Monthly Archives: June 2015

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Measuring success. In a meeting it was casually mentioned that exceeding the standard wouldn’t be hard at all if we just changed the way the standard was measured. Well sure. As long as no one cares what something actually is, a perfectly acceptable description of it is “not my bathtub.” It’s technically correct but doesn’t tell you a damned thing about what the object actually is or how well it’s performing. The fact that there were a lot of allegedly smart people in the room who all nodded their heads in agreement of this asshattery leaves me so very little doubt about why this country is so utterly jacked up.

2. Walkers. The old woman who walked out from between two parked trucks on a one way street at 5PM without even looking in my direction (i.e. the direction from which traffic was coming) clearly has a death wish. I know this because she flipped me off and then yelled that I almost hit her. I hope I at least taught that wrinkled bitch a few new words. Fortunately for all of us I was more interested in getting home than jumping out of the truck and pummeling the Crypt Keeper with a tire iron.

3. Nest. It’s trying to be helpful. Maybe most people don’t notice the difference a single degree of temperature makes, but I do. Yes, my automated friend, I can feel the difference between 70 and 71. If I wanted 71 that’s the temperature I would have set. I appreciate that you’re doing your level best to save me money while keeping the house reasonably cool, but what I really need you to do is just go to the temperature I told you to go to and stay there until you receive further guidance. I’m fine with compromise, but not when it comes to comfort – and especially not when the cost is about $.37 a month.

The must haves…

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Because I like lists and I’m feeling much more lazy than usual this evening, you’re getting a brief glimpse into the things I’m thinking about while I’m laying out my ideas for the back yard. Since they’re going to be shoving around a respectable amount of dirt I thought it would be helpful to go ahead and spell out exactly what I’m expecting out of this little project – especially since I’m looking for bids from three or four different companies. It’s only fair that I evaluate them using the same basic list of must haves versus wants. It’s certainly helped clarify my own goals… especially since I haven’t started assigning a dollar value to anything yet.

So far, the list looks a little like this:

Must haves:
1. Re-grade yard to drain away from house in the garage/porch area – add piped drainage if sufficient negative slope can’t be achieved
2. Remove mulched bed around a/c condenser – replace with sod/grass. Note this is a future zone for placing a backup generator so finish will need to support eventual placement of poured concrete pad
3. Remove boxwood shrubs at back porch steps, transplant to empty bed in front of house if feasible
4. Remove and dispose of “sticker bush” shrub at rear of house
5. Reinstall/replace sidewalk in existing area – all hardscape to be flush with surrounding ground/crossable with riding mower

Nice to haves:
1. Hardscape patio in current location of step down from porch – approximately same size as existing porch
2. Ramp/shallow steps from porch to ground level
3. Cut and haul away pine tree nearest house in front yard
4. Install privacy screen/surround for a/c condenser unit and similar screen for trash and recycling containers

The must have list is the bare minimum that’s going to have to be done regardless of cost… the rest, well, I’ll stretch the budget to allow for as many of them as possible… if there’s any budget left once the main effort is accounted for that is.

I’ll get to it when I get to it…

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Sunday afternoon I spent a not insignificant amount of time shoveling mulch off the sidewalk and driveway and back into it’s rightful place around the front flower beds. With a little raking it looked reasonably presentable and not at all like last weekend’s rain had washed a goodly portion of it into places it had no business being. It stayed there for approximately 30 hours before last night’s torrential rain promptly washed even more of it down the driveway and out into the street.

Sigh. I won’t even start on the volume of water laying against the back side of the house, ever willing to probe for a weak spot in the masonry. Funny how that sort of thing didn’t bother me when it was someone else’s foundation soaking for hours at a time. Paranoia is possibly one of the joys of home ownership.

The good news is I think we’ll start to have some of those issues addressed this weekend – with a little gutter cleaning to help resolve the issues out front and hopefully enough time to get some risers under the air condenser. As next week marches on, I’m getting some initial estimates from landscaping companies on reworking the drainage and slope of the back yard… and maybe a few other little projects that would be awfully easy to deal with while they have a bobcat running around the premises.

