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Labels: house project
Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
My nephew Shippy makes very pretty ceramic items. Click here to visit his online studio. Give someone one of these, and you can be sure that they don't already have one!
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Other blogs you may enjoy:
My civilian gun defense use blog
My daughter's blog
Pete Drum's Web Page
Gun Laws Don't Work
instapundit.com
Dissecting Leftism -- By John Ray
A courageous Briton arguing for relaxing Britain's gun control laws
Right Thoughts
Final Protective Fire
Amitai Etzioni's Blog
Scrappleface -- Dangerously Clever Satire
Michael Williams -- Master of None
Lt. Smash is Again Citizen Smash
Another Conservative Blogger
A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
An Iraqi dentist
Promoting children being raised by their own parents
A federal law clerk opines about the law
Michelle Malkin's blog
Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party
Music, Politics, Motorcycles
Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
Click here for a FREE NEWSLETTER on Ohio Gun Rights from Buckeye Firearms Association!
Another conservative.
Neocon Blues
Conservative Oasis
Other Idaho Bloggers
Bubbleheads is a retired submariner
An Idaho State University student. A Democrat. Someday, she'll start paying income taxes and change.
A retired Las Vegas stagehand, of all things.
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The House Project: Internal Framing & External Walls
Sure enough, the internal wall framing is up, and some of the external walls are in place. Some of the pictures may look a little odd--it was dusk, and I have had to artificially adjust the brightness.
Here's the master bedroom, master bath, second bath, exterior wall.
Click here to enlarge
Here we are in the kitchen, looking towards the laundry room and garage.
Click here to enlarge
Somewhere in this sea of studs is my office and another bedroom.
Click here to enlarge
I think this is the view from the dining room. The redhead, of course, is for whom I am having this house built. (An old friend asks why she hasn't aged since he saw her last in 1994. She claims that there is a picture of her in the closet that is aging. Actually, it is Oil of Olay that is doing the miracles.)
Click here to enlarge
The water pipe is now going under the house--presumably for connection to plumbing fixtures. I don't know why they don't put the pipes for this in place before the subflooring, but I presume that there's a good reason, established back when the materials arrived by horse-drawn wagon.
Click here to enlarge
Here's the view through what will be a sliding glass window on the master bedroom.
Click here to enlarge
Oh yeah, a cool sunset, accentuated by forest fires somewhere in the distance.
Click here to enlarge
Previous house entry.
Too Cool To Not Share
My wife is starting to sort through her stuff in preparation for the move to the new house next year, and we looked really carefully at this peacock feather. Is there anything manmade more astonishing in its beauty?
Click here to enlarge
If The DNC Had One Of These, John Kerry Might Be President Today
I was helping my father-in-law clean up his apartment in Orange County, and he told me to throw away a typewriter. I didn't know what kind of typewriter it was, but I figured, "Hey, it probably works. Maybe some thrift store will take it?" No, he told me. So I pulled off the cover... and was I shocked. There was a time when I would have given anything to have one of these--and with the correcting button! 
Do you think that they could have at least produced half-believable forged memos?
By the way, it works! Even the correcting button. For those of you not old enough to be familiar with this now primitive technology--but was it cool back when I was young--if you typed the wrong character, you hit the little button in the lower right corner, and the typing element backed up one space. Then you retyped the wrong character. A little piece of sticky tape pulled the ink off the page--and you now had a blank spot in which to type the right character.
This wasn't putting white over the bad character--it actually removed the ink from the paper. Okay, for those of you with spell checkers, grammar checkers, and perhaps next year, sense checkers, this doesn't seem like much--but in 1971, this was as cool as typing could get!
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act
I've been out on the road and sick, and busily manufacturing the newest member of the ScopeRoller line of products, so I haven't been paying enough attention to politics. It appears from this editorial that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act is about to be voted upon by the Senate, and I guess go from there to the President's desk. I've blogged before about some legitimate concerns about this bill--but as Schulte's Blog points out, some of the opponents aren't attacking on those concerns, but on bogus concerns: Any person with a 2nd grade reading ability can see that this bill in fact would not shield dealers or manufacturers from engaging in negligence with respect to whom they transfer firearms to. More specifically, in the DC sniper case, the dealer would receive no protection whatsoever from this legislation, as that transfer of the firearm in question happened under negligent terms.
Now, Schulte points out:
The bottom line is that this bill is designed to do one thing, and one thing only: to protect the gun industry from lawsuits which result from a third party engaging in criminal activity with the use of one of their products. We don’t sue Ford or Miller Light because one of their products was involved in a vehicular death by DUI, do we? No. However, we certainly might sue Ford if one of their vehicles was known to have a material defect. That’s expected. And in fact S. 397 gives clear note that a defect in design or manufacture of a firearm will not be given immunity, unless that defect came to light through a criminal act. That seems reasonable to me.Being that this was an “official” position from the paper, it’s sensible to assume that the writers engaged in just a little bit of research before making grandiose claims that this bill would in any way protect bad dealers, or pose any threat to public safety. If I could find the real story in less than 3 minutes, it would follow that a professional journalist would be able to the same in even less time.
