It was a whirlwind weekend. I played with the camera on the way home late at night from work. This is an impressionistic view of one of my favorite bridges. It's blurry because it's night, the shutter speed is slow, and I'm driving fast. (Stay out of my way, is the lesson here.)
The last one is the bridge in the daytime. You can see a long way from the top!
We called the water people to come work on our well and water equipment again. The equipment is as old as the house, and keeps breaking down because it is weak with age. This time the two major filtration parts had quit working completely, which is why the water smelled bad and was putting white scale on all the dishes. An hour's labor from Bob the water guy and a graciously-discounted fee of $100, and we were again in business. A new piece of the equipment costs $1700, and that's only one out of four pieces. So we want to keep it going as long as we can.
I also got to inspect my sunflowers that my wife planted for me. The 15-foot variety didn't even germinate. The 6-foot variety did. They're doing wonderfully, even if they're doing it a bit slowly, as most vegetables usually do.
The new kitchen appliances were delivered – a new 18 cu ft Frigidaire refrigerator (the "Gallery Series"! ooooooooooh) with a light in the freezer (I have never had a fridge with a light in the freezer, that is SOOO helpful for finding the Fudgesicles!) and a matching dishwasher, each for more than $150 off the normal price because the appliance store was going out of business. My wife is SUCH a good shopper. So although they were sold by a surly salesman (who lied about the installation price) and delivered by a surly deliveryman (who was just rude and stupid, trying to use a Phillips-head screwdriver on square-drive screws to install the faceplate on the washer, thanks so much for buggering them up, you twit), all of which explains WHY the appliance store was going out of business – all in all, it was a fantastic bargain. And the dishwasher actually CLEANS the dishes. My wife is in heaven.
We also pulled everything out of the laundry room and put it in the garage, intending to lay stick-on linoleum tile in the laundry room to cover up the horrible 1970s linoleum. Thanks to a burst water heater at some point in the past, though, we discovered that the edges of the linoleum were peeling up away from the walls, rolling up like a scroll. So we spent the rest of Friday pulling up the linoleum edges, smearing contact cement on the floor beneath with a plastic fork (and getting a bunch of it in my arm hair as well – OUCH!), and weighting the curling linoleum back down with anything heavy we could find – patio stones, toolboxes, cat-litter pails, you name it. We had to leave it there overnight, so we went up to the storage building north of town and spent the rest of the day pulling crap out of there. We have a 10'x20' air-conditioned unit in a hurricane-proof building which costs us $280 a month. We're tired of paying that. So my wife intends to sell a bunch of our stuff on E-Bay. Now that we have a decent digital camera (Nikon Coolpix S4, go buy one now), we can take good pictures and sell like mad. Our Christmas decorations alone occupy 50 square feet of space. Halloween is another 10 square feet at least. I'm looking forward to "right-sizing."
So we brought a partial truckload home, and then went to buy a window air-conditioner for the garage, since the one that was currently installed (and concreted) into the wall of the garage had long since died from being clogged with wasps' nests, lizard eggs and also because its vents were obstructed by being installed too deeply in the concrete-block wall. We found a Consumer Reports-recommended Frigidaire unit for $138 (with a remote! Like we NEED a remote in the garage) at Lowe's, and brought it home. Our goal is to unload everything we can from the storage unit and put it in our now-air-conditioned garage so that we can save money and keep our stuff cool and non-moldy while we work on selling it off.
We went to the beach first thing Saturday morning.
The seagulls were flocking around something. Probably something dead. That's because there was a new warning sign I never had seen before.
I'm going to make copies of this sign and start putting it up whenever I go to the beach, especially when tourist season starts. Maybe it will keep those $*@#ers off my beach. I like having the beach to myself. Why can't they pay their taxes and stay home, is my question. Just send us a check and we'll send you some pictures and some dead fish so it'll seem like you're here.
Someone is running around naked now. Our beach is popular with gay men, for some reason. Apparently, gay forgetful men. Well, it IS God's waiting room (everyone's old here except me and my wife). Is it so much to ask, though, to be properly clothed while you wait? Hmmm?
Saturday was mostly occupied with INSTALLING the window air-conditioner. The existing dead one was concreted in and then stuccoed over, so we basically had to chisel it out of the garage wall. It still wouldn't come out easily after we chiseled, so we resorted to whanging on it with the sledgehammer, trying to push it inward through the wall, which of course made the outside edges wider and flatter so they wouldn't FIT through the wall. So I chiseled off the riveted-on rails from the faceplate of the unit (which hold it from falling out of the window) and then pushed it out. (When popping rivets, it works well to insert the claw end of a framing hammer against the rivet, bang it in with another hammer so that the claws go to either side of the rivet, then pry hard.) Then we spent the rest of the day trying to fit the new A/C unit in – getting it level, making sure it tilts a little bit down so it drains the condensate properly outside, fitting 2x4 boards above it to make sure it is solidly in the hole (since we had to remove its rails also so it will stick far enough through the wall to the outside that its vents are exposed). My wonderful wife did most of the fitting, while I lifted it in and out of the hole at least ten times. Finally it fit, and my wife caulked it in with spray caulk, which is like whipped caulk that expands a little but not as much as insulating spray foam. Now the garage is wonderfully cool – cooler than the house, even. Very surprising. In the next several weekends, we will progressively empty our storage unit and move everything into our garage. It means we'll have to park the cars outside, but since it's a one-car garage, so what.
The dead, sledgehammered unit. Bashing it was quite therapeutic. It looked pretty much the same before I bashed it, though.
