Home Improvement

Homeowners uniformly understand the pain of home improvement projects. Sure, they all seem like they'll be great fun, and the house will look so much better afterward, and you'll be increasing the value of your home... then someone loses a hand on a borrowed circular saw, you make three hundred trips to Lowe's and still have the wrong drill bit, and things in general start to go downhill.

I am like most men in that I like to think of myself as a DIYer (that's a "Do It Yourself-er" for the uninitiated).  What I mean is that most men like to think of themselves as someone who can handle most any task, but would rather not actually be bothered with the handling of anything more difficult than changing a light bulb (I currently have at least four burned out in our house, and will get to them when I get to them). DIY sounds great - most guys equate power tools with fire and red meat in terms of thing that elicit primal bliss. But most DIY projects are undertaken less for the masculine joy of the thing, than for the very practical reason that it's a lot cheaper to do it yourself. This  is borne out historically. The very concept of being a DIY homeowner - someone who handles all but the most arduous of home improvement and maintenance tasks themselves - is a relatively new concept. Fifty years ago, it was just called being a homeowner. If you bought a house in the fifties or sixties, it was more or less understood that you had some basic mechanical proficiency and you would be taking care of your home and wouldn't need any damn professionals to fix a leaky pipe or change out a ceiling fan. Much the same with cars "back in the day." Sure, you could take your Chevy to a mechanic, but if it was for anything less than a thrown rod, you handed in your man card with the keys. 

Our society has gotten more specialized, and as a result it is more than acceptable to pay someone whose time you value less than your own to do unpleasant tasks like painting your trim, putting up fences, or de-pooping your backyard if you have pets or free-range children (I kid you not, this service is now being advertised on the radio locally). It has become increasingly quaint to actually do significant manual tasks  around the home yourself. There is a reason for this, as I have recently discovered. "Significant manual task" is just a fancy way of saying "hard damn work." All other things being equal, I'd rather pay someone to do that kind of stuff and spend my free time playing with my kid. Or playing Mario Cart. With my kid. Who is six months old. Shut up. 

Before

Despite this recently acquired insight, the Wife and I, along with a sizable portion of our social circle, have recently completed (mostly) the single most significant home improvement project of our relatively brief home-owning life: we replaced the twenty year old carpet in our downstairs with hardwood flooring. Among other minor projects thrown into the mix just for funsies. The flooring thing has been a long time coming, but the fact that Olivia is getting closer to crawling everyday kind of forced the issue. The carpet was bad, and the fact that Auxiliary Dog had three or four dozen favorite accident spots downstairs did nothing to help matters. So it had to go.

Sans Flooring

We rolled out the padding last Friday night, after the carpet and original pad were taken up. We started the process of putting the flooring into place, but didn't get very far that night. We basically put down four rows of snap-and-lock flooring, just to get the feel for it. We were glad for that the next day. On Saturday we had a group of friends come to pitch in on the heavy lifting. With a few exceptions, actually placing the floating floor boards is a (forgive me) snap. The tongue and groove generally lock together pretty well, and you use a vinyl block and mallet to close the gaps periodically. The hard part is the constant measuring and cutting, which itself isn't so bad, except that the various tasks require you to constantly get up and down, kneel on hard surfaces, and avoid losing digits to a table saw. Over a twelve hour day, this can wear on you. I have always thought I had respect for people who do back-breaking labor for a living. I woke up Sunday sore in places I hadn't known about. Next time I will pay someone and thank him for the privilege. And yet, sore or not, the show must go on.

Thought about keeping the blue motif...

Saturday we nearly finished the installation of the floors, and I thought we were about 90% there with the whole project. We did manage to polish off the floor installation on Sunday in a matter of just a few hours. This, I thought, meant we were nearly done, with nothing left but a few hours of finishing work. Hah. Right. Finishing work is a cute little euphemism for the final 2/3 of any given project. In this case, the finishing work involved the installation of about 200 linear feet of quarter-round (shoe molding, if you prefer) and several floor transitions (thresholds or floor molding - pick you poison). The problem started with the fact that I hadn't bought any of this stuff in advance, assuming that our local home improvement warehouse would have an ample selection of everything we needed. True for the quarter-round. Not so much for the thresholds. See, being the amateur installers that we were, there were several places in our floor where the standard three-inch wide floor moldings offered by Home Depot weren't quite sufficient to cover our "creative solutions" to the more intense installation problems. We needed something wider, and it was nowhere to be found.

