Blog of Chris

I met with a representative from BGE today, concerning the relocation of the electrical feed coming into my house after I put up my addition.

Both my cable and the neighbor’s run through the space where my new bedroom will be, so they must be moved. I figured this would cost a lot of money, but with a little bit of tweaking to the construction plans, it should only be a few hundred dollars.

When the back of my house is torn down, the existing electrical panel and meter will be temporarily mounted somwhere out of the way so that there is still power available for doing the construction work.

Once my electrician is just about done with his rough-ins, he will re-route all the old circuits to the new panel (at which time there will be no power!). Then BGE will come in and hook up the new panel, and the juice will flow once again.

All I have to do is mount an unsightly 20 foot 6×6 post to the side of my new addition!

BGE said the whole thing will cost about $170, which isn’t bad, all things considered. (Plus the cost to buy and install the 6×6 post)

-C

I am just going to link to Tom, he pretty much summed it up.

 http://www.tomstover.org

I will say that I want to build a flugtag machine, and that it was fun to be in CP again, complete with late night fatty diner food after a night of drinking.

-C

This is a pointless blog post. I am going to walk you through the brown shelves by my front door, from top to bottom.

I was taking pictures of my pet fish (who reside in a tank on said shelves), and ended up taking shots of the whole thing.

On Top: A lighthouse lamp. Lee bought this for me when I was training in Missouri in 2004 (because I like lighthouses) This is the most recent shot of the Whong brothers all in one place, taken shortly after I returned to the U.S. from the Middle East.

The travel alarm clock was a gift from my Dad. The Mug was hamd-made by my friend Missy. The Photo is Lee and I on Federal Hill back in 2004.

This shelf holds Grimlock, one of the dinobots. This was a gift from Lee when I came home on leave last December. She found him on eBay, complete with guns. Behind Grimlock is a custom made candle holder from my friend Mike Silber. He does cool things with an image in photoshop, prints it out on translucent paper, and affixes it to this neato candle holder. It looks cool when lit from behind. Next we have a teeny tiny jack-o-lantern with a paw print carved out of the front. This is supposed to be Nathan Scott Phillips’ jack-o-lantern. I am not sure how we will light it. You will also see a desert colored notebook, and a desert colored toy truck, both from my deployment. The toy truck was used as a training aide to plan out attack scenarios, etc. Oh yeah, there is a slice of railroad track I found last week when walking my dog down at the train tracks.

These are my fish. Only one made it through the 14 month deployment, only to die a few weeks after I got home. Now all I have is guppies.

This shelf is not so exciting, and houses fish food, and a postcard from Iraq.

Middle School and High School Yearbooks, et cetera. Note: I sadly lost my 8th grade yearbook… I left it on a bus after our class trip, along with my discman, and two CDs (The Metallica Black Album, and the Beavis and Butthead Experience)

Well, that’s it.

-C

형

Can anyone read this?

I spent about 3 hours last night finally installing trim tile in my bathroom.  It’s been needing it for quite some time, as the bathroom was been functional for nearly 2 years now.  I had to use 2 boxes of cove base tile from home depot, which I think costed about 60 dollars.  I also had to pick up a set of tile pliers (for cutting shapes), a sponge, trowel, and a tub of pre-mixed mortar.  (Oh yeah, and a tube of caulk-style sanded grout).

Overall it was a simple process.  Like all trim work, the only tough part is the corners, which my bathroom has plenty of.  There are matching outside and inside corner peices that you are supposed to buy to tackle these corners properly, but I regrettably did not have the foresight to get these.  The not so professional solution is to get creative with the grout.
The pain of it was that about a third of the way into the project, I realized that the tiles I bought were not quite white.  They were buscuit, which looks a lot like white, especially under the dull flourescent low-level lighting of your local Lowe’s home improvement warehouse.  Sigh.  So, the bathroom has trim, but the corners are not as pretty as they could be, and it’s not quite white… You can’t really notice it unless you are looking for it…  of course, it’s the first thing I look at when I enter the room.

-C

i stole it off Eugene’s blog because I think it’s cool that you can just mix hangul with english.

