Phutu...or is it?

5/29/2003 I got a little done this weekend. If you look at the top two photos you can see at the bottom of the lower one there is a pointy shaped jut in the finished wood flooring into the unfinished area. It took me hours to patch up the wood flooring with material that we had pulled up from the kitchen area. It then took me many more hours, although I'm not sure why, to put down the backerboard for the kitchen...and I didn't even finish it. Tomorrow we're off to Southern Cal. again for Joe and Jessica's wedding; I'll have to wait until next Monday to get anything else done.

5/25/2003 The last couple mornings have been cold and wet ones. Not so much cold as wet, at least by national standards. I haven't been doing a whole lot with the house in the mornings; it seems that a lot of the stuff that I need to do these days requires larger chunks of time...or maybe that's just an excuse. This morning I got up and made some coffee before heading off into the misty fog to walk Romeo. We went up to the top of Bernal hill and around. On a clear day the view is quite expansive, but this morning it was a white blur all around except for the haloed yellow of the morning sun. At seven on a Sunday morning there really aren't a lot of people out and about. Most of them probably haven't made it past the coffee part of the day. Romi is getting better at coming back to me during walks since Dory and I started giving him little pieces of steak every time he does. Of course, that's exactly what the dog trainer in the class we're taking told us to do; but how could it not work if you think about it...

Yesterday was my Birthday. I can't say it was the greatest one that I have ever had. I had to work all day at the track...it was crazy too, lots of people making unusual requests. Dory is in Michigan visiting her parents at the moment so we are going to go celebrate on Tuesday by doing something fun. Maybe if the weather is nice we'll go to Mt. Diablo, which I have been wanting to do for a while. It's a state park over in Walnut Creek, about thirty minutes away by car. I bought a book called Oaks of California a while ago which says that Mt. Diablo is a great place to hike if you like Oak trees...which I do...full size and Bonsai alike. Speaking of which...I now have three oak seedlings that I collected and a couple that I bought on my bonsai "bench" in the back yard. I don't know if you, the reader, has seen the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, but in it there is a creature called an "Ent" which is kinda a tree herder who is a tree itself...cool idea, so I am going to try to create a tree that looks like the one in the movie...at least roughly. Check back with me in about ten years to see how that's going.

The other day, as I was laying the floor tile in the bathroom and cursing over the fact that the floor isn't flat or level, I started to realize that there may be a problem with the framing under the first floor on the uphill side of the house. It is covered up in the basement by 1x6 boards; so Friday I trudged down there with a prybar in hand and removed a couple of them to see what the condition of the framing was behind the facade. As I had suspected some of it is in less than great shape...but I don't think that it is the reason for the sag in the floor. The people who built the house originally didn't reinforce the floor joists around the chimney and they seem to have sagged without the help of any dry rot. So now I have another thing to worry about.

5/6/2003 Ok, No excuses this time. I'm just lazy. Yesterday (monday) I didn't even really work on the house and I didn't manage to post anything. In fact, It was yesterday and I can't remember what I did for most of the day. That's the worst. I better find something to do today that will be at least memorable or the whole weekend will be wasted. I ought to be finishing the drywall in the bathroom and the electrical outlets in the kitchen and upstairs...but for some reason I just haven't felt like doing much. Oh yeah, that's what I did...I worked a little in my garden. I ordered Chinese food for dinner which was very lazy of me...the guy who delivered it was very interested in my garden. He said that he liked the Blue Atlas Cedar that I planted in the middle. The work I was doing was stuffing little rock garden plants into the crevices of the rock wall. It makes everything look a little more colorful and interesting; although I used one bluish gray plant, which seems to blend in rather than add contrast.

I keep working on my bonsai, but for the most part I just need to leave most of them alone to grow. It's actually kinda' frustrating because I want to be fiddling with them but they're not growing fast enough.

Romi has been doing a number on the remaining plants in the backyard that are accessible to him. I replanted one of the rose bushes when I put in my bonsai bench and it seems to be rather happy now, except that Romi keeps ripping off branches and chewing them into little bits. I went around and threw lawn seed on all of the bare spots that he has made from digging and trampling and urinating on...some of it is actually growing which will hopefully keep the back yard from looking like a dustbowl by the middle of the summer.

My brother recently swung through town, back from skiing for the winter in Park City, Utah. We had a little BBQ and drank some beer. It was kinda' a white trash moment; since I have no deck to speak of and no good flat spot in the back yard, I drug the BBQ out onto the driveway and we stood there nursing beers while the food was cooking. He brought me a copy of the DVD box set of the first season of Futurama, the best animated series ever. Last night I watched two of the episodes...which incidentally are really short sans commercials...22 minutes. I highly recommend that everyone get a copy, I didn't realize until I was watching it but I hadn't even seen one of the episodes. It was the first one with Zapp Brannigan, probably the funniest character on the show. Anyway, I can't seem to figure out how to properly cook vegetables on a grill. I seem to just burn them. Chicken: no problem, steak: no problem, vegetables: burned outside, raw in the middle, even on lowest heat setting. It's something I need to look into.

4/22/2003
3/18/2003
2/27/2003
2/18/2003
2/15/2003
1/31/2003
1/21/2003
12/18/2002

e-Mail Eric