Table-sawing by lamplight. Brilliant.

In the meantime was the quarter-round installation. This is relatively straightforward, if a couple of assumptions hold true: (1) you are at least mildly competent with a power saw that can cut at 45 degree angles, or have a hand saw and miter box; (2) your house has straight walls; and (3) you've done everything with your install completely correct up to this point. I'd love to say one out of three ain't bad, but here I'd be lying. Needless to say I needed some guidance on this part of the project, and there was much weeping and gnashing of the teeth when it came to certain cursed corners of our home. While we are generally very happy with our house, it is obvious in a few places that this house was part of a planned development and some of the subs cut corners to move on quickly to the next house. The curved wall in our hallway wasn't all that obvious until we had to work around it. Stupid wall.

I finally found a place that sold thresholds wide enough to cover all of my half-assery. This wonderful establishment had the audacity to hold the inconvenient hours of 9-5, Monday through Friday, and be located near Williams Brice Stadium, thirty-five minutes from my house. This is only relevant because, in my frugality, I bought precisely as much threshold as I needed and promptly ruined the first piece I tried to cut. I nearly killed a friend of mine in the process, but no actual blood was spilled. I think I ended up going to this place three times, all told. And, as I've intimated, we're not really all the way done yet. 

After multiple trips to every hardware store in the midlands, and a full week of working on the "finishing" work, the project is about where I said it was after the first full day of working on it - about 90% done. But this is actually 90% done as opposed to incredibly naive assessment 90% done - the downstairs is usable again, and the floors really do look fantastic. There are more nails to countersink and putty, and one last threshold to go in once the grout sets in the bathroom (one of those other "fun" projects thrown in for good measure). All in all the experience was a good one, though I do believe that weekend projects should never last beyond the weekend in which they begin. But they always do. Stupid projects.

The (more-or-less) finished product

Shortly, Beagle and Auxiliary Dog will come back from their exile to my parents house to a home that is wholly unfamiliar, and provides them with limited traction. This, by itself, should be worth every penny. I'll try and get video.

Super Bowl Edition

In the spirit of ESPN's ten takeaways from last night's game, I've decided to offer up my own short list of takeaways for the common man - the man who, like me, is from somewhere other than Boston or NYC, prefers college football to the overpaid, over-praised divas of the NFL, and didn't really have a dog in the fight last night. This sub-par Bud commercial is for you.

1.  The commercials really seem to be going down hill.

There were a few decent offerings. The Chevy apocalypse commercial was good fun, and the lack of any sense of humor from Ford's corporate office this week only makes the commercial seem more valid. Clint Eastwood for Chrysler was powerful in a whole different way, but the Seinfeld/Leno effort to sell cars was a forced, weak effort, as evidenced by the fact that I cannot now tell you which car company they were shilling for. The E*Trade baby made his customary appearance, which was good for a laugh, but he's getting a little long in the tooth. Time for some younger blood, perhaps.

Mostly though, the commercials were just kind of blah. I'm probably the only person in America not putting the Ferris Bueller car commercial into the elite category, but Broderick just kind of mailed it in (almost as if he called in sick...how meta). The typical beer and Pepsi ads were universally forgettable. Betty White's appearance (regrettably advertising reality television) was at least worth a laugh.

2.  The halftime show was (much) better than I expected.

I heard Madonna was performing and automatically thought "meh." She's not my cup of tea on the best of days, and her best days are behind her. I thought.

I stand corrected. While her music is still not going to top my playlist, Madonna proved to me that she is still a knock-out performer capable to delivering a high quality product. The visuals were amazing, and the quality of the sound and dance was top notch. Apparently there was a "middle finger malfunction" with one of the featured artists - clearly in poor taste, but I missed it. All in all a great show. Anything would have looked good after last year's Black Eyed Peas fiasco, but Madonna took it several notches above the talent we've seen the past several years.

3.  I am not as young as I used to be.

Eating my weight in junk food at a Super Bowl party used to be no problem. Now, like staying up past midnight and trying to work the next day, it's a sure way to wreck myself. Keeping a six month old up for the game and then trying to get a normal night's sleep? Also guaranteed to start your next day off wrong.


