The dog house

There are many perks to working for a video game company...

(thanks to Kim and Ashley for this awesome montage)

I still remember waiting at reception for my first interview here, self-consciously early and over-dressed.  A little white bundle of Bichon came tumbling down the stairs with his owner in tow and I was in love.  Yes, the games are Epic.  Yes, the people are phenomenal.  Yes, I had left consulting to return to school after confronting the reality that the highest form of life I could keep alive on my 4 days out of town 3 days back routine was a guinea pig... and even that didn't turn out so smoothly after picking up corporate digs in West Village.  The day I got the offer, I asked my would-be supervisor if he could check on whether my would-be coworkers were cool with a would-be mascot.  Then I got Kai (pictured).

But over time, it became clear that the warg streak ran strong with Kai and her eventual sidekick Rho.  They were a pack.  They knew who had a seat in our open office cubes and would chase intruders (particularly those wearing hats or pushing bikes).  We discussed redoubling dog obedience efforts, perhaps enrolling them in extra classes, but the hours on call at work undermined our resolve.

To contain the pint sized predators, MacGyver outdid himself, making these super-stylish "Graymane Saloon" swinging doors.  Such an elegant solution to Klee Kai containment without forcing fellow cubemates to step over unwieldy baby gates or get tangled in tie outs.  But alas, the doors had many admirers (and concerned facilities caretakers).  After a poorly considered nip, the dogs are under Halladay House arrest.  The saloon doors are waiting for their next epic installation, next to plans for at home agility course obstacles.  GG.

By the Books

Speaking of that idyllic shot of bookshelf and comfy chair (consignment shopping for the win)...

Some of us have the gift of grok, we can disappear into a powertool encrusted cave and emerge with-- reclaimed romex wrought iron window-mirror knock off...  I am not that some of us.  I'm more like the Diablo archivist, Deckard Cain.  I surround myself with stacks of topical literature trying to triangulate on consensus and brinksmanship from myriad points of view.  As a consequence, I'm inordinately interested in friend's libraries as a mirror into their soul or breadcrumbs as to why I like them.   

In the event you find yourself more in the Cain camp, here is my current literary canon:  

*Letters of a Woman Homesteader. Stewart, Elinore Pruitt.  Collected correspondence from a widow who moves to Wyoming in 1909.  Free download from Amazon, quick read.  Holy cow were there some optimistic, git 'er done types at the turn of the century!  Makes the small complaints about lack of heat or shower seem trivial, plus better tune into the spirit of the times when Halladay broke ground.  

*The American Frugal Housewife.  Child, Lydia Maria Francis.  1832.  Housekeeping tips from pre-Halladay era.  Free download on Amazon.  You won't recognize half of the inputs, so these aren't actionable recipes, but the spirit of frugality and industriousness is strong with this one.   

*Getting Things Done.  Allen, David.  When people say I have "my sh*t together," it's largely a credit to this book.  Like most people, I've settled on a lighter weight version of the project management routines he outlines (with periodic returns to the well).

*Three Black Skirts and One Hundred everybody needs a couple pink girl power books.  Three Black Skirts was the first how to stay sane as a semi-autonomous 20-something guide.  One Hundred appealed to my compulsion to make lists and collect stuff.   

*The 4-Hour Body and The 4-Hour Work Week.  Ferriss, Timothy.  Tim is the ultimate hacker, tearing an objective down to the studs and finding the most expedient way to get there (bonus points if its also unorthodox).  The TF diet helped MacGyver and I slim down last summer while the work week helped me escape from a career that was all about optics and being first in/last out/first to respond to weekend email.  

*The Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer.  Lived up to its title (twice) and has a super accessible training schedule.  I was hoping it would have tips on speed training for an upcoming relay, but sadly, this is all about finishing and not about setting PR.  

*Making It and The Urban Homestead.  Coyne, Kelly.  Granted, she came across a bit extreme when the first chapter discussed alternatives for the toothbrush.  This was the first survey into sustainable living.  Have found myself pulling these out of the archives when looking for natural cleaning recipes to grey water capture designs.  

*Home Comforts.  Mendelson, Cheryl.  A home ec geek!  Super rare spawn!  Her book is super fun to page through sighing about how long it will be before making sure we vacuum the blinds fortnightly tops our to do list.  

