Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.
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The banana I ate today came with a LOL sticker on it. It was a perfectly ripe banana which made for a good noon time, starting to feel better meal-ish thing. Now to decide on the rest of the day’s food. I think a nice Thai or Indian curry will jump start my digestive system.
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Winter is definitely on its way. I guess this is a good day for it, though, as Danielle and I are both stuck here at my house sick with something sort of flu-like. It’s my last day of vacation, but she was supposed to be at work today.
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Last night at 1am Danielle was reminded that her gas gauge occasionally fails to indicate the amount of fuel remaining in the tank. Whoops. It’s a good thing she had a gas can and was able to make it into a church parking lot in a reasonably decent area.
Here’s another photo which doesn’t show quite what I’d hoped. That is, it was supposed to show the pile of leaves and tumbleweed collected outside of my garage door, but instead it just illustrates the shadow of my bike at night. Ah well, I guess I can’t expect the CCD in it to be that great.
Leave a CommentCan any of you help me locate a digital copy of the album The Sounds Of American Doomsday Cults, vol. 14?
I’d heard samples from this a few times before, but when listening to Rough Trade Shops: Counter Culture 06 (disc 2 track 13) I was finally able to put an album with the sample. Searching around revealed this site with a broken RapidShare link, but no other traces of where to find a copy. Would any of you happen to know where I could get one?
Thanks!
UPDATE: I’ve found a few places to buy the CD from, so it looks like it’s available, it’ll just take a while to get.
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After acquiring a table and chair for Danielle I had positioned it right in the middle of my office, which was quite in the way. Having some time off, wanting to stay around the house due to feeling sick, and having completed today’s main goal I decided to rearrange my office and fit the table in.
I ended up removing everything from the rack, rotating it against the wall, putting the table between it and the CD rack, then completely re-cabling the rack with only the needed items in place. The vertical wooden shelves were moved next to the door where I previously had a theremin. Everything fits great and I’m really happy with this arrangement.
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Since I bought this place I’ve had cellular blinds in the bathroom off of my bedroom, but over the years they’ve become dirty and I found that I never opened them, so there was little point in actually having blinds there. With some time off I decided to frost the window instead, eventually settling on using Rust-Oleum Frosted Glass spray paint purchased at Home Depot for $4.39.
I first removed both panes of the windows (they are double hung Wallside Windows-brand and thus easy to remote) and cleaned them up with glass cleaner, 99% isopropyl alcohol, a toothbrush, and some clean rags. I then masked the edges with 3M Scotch-Blue™ Painter’s Tape, then masked everything else off with more tape and newsprint.
Due to the cold weather painting was done in the basement, and I had to be certain to ventilate the house afterwards because the fumes were making me feel a bit funny. Normally I’d paint in the garage, but with the weather hanging around freezing that wasn’t possible.
Painting itself went well with the paint having a 10-15 minute dry time, after which it could be recoated immediately. I did a total of three coats with each applied in left/right, up/down, diagonal crosshatch patterns to try and get as consistent of a coating as possible. Upon application the paint appears wet, but it dries to a nicely hazy, translucent finish.
Twenty minutes or so after the last coat I removed the masking and blew the dust off of the finish. There were some odd white particles of paint left on the surface, but a gentle wipe with a terry cloth rag dislodged them and left a much more consistent surface. With a total cost of around $5 (taking masking costs into account) this seems to have been a nicely effective replacement for the blinds. Total job time was just over two hours, including removing the windows, painting, waiting, and replacing the windows. The paint did what it claimed to do, which is exactly what I was wanting.
Here’s the photos I took while doing this project to document this project and how it came out:
8 Comments· Masked window set up to paint, next to a can of Rust-Oleum Frosted Glass spray paint.
· Two window panes after receiving their first coat of Rust-Oleum Frosted Glass paint.
· Powdery overspray on the garbage bags and basement floor. Yes, I was dumb and painted indoors, but it was the only option due to the weather.
· Detail of the surface of the glass immediately after painting. Note the white powdery pieces.
· Detail of the surface of the glass again with the white powdery pieces.
· After gently wiping the surface of the glass down with a dry terry cloth rag, most of the white particles were removed.
· This portion of the window lock was removed so that painting behind it wasn’t a problem.
· Window lock reinstalled and detail of the texture on the surface of the glass.
· Window from the outside after painting the inside with Rust-Oleum Frosted Glass spray paint. Note the bottle of window cleaner to demonstrate how the light is diffused.
· Window from inside after painting with Rust-Oleum Frosted Glass spray paint showing the location of the glass cleaner bottle demonstrated in the previous image. This should work well.