4.  The Giants won.

Turns out there was a football game on last night too. This might seem obvious to some, but since the Patriots' receiver corp missed the memo, I thought it was worth reiterating.

Go the *&^% to sleep!

Parenthood is amazing. The show is moderately entertaining, I'm speaking here of the real deal. Having a kid - it's awesome. Those of you faithful readers without kids are undoubtedly in the phase of life where you are surrounded by people like me, high on their own blissful cloud because of the joy that comes from having a kid.

You can't stand me.

It's okay. I've been there. I know how unbearable I am. I also know that the ability to reproduce doesn't make me any better, smarter, or faster than anyone else. God knows you just have to look around once in a while to see that being a parent doesn't automatically qualify you as #winning at life. But, all other things being equal, it's pretty awesome.

Olivia is probably in the best phase of babyhood I can imagine, though undoubtedly I will say that of every phase. Right now, she is smiling and laughing all the time, babbling nonstop in her consonant-heavy language of nonsense. Undoubtedly, if we could interpret her revelations, it would just be "42" over and over again. She is rolling over, and getting close to sitting up on her own. She loves to stand and sway and cuddle, but can't yet crawl or walk away, so she's not getting into all the stuff babies eventually get into like electrical sockets and day-trading. And she's sleeping through the night.

Correction. She was sleeping through the night. We have begun to experience the dreaded dormis interruptus (not to be confused with another genus of interruptus that flows naturally from having kids).

For about three blessed months, Olivia slept through the night. 5:30 or 6:00 wake-up calls were common enough, but any new parent will tell you that this is an amazing lie-in. Especially if we actually went to bed shortly after we put her down at 9:00 or 9:30 the night before. Oh man, those were the days.

Then something changed. We don't know what, or why, but suddenly she stopped sleeping all the way through the night. She first started waking around two or three, crying or wanting to play. We assumed, because this was about the time she was mastering rolling over, that she was waking herself up with her new mobility, and it would pass. Then she started needing to be fed in the middle of the night again. After going months without a midnight feeding. She started fighting tooth and nail against being put in her crib. Lately, she just doesn't really go down at all. She sleeps fitfully for a few hours, then yells. Another hour. Another yell. Another...and another...

I do not get the full brunt of these midnight air raids. Saintly Wife sees to her at night so I have an outside chance of functioning at work (I really am the luckiest man alive, and I know it). But even so, it is taking its toll on both of us. I'm getting paler, and sunlight really irritates me. Also, I've noticed that I'm starting to sparkle sometimes, and no longer think Stephanie Meyer was just writing to pay the rent. Something is truly off about me.

Parenthood really is awesome. But if you can get a robot nanny to get your kid through the night for the first year or so, definitely jump all over that. You'll all be better for it.

Weekend Edition: Primary Day

I detest politics and political discussion, and I'm not about to use my blog as a stump for any political ideology. I have enough to be getting on with on spiritual, parenting, and geek ideologies.

But today is primary day here in South Carolina, and suffice it to say, I am not impressed with any current candidate for political office, or any current incumbent politician, which doesn't give me warm fuzzies about the immediate future of our state and country.

Despite that, I do believe voting is important. If you don't vote, you have absolutely no right to gripe about the condition of our country. I value my right to gripe, so I am voting.

Just not necessarily for anyone with a shot of winning....

Please vote.

Musings upon my imminent deterioration (happy birthday...to....me)

"Thirty is just a number," he said, weeping openly into his scotch glass.

No, seriously, thirty is just a number. As ages go, it's one day older than twenty-nine.

Most of the people I thought of as "old" when I was "young" still consider thirty to be quite a youthful age.

But then, they've aged a lot since then.

If it's not clear to you yet, I've just turned thirty. Despite my rather morbid title, I really haven't been terribly bothered by the "milestone" birthday. Maybe it hasn't sunk in yet. Maybe the fact that my daughter's birthday present to me was to decide depriving me of her presence at 2 a.m. was unacceptable, and I was too tired to care about turning thirty. But the fact is, thirty really doesn't feel that much different from twenty-nine. Twenty-two? Yeah, a little different. Sixteen? Sure, lots more energy back then. Three months old? I only vaguely remember, but I'll take it as a given that there's a difference. But the subjective difference between twenty-nine and thirty is negligible.