*A Random Walk Down Wallstreet.  Malkiel, Burton.  Loved it, helped me to save the majority of my income to go back to school.  I still use the asset allocation suggestions he provides in the last chapter.  It was written pre-housing bubble, so he's a bit more optimistic on the ROI of home ownership vs. renting, but so are we.  

*Your Money or Your Life.  Dominguez, Joe.  Sparked the realization that to be independently wealthy needn't take the form of a trust fund and an approach for "fully loading" your hourly wage to account for costuming/elbow rubbing/decompressing.  In short, this book got me aspiring to be more of a cottage industrial.  

*The Tightwad Gazette.  Most of this is too tight for me.  Plus it's a compendium of e-zines put together before the internet was so big, so a lot of the tips aren't really the most frugal anymore.  That said, I love the concept of documenting and celebrating ways one saves money.    

*Enough.  Bogle, John.  Deeply respect this dude for coming up with the concept of index funds and making them available at Vanguard.  

*World Changing.  Found this one in a library in Oregon and loved it.  It's basically an encyclopedia of the things they think are broken in the world and what cool skunkworks projects are underway to address them.  

*Gaia's Garden.  Hemenway, Toby.  First introduction to permaculture, the concept of plant guilds, and the concept of allelopathic walnut trees that can poison everything beneath them (except agapanthus I'm desperate to uproot).  

*The Vegetable Gardener's Bible.  Smith, Edward.  Deep beds!  Cold frames?  

*Victory Garden Cookbook.  Loved the backstory about it being a supplement to a TV show encouraging folks to start victory gardens and not knowing what to do with the bounty.  That said, skews towards the sub-zone 9b crowd and some very unappealing staple veggies.  

*City Chicks.  Foreman, Patricia.  A bit misleading, her "microflock" is 20+.  This was the best book I found geared towards folks with the luxury of a yard, but the responsibility that comes with close neighbors.  Deep dive into chicken diets and how to diy.  You will have a minor in composting when you finish this book.  

*The Art of Raising a Puppy.  Monks of New Skete.  Read this on the plane from Boston to Orange County with a 4 lb bundle of joy under the seat in front of me.  Got me through the first months until Kai was old enough for puppy K and doggie day care. 

*The Whole Pet Diet.  Super helpful when Kai was having health troubles.  Turns out most of it was puppy immune system catching up and sketchy chemicals sprayed on the apartment complex lawn.  That said, we learned how to cook her chicken dinner and accidentally started eating more vegetables to get rid of her scraps.   

*The Singularity is Near.  Kurzweil, Ray.  I personally don't believe I'll live forever, but that sliver of possibility really changes the way one approaches life and the decisions one makes, eh?  

*Willpower.  Baumeister, Roy.  Partially because I love spinning through the pop lit version of the heavy duty lit review authors of theses past.  Partially because when times are tough, I'd rather believe I just need to muscle in 10,000 hours, however crappy they may be, and I too will be considered a virtuoso (see also:  Talent is Overrated)...  oh, and Baumeister offered more insight into why MacGyver is so careful to make sure my glycemic index does not drop perilously low.   

*A Pattern Language.  This group rocks.  They pull apart all of these patterns that change the way you look at architecture and space.  I was so inspired, I got MacGyver to rotate my work desk 90 degrees in order to have a more "quiet back" and feel less paranoid.  Elements of their observations are baked into every home design decision we've made, and even the meta-process of slowly revamping and prototyping, rather than gutting the house and designing it's rennovated version in a vacuum.  

*Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft.  Buckland, Raymond.  You ever have something you just couldn't bring yourself to purchase when you knew someone else would be reviewing the credit card statement.  Yeah.  Not planning to do any "skyclad" rituals on the next Samhain, but it is kind of cool to see where Science and Religion (however disorganized) diverge and maybe laugh quietly to myself when the trend reverses.  

*The Secret.  Byrne, Rhonda.  See above.  

*The Illiad & the Odyssey.  Homer.  Because we needed some handsome leather bound tomes.  Plus I've read both as an almost-classics major and James Joyce enthusiast.  

*The Lord of the Rings.  Another handsome leather bound tome.  Plus a good overall story, if you have the time to sit down and crack it.  