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Here’s a photo of Bob / utabintarbo riding across the S-shaped bridge which is part of The Pines at Stony Creek. He and I met up with the intention of getting some extra riding in before the normal Wednesday at 6:30 PM group ride, but after our first lap (and a naughty daylight backwards run through The Pines) I was so out of it that I had to stop and go home early. I think I’m getting the cold that Danielle had while we were in the UK, as I feel extremely tired, I’m coughing, can’t properly get my breath, and just feeling blah. I hope this doesn’t turn into pneumonia.
Riding was interesting as the leaf and snow covered trails were reasonably slippery, previously muddy areas were rock-hard narrow ruts, wet areas were now slick ice, and previously loose sand was hard as concrete fun. I had a very hard time making it through some normally easy areas, and I’m blaming this on being slightly overdressed for the cold weather and unable to breathe properly. Ah well, hopefully I’ll be better next week.
A couple of trips to Home Depot and Lowes has resulted in my purchase of some spray paint designed for frosting windows, a replacement light bulb for the ceiling fan in my bedroom, and new LED-based nightlights for the bathrooms. Tomorrow I’m hoping to remove the blinds in the bathroom and frost the windows. Hopefully that will go as well, which is how replacing the bulb in the ceiling fan went, making the room light up properly again.
On a very positive note, I had no problems uploading the image above, and I didn’t anticipate any after incorporating the fix mentioned in the bottom of this post about php-cgi hung as sbwait. It turns out that a default setting in lighttpd breaks particularly badly on FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE, but not previous versions. Changing it to a different setting suggested by one of the lighttpd developers has worked around the issue. This is good.
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Here’s the sample of today’s chili sin carne which I pulled for purposes of “testing” to be sure the whole pot is ready for eating. It was made as follows:
1) Sautee a chopped sweet onion and bulb of garlic in ~3 TBSP of butter with three whole Kung Pao chilis until brown.
2) Add a bottle of barely carbonated Rochefort 10 Clone and reduce.
3) Add one 28oz can of Muir Glen Fire Roasted Diced Tomatos, one container Garden Fresh Jack’s Special Medium Salsa, one 6oz small can of Meijer tomato paste, and one 7oz can of Empacadora San Marcos Chipotle Sauce.
4) Remove chilis and add rehydrated beans, one bag of Morningstar Farms® Meal Starters™ Grillers™ Recipe Crumbles™, and about half a bag of Trader Joes Fire Roasted Corn. Bring to simmer.
5) Notice that the mixture is getting dry. Add another bottle of Rochefort 10 Clone, about 3oz of chili powder, and about 1 Tsp of fresh ground black pepper.
6) Simmer for about 2.5 hours, stirring every 15 – 20 minutes.
Suddenly waking up at 6:45am made it possible to eat this for lunch. Now I have to decide if I make rice and have it that way, or with chips and cheese. Or maybe I could make up some pasta for a better-than-authentic Skyline-esque experience.
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It’s cold out, I’ve got some sort of UK-ian cold / sinus infection, and I’m wanting to eat at home as much as possible while on vacation. While at Meijer and picking up milk I decided to make up a pot of chili sin carne using my standard method, except with dried beans. Normally I use canned beans, but dried are cheaper and better tasting. Hopefully I’ll be using these 1.5 pounds (dried) of beans along with a clove of garlic, large sweet onion, container of Garden Fresh Salsa, a bag of Morningstar Farms beefy TVP stuff, failed-to-carbonate home-made Rochefort 10 Clone, Trader Joe’s Fire Roasted Corn, and random other things to make something which is hopefully tasty and sustaining.
It will likely be eaten one of two ways:
Leave a Comment· Over rice cooked in an Indian style, as demonstrated here by the wonderful Manjula on her YouTube channel.
· With Garden Fresh Tortilla Chips and smothered in sharp cheddar.
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It amazes me how much stuff good stuff people will throw out. Two weeks ago I found a whole set of women’s golf clubs set at the curb for pickup when I was taking my trash out, so I grabbed them. Now that I’ve got a bit of time, I wanted to post here and ask if anyone wants them. If not, they’ll be going up on Craigslist or to the Salvation Army or something. The clubs aren’t particularly new, but they are in good shape. There are some balls and tees in the bag, along with some animal club covers.
I’ve also got a hand cart for golf clubs that is also free, except this is an old, leftover item from when I was much younger and interested in golf.
So, would any of you like these things? Just let me know. The only thing I ask is that it be picked up fairly soon.
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