And I find that rather odd.

See, in the back of my mind, I always sort of pictured thirty-somethings as... well... adult. Twenty-somethings are party-animals, drunks, spendthrifts, and dreamers with no real prospects. You know - college students. Thirty, though, was supposed to be the beginning of adulthood. I don't know why I assigned such significance to this number. Probably as an excuse to enjoy my twenties more. But, as stated previously, I don't really feel any different.

I don't think I expected to magically have all the answers by virtue of seniority, but back in the dark ages of my adolescence, I sort of thought that one day I'd stop having to wing it. That maybe I'd get the important stuff down. And yet, here I am. No different than I was a week ago, except that I need to shave.

By any objective measure I can think of, I'm about as adult as you can get. I've got a wife, a baby, a job, a mortgage, one and a half dogs, and Cat. I commute and listen to NPR because the rock station plays the crap today's kids listen to. And it is crap. I work behind a desk, and mostly enjoy what I do. I get excited about home improvement projects and ask for practical Christmas presents. I go to happy hours out of professional obligation, and leave by seven so I am home to see my baby girl before she has to go to bed.

And yet, most of the time, I still feel like a kid dressing up in his dad's suit. (I'm speaking metaphorically here, but as it happens my closet is about half hand-me-downs from my dad. Just FYI. That's how I roll.) I don't have all, or even a big fraction of the answers. I can't even manage most of the simple stuff on my own - stains are my nemesis, and my wife has to throw out my old  underwear to keep me from wearing stuff that has worn down to nothing but elastic bands. As excited as I get about home improvement projects, I am very fortunate I have not burned down our house. Not kidding. I'm really just kind of faking it through this whole "adult" phase until I start to get a handle on things.

Thirty hasn't changed much in that regard. But I suppose not having all the answers keeps life from getting dull. Like the old proverb says, "May you live in interesting times." I know I do.

Ghost of Christmas Past

Christmas is a time for making memories and, as you get older, for elevating and embellishing the older memories far beyond the quality of the original experience. Many people tend to think that Christmas used to be way better than it is today. Maybe, but I think Christmas is pretty much the same today as it has been since post-WWII - same movies (except for those starring Chevy Chase and Tim Allen), same songs (except for the one Mariah Carey sings), and let's face it, there hasn't been much innovation on the decorations front in that amount of time either. A friend recently joked that Christmas is the time of year when we try and replicate the Christmas experience of the Baby Boomers' childhood. It's kind of true - there's not much support for the idea that Christmas 100 years ago looked much like it does today. Tradition isn't much more than something you can get two generations in a row to do more than once in a lifetime.

None of that diminishes the fondness with which I hold many of my Christmas time memories. I'm just a bit of a realist and recognize that childhood memories (mine, at least) tend to get exaggerated over time. So while my fondest Christmas memories (and I think those of most people) tend to be the oldest, I really think Christmas is pretty awesome today as well.

I say all this only as an unnecessarily long preface to a few reminiscences of Christmases past. I'd like to share them in the hopes that you might have some similar experiences to share, or at least some pleasant memories of your own to enjoy.

Christmas as a kid usually meant lots of time with my grandmother. My mom's mom lived nearby, and would usually stay with us over the holidays, and keep us kids while school was out. My dad's parents lived further away, and while we usually saw them for a short visit over the holidays, I had nothing like the same degree of time spent with them. Gramma's presence, as with most grandparents, meant we were spoiled rotten. Among other things, this meant anything we wanted for breakfast was fair game. I could probably have asked for lobster thermidor and she'd have found a way to do it, but invariably I asked for nothing but french toast for breakfast for the whole of Christmas break. We also had a seemingly endless supply of "Gramma cookies" - homemade sugar cookies cut into Christmas shapes and sprinkled in red or green. For a special treat, we'd get an occasional pan of homemade cinnamon rolls which made Cinnabon look like the mass-produced, overly-sugared lumps that they truly are. Really, it's kind of no wonder I was a chubby kid. Food is awesome, and the homemade variety doubly so.