*Faceforward and Making Faces.  Kevyn Aucoin.  Incredible coffee table books of one famous actress being a dead ringer for another famous actress/actor using the magic of makeup.  Eye Candy.  

*Caravaggio.  Him and Bernini were the highlight of studying abroad in Rome.  Eye candy.  

*V for Vendetta.  More eye candy.  And nerd cred.  

*Fell... misc. Ben Templesmith graphics.  Modern day Caravaggio, imho.  

*Game of Thrones.  Martin, George.  The HBO series was so good!  and true to the books!  Midway through book 2 and this is my go-to read on my phone for those long plane rides.  

Penny floor details

Houston we are out of pennies!

Mysteries of the penny floor disclosed: There was not much online about how to install a penny floor. Plenty of articles describing the floors with pictures, but very little info on glue, flooring material etc. Those guys used a black grout, it looks like the people here used thin set. Not really sure what these guys used but I am very happy that I am only doing 100sqft. I got a tip from the comments here stating that resin was used as a topcoat, that gave me an idea.

We definitely wanted the floor to be sealed. While having exposed pennies age would be cool we figured it would be too hard to clean and too cold on the feet. I had an extra gallon of polyurethane snowboard resin which has been very useful in making random things so I figured I would give that a try. As I mentioned before the first attempt was to actually put the whole thing in the snowboard vacuum bag and essentially veneer the pennies onto existing laminate tile. I never made it that far because I discovered that hand laying these is easier and not that difficult. I wanted the mould to be extremely precise (when intersecting pennies are 5/8" to center, pure diameter they are 3/4". So I used a 3/4" router bit on 5/8" lines. It came out ok, with some gaps, but the real trouble is intersecting the tiles. I probably could have got it working in the vacuum bag but it would take a long time to build all the 1x1 tiles even 4 at a time.

Hand laying is the way to go. Polyurethane resin works very well and it holds my snowboards together so I know it has pretty good impact strength. It has very poor tensile strength so I expect cracks in the first earthquake. To strengthen it I could have laid a layer of fiberglass mat under the pennies, but I hadn't really thought of that and it would increase the cost. Once dried the surface is very smooth and not cold at all. As you can see from the picture below the resin amplifies the pennies shine when exposed to light.

In other news I noticed that the site (graf snowboards) where I learned how to make snowboards is no longer online :(. Going through that process taught me so much about laminate construction and exposed me to some great tricks (vac bagging)

Sticky fingers.

Lots has happened so it is about time for an update.

Did some mini projects during the week which included playing with fire, which has always been a hobby of mine. I burned the paint off of the brass chandelier in the office and re-wired it. It was not too bad to get the paint off, and we left some of the tarnish and burnt paint on for the distressed steampunk feel we are going for with the office. Rewiring it was quite a pain because of how the thing was built, in my confusion I ended up soldering it together 3 times, then running late live wired it in with rubber gloves on. Fun times.

Sunday was family day with Belle's mom, uncle and grandfather coming over and MaGyver coming down. We did the standard tour for the fam and before hitting original mike's for dinner I prototyped the first couple tiles for the penny floor. I had built a jig that was supposed to let us resin in a 1'x1' tile at a time, but in testing that simply did not work. I had also hand laid a tile with pennies and a resin top coat which came out much better. Based on this we decided to forgo laying tiles and simply penny over the existing floor. As of tonight, we have laid and coated about 2% of the floor, and it looks really good. Pics to come (I don't want to touch my phone with such sticky fingers.)

Once the floor is done, the office will be complete, just need to shuffle furniture around after that.

In addition to that we also removed the old in window AC unit, which was very gross. The kitchen looks noticeably better.
Scraped some more wall paper off the bedroom walls.

Meeting more of Belle's family was very cool, all very nice people (Hi!). Grandpa had some very interesting stories and it was very neat seeing him relate to some of the older parts of the house. I wonder if after another generation the nostalgia of seeing a push button lightswitch or a raised tank 'crapper' will be forever lost. I enjoy those details of the house for their difference and uniqueness, and it was interesting to see someone to whom they were so ordinary and familiar.

Painting!

So we finally painted a room, which really feels like an accomplishment since it is actually moving the house toward a finished state. Its really hard when most of the work done is a band aid to just make living here more tolerable. We have some pretty grand ideas but most of the work on the interior of the house has not moved much toward our end goals. The yard work has always felt more productive to me from an end result standpoint.

