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Home 2005-01-31 2005-01-29 2005-01-28 2005-01-27 2005-01-26 2005-01-17 2005-01-16 2005-01-15 2005-01-11 | 2005-01-17: Long lunch - for housework.Ok, I realize that this is not what people generally do with their lunch breaks when they go home for lunch. They either actually eat, or they do random nefarious acts of non-devotion to their employer. I, being the monumentally boring person that I am, chose to nuke a burrito and do house/car work. Oh, and call the cable company about redoing my cable connection. See yesterday for details and pictures of what I'm talking about here. I left a voice mail; hopefully they'll call me back this afternoon, but I'm not holding my breath.First off, my Pathfinder's rear window has been covered in dog-nose smudges for the past few months, thanks to the dynamic duo of KD and Shasta. Don't get me wrong, I love my canine sisters, and a few window smudges really aren't all that bad in the great scheme of things. On the other hand, trying to remember to actually get them off of the rear window does tend to be harder (for me) than it sounds. The smudges show up really well during daylight, when I'm going to work - naturally, when I get to work, I need to get into the office quickly, and don't have the supplies around to clean off the smudges. At night, they're not very noticeable and I do in fact go home and concern myself with other things. Today, since I went home during the day, I was annoyed by the smudges AND at home, so I took care of them once and for all. Or at least, until the next time the girls are in the back of my Pathfinder. Next, I took a close look at the weather seal on my Pathfinder. Yes, this would be the weather seal which has yet to be chronicled in other days' entries, which has necessitated the purchase of both Artoo Deetoo and my $100 Pathfinder cover. I had purchased a tube of weather seal adhesive for this occasion, but I noticed a couple of metal ridges, and rubber grooves on the weather seal, which had slipped free of each other. Using a flat-head screwdriver, I managed to get it re-connected, and I'm going to keep an eye on the seal to see if it gets detached again as I open and close the driver's side door normally. The weather seal has a nice big water groove in it, which (now that it's actually connected to the frame) should carry water well past the point where I believe it had been streaming into my Pathfinder. I think my wet-carpet problem is now taken care of, $195 later, using a screwdriver's blade and no actual expense. Oh well, I never claimed to be an auto mechanic, and at least Artoo has proven useful for other things around the house. By this point, reasonable lunch time was starting to run short. Most of the guys here at Kyocera seem to take 90 minute lunches, two hours on occasion. As my final act before heading back to work, I used the reel mower to tame the back yard a little. I need to take photos, considering that it's much less unruly now. Although, I do need to use the hedge shears to trim the grass out of the plant bed. I'm not sure what exactly those plants are, but I think they're some kind of bulb. Thankfully, when Mom reads this, she'll feel an irresistable urge to let me know what kind of plant it is, and the answer will be had. Yay Mom! In other news, I have now had two of my pelican photos accepted at Shutterstock.com. My gallery over there now consists of two pictures, for which I'll get $0.20 every time someone downloads them for use in fliers or whatnot. Folks may think I'm being insane and letting people pay me $0.20/download for photos that may be worth big money or something, but come on. Just leaving them sitting around on my hard drive isn't making anyone any money. If I get a couple dimes whenever someone decides that my pelican belongs in their flier, frankly that's two more dimes than I had to begin with. I did originally leave the office for the express purpose of going home to clean my guns for the range run tonight, just got sidetracked with the housework. It is my intention to leave work a little early, clean the guns tonight, and then get going promptly. More details on the range run when I return. Well, I wound up leaving pretty much on time, but noticing that my mail about the range didn't go out (I need to load ezmlm-idx on the server). This means that, although I don't mind going shooting alone, I owe it to the other folks in the group to give them some advance notice. So, I got home and did some more trimming on the palm trees, then decided it was time to fix the brick walkway in the back yard. It and all of its uneven, ridge-in-the-center glory. This precipitated a trip to Wally World for a trowel, which they didn't have - so I went to Home Depot, where I followed Martin tradition and picked up not only a trowel, but a halogen clamp-on work lamp to turn night into day while I'm working. I think the neighbors tried to bribe me to turn it off part of the way through, because I could smell meat cooking. Perhaps they thought the smell would tempt me enough that I'd turn off the lamp. Fat chance, I had a project and it was going to happen, end of story. So, I spent the next couple of hours lifting up each brick in the walkway, scraping away the dirt which had managed to get in between the bricks, removing all the grass which had encroached upon the space where bricks were supposed to be, and then re-levelling the dirt beneath them and re-laying them in the dirt. Yes, I know, sand is supposed to be involved in this process. Tell that to the guy who laid them in the first place, not to me. Compare and contrast: the brick walkway on the 16th vs now.
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