Tag: contractors

Random Thoughts

I am wrapping up my lunch break on this random Wednesday in March and I thought I’d jot down a couple of thoughts for posterity. Ready? Okay, let’s roll….

  • Want to know something that sucks? I brought two ounces of Planters Salted Peanuts with me for lunch today (14 grams of protein). I took a small handful (my gastric bypassed body can’t handle more than a small handful at a time without getting sick) and popped it into my maw. I chewed it up a little (again, part of the post-gastric bypass world means chewing the holy hell out of everything, which sounds silly and obvious [like, didn’t you chew the holy hell out of everything before surgery? I thought I did, but apparently not] but until you fail to chew something down enough you can’t really understand) and suddenly and without warning I had to sneeze. Know what’s gross? Sneezing with a mouthful of partially chewed up peanuts… that’s what’s gross. Worse? 20 seconds after you sneeze, when you think you’ve recovered and cleaned up the mess… you sneeze again. Ugh.
  • Elon Musk posted to his nazi social media site that he didn’t understand why people are out to get him. He said he sells things that are good and that he’s never hurt anyone. Never hurt anyone? Are you fucking kidding me, you fucking moron? This nazi fucker’s end can’t come soon enough. Deport his moronic ass to mars and be done with it.
  • We have a contractor coming tomorrow. We have two contractors coming Friday. March 2025 will go down in family history as the month of the contractors. We just can’t get away from them. Please please please let this be the end of it for a while.
  • We are one week and one day away from the start of the Boston Red Sox 2025 season. No matter what happens, they can’t be any more painful to watch than the Bruins were this year. Even if they come in dead last again it still won’t suck as badly as the B’s. I’m thinking about signing up for an online subscription to NESN (the New England Sports Network. The TV network that carries both the Red Sox and the Bruins). I think my days of being a radio-only Red Sox fan might be coming to an end. I haven’t decided one way or the other yet, but I think it’s going to happen… we’ll see.
  • I don’t want to buy a tenor saxophone. I don’t want to buy a tenor saxophone. Did I mention I don’t want to buy a tenor saxophone? Who am I kidding. I want to buy a tenor saxophone. Only if it’s a good one though. Aw, hell.

Okay. I have to get back to work now. This is all I have time for right now. I’ll probably write up some more brain droppings later. It’s one of those days, if you know what I mean.

In the Office Today

I am in the office today. I expect to be in the office tomorrow, at home on Thursday, and then in the office again on Friday. You are clearly beside yourself with fascination, I can see. Clearly.

I took a picture for today’s photo a day entry. Again, you are fascinated.

199/365

We called the contractor’s office who worked on our dishwasher over the last two weeks and demanded a refund. They sent out a tech to see what was wrong instead. He ripped our kitchen apart and found nothing wrong. Insert a frustrated sigh here. I ran the dishwasher twice last night and the error message did not return. The working theory is that something was partially blocking the outflow, possibly in the garbage disposal, and it just backed up into the dishwasher. Yeah, I guess. We’ll run the disposal before running the dishwasher and see how that works. Frankly I am still wanting to take the thing outside and run it over with the car. We’ll see how it goes for a while, but I don’t see myself trusting the little bastard any time soon.

Okay, I gotta run. Someone needs me to move some code out to a customer. I’ll get on that and talk to you folks later.

The Frustration Continues

I am starting to wonder if this particular contractor just likes our house or something and wants to keep coming over. I’m kidding, of course, but sheesh.

The project that was supposed to happen today uncovered an issue that required us to push to another day as well as make some changes before it can happen. Which means we’re going to have to schedule another day for them to come back once they find the parts they need. It’s routine maintenance that just never seems to end, somehow.

Insert yet another frustrated sigh here.

On the plus side, since I’m only working half a day today, my work day only has two hours and 12 minutes remaining instead of six hours and 42 minutes. Nice.

