Everyday Stupidities

It was another beautiful weekend of running around goofing off one day and running around investigating home improvement supplies the next day. Nile Valley Days was still as small and charming as ever; we missed the lumberjack events and they ran out of huckleberry ice cream (and elephant ears!!), it seems, but we did watch the eggtoss and a Civil War reenactment. We spent plenty of time at this rest stop on Chinook Pass looking at native plant life and this woman using a paper plate as a visor. At one point I'd pulled over near a snowfield to get some snow to wipe off the windshield (officially the only clean spot on my car presently) when a DMC SuperCar went by... I had my camera in hand but was so astounded I forgot it was there. My wife has been insisting, despite that casino's radio ad saying they are raffling one off, that Supers are not available in the States yet, so she was rather surprised too. So from my few seconds of seeing one in action: They are cute but freaky. And by freaky, for some reason it reminded me of one of the space characters used by Freakies cereal in the 1970's. [Hi Jamie!]

Sunday was spent at Home Depot and Lowes and the home disrepair departments of Target and Fred Meyer and Kmart, though the only thing we actually bought was a light fixture at Costco ($15!). The tile place down the street will wait until next weekend, I guess, but we now have some concept of what supplies we need and how much time it will take to lay the floor (approximately five days on top of the drying time for the paint on the walls/cabinet). This ought to be fun. There are two facets of our bathroom we're not going to touch: first, we don't need to mess with the shower stall itself, though the curtain and rod will be changed and the caulk around the tub needs to be replaced (if only so my bride will stop complaining about how bad it looks; it's supposed to be clear but it's dirt-colored); second, we're not going to try to fix the window framing. Before we bought the house a previous owner had the original windows replaced with energy-efficient ones, but whomever mounted them did a horrible job -- they're straight, but there are huge chunks where the originals were dug out and rough spackle where they were filled in. We're just going to ignore that, other than applying some fresh paint over the carnage. I told you that crackheads owned the house prior to us! Taking up the linoleum should be a lot of fun, since we have no idea what's under there. We have more faith that this bathroom will have a proper subfloor, whereas our other bathroom we know for a fact (by walking on that painted!! linoleum) the entire room was done in an 18 hour nonstop span after several drags off the glass pipe. It's an adventure and we're gonna live it.

Repeating that special message for Gab:

Why hast thou forsaken me??

I remembered what I was going to say last time but have again forgotten it. :) Below is a photo I took of Mount Rainier from Enumclaw, WA on Saturday. Chinook Pass usually has a great view of the mountain but while there it was as though the mountain didn't even exist -- we were likely close to that grey band you see here. There were plenty of stupidities seen on the trip, mostly among the people at the festival, but I'll throw up photos of those here every so often. A majority of this blog entry was written while on hold to the helpdesk, since someone has scheduled only one lead from 5:30pm until 9:00pm, and that does qualify as really incredibly stupid. [Postscript: The issue I was on hold for so long about -- er, was easily solved: seems I never checked to find out whether the damn phone was even turned on. I qualify now as one of today's Stupidities!] Anyhow. Enjoy the scenery...