Stripping and staining the redwood, and painting the office however is an actual step toward how we want the house to look and is quite refreshing. Big thanks to MaGyver for laying down some primer and to our old neighbors J&N for painting assistance. In fact our team of 5 got quite a bit done:

I continued to work on adventures in romex wire. We want to move the Koi pond to the front porch so I installed an outdoor outlet which is substantially more difficult than running non conduit indoor wiring. In addition to installing the outdoor outlet I replaced the sketchy open air connections with actual junction boxes that were *gasp* protected from rain. Sometimes the world rewards you in very convenient ways, in this case the extra conduit I had left over was a perfect fit to cover the exposed wires on the roof that powers the knob and tube. Did not need to cut it at all, and was very pleased by that fact.

While MaGyver cleaned the office then laid down a layer of primer, Belle, J, and N planted the frankentree. This thing is cool, its actually 5 trees grafted onto a single root stalk. It has 2 kinds of peaches, apricots, nectarines and plums. Water one tree, get 5 fruits.

Afterward, J and I continued to paint the office, in the bronze yellow color and Belle and N were patching cracks in the bedroom plaster.

Meanwhile Kai and Toby, J&N's corgi played in the yard and tired each other out. Kai has learned "inside voice" barking where she will bark extremely quietly while inside with us then run outside and bark at full volume. Together her and Toby whipped all the neighborhood dogs into a chorus as they discussed the intricacies of their lives.

Phone back, big update

My phone got fixed and returned this week. The work order said they "Replaced Component" thanks Samsung... Pretty sure they were supposed to send me a shipping label too but never did so it cost me 60 bucks to ship it. All in all very crappy experience. Plus side is Google had all my contacts etc backed up, once I signed back in it was smooth sailing.

Well in the last couple weeks we have gotten a ton of stuff done, and had some mishaps as well. My focus has been on the office which is quickly becoming the most finished room in the house in terms of how we want things to look when finalized. Nearly all of the old white paint has been removed from the door frames and last weekend I redid the electrical and also moved the internet wire to run into the basement then inside an interior wall instead of being stapled around the door frame. Patched up all of the walls and its almost ready for paint.

I also modded some outlet frames which came out very cool bronze looking. Simply sanded the paint off with some 220 grit sand paper to make it look like reflected water. Definitely looks better than the flat black you can compare here. The white outlets still look kind of silly so I might get some black ones or paint the faces. They are not high traffic plugs so paint might not get too scratched up.

Belle has been hard at work stripping the wallpaper in the bedroom. Also last weekend the last 2 gaping holes in the bedroom got patched, which leaves us only with 3 rooms left from the repipe, the upstairs bath which is half done and waiting for a shower, under the sink in the kitchen, and the bathroom by the pond.

Speaking of the pond, one of our Koi fish got sick and died, and worse in the flurry of trying to save/quarantine it the pond pump line got bumped and the water started being pumped out of the pond. We didn't notice and promptly left for work only to come back to all of our fish in about 2" of water as the entire 30ish gallons had pumped out over the course of the day. Luckily it drained through an old shower vent hole and most of the water ended up in the dirt. I guess having a sloping floor helps in some situations. Outside of the one Koi, none of the other fish were harmed in the debacle as the giant albino catfish dredged a trench in the sand and led them all to safety.

We are once again insured! I took to the roof to nail down the flashing the insurance company complained about. Since our roof is very high up (30' maybe) and our biggest ladder is 6' the only way was to come down from the top. I tied off to the chimney and slid down to the edge. Quickly nailed the flashing and cleaned out the gutters. Was not too worried but it is a long way down, big thanks to whoever did the brickwork on the chimney 100 years ago.

The plants are doing fantastic, even the pepper plant that the tree trimmers landed a pecan branch on top of is rallying.

I added an outlet to the basement when I was doing the wiring for the office.
I replaced a broken outlet next to the microwave, and we no longer need to use an extension cord.
Brother and I knocked out/dug up the old dead palm tree stump and most of it fit into the green trash bin. Going to get the rest in this week's load.
Mom came by and cleaned up the rose garden.
After the rain (roof was fine btw insurance ppl) the yard looked really good, cool green clovers are popping up all over by the orange trees.