We didn't have many huge traditions. I don't recall caroling as a family, no big Christmas letters or Christmas cards with pictures of the kids in their Sunday best (I fought tooth and nail against my Sunday best on Sunday, let alone on other occasions), and we didn't have elaborate light displays on the house a la the Griswold's. We had a tree, of course, and in later years we had a small secondary fake tree set aside specifically for mine and my dad's Star Trek and Star Wars ornaments. The Death Star v. Borg Cube debate raged even then in the midst of an artificial evergreen microverse, complete with lightsaber sound effects and Spock hailing the Enterprise with "Happy Holidays" from the shuttlecraft Galileo. But I digress.

In the weeks before Christmas, it was traditional for me to take every opportunity to snoop for my gifts in every nook and cranny of our house. My parents weren't stupid, however, and either used a hiding place I couldn't access without being noticed (like the pull down attic) or kept all of our gifts at Dad's office until they were wrapped. I usually only managed to discover wrapped gifts, and wasn't quite bold enough to attempt the unwrap/rewrap game. Only once did I manage to discover what I was getting ahead of the big day, and that was through no particular cleverness on my part - an instruction manual was left out from where my parents had the foresight to test and make sure my present actually worked. Unfortunately, I made the discovery in plain view of my parents, which nearly cost me the present. Now that I am a parent myself, I finally understand what got them so upset. Not so much the spoiling of their big surprise as the sheer stupidity I showed in asking "what's this?" when the perfectly obvious answer was "it's the instruction manual to the gift you've begged and wheedled for over the past six months." They were undoubtedly furious that they had wasted so much effort over the preceding years on a high-achieving moron. If Olivia demonstrated that lack of subtlety, I'd probably ask whether she needed to be held back a grade.

At some point every year I recall hearing the Charlie Brown Christmas Special on in the background. The Grinch, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Clay Lump, and even the rather forgettable Garfield Christmas special made occasional appearances as well. I don't recall seeing any of the "classic" Christmas movies like "It's a Wonderful Life," or "Miracle on 34th Street" until I was much older, but "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" and "A Christmas Story" did get some occasional play. Growing up in South Carolina, Christmas very rarely meant snow, but on the few occasions where we got some December flakes we took full advantage, sticking a carrot in an 18-inch pile of dirty ice and calling it "Frosty."

We went to Christmas Eve services at church every year. I enjoyed that more than most church services as a kid because they let me, yes, me, play with fire. Well, a candle. Christmas morning usually involved me sneaking in to the living room as early as possible to spy out whatever Santa had brought (Santa's gifts were traditionally left unwrapped). There was no explicit rule about waking the parents up - just the general understanding that if you wanted to enjoy your Christmas presents at all, you would let them lie abed until the unreasonable hour of six a.m. or so. I do fondly remember the Christmas I received a Sega Genesis (I was not an SNES kid, and we can debate their relative merits in another post), which had quite kindly been hooked up for me in advance. I'm not sure how early I got up to snoop on my presents that morning, but I'm fairly confident it was in those wee hours that blur the lines between "too late" and "too early." In any event, I had not been playing terribly long when my dad came stumbling in, sleep-blind and in desperate need of coffee, five more hours sleep, or both. Rather than sending me back to bed though, he sat down, and we took turns running Sonic the Hedgehog off of cliffs.

My dad had as much talent for the Sega's three button controller as I have for the 60-button fiascos that come with modern consoles. But we had a blast. I did anyway, and he at least humored me.

There are lots of other good memories I could share - Lights at the Zoo, listening to Christmas music on the radio until you wanted to puke, the elaborate nativity scenes of some of our neighbors, and Monopoly-based brawls with cousins while visiting family out of town. This last was not so much a Christmas specific memory as a fact of every family gathering between the ages of 6-12, when someone had the clever idea to ship the Monopoly board to Jimmy Hoffa. There were some rough Christmases too, of course, like the year Gramma passed away, along with several other beloved family members. There was the Christmas Eve in college where I very nearly totaled my truck on the way home from Columbia. Still, no one was hurt, and the honey-baked ham in my floorboards was unscathed. Vehicles can be replaced, but those hams are expensive. There have been some pretty incredible Christmases in more recent years too, like five years ago when Christmas came a mere five days before the Fiancee became the Wife. That was a great year, and a great celebration.

