This is what happens when you do stuff

You may recall that I had an issue with my new floor, that it was so tight that one little spot bulged up a little.

Now that the weather has gotten a whole lot warmer, the problem is much worse as the floorboards have expanded.  We’ve now got this huge spot where the floor arches off the ground, probably an inch at the peak.  It’s ridiculous.  We have to figure out how we’re going to solve this problem.  We tried moving our furniture but then the flow of the room is disrupted and my chi has issues with the new arrangement.  (I call my eye for interior design my chi.)  (I don’t, actually.)

Other stories bleach in comparison

So some people think that a jinx, bad luck, or Poke equals undercooked ground beef.

Well.

We got up at 2 in the morning to get going on our trip, took the bus to the airport, got there in plenty of time, to find out that our plane had been struck by lightning overnight and was delayed.  We were supposed to fly out at about 6:30 am, but they projected 11 am.  After a couple of hours, they pushed it back to 1:30.  The gate attendant said, “Oh, we can put you on a different flight with a different airline!”  We went to the different airline.  The gate attendant was wrong.  We went back to the original airline.  They were now shooting for 2:00.  If they didn’t make it, we would miss the last connecting flight out of our layover airport until the next day.  We ended up leaving at about 2:15.  When we arrived we practically ran to get to our gate, which was of course nearly the opposite side of a very large airport.  We barely made it in time.  We arrived in Washington DC at about 10:30 pm, where we were put in a room with no beds.  In the biz we call it parlor slamming, where a guest has to take the parlor of a suite instead of an actual bedroom because the hotel is completely full.  Our parlor was on the first floor, overlooking a busy street.  It was noisy and the view was of a bank.

So there.

i must be a jinx

tuesday was my oldest daughter’s birthday, and she wanted to go eat out

unfortunately the restaurant she chose is closed on tuesdays, so we went last nite instead

we got there about 5 after 7

we ordered our drinks and told the waitress we needed a few minutes to look at the menu

daughter #1 (b’day girl) ordered the crawfish fettucine, son ordered the seafood platter, i ordered the blackened redfish, and daughter #2 ordered a hamburger steak, which i said we wanted not just well done, but very well done

i mention what the rest of us ordered only to show that what daughter #2 ordered should have been the easiest and fastest to prepare

it was almost 8 before we got our food (and the place was practically empty, so WTF?!?) – my food and the two oldest kiddies’ food looked fine, but little SG cut into her HB steak and…ok, if i told you it was rare i’d be less than accurate

the ground meat was RAW, i kid you not

raw ground meat covered in a burnt outside and gravy that looked like it had just been poured out of the can…kinda jelled looking, ya know? like when you’re a kid in elementary school and for some reason the cafeteria insists upon serving cranberry sauce for their thanksgiving dinner, and you can still see the rings on that nasty stuff, as it had just been dumped from the can, which we all know it had been

little SG looked sick but said she’d try it and before i could stop her she’d picked up her fork, poked at a piece of meat, then put the fork down with a sick look on her face and said no way, she couldn’t even attempt

i said hell no you won’t!

looked around and didn’t see the waitress, or a cook, or ANYBODY

so i went directly up to the front register with the food (the girl behind the counter had a somewhat nervous look on her face when i started walking up,  and i showed it to her

told her we’d waited almost an hour, and yet this was still RAW and i wanted them to fix it

so the waitress came to our table and asked if we wanted them to fix another one

well duh, my girl couldn’t just have fries for her supper

so she brings the food back to the kitchen, then walks back up to our table – she rolled her eyes and said ‘the cook said to tell you that it’s the ground meat, that sometimes some batches just don’t turn brown, but that’s not true! i told her i didn’t want to tell you that but she made me!’

i told her it wasn’t her fault, but i wanted the next one fully cooked and that daughter was allergic to spit so we’d better not find any in there

later she came back and asked if i wanted to talk to the person in charge – while i was thinking about it, she said she thought it would be a good idea, and that if i did, could i please let them know that she did tell me what they said (they didn’t believe she had) so i said ok

meantime another waitress at the next table had heard all this and she rolled her eyes too and told me that she (the cook) was always like that and always bitching at the waitresses

so finally this GINORMOUS woman (i said she looked like 2 people with one head, but daughter said she looked more like 5 people with one head) came over and asked how we were doing

um…so i told her

told her how long we’d be there (at which point she said she hadn’t looked at the time the order was put in…not the point!) and how the steak could practically have gotten up off the table and walked away on its own)

so she started with the BS about how the ground meat (cept she called it “grind” meat) sometimes doesn’t turn brown, depending on the batch, blah blah blah

nuh uh

i basically told her that was BS, that i’ve been cooking ground meat for many years, have had it in other restaurants, and not only that has that never happened but that i’d never even heard of such crap, cuz it’s not true

she kept trying to say that she was right, and i kept cutting her off and telling her she was WRONG (son was muttering under his breath at this point for me to ‘let it go’) but um, no

so right then the waitress comes back with the second steak (the rest of us were finished eating by this point, of course) so right in front of her i cut open the steak

it was cooked, so i said ‘imagine that…same batch of meat, but amazingly, this one browned!’

she didn’t say anything after that so i told her i expected to not be charged for the meal (little SG’s part, of course, not all of it) and she said she’d take it off the bill

which they did

but the night certainly did not go as expected, and it’ll be a looooong time before i ever go back there

Mmm… kibbles…

When I got out of work today and started walking to the train, the city smelled like dog food.

UPDATE:  Apparently there’s a dog food factory nearby.  How come I’ve been working here more than a year and never smelled it before?

How low can we go?

