Author: bob

Well I trust everyone had a good set of holidays. I worked through most of it, but I did take an extra day off to celebrate the birth of Santa Claus, that fickle diety who will destroy the universe if retailers end the year in the red. Once again we made it, barely.

Christmas dinner was gluttonous, featuring a 10 lb. turkey, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, baked macaroni & cheese, mashed potatoes (AB’s “mashers”), dinner rolls, a bottle of white wine and the piece de resistance, a Ghirardelli chocolate cheesecake, all homemade. Not a bad meal for the two of us.

No one came through on the NYE invite, TYVM. What do I pay you friends for? So I spent the 31st playing with my robot. Really: I bought myself one of those Roomba things that day. My house has never been cleaner.

So here’s hoping ’06 is a good one filled with joy, and that our robotic housekeepers postpone the revolution until next year.

Did I say patching the hole in my wall was the last engineering hurdle for my kitchen? Well, in fact, I had plenty this weekend. My original sink was about 75% of the size of the new one. My new sink, in addition to being wider in the front-to-back dimension, is also an inch deeper than the previous one. And, it’s an undermount whereas the previous went on top of the countertop. So my installation of the new garbage disposer with the new sink faced two problems: the old waste line plumbing was too tall to mate with the much lower discharge side of the disposer, and, more annoyingly, was two inches too short to reach the unit.

I decided to tackle problem number two first. After a half hour spent rummaging through Lowes’ selection of PVC thingys, I found a good approximation to the discharge tube of the disposer, but without the 90 degree bend, and I also grabbed a 90 degree elbow. This is not schedule 40 PVC; it’s really flimsy plastic stuff, but it’s a good match for the tube that came with the disposer. I did the obvious thing: instead of bending after one inch, I fashioned a tube that travelled horizontally three inches before turning downward into the waste pipe. It lined up well with the existing waste line.

So the height now needed to be solved. I took a hacksaw to the existing schedule 40 PVC line, before I realized that did no good. I’d have to replace the whole P-trap since the previous stuff was solvent welded. I then intended to just detach the existing U segment of the trap and put a new one on. However, I soon discovered that the old traps had the nut on the top whereas newly made ones have it on the bottom. F-bomb.

The only avenue now available (I’d already cut the U segment in half in a misguided effort to get it off) was to do what I should have done in the first place. I cut the old waste line just before the old trap and decided to extend the line two inches and put a new trap on, to solve both problems at once. A vigorous bit of hacksawing, a coupler, two cuts of PVC pipe with the table saw, a near-vomit-inducing bout with PVC primer and cement fumes, and a waste line adapter later, and I had the original disposer tubing connected to the waste line. For the first time since August my kitchen has running water again. Yay!

While in Atlanta, I finally faced the object of my derision. I became one of them. I paid ten bucks to watch a commercial. In short, I went to World of Coke.

Listen: there isn’t a whole lot to do in Atlanta, touristly speaking. We didn’t have time to visit the zoo/Cyclorama, and the new aquarium was fully booked. The olympic park took a few minutes to circumnavigate, as did the Adult Swim section of the Turner store at CNN center. The High closed too early. Plus, I like the soft drink, isn’t that enough reason to go? Okay, enough rationalizing.

On the inside, it’s like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory without Oompa-loompahs… or… well okay it’s not like that at all. It’s like a monument to a global marketing machine. But that’s not all bad: plenty of memories were rekindled, such as the Mean Joe Green commercial and Tab, and there were some interesting exhibits including the chunky pin-up girls of yesteryear and six foot bottle sculptures in obsidian and granite. And at then end you can drink as much as you like of Coke and weird other-worldly sodas sold in various hemispheres. The “bitter apertif” drink won most disgusting award, while the Chinese green apple was pretty tasty. The floor is really sticky.

Since I’ve been slacking, I have a number of unposted posts swimming in my head. You may get to see them, or not, so there. Anyway, here’s an update on my decade long kitchen project. A couple of weeks ago saw the arrival of hundreds of pounds of rock on my doorstep. The results, I have to say, are well worth the trouble.

Tasks remaining: replumb the P-trap to fit with the garbage disposal, add cover panels, base trim, molding, quarter-round around the edges of floor, and install an over-the-range microwave. Easy!

I am finished with my whirlwind tour of North America including five nights in Atlanta and three in Toronto. In this new age of starbucksification, let it be said that there is no place unlike home. Click your heels thrice and have a McGriddle, Dot, you’re still in Kansas. More later.

As authority on all things good, it is occasionally my responsibility to advise you, the public, on which products to avoid. First up is the Poulan “Weed Eater” brand leaf blower. This is a product with an identity crisis: it has never, as far as I know, eaten a weed while in my employ. I bought this a couple of years ago, and while it has served me well for two seasons, yesterday the throttle control decided to jettison itself in the middle of leaf cleaning duty. I believe a piece of the throttle is now forever missing (possibly at the bottom of a mountain of leaves), without which I shall no longer be able to start the engine on the thing.

Also, stay away from Giant brand shaving gel. When they are out of the real thing, as was the case this weekend, you would be better advised to shave with hot pepper sauce.

I recently turned off images in firefox to reduce my traffic footprint on the corporate firewall. Here’s my plea to web developers everywhere: please don’t set the alt tag on your 1×1 transparent layout hacks to anything but ‘ ‘. pixelItblankcanspacebe1x1hardemptytospacerread. Thank you for trying to be accessible, though.

New countertop arrives tomorrow. Antsy.

Man you know you’ve been gone a while when you come back and LJ has a whole ton of new features.

Anyway, I have a table saw now. 4800 RPMs — Yum. And I haven’t even lost a digit yet! Word is that my kitchen will be completed within two weeks, as that is when my countertop is installed. Just in time for the holidays. I may throw one of those “party” things once I get it all cleaned up. Pictures of the completed thing to appear soon.

I’ll be in ATL for Thanksgiving starting on 11/23 through 11/28. AC is going with and we’re going to try to sight-see on Sunday. And possibly watch the UGA game somewhere if it isn’t too late in the day. So hit me up, you individuals who will also be there.