Now come the memories we get to make as parents. Our perspective on Christmas over the next few years will undoubtedly be world's apart from the perspective Olivia will have, (for starters, our perspective is about five feet further from the ground) but I look forward to helping shape her memories and experiences of  this time of year, and creating some traditions of our own.

We have already decided to nix the egg-nog gallon challenge, and I'd recommend you do the same.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Christmas - the least interesting title possible for a blog post about Christmas

Saying "Christmas is my favorite time of year"  in a crowded room in America is akin to saying "No way! You're a fan of eating and breathing, too!?" There are certainly grinches, scrooges, and those who object to the holiday on religious, philosophical, or moral grounds. They are wrong, of course, but they are out there, and are part of the reason why Wal-Mart greeters will generally only give you the generic "Happy Holidays" as you flee a hoard of ravening Black Friday shoppers.

Even when you love the season, it's easy to get cynical about certain aspects of it. Materialism is at a peak between Thanksgiving and New Years, and it's easy to get a little grouchy when you have to sit in traffic moving at the approximate speed of a glacier on a Saturday afternoon because everyone else lacks the good sense to Christmas shop on Amazon.com. Not that I'd know firsthand. There's also the fact that the primary message of the season tends to get lost in the "traditional" Christmas shows and movies. Christmas is fundamentally a Christian celebration that has been all but completely secularized. Yes, I am aware that before it was a Christian holiday, December 25 (more likely the 21st) was the pagan celebration of the winter solstice, later Saturnalia, that it was chosen for convenience by the first Holy Roman Emperor, and that in all probability, Jesus was born sometime around April. So? I suppose I should also acknowledge that there is only marginal biblical authority for the existence of the Easter Bunny. So what? I'm making a point here.

Despite the many aspects of the season there are to be cynical about, most people who grew up in the U.S. have pretty fond memories of Christmas (because, despite what Occupy would have us believe, the poorest U.S. Citizen is still in the 1% of the rest of the world). With a few notable exceptions, most of my own best memories of Christmas have little or nothing to do with the gifts I received. They have more to do with the people I spent the holidays with, the traditions we observed (sometimes unwillingly), and, inevitably, the food. Based on common wisdom and a complete lack of personal research, I know that the sense of smell is  the most prominent memory trigger we have, so it's really know wonder we develop strong memories of Christmas and Thanksgiving, when we are surrounded by scents and tastes that we might not have any other time of the year.

As time goes on, my memories of Christmas actually seem to get stronger (probably more exaggerated), while my enjoyment of the season itself .... I suppose the best word for it is "matures." I remember as a kid experiencing this overwhelming anticipation for the day itself. Christmas Eve had me wound tighter than a guitar string. Christmas Day was an explosion of gift wrap and boxes, and flurried visits with cousins to compare loot, and finally, the inevitable crash. Not like a let-down crash, more like a kid coming down off a sugar high (which more often than not ran parallel to the Christmas adrenaline). You enjoyed your gifts and started counting down for the next year, which never seemed to come.

These days my experience of Christmas is a lot more sedate. I find myself more and more often asking for "practical" presents and finding myself overjoyed with them. Christmas doesn't seem to take anytime at all to get here, but the  enjoyment of it seems to start a lot earlier - maybe because the family has grown, and our get-togethers have started spanning the entire month. The gifts are nice, but the gatherings, the food, the planning, the parties, the cards, the songs, and the general feeling of the season ... none of these have to wait for a date on the calendar. Neither do the gifts in point of fact, but the Wife still won't let me open any.

I am overjoyed that my Christmas experience will now include building traditions and memories for our little girl. I know - this year she's a touch young to actually retain anything, but it will come. I can't wait to enjoy watching her ever-growing anticipation, helping her decorate the tree, singing hymns with her at Christmas Eve services, and holding the ever-present threat of Santa over her head for her obedience and cooperation (though I draw the line at that creepy Elf on a Shelf).  

I hope to share some of my best Christmas memories with you in another post in the near future, but for now I'll just say that I hope you and yours are enjoying the Christmas Season. Watch a bad clay-mation movie with a fire in your fireplace and apple cider or eggnog in your mug. Kiss your wife under the mistletoe. Put reindeer antlers on your dog and take bets on how long they last. Mostly, have a Merry Christmas.