The gods of weather are a competitive bunch.  Word got out that the nigh-impossible happened:  snow fell in the warm southern lands from which I came.  Even more amazing, the snow actually accumulated and remained on the ground in snow form!  I can remember that before I left to conquer the northlands with naught but a battered sword, an extra-soft loincloth, and a six-pack of root beer, I experienced snowfall maybe a half-dozen times, but only half of those had enough to do anything with.  One year we wiped out the snow from half of the large backyard to make a snowchild about 2 feet tall.

So the local weather god sat on his golden throne and considered.  How could he show that he was truly the most powerful and jerk-like of them all?  At last he stood.  “If cold weather impressed them, I’ll give them a dose of cold they won’t forget until their children’s children are old and grey.  And even then they’ll have newspaper clippings.  Bwah-ha-ha!”

We broke the record the last two nights.  Last night it got down to 6 below.  Not 6 below freezing, 6 below zero.  The previous night?  -19.  About 50 degrees below the freezing point of water.  Now that’s just ridiculous.  Once the water freezes, the rest is just overkill.

Well done, local weather god.  You truly proved that you’re number 1.

The Chronicles of Flooria Part 3

Well, it’s done.  99% done, anyway.  Besides a bit of moulding work and paint touch-ups, it’s finished.  The angled fireplace caused some issues but surprisingly less than expected.

The only reason I took so long to show this is because I wanted to get a shot of the room during the day.  Unfortunately, I didn’t finish until dark last Sunday, then worked all week leaving before light and coming home after dark.  So, at last, Here are a couple of shots to show you how it all ended up.

The Chronicles of Flooria Part 2

Man, oh man, did the troubles continue.

We had to work around a stair entrance, then the wider living area.  Apparently things weren’t quite aligned properly, either on our floor-installation end or when the house was built.  In any case, the boards were at a slight angle and wouldn’t pop in, and once we supposedly solved that, the boards were too tight and I couldn’t fit new ones in.  One thing to be somewhat proud of is that every time we had a seemingly insurmountable problem, after a few moments of wiping my forehead and sitting dejectedly on the partial floor mumbling swear words, hands clenching in preparation to yanking out my remaining hair (mostly gone after previous home projects), my massive intellect kicked in and I somehow figured out a way to make it work.  I’m still not sure how.  It’s all kind of hazy.

Not that it’s all perfect, by any means.  We’ve got places where the laminate peeled off, places where the boards smashed too tightly into each other and aren’t level, and one weird place where the floor is slightly off the ground and feels funny when you walk on it.  I think it’s due to the issues I mentioned earlier.  Plus we keep having to shuffle the furniture around as we fill in new spots.

We’re almost done now, though.  At last.  I do have a tricky bit around the angled fireplace, but I’ll burn that bridge when I find one suitable to replace it.

The Chronicles of Flooria Part 1

So,it has begun.  And so have the Pokes.

Below is the first and usually most fun stage:  demolition.  It’s a little less fun than we hoped, though, as the carpet strip all along the edges is nailed directly into the cement foundation.  It takes some work to pry it up, especially when one doesn’t have all the tools recommended for the job.  But it’s coming along.

Now you can see that we’ve begun placing the boards.  As I tap them in, some slide back out, leaving a gap by the front door.  That’s why we stacked all the cases of flooring there, so the weight will help hold things in place.

When we’re done, the entire living and dining area will be covered.  Overall, it hasn’t been so bad, but I’m coming up to the part when I need to cut the boards length-wise to fit on the side.  Considering I’ve only got a hand circular saw, I’m not looking forward to it.

Wood you like a new floor? Aw, jeez, that’s a terrible pun.

So, if you may recall from previous posts (1, 2, 3 and 4), home improvement jobs are something I enjoy until I actually start doing them.  That didn’t keep us from starting a new project:  installing a new wood laminate floor.

Yesterday, after being dazzled by a sparkly flyer from Lowe’s, we decided to make the plunge and buy it.  We’ve been wanting to do this for a while, but never quite wanted to spend the money.  Damn you, you persuasive flyer!  We each had something we liked that the other didn’t (for assorted reasons, some financial, some purely aesthetic), but found a compromise we can both live with.  Looking at it in the store, it seemed fine, but it’s hard to say what it will look like in a real house environment.  Well, we snapped together a few boards in the living room just to see and it’s definitely going to be nice.  Amazingly, the wife and I are both off over the Thanksgiving holiday and following weekend, so that’s what we’ll be doing.

I’ll try to do like last time and show the progression.  I’ll also keep a lookout for Cookie Monster.

Lucy, you got some c’mplaining to do!

If you’ll forgive a couple of generalizations, here’s a couple of things I’ve noticed since I moved here, things that really bother me:

1.  People here like to spit.  Considering how dry the air is here, you’d think that people would want to hoard whatever moisture they’ve got.  You’d be wrong.  Instead, you can hardly walk down the street without hearing sptoo and seeing a disgusting orb of unwanted saliva flying past your peripheral vision.  At least one guy had the decency to turn the other way when he was about to spit, since at the time he was aimed squarely at my feet.  It makes me want to swear at these people, which leads to the next thing.

2.  People here like to swear.  Now, I don’t really care what sort of language people use, whether it’s Mandarin Chinese, Dutch, ancient Mayan, or foul. However, there’s a time and a place for it.  In your car yelling at the idiots who slow down abruptly to 45 to take an exit while you’re traveling 75 right behind them?  Fine.  Watching TV by yourself, screaming at the guy who can’t solve the puzzle even with all those letters?  Great.  After stubbing your toe while feeling around in the dark trying to find the door to the bathroom at 2:30 in the morning?  Wonderful, as long as you’re quiet.  But on the commuter train, with dozens of people all around, sometimes including small children, literally a foot or two away?  Shameful.  It makes me want to spit on them.