The thing that’s constantly surprising me about this house is that the little stuff is squared away… which only leaves the big things to do when time and funding allow. It’s safe to say that the master bathroom renovation budget is officially busted and that project is now on the “I’ll get to it when I get to it” list. That one hurt a bit, but the part of my head ruled by logic and reason tells me the mechanicals and drainage systems aren’t working right, all the other projects are purely academic.

Yep. The joy of home ownership indeed.

There are worse things…

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Sunday is usually my lead off post for the week. It helps set the tone for what’s to come. Believe it or not I tend to put a lot of thought into what shows up on Sundays… Not that you’d know it based on what’s showing up here tonight. I’ll blame that mostly on spending a large portion of today thinking it was Saturday. You can imagine my grave annoyance when, around 4PM it occurred to me that it’s actually Sunday – and all the baggage that goes along with it.

As happy as I am that Game of Thrones is less than two hours away, I’m all too aware that it’s the big huzzah before Monday comes along and sucks all the joy out of life. It wont be as bad as all that, of course, but still I’d be more than happy to roll back the clock and have a bit of extra time. Since that’s not going to happen, I guess I’d better do my best to make the next couple of hours count.

A friend of mine sent me a text from their office this afternoon – which reminded me there are worse things than watching the end of the weekend close in… Sunday could just be one more day at the office. That’s probably good for the hard chargers among you, but as for me I’d rather be screwing around in the yard and wargaming the next home improvement project. At this stage of the game I don’t think I have it in me to give more than 40.

Come to think of it, I need to go check my Powerball numbers. This whole discussion could be purely academic.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. You drink too much coffee. So you say. That’s purely a matter of opinion, but in a world where I’m not allowed to smoke, where all food should be salt-less, carbs are off limits, red meat is the devil, and cake is a hanging offense, I don’t care what your opinion about my coffee intake is. Too much joy has been sucked out of life for me to willingly give up my all-day infusion of warm, roasted, caffeine-laden goodness. Sure, maybe it would extend my life a few years… but is it a life worth living if you’re stuck drinking nothing but water and eating nothing but sprouts and granola? Feels like a decent trade off to me, so you can go ahead and stow your objections to coffee.

2. Primary Season. Every week we seem to find a few more would-be-candidates wandering onto the field of electoral combat. I know it’s primary season here in America and that’s what happens. That doesn’t mean I have to be the least bit interested in anything they’re saying at this point. I’m an educated voter and so far all I can really tell you is there’s a brain surgeon, a socialist, a guy who wants to make us use the metric system, Hillary Clinton, and a bunch of other people whistle-stopping around the country trying to scrape up enough money to stay on the road for another few weeks. There will be more of them before the field starts to winnow – then maybe I’ll start paying a bit of attention. Until then the whole conversation – the left-on-left, right-on-left, and right-on-right hypocrisy – is just too thick to warrant giving them any serious thought.

3. Rain. I spent a lot of the last three weeks complaining that the yard needed rain and was in danger of turning into my own mini-dustbowl. I was wrong. Now that the rain has come and (mostly) gone I’ve been giving myself a crash course of rainwater diversion and storm water management. Talk about things they don’t teach you in school. Well, they don’t teach them to history majors anyway. So far, my plan of attack seems to require a combination of roofers, heavy equipment operators, landscapers, air conditioning repairmen, and possibly a general contractor, soil specialist, and hydraulic engineer. All of these are skills I could probably learn myself given an unlimited amount of time, but as things stand I’m not willing to wait that long to bring good order and discipline to the free flowing surface water that finds its way into the back yard every time more than a light mist falls.

Two months in…

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For lack of a better update, after making the first two of 360 scheduled payments the whole “new house thing” is coming along nicely (I’ll just set aside the discussion on storm water and runoff management for the moment). The boxes are almost all unpacked, with the empties being passed along for others who had use for them. A few rooms still look awfully sparse – a surprisingly nice side effect of trebling the square footage you occupy. The empty maw of the dining room was filled in with pieces that have been knocking around the family for over 100 years. The 3rd and final bedroom is an ongoing effort that has been part staging area for all the other rooms and part catch all for the things that don’t fit in anywhere else. Under other circumstances that would have been the designated home office, but in this case other more convivial locations were available.

