Everyday Stupidities

Hey there. We'll start off with an amusing picture, this being a screen capture from the website of an auto dealership in Brazil. You can say that four-letter word out loud and proudly because it's the family name of the owners. In these parts, it'd be hard for someone with that name to get through twelve years of public school. (I wonder about one of my mother's classmates, Janice Boob. Everyone I've ever known agreed that one of our college classmates, Rodney Schmoe, was a schmoe and so much more... "Rodney Shmuck" is what people called him behind his back. And then there's the Seattle Mariners closing pitcher JJ Putz, who pronounces his name with an "oo" sound, like "pootz".) Anyhow. Maybe you wondered how the kitchen remodel is going. Yup, it's going. Below is a photo taken a few minutes ago as an update: the cabinet and cupboard doors are back up with new hardware, and the painting o' the green (color = "field of pines") has begun.

At the moment I'm sort of in an odd place in my head. It's all juxtaposition. I'd been talking frequently with someone on Flickr that lives in Houston whose last email said, "if I get quiet for a few days it's because of Hurricane Ike, which I figure will pass by us in the night." Well, apparently it didn't just pass by, and so I haven't seen hide nor hair of her since she was blithely going to bed. Then there's the local who keeps talking about wanting to meet me, have chai (neither of us drink coffee), and get her moved into a new place. Well, I was busy on moving day and she won't commit to a day and time (I've suggested a couple, she's said they sounded good but that's it) to get together, so at this rate I'm figuring that it's all talk. I got email from my bestie Chrome, who says he's hating himself and the world around him but school starting for him next week should snap him out of that, and once he's done... hmm, moving in with his half-brother in Branson, MO? I have not devised an opinion about how I feel about that yet. But I think the thing that has me a little imbalanced is when I met up with my favorite cowgirl, Karen, at the Fair for a little while ("I'd love to hang out with you and talk," she said when I first stepped up to her, "but I have to go to something at the top of the hill in a little while"... and I'm not planning to go back to the Fair this year) and without much information or prompt she said "I'm worried about you" and basically said a few things that I'd been thinking which I didn't believe anyone could know, and I wish we'd had the time to hash that discussion out fully. But hey, a couple people I'd lost touch with months or years ago have resurfaced so I have some blossoms to pick as the present flowers fade.

And now, a few words on the progress of the kitchen and of course something stupid found along the way. Click the picture to make it big. A few comments to make about this snapshot: a) The white thing at the right is where I patched the hole where the phone jack was... I wired this back out the side of the house, into the attic, and ten feet to the inside wall behind where I was standing to take this picture, so the phone will be on a little desk by the refrigerator. I sprayed on a little texture so the patching and damage to the wall from what had been there before won't be so obvious. b) Yes, that's the color we're doing the kitchen. We'd originally bought a lighter green, which turned out to be too light, so we are using it as primer to cover the nicotine-ish yellow [original kitchen color] and sunny yellow and flaky white [what the Crackheads™ painted it in the 1990's]. There's only one coat of this darker green up presently and it's not everywhere, so what you see here is by no means 'done'. c) The ceramic outlet covers with nickel framing are on order from MyKnobs.com -- I thought we could save some time by ordering online, since it was going to be two weeks before any Lowe's in the entire Puget Sound area are going to get another shipment (seriously, their computer says they're available in Bremerton and North Lacey), but it's going to take a couple weeks that way too. And now, for that stupidity... The trouble is not so much that when we took the doors off the cabinets we didn't mark them somehow to say where they'd come from. It's also not that in January my wife bought new hinges, but didn't look at the old hinges first to see what style the doors require (there's a 1/4" inner ledge on the doors, so the new hinges have to have this right-angle bend to compensate for that) so we had to find a way to exchange them nine months later. The stupid thing is that when putting the doors back on, they don't friggin' fit. Okay, that and the fact that several of them are a bit warped so don't close right, but seriously, I'm securing the hinges on the frames and the doors are overlapping yet snugged into their places on the hinge sides. So far as I can tell, the previous folks who put the doors up in 1959 must have pushed and pulled on the doors to bend the old hinges enough to where the doors would close. (The Crackheads™ left them up and painted over all the hardware.) I've done a little of that manipulation, a fact I'm not proud of, plus on a couple of them pulled out the tools and planed or sawed a fraction of an inch off the meeting sides. I'm standing there shouting "why the hell aren't they the right size? they were up, right here, and worked fine previously!" as I try to hang the doors on the cupboard which houses the spices and cereal. They always make mounting cabinet doors look so effortless on TV...