Sorry, but at least on the op-ed page, "professional journalist" generally means "rewriter of press releases"--especially when it comes to gun control issues.
Still Sick As a Dog
I'm headed back to sleep in the hopes that rest will help. My wife had flu followed by a sinus infection. I am experiencing both of these problems simultaneously. At least it means that I can finish them both up at the same time.
I was feeling a bit better yesterday evening, and I foolishly used my delusion of being better to assemble several ScopeRoller 11 Deluxe sets, and get them ready for shipping. I also figured out why one of my customers was having a problem with one particular caster set not unlocking. So many learning experiences!
My builder tells me that the interior wall framing is now complete, and they are putting up the exterior walls. I'll try to get up there this weekend to take some pictures.
The Worst Road Trip Ever
I returned home Wednesday evening from the worst road trip ever. This was a mission of mercy, so I wasn't expecting it to be fun--but still much harder than I expected.
My father-in-law and his wife (does that make her my stepmother-in-law?) have a big friendly yellow Labrador named Samantha. Samantha loves to sit in the rear seat and hang her head out the window--or so Dick and Bette insisted. It turned out that most of the 1000 mile trip involved Samantha panting in my ear and drooling on my shoulder.
Bette's short-term memory is going; I have confidence that even if she had a computer, read this, and took offense, she would forget it so quickly that she wouldn't be upset with me the next time we met. Her long-term memory seems fine; she was able to tell me about meeting her first husband in New Guinea when they were both in the Army Air Force during World War II, about their home and servants in Manila after the war, and a number of other mildly interesting stories. Unfortunately, anything that involved events in the last few days were lost immediately, and she would often tell me the same story three times in an hour, or ask where something was that she had just been given. Television and movies sometimes play this early stage of Alzheimer's for laughs, but there's nothing funny about it. It is tragic, and because you know that she has no control over it, you can't really get angry--you just get exhausted by it.
Alzheimer's is one of the more depressing aspects of old age. Money spent on finding cures or preventative measures for it seems like an excellent investment. In the meantime, here's a good excuse to hit your local Chinese, Thai, or Indian restaurant: A spicy ingredient of many curries may be an effective treatment for Alzheimer's disease, say researchers.
We stayed in motels that were part of the Vagabond Inn chain in Bakersfield and Reno. I think their motto is, "Deferred external maintenance, as long as possible." Inside, they were a bit nicer than Motel 6, with whom they are roughly cost competitive. Outside, the paint was peeling, and wood surfaces were crumbling. Cost effective, I would say.
A team from the University of California at Los Angeles believes that turmeric may play a role in slowing down the progression of the neurodegenerative disease.
The finding may help to explain why rates of Alzheimer's are much lower among the elderly in India than in their Western peers.
Previous studies have found that Alzheimer's affects just 1% of people over the age of 65 living in some Indian villages.
Vindaloos
Turmeric is found in everything from mild Kormas to the hottest Vindaloos. The crucial chemical is curcumin, a compound found in the spice.
Alzheimer's is linked to the build up of knots in the brain called amyloid plaques.
Turmeric reduced the number of these plaques by a half.
My wife came down with a sinus infection while we were gone, and she thoughtfully gave it to me. We are both taking Augmentin for it, and perhaps I will be well enough to be fully productive by Saturday or Sunday.
Expanding Intellectual Property
I was driving north on the San Diego Freeway, just north of Los Angeles Airport, and I noticed that the graffiti on one of the overpasses seemed to have a "c" inside a circle--the copyright symbol. I'm confused. Is the intellectual property content of graffiti so high that it requires this sort of protection?
Automotive
I rented a Chrysler 300 from Dollar Rent-A-Car. The look of this car is certainly different, like the Magnum and Charger and the PT Cruiser. All of these cars are enjoying (or perhaps suffering) from Dick Tracy Syndrome. By that, I mean that these don't look exactly like real cars, but more like the stylized cars of the future that used to appear in the Dick Tracy comic strip of the 1950s and 1960s. I expect mobsters firing Buck Rogers ray guns to come out of any of these cars.
Anyway, this particular Chrysler 300 is white. Because of its rather bulbous and overdone styling, its color, and the preparation that my wife is now doing for teaching Herman Melville's classic about whaling and sin, she calls it "Moby Schtick."
My assumption when I started driving it, based on my experience with other Chrysler products (such as the Cordoba, "with the fine Corinthian leather") was that it would be powerful and have a suspension that was too strongly biased in favor of a soft ride. Oddly enough, it manages to combine a not terribly smooth ride with poor shock absorbers and soft springs. It has quite a bit of body roll--yet even the mildest of road surface irregularities can be felt coming up through the suspension. The one area where the 300 improves on past Chryslers I have suffered from is that the steering wheel now has effort, and at least a pretense of road feel. Compared to my son's Malibu, my wife's Equinox, and my Corvette, this car stinks. It doesn't ride as well as the Equinox--not even close. It has about as much body roll as the Equinox, and handles poorly compared to the Malibu. The 300 is certainly superior to the Corvette in ride quality, but it darn well better!