The stacks of cardboard have even disappeared from the garage. I’ve resisted the temptation thus far to organize that space on the fly so it’s still basically controlled chaos. With the rest of the house whipped into livable shape, though, it should be long before I jump in to get tool racks hung and bring my own brand of order to everything piled onto shelves and ever available flat surface. One temperate weekend afternoon should suffice to get that effort out of the way. Like the back bedroom it’s not one of those tasks I’m chomping at the bit to dive into. Since both require some serious organizational planning, I’d like to give it some time to ferment and then do it right so I only have to do it once.

I find myself still finding out the quirks and oddities of the house. There’s nothing earth shattering, but odds and ends I wish I’d have known about when I was writing up the pre-closing “owner will repair” list. All things considered though, the place is starting to feel like a home – or my home at any rate. I look forward to being there at the end of a long day not just because it’s where my stuff is or because it’s where other people aren’t, but for reasons far more intangible.

To be honest for the first few weeks I was confronted by “oh God what did I do” more often than I thought possible. The house and its nuances were all strange to me. Everything felt not-quite-right. It’s safe to say I’m well past that initial break in period. Sure, I still want to gut the master bathroom down to the studs and replace the tragically white composite kitchen countertops with something more substantial, but I won’t feel at all strange about doing it now. It’s taken a couple of whole-house cleanings, a few weeks of cutting the grass, and a whole bunch of rearranging furniture, but it feels indisputably mine now… and that’s not bad for being just a couple of months in.

Hello Caitlyn…

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Half my friends and family are probably appalled that the olympian formerly known as Bruce Jenner is now called Caitlyn. Abomination in the eyes of God, blah, blah, blah. The other half of my friends are celebrating Caitlyn as a hero for the 21st century. Such bravery in the face of certain criticism and hate, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Color me ambivalent. Disinterested. Nonplussed. If Bruce wants to be Caitlyn, as in all things that don’t infringe on the free exercise of my liberty, I say God bless and have a good life. It’s a short one – far too short to go about wringing your hands and gnashing your teeth because someone somewhere doesn’t live their lives the way you think they should.

Don’t like pornography? Don’t look at it. Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t have one. Don’t like booze? Don’t drink. Don’t like the way someone is talking to God? Don’t listen. Don’t like that Caitlyn Jenner is on the cover of a magazine? Don’t look. No one is forcing a damned thing down your throat. You’re free to take it or leave it – but when you fixate on it, when it becomes an all consuming irritant in your life, when you want to cram everyone else on the planet into your narrow minded mold, don’t be surprised when I think you’re a crate of AK-47s away from being the damned Taliban.

Go live your life. Let other people live theirs. Put on a dress. Put on a track suit. Get out there and allow your friends and neighbors to enjoy the same freedom of conscience you expect them to give you. You’ll save yourself a lot of angst and anguish that way.

Not a sermon, just a thought.

Such fine company…

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I’m not a big birthday celebrator. I don’t need or really want a party a cake or really any kind of a deal made about it at all. Being an introvert by nature, a lot of glad-handing and forced socialization is less like a party and more of a jail sentence. I’m uncomfortable with the singing and being singled out and the (even small) spectacle of the thing. I’ve made a studied effort at learning how to be in the action without being the center of attention. It doesn’t suit me. Frankly I’d rather just get home, throw a couple of burgers on the grill, have a beer or two and call the day mission complete.

That said, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say thank you to all you crazy bastards who called, emailed, texted, tweeted, or messaged me on Facebook. It didn’t go unnoticed or unappreciated. I’ll do my best to reach out to everyone individually over the next day or two – but in the event I inadvertently miss someone, please, for the love of God, consider this a blanket statement of appreciation.

It’s immensely gratifying to have survived another year in orbit on this strange rock – and to have had the opportunity to do so in such fine company.