We also went downtown to go to a craft fair, and to see a bike race. I don't really care about bike racing, but it gave me a chance to play with the camera and explore some sport-shooting modes I hadn't tried before.
(I'm not sure what good that last multi-framed one is for. It takes 16 shots in 1 second. Kinda cool, but haven't really figured out a good use for it yet.)
I found a cool Budd Hopkins book in the local bookstore, about aliens who now can abduct people from military bases in broad daylight because now they are invisible. (If THAT doesn't make you paranoid, what does? And, invisible aliens are the perfect un-disprovable conspiracy theory.) I have a whole library of UFO and alien literature spanning the '50s through the '90s, but since I got married, I haven't felt the need to buy more. But Budd Hopkins is a world-renowned author, and I like his work, even though his hypnotic regression techniques are suspect. So I'll buy his new book after I get paid.
At the craft fair, we found a very cool pink flamingo stained glass piece that fits perfectly on the side of the upper cabinet over the kitchen sink…tall and narrow, and with beautiful flamingos. My wife didn't want to ask me to get it for her but I asked her if she liked it, and when she said yes, I went ahead and got it for her, since the next time that artist will be in town is in late October, and with my luck, I will either forget to go to that craft fair (my wife will be out of town) or the artist will not have that piece available. So, buy it when you can.
We also got hot dogs from our favorite restaurateurs, who had to close down their café last year after their building was sold out from under them. Now they run a catering business out of their home, and they make better money with less work (no overhead, compared to the expense of running a café). It was nice to see them.
Sunday we spent working on installing the dishwasher. I spent half an hour fighting with the power, trying to get a GFCI socket wired into the wall so I could plug in the dishwasher, but (a.) I couldn't mount the box in the wall because of the concrete block directly behind the drywall, and (b.) I couldn't get the 16-gauge wires to wrap around the screw terminals in the socket. Finally my wife read the "destructions" to me, and pointed out that if I straighten the wire, I can push it straight into a hole on the backside and then tighten down the screw to grab it within the casing of the socket. That worked MUCH better. I also hooked up the water, then leveled the dishwasher, then screwed it to the underside of the counter. My wife is VERY excited because it actually CLEANS the dishes (the old one did a terrible job before it quit completely), it tells you how long it will take to clean them, and it's exceedingly quiet. I'm excited too, in a distant, sexist, avoiding-kitchen-work-whatever-way-I-can way.
I also sprayed a bucket of Sevin around the base of the house, since the ants are trying to invade again, and I mowed the lawn which was getting out of control since I've been gone two weeks. The sheriff has a new toy, a nice new Bell Jet Ranger helicopter (a $2 million model 407), paid for in part with my tax dollars. He buzzes around all the time, even landing in the parking lot of the shopping center across the street sometimes. He was orbiting that shopping center while I was mowing. After about the 20th orbit, I decided to take some pictures. Then he went away to get gas. Then he came BACK, but by that time I was done mowing, so I could go inside and ignore him. I really wish he would play with his toy somewhere else, but since we live next to the city airport where he's hangared, we're kind of stuck with him. It's fun to watch him land on the little cart, though. Then they drag the cart into the hangar. Now that's precision-landing.
We watched part of "50 First Dates" on TV. I had missed the movie when it was in the theatres – there's always so much to do besides sit in the dark. For such an ugly guy, Adam Sandler does romantic comedies well. And Drew Barrymore is sort of the new Goldie Hawn, ditzy but fun. Playing a character with brain damage seems to come quite naturally to her. A cute movie, but my favorite characters were the walruses. I didn't know you could TRAIN a walrus. But these walruseseses (walrae?) were VERY smart and very funny.
Anyway. That was the weekend.
The nice shiny white kitchen, which we painted after we got tired of looking at 1970s lime-green woodgrain. There's a paint called Cabinet Rescue. It's $15 a quart and is VERY effective at covering most cabinet finishes. Go buy it. It's worth its weight in gold, and is a darned sight cheaper than paying thousands of dollars for new kitchen cabinets.
since that time, even after 95% of all life on earth was killed off in a mass extinction at the end of the Permian period ("The Great Dying," 251 million years ago, the worst of any extinction in the geologic record, caused (scientists think) by a meteor impact in Antarctica, marked by the 300-mile-wide Wilkes Land Crater, which is twice the size of the Chicxulub crater off the Yucatan peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico - that one killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. So imagine how bad the Wilkes Land impact was. Like, enough to crack the planet in half). 
since that time, even after 95% of all life on earth was killed off in a mass extinction at the end of the Permian period ("The Great Dying," 251 million years ago, the worst of any extinction in the geologic record, caused (scientists think) by a meteor impact in Antarctica, marked by the 300-mile-wide Wilkes Land Crater, which is twice the size of the Chicxulub crater off the Yucatan peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico - that one killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. So imagine how bad the Wilkes Land impact was. Like, enough to crack the planet in half). 
Dead fish on the beach, thanks to red tide. Red tide is a red algae bloom prompted by pollution, mainly from phosphates (I think) from farm fertilizer. Our oceans are dying, and this is the proof. How long until we do something about it? I don't think anyone will do anything about it, until it's too late and we're dying too. I wish there was something I could do about it. Recycle. Drive less. Use less electricity and water. Buy organic. Donate to scientific research. Vote for people who will put a stop to letting farms drain their fields into the rivers, which are killing the oceans. I hope SOMETHING will change.