The interior is nicely quiet, except when the engine is straining hard. (My wife says, "Oh, so it's a baleen whale." Baleen whales strain their food out of seawater.) With all the noise, unfortunately, there isn't a particular impressive amount of power.
Adding to the annoyance, it often does not start the first time through. Of course, it does have 7000 miles on it.
Memories, Of The Way We Used To Be
My wife and I both attended Santa Monica High School. I graduated in 1974, she in 1978. I lived in Santa Monica starting in second grade; my wife's family moved there after her father returned from several years working in Hawaii. We married there in 1980, and moved away in 1982 for a variety of reasons. One reason was the realization that we would never be able to afford to buy a home there on a software engineer's salary.
We've been back a couple of times since. Everytime is a reminder of Heraclitus' famous saying that, "You can never step in the same river twice. You are a different man, and the river is a different river." Visiting a town where I grew up is a poignant reminder of that fact.
We've been living in Boise for 3 1/2 years now; returning to Los Angeles traffic is just astonishing. We drove from Laguna Beach to Long Beach along Pacific Coast Highway. Stretches of this beach that were largely open space when we lived in Irvine in 1984-85 are now solidly developed. The California Coastal Commission, which was supposed to prevent this sort of horrifying captailist exploitation of the beauty of our coastline when the voters passed it in the early 1970s, seems to have been completely ineffective. I presume that this was because the developers with money could hire enough lawyers and pay enough in bribes to get their projects approved; the scale of the development reminds you that the days when an individual with some land could build a beach house are over.
The cars, of course, are a very California thing. Corvettes aren't rare in Boise, but they are much more common here. Porsche Carreras are vastly more common, and Jaguars were astonishingly more common along this stretch of road. Dodge Vipers--we saw more of them in one day than I think I have seen in 3 1/2 years living in Boise. I saw at least one, maybe two Maseratis, and a Rolls-Royce. Definitely not Boise cars!
OF course, along with all that conspicuous consumption was a lot more homeless people--testimony to the failure of California to deal with the problem of mental illness. At what used to be Lincoln Park in Santa Monica (now Christine Reed Park), what used to be an open park now has a fence all the way around, with signs telling you what hours the park is open--and dozens of homeless people sleeping outside the fence. Compared to my memories of Lincoln Park in the 1960s, and even in the early 1970s, It feels like one of those science fiction movies where the barbarians gather around a nuclear power station, completely oblivious to its meaning, because so much has been lost.
One of our favorite places to eat breakfast and lunch was Zucky's at Fourth and Wilshire. We had high hopes as we drove down Wilshire, because we could see the end of the sign. But when we actually reached it, the sign was broken; windows were boarded up; and there was a For Sale sign on the building.
At least Campos' Famous Burritos was still operational. The beef burrito was as I remembered it--and the great news that that it used to be $1.90 when I was young. Now it is $3.85. It was a bargain when I made minimum wage; it is even more of a bargan now, having doubled in price while my wage rate has increased about 10x.
The Apparent Terrorist Shot Dead By London Police
Now there are reasons to believe that he wasn't what he seemed: LONDON, July 23 - Scotland Yard admitted Saturday that a man police officers gunned down at point-blank range in front of horrified subway passengers on Friday had nothing to do with the investigation into the bombing attacks here.
Why did he run? He wasn't a Muslim, apparently spoke good English, so he should have understood orders from the police, and he was legally in Europe. The witnesses who reported seeing wires--perhaps, being an electrician, he was carrying some wire with him? This is bizarre.
The man was identified by police as Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian, described by officers as an electrician on his way to work. "He was not connected to incidents in central London on 21st July, 2005, in which four explosive devices were partly detonated," a police statement said.
When I was taking a concealed weapons class many years at the sheriff's department training facility, one of the videos we watched showed how easy it was to misinterpret a situation--and the importance of holding fire until death or great bodily injury to another party was imminent. Under the circumstances, I can see why the London police would have legitimately interpreted this guy wearing a heavy coat in warm weather, who ran from them after having left an apartment under surveillance, as being a threat. Unfortunately, because this guy seems to have been uninvolved, this is going to make the police hesitate the next time--when perhaps they really are chasing a suicide bomber. The other tragedy is that an innocent person who inexplicably ran from the police is now dead.
If Invading Iraq Caused The London Terrorist Attacks...
Then what explains the suicide bombing in Egypt? Egypt didn't help us. The most that Egypt has done is send an ambassador to Iraq--who al-Qaeda promptly kidnapped, and claims to have killed.