On Sunday night Lee and I went out for Korean Food. I may have mentioned it before, but the place I used to go (incidentally translated into “shaking duck butt”) in Glen Burnie closed while I was overseas! The nerve!

So, we are limited to “shadier” Korean restaurants in Baltimore City proper, namely in the little Korean enclave North of North Avenue, near Charles Street.

There is a place in the basement, which we nicknamed “basement Korean”, and a place across from the highrises called “empty Korean” (because there is never anyone in there).

We actually went looking for another restaurant that is on a corner and has a big sign. We couldn’t find it (it might have closed) but we did find another restaurant which opened up literally right nextdoor to empty Korean. It too was empty, so I am now calling it Empty Korean II.

I always order Duk Mandoo Guk, which is a gigantic bowl of beef soup with noodles, rice cakes, meat, eggs, and seasonings. Lee gets some kind of Bibim Bap, and we always get Mandoo as an appetizer.

Baltimore isn’t the best location for good Korean food, but there are options. I hope that someday they will re-open shaking duck butt.

Well, not really woes, as nothing has gone wrong (yet). It just takes for-frigging-ever. On Friday I had to go downtown for the 4th time in this Baltimore City zoning process.

Here’s a recap:

1st visit: Informational visit to the downstairs zoning office. I picked up their “Guide to Rowhouse Additions” which clearly outlined what was needed: Photos, site plan, sections, and elevations indicating old and new construction. I then proceeded to complie all of this stuff into a neat packet. Also on this visit, I ordered my zoning plats for $42 dollars, at another city office building (located next to city hall). You must submit the plats themselves in your packet, or a receipt showing that you have them on order.
2nd visit: Drop the packet off in the downstairs zoning office. They review it, and find out what exact zoning codes you are violating (if any).

3rd visit: After the downstairs office has had your packet for a week, they will call you to come pick it up. When you get it, you will see a typed out list of the zoning ordinances that you vill violate if you build. You take this information to the cashier in the permit office, and pay a $25 fee. Then, you hand carry the packet up to the 14th floor to the Board of Municipal and Zoning Appeals. You drop it off (I forgot to get it notarized, but they have a notary right there… another $2, but it’s better than if they didn’t have one at all.) Again, it must be reviewed and they must put their own, new cover sheet on it… This takes about another week.

4th visit: Again, I visit the BMZA office on the 14th floor to get my copy of the wording for my public sign, and my official hearing date. The sign is to let the community know that I intend to build, and that they may come protest my addition if they think it is out of line.

So, now I have the wording and standards, which I must adhere to exactly…

“To whom it may concern, Chris Whong wants to finally finish his friggin rowhouse, three years after he started.”

So, my hearing is scheduled for December 5th. That’s how far out they had an opening. I imagine that it will still take a little time after that to get the permits in order, and then it’s the holidays.

Also, if it’s too darn cold, it’s a bad idea to rip my house open in the middle of winter and risk pipes freezing, etc.

We’ll see how this all pans out, but I have from now until the 5th of December to hammer out the numbers with my contractors.

-C

So, out of sheer curiosity, I added google adsense ads to my main page at chriswhong.com. I made $5.63 on the first day! I was completely shocked, and proceeded to slap them all over all my auxillary websites. Yes, it’s part of the consumer whore thing.

So, on day 2, I have made $0.01. I don’t know where the discrepincy is, but hopefully day 3 will yield positive results. I am sure that my traffic is down because the search engine robots have yet to discover chriswhong.com.

-C

In Locust Point, the ice cream man (lady) still comes around, even though it’s October. Just as I entered my house after work yesterday, I heard the familiar electronic jingle of “Raindrops keep falling on my head.”

This gets really annoying after you hear it 2 or 3 times, but it does serve as an sure indicator that ice cream is headed your way.

Actually, it’s soft serve, but still awesome. I had a caramel sundae yesterday, sat down on my new couch, popped in Star Wars Episode 1, and passed out. What a great way to end a weekday.

-Chris

Flip, Flossing

Flip, Killing a baby seal

Flip, attempting to fight my foot.

Flip, being good for a change

Flip, Continuing to be good.

Flip, doing his impression of the Sphynx.