Demolition: Underway

The contractors are here. The demolition of our kitchen is underway. They got here a few minutes before 8:00am, spent a few minutes going over the details, and here we are at 9:19am and most of the kitchen is already gone.

On top of that, half of the cabinet boxes are already put together. They are blowing through this at world record speed. It’s amazing. Maybe they will be finished by tomorrow night like they predicted.

Maybe they know what they are doing and I should stop worrying about it and just let them do their very impressive thing.

Happy Mini Split Morning

It’s Friday morning and we are having our new mini split HVAC system installed today. They didn’t give us a window for arrival so we were assuming sometime this morning. At 6:30am we got a “we’re on our way” text. Yikes, that’s super early!

At 7:45 a pick up truck parked in front of the house. There is one guy in it and he’s been sitting there for 15 minutes. Is he waiting for more people? Is he waiting for 8:00am? No, because it’s 8:01 right now. What’s he waiting for?

The cats, the cat food, and the litter boxes are closed up in Bellana’s room. Another truck just pulled up. I think we are just about good to go!

Tuesday July 5, 2022

The long weekend is over. It was nice, even though July 4th is now meaningless. Mostly Jen and I just hung out, but I also visited mom a few times and bought some clothes that fit (for now) and took a shit load of pictures on both Dad’s camera and my camera. We also went for a random drive to enjoy the nice weather yesterday. It was a pretty good weekend.

And now it’s over. We have a couple of contractors coming today to give estimates on fixing a potentially huge issue in the new bathroom. We’re pretty much guaranteed to lose the shower in there, which makes me sad. It is a walk in shower and I always wanted a walk in shower. Unfortunately there is a leak somewhere and there is evidence that the wall behind the shower stall is rotting so… buhbye walk in shower. Not sure what we’ll do with the space once it’s cleaned up. A linen closet? Maybe?

As for everything else. I did not get a chance to work on any music last night. I’ve been so hung up on the photography stuff lately that I haven’t been thinking music much at all. Time to find a middle ground where I can obsess over both topics. Music needs to be written, guitars need to be played, thrift stores need to be combed for inexpensive old film SLR cameras. Lizardfish needs to reunite. I sent a chat to the band yesterday saying if we don’t practice soon I am going to die. Here’s hoping they can save my life.

Okay. Get to work.

Hectic Weekends

Last weekend was a kitchen furniture building pre-fab marathon that left me sore and exhausted and with some sweet new looks in the kitchen and dining room.

Yesterday didn’t involve putting together pre-fab stuff but it did include moving a lot of really heavy stuff, some of which went outside for a junk pickup service to haul away. The living room doesn’t look terribly different, but the changes we made make it feel completely new. It’s weird that way.

Now what? Well… now comes the biggest job of all. The cellar. We have someone coming this week to replace the lights, then someone coming to take down what’s left of the panelling on the walls and replace it all with wall board, including a new paint job. After that we’re getting new flooring installed.

Then what? Furniture, mostly. Nothing is set in stone yet, but we’re thinking a mini-living room space and maybe a pull out couch or something that can act as a guest room. Like everything else we do, the more time we have before it happens the more complex the plans get. We’re thinking of maybe upgrading a few things in the living room (not the TV, our TV is gigantic and amazing and it’s staying right where it is) and moving the current things to the cellar.

Jen came up with this plan, and it’s a good one that I wish I thought of, to have a space in the cellar where I can go to ride out my post-surgical recovery period. I could stew in the living room all day, but she’d be working in the next room and I’d be afraid I was bothering her. If we have an alternate living room space in the cellar I could go there and moan and groan in my post-op agony without worrying about being heard on her conference calls. I imagine the first few days are going to be spent in the bed room, but as things (hopefully) lighten up for me I will probably go into the cellar and maybe binge watch all of the Marvel movies or something. Assuming we stay on schedule and everything is done by May 4th.

As for this moment in time… holy shit does my back hurt.