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Weekend End.
Apr. 12th, 2015 10:04 pmWe got good stuff done the past two days. Eleanor spent most of yesterday re-caulking the bathtub, and we then both ventured forth into Big Box Hardwareland to begin tackling another project.
Both our stove and oven are built-in, and original to the 1960 construction of the home. The oven is okay, and even kinda cool in its resemblance of the south end of a 1959 Buick- but the cooktop to the left of it is down to two working burners and has crud in its base that's older than Emily. So we tried out the two leading contendahs in the DIY marketplace, and think we have something close to what we need....
and even had moderate fun checking it all out.
Home Despot barely had a single employee on the floor of the entire warehouse-style store. He paged "customer service" for us, but that, increasingly, is an oxymoron in retail. Most of the help we saw was no help- headed, as they were, to the employee bathroom just down the aisle from where the cooktops were. Still, we took notes and copied measurements before heading over to the Lowest of the Lowes.
There, there were actual helpful people, and a smarter use of display space- the cooktops were nested in drawers that pulled out. Things did get a little punchy, not so much over the stove options, but in discussing the tile Eleanor wants to install near and around it. At one point, after talking with Tile Dude about special-ordering issues, she thought of another question for him and cited Columbo's old "ah, just one more thing" schtick. He was probably too young to recognize it, but I certainly did- and almost had to excuse myself among carpet samples when I couldn't stop laughing, thinking of Peter Falk coming back with yet another "one more question" for him: Yaknow, I just happened to notice those two feet stickin' out of that dumpster over there,and I just wondered when it last was you'd seen your wife, sir.
It wasn't long before I was degenerating into tile-and-grout porn- proving the truth of Rule 34 perhaps as pointedly as anyone ever has. (In fairness, I DID just put "grout" into that search engine and it didn't find anything. Yet.)
The hole we need to fill is a little bigger than the shiny metal thingy we're fixing to stick inside it, so there will be some extra work needed to make this project come.... to fruition.
----
In other, less fake-porny news:
* We ate dinner in the greenhouse for the first time of the season tonight. Spring finally more-or-less arrived, although the heat is back on for the overnight and I refused to put the screens in the front and back doors until we've gone two straight days without having to use it.
* It took almost nine weeks of on-and-off struggling with it, but FINALLY, J.K. Rowling's Casual Vacancy is behind me. It finally picked up enough flue powder in the final few chapters to carry me to the end. And she did manage to make the cast of almost entirely unlikeable characters bearable- by the added schadenfreude of seeing them all turn on each other in almost every possible permutation by the time it was done. Now on to two more books I expect I'll actually like.
* The Sabres fired their coach for doing his job of sucking. I think it's all for the best. I wonder if there's such a thing as tanking porn.
Both our stove and oven are built-in, and original to the 1960 construction of the home. The oven is okay, and even kinda cool in its resemblance of the south end of a 1959 Buick- but the cooktop to the left of it is down to two working burners and has crud in its base that's older than Emily. So we tried out the two leading contendahs in the DIY marketplace, and think we have something close to what we need....
and even had moderate fun checking it all out.
Home Despot barely had a single employee on the floor of the entire warehouse-style store. He paged "customer service" for us, but that, increasingly, is an oxymoron in retail. Most of the help we saw was no help- headed, as they were, to the employee bathroom just down the aisle from where the cooktops were. Still, we took notes and copied measurements before heading over to the Lowest of the Lowes.
There, there were actual helpful people, and a smarter use of display space- the cooktops were nested in drawers that pulled out. Things did get a little punchy, not so much over the stove options, but in discussing the tile Eleanor wants to install near and around it. At one point, after talking with Tile Dude about special-ordering issues, she thought of another question for him and cited Columbo's old "ah, just one more thing" schtick. He was probably too young to recognize it, but I certainly did- and almost had to excuse myself among carpet samples when I couldn't stop laughing, thinking of Peter Falk coming back with yet another "one more question" for him: Yaknow, I just happened to notice those two feet stickin' out of that dumpster over there,and I just wondered when it last was you'd seen your wife, sir.
It wasn't long before I was degenerating into tile-and-grout porn- proving the truth of Rule 34 perhaps as pointedly as anyone ever has. (In fairness, I DID just put "grout" into that search engine and it didn't find anything. Yet.)
The hole we need to fill is a little bigger than the shiny metal thingy we're fixing to stick inside it, so there will be some extra work needed to make this project come.... to fruition.
----
In other, less fake-porny news:
* We ate dinner in the greenhouse for the first time of the season tonight. Spring finally more-or-less arrived, although the heat is back on for the overnight and I refused to put the screens in the front and back doors until we've gone two straight days without having to use it.
* It took almost nine weeks of on-and-off struggling with it, but FINALLY, J.K. Rowling's Casual Vacancy is behind me. It finally picked up enough flue powder in the final few chapters to carry me to the end. And she did manage to make the cast of almost entirely unlikeable characters bearable- by the added schadenfreude of seeing them all turn on each other in almost every possible permutation by the time it was done. Now on to two more books I expect I'll actually like.
* The Sabres fired their coach for doing his job of sucking. I think it's all for the best. I wonder if there's such a thing as tanking porn.