Wall Down

Houston, The Baby as landed! Clark Kaiming Winter arrived on 7/29 weighing in at 8lb 10oz. Max is taking good care of him:

We are over the moon.

Back on Earth, Helen had a nice trip LA to visit Aya & Eric:

I’m enjoying retirement with various activities. I started with Irina’s house, finished cleaning it out, did an estate sale, and FSBOed it onto the market:

3041 Whispering Pines Circle
170,000 with Rooms: 10, 3 Bedrooms, 3 Bathrooms (Full), Condition: Well maintained, 1960 sq. ft., Lot size 0.53 acres…3041whisperingpines.com

Now I’m into renovations on our house. I started with replacing a ’70s style sink faucet with something from the future:

It lights up blue/green/red, depending on water temperature:

The next project was/is a bit more challenging. I had a dream in which a Regan like voice said ‘Mr Gorba-Winter, tear down this wall!”. He was speaking of this wall between our bedroom and fireplace room:

So we did, and now we have a room fit for a King and Queen and his King sized bed (why is it that the Queen’s bed is smaller?):

The next challenge was the floor. The solid oak wood floor was in good shape, but the carpet had to go. So I you-tubed up how-to-tile videos and gave it a go. First had to take out the old carpet and particle board:

Then replace sections of weak sub-floor and installed new plywood with legions of screws:

Then comes the Ditra membrane, a bit thinner then conventional tile backer-board, for a better height match with the wood:

We went for these new bleached wood plank styled tiles:

I used a yellow wedge leveling system. A bunch more work, but helps keep the tiles level with each other:

This video condenses the 1 week project down to 3 minutes:

Next up is painting. This room, living room, and kitchen, all white, we like light!

Speaking of light, the eclipse here was at 94%. Dogs were not impressed:

The shadows were interesting, sun crescents everywhere:

Closing with a baby Alien, captured by our spider defense network:

Bruce

Cleaning house

I had a great trip out to Rochester. “Hung out” with Zach for a week. His pull-up bar is the centerpiece of the living room:

We got a lot of house cleaning done. When we finished, we discovered a new room in the basement:

We filled up a big dumpster and took 600+ lbs of electronics to recycling:

Lots of memorable items ended up in the dumpster, but I took pictures of some of them, as photos are more portable and last longer. Like this photo of the clay model Laurie and I made when we were designing the house. It had survived several big earthquakes:

The garage also got a good cleaning. We filled up an old miata with tons of metal to recycle. It will probably need some help getting to the recycling center:

In the process, we un-buried Zach’s prized super-souped-up sports car. Not really a practical daily driver, as the doors don’t open and it requires ramps to get in/out of our drive:

But it is fast! He took me for a quick spin. This is just before he punched it for a few seconds … that is all the runway the frontage road (and my stomach) could afford:

Enjoyed meeting Zach’s friend Emma:

They took me to the climbing gym. They are both accomplished climbers. Emma started climbing to help her with a fear of heights!

Zach went all the way up and down this wall using just the crack and none of the other holds. And then he got stuck on the ceiling. Emma tried to rescue him, but her head got stuck there too:

I, on the other hand, played it safe on easier routes:

We cleaned up the yard a bit, creating a big brush pile that Zach turned into a big bonfire:

Straightened up a retaining wall and put a new cap on the deck railing:

Did some muddling in preparation for painting. Made the mistake of destroying some sheet-rock by taking down a well glued cork board:

I spent a few days at IBM, checking out renovations and attending a dept meeting:

Also spent a few hours ferrying some of one of Zach’s friend’s exotic collection of Zelda character sculptures to his new house.

Helen and doggies were glad to get me back home. In my absence, Helen took up sewing, and girl dog got her first period, which even to a fixed dog is apparently hard to resist:

Helen and I got these clever Oura smart rings that track blood flow and acceleration with enough accuracy that they can distinguish 3 different levels of sleep. I took a self-portrait in the shiny ceramic reflection:

I talk about them a bit in this a video tour I made of my home office:

Closing photo. Doggy and Helen got so tired one night that somehow neither of them minded this sleeping arrangement:

Bruce