Wednesday, however, continued pretty well. I grumpily changed out of my motorcycling gear and got out my bicycle. The ride up to the house was no more difficult than it ever is, so at least that wasn't a big deal. Once there, I finally tackled the job I should have finished in 2004: installing under-cabinet lights in the kitchen. It ended up taking all day, but I got a late start. When I was done, it was a beautiful thing to finally see that second switch, which had so long sat idle, flip on those lights. It's not quite the perfect system I might have wished for, but it works pretty well -- mostly, I decided against putting lights over the sink, which had been part of the original goal.
If you check your calendar, you'll see that Wednesday was the 4th. Of July. So, naturally (weather permitting), I wanted to go flying. As I mentioned previously, I did go flying, and we had a great time. Kristin and I went up by ourselves, despite invitations to a few other people to join us. Ah well, it was a lot of fun, and I like flying the little Cessna 152 better than the bigger 172s. We brought along the video camera, and Kristin shot 50 minutes of footage, including my atrocious landing. I clearly need to practice night landings. Scroll down to see a link to that video.
Thursday dawned well enough, my mood having been lifted by the success with the under-cabinet lights and the good flight the night before. I bicycled up to the house (still grumbling under my breath that now I was bicycling because I had no other choice), and got to work. The big event for Thursday was taking some trash up to the dump. In particular, that awful latticework under the deck had to go.
I had tried to arrange a truck for a dump run, but my friends with trucks have stopped paying attention to voicemail and never answer their phones, so I decided I'd better just do it myself. I laid out one of the canvas dropcloths from painting in the back of the minivan. Floor successfully covered, I started loading in chunks of lattice, which had largely disintegrated as I pulled it off. In the end, I probably had 500 lbs of lattice, and other junk I've been meaning to throw away forever. There was a tremendous line at the dump, and it ended up taking 20 minutes to get in once I'd arrived. Fortunately, that line was keeping people from actually getting in and dumping, so once I got in, I was quickly done.
Thursday night culminated in downloading the video from the 4th, and cutting it up for YouTube.
Friday was the Day of Paint. I had one coat left to do in the bathroom, and three coats to do in the stairway down to the basement. It took me a long time to decide to do the stairway, since I was really quite sick of painting. However, the walls in there were pretty awful -- not only ugly stucco, but with mysteriously unpainted sections, and lots of crayon marks and other violence from previous residents. So, pretty much all I did on Friday was paint.
The other, non-house thing I did, was to cart my motorcycle gear up to the house, so I could ride the sidecar rig. I caught the 5:30 ferry, and finally met Kristin's brother Paul, who recently returned to the land of the living after a years-long drug binge, living homeless in Hawaii. He seems to have recovered quite well, and the sober lifestyle is sticking. It was pleasing to finally meet him; I've heard lots of stories from when Kristin was younger.
Which brings me to now, riding the ferry back to Seattle. Today will be a day full of paint and little jobs, I suspect. The stairway needs its last coat of paint, and there are a ton of little things which need to be done. But, and this is important to me, the stairway painting is the last "big" job I have to do on the house. Everything else is little stuff, which can be successfully completed in an evening, if necessary (meaning I don't need to take more days off to do them). Something like painting or dealing with trim can be tried in an evening, but it'll either be very long, or necessitate cutting it off half-way done to come back the next night. I'm glad I'll be past that point.
But now the boat is pulling into Seattle, and I'd best get my helmet on and get ready to go. Here's to progress!
Posted at 23:37 permanent link category: /misc
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater