1/2 floored

Our flooring makeover is in full swing.  I’m waiting for some cement to dry, so time to post!

A construction (rather de-construction) mystery photo:

This is our basement, as it was last month:

And this is it today.   Note, the poky, dying cactus on the right didn’t make it to the new home … he is now outside. I never liked him much as he is they guy who killed 2 of our sitting balls.

We decided on tiling the stairs, rather than wood:

That mystery photo was a closeup of the carnage left in the wake of my destruction of the glass fireplace hearth.  They used a lot of glue putting those mirrors down!

I’d like to take credit for the stone and tile work, but that goes to the pros, Noah and his brother.  They did a great job!

They finished last week and I started on the living room wood flooring.   The carpet under my workstation was the last of the living room carpet to go … I worked off the floor for part of one night:

I invested in a $110 table saw:

And 3000 lbs, ($3k for 1100 sq feet),  of 14 mm laminate flooring:

I started in the corner last weekend:

We had a guest for the week, Irena.   She helped me here by standing on the floor while I hammered it:

After 2 weekends, here is the current state, about 1/3 done:

I messed up two cuts for circular floor outlets before we got smart on how to mark them more accurately.  I was looking for lipstick, to paint on the outlet to transfer to the plank, but Helen doesn’t use lipstick (neither do I).   So she suggested deodorant instead, works great!

There are several places our floor is not level enough, so I poured about 200 lbs of levelizing cement, which is drying now:

Looking at my photos for the month, the only non-flooring photos I have are from when we took Boris and Irena to our first concert at the Salt Lake Symphony Hall:

They have one of those amazing, but (in my opinion) fairly ugly glass sculptures by that famous one-eyed glass blower in the lobby:

Next month I’m guessing you will get more floor photos.   Sorry about that.  After that set, you will probably be safe from floor photos for a couple of more decades.

Floored

Greetings from a couple of snowy people

We had a fun snowstorm that included some low flying clouds that, when parked over the university, combined with the university lights, made it look like they was a massive fire!

 

We just marked our 1 year anniversary here.   Seems that was a long enough penance of living with carpet to cover any past sins, so we are about to renovate 1700 square feet of flooring, a combination of travertine, tile, and wood.    To pick the wood, we did stress tests of a bunch of samples.   Here I’m doing the wrench drop:  

And Helen did the knife test:

We also did water, sandpaper, and rocks.   Here are some of the samples looking the worse for wear:

Today I started, with some pleasure, ripping out the carpet:

I’ll do the wood install and hire out the stone and tile installs.

In other news, Nick has been hard at work on porting Skritter to the Ixxx universe.   He has a fun preview video here:

    http://www.skritter.com/ios

And in slightly older news (from December), here is an article about one of the activities that has been keeping Helen busy:

 http://healthcare.utah.edu/neurosciences/news/pressreleases/sep_directors.html

And in amazing stuff from the future news, here are some of the latest things those amazing flying robots can do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YQIMGV5vtd4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=S-dkonAXOlQ

I was impressed.   This guy was not impressed:

Bruce

Harvesting Mangos

The LDS Salt Lake Temple is pretty amazing.  40 years to build, 210 feet (120 cubits) tall, 9 feet thick walls of hand hewn granite.   Care to guess the difference between these two photos?   Same wall, same night, one is backwards:

I’m guessing you’ve guessed it.   The first one is upside down, taken by looking into a reflecting pool.

This is what the Utah state capital would look like after being buried by 100 feet of ash after the Yellowstone super volcano erupts. 

And this is what a biker would look like if he stopped to watch the super volcano erupt: 

And this is what Helen would look like if we went out for a fun ski trip with Marie, one of the residents:

And this is what I would look like if I was being chased by an angry turtle on a snowmobile:

And this is what Helen would look like if I coaxed here up the trail for a sunset hike:

We enjoyed fun New Years visits from both Aya

and Noah.

  Here Helen is instructing children on how to harvest garlic:

This is Aya teaching Noah how to harvest a Mango:

And here how to harvest an mp3 file:

And here Aya is harvesting knowledge from a school book:

And here they are both harvesting Chess men:

Which Helen did not find very tasty:

We took our first trip to Park City:

where we passed on the opportunity to buy $10,000 wolf fur coats or $1,000 cowboy boots.

Finally, I also had the opportunity to eat two exotic foods.   The first was this boxelder bug, who is wintering with his clan in our house: 

The second was this hand crafted cinnamon sugar snowball:

I decided to save the bug as a treat for our next visitor.   Anyone up for a visit?

Bruce

Buddha’s Hand in Uppercase and Lowercase

The bizarre plant of the month is called Buddha’s Hand:

Also know as fingered citron, it looks like a lemon that met a creative chief with amazing carving skills.  But reality is stranger, it actually grows this way.

They couldn’t fix my camera, so they gave me a new one to replace it!   Coolpix S8200.   This guy modeled for me on our carpet so I could test out the macro focus:

We had a great Thanksgiving visit with Mom and Dad:

We touristed Antelope Island, an Island in the Great Salt Lake that is semi-famous for one of the few places where Bison were not exterminated by hoards of white men with big guns in the 1800s.  So they called it Antelope Island.  Maybe Bison are like Antelope.  Except bigger.  And blacker.  And less jumpier.

We also had a great visit with the Tim, Sue, and Abby.  Tim plays a mean game of ping pong.  Checked out the frightened yellow ping pong ball in this shot … I think it pee-ed its pants in fear of the upcoming hit (you can see a left a trail of yellow to the left of it):

And Abbey has the rare innate ability to hula-hoop in either direction … took me a lot of practice to be able to do that:

We were all surprised to see that Abbey had a growth spurt and is now as tall as 6’ 2”Tim!  Maybe it was the hula-hooping.

We visited the new Natural History museum.  That guy about to eat Dad is a ancient sloth bear:

And here Mom and Sue are planning a rare gem heist:

Last weekend we went to the Annual Epilepsy conference, this time in Baltimore.   This is taken from an skyscraper observation deck, looking down on the historic USS Constellation.   Those tents in the corner are from “Occupy Baltimore” … I wonder what the 1800’s ship’s crew would have thought of the tent city protest.

They had a science museum with this cool 10 foot globe magically suspended in air with various movies displayed on it:

This was a 200+ tower that made ‘drop shot’ for guns by dropping molten lead from the top into water at the bottom.  Was the tallest structure in the US for 20 years:

In this museum I learned that the term UpperCase and LowerCase come from they way they stored the moveable types used in early printing presses … the big types were in the upper case, the smaller ones were in the lower case.  True story.  I think our tour guide invented it (that part probably not true, but maybe his Dad did):

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the piano.   I took out the keyboard assembly to count all the parts need to make a piano.   Helen was terrified.    

I got up to about 10,000, about 8000 in the key assembly alone, then decided to count the number of lights we can see at night in the Salt Lake City valley instead.   Seemed easier, but I’m still counting.

B