Blog of Chris

I am a fan of IKEA, but in moderation.  They make shopping for crappy unassembled melamine furniture into an experience.  My rule of thumb has always been that too much IKEA in one room is a bad thing…  one or two peices of furniture is ok, but when you have the IKEA $8 floor lamp with the IKEA futuristic coat hooks, IKEA teeny tiny couch, IKEA flimsy TV stand, and IKEA desk, your room starts to look very cheap (sort of like it was furnished with cheap, recently assembled melamine furniture… hrmmm)

This, of course, is not the look I would like to acheive in my new kitchen.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the kind of money to be picky, so I have shifted my focus to a kitchen solution that involves some IKEA, but not all.

Ikea has decent cabinets, but they feel flimsy for the most part.  I did find out last night that they have an option where the cabinet itself is melamine, but the doors are stained solid wood.  I think this creates a sturdier-feeling door and a much nicer look then the cheaper stuff.

Now, IKEA also has their own trendy looking plumbing fixtures, countertops and sinks, all of which I find pretty ugly.  My plan is to incorporate much nicer countertops, appliances, sinks and fixture to IKEA cabinets.  I save over $2000, and I can still incorporate all the cool stuff I was planning in my kitchen.  Again, the philosophy is that some IKEA is ok, the whole room is bad.

Also, IKEA claims that these cabinets will be ready within 14 days of ordering, which is pretty awesome considering my upcoming construction schedule.

Last night, I was that guy who is at IKEA by himself at 8 p.m. on a weeknight.  I did have some swedish meatballs, which were pretty good, and some weird frenchy santa claus marshmallows they had at the checkout line)

One week until my zoning hearing!

-C

Morning calls for pain relief
A line above the step beneath
The worst that you could do
And the best that you could hope for
Is hardly the best

Tepid water chase the pills
With turpentine and chamomile
And don’t get cheap with the wine
You need to be up all of the time

Shield your eyes, conceal your lies.

Don’t blink, everyone’s watching.
They’ll think you’re up to something.
They need for you to be everything
that they cannot be themselves.

In preparation for putting an addition on my house, I started to move everything out of my basement to the first floor.

Part of my plan is to finish the basement, and have a laundry room and a nice workbench. Just about every bit of home improvement I have done results in a tremendous amount of dust, most of which ends up in the basement. Vaccum all you want, in a few more weeks everything will be covered in dust. It will be nice to get the walls and ceiling closed in.

I did also finally get rid of some relics in the basement that came with the house and I was never motivated enough to remove before. Two make-shift shelves (made with unfinished dimensional lumber, probably from the original walls of the house) were constructed down there. The only way to get them out was to dismantle them. There was also a very old, very broken dresser with a mirror that I proceeded to throw out my backyeard into my concrete back yard (Which, incidentally, is already occupied by a growing mountain of trash and tons of clippings from viens that grew rampant while I was deployed).

So now I have a very large mountain of trash in my backyard, which is bad for three reasons:

1) I am not home during the day, and a big pile of trash invited trash-pickers to come root, who may also take things that are not trash.

2) Some people see piles of trash as an opportunity to get rid of their own trash, especially if nobody is around to see them.

3) Neighbors don’t like big piles of trash… it looks, well, trashy.

The burning question now is whether or not to hire a general contractor to do the major construction work, or to hire some workers myself to get it done. The former is eternally simpler, but will cost a lot more money. The latter leaves me exposed to a lot of setbacks, liabilities, etc, but it more budget friendly.

I can remember coming home from Kuwait with the thought in my head that I’d be done my addition by Christmas. That didn’t happen, and now, with 4 months to plan, it may not even be underway before Christmas. (Sigh)

My guppies had a baby. Well, actually they had many babies, but one has managed to survive in the hostile environment it was born into.

I got these guppies at Wal-Mart… I know, it’s not the most reputable place to buy tropical fish. (And, indicentally, they stock more dead fish than live ones) It was an impulse buy, and the lady who sold them to me said they would mate every 28 days. I said, “neato”, and bought a male and a female, and they threw in a baby guppy for free (I named him Stewie).

28 days went by and nothing happened. For no particular reason except that the other fish kept dying, I got 4 more male guppies and added them to the tank.

After a week or so, I noticed the female was getting bigger in the midsection, and had secluded herself in a corner behind the plants. I figured she was pregneant. I had assumed that guppies lay eggs, and that there were no good secluded areas to lay them in a 3 gallon fish tank, and that is why there had not been any babies yet.

After another week, she was skinny again, and swimming around with all the other fish. I figured she had laid eggs somewhere that I couldn’t see.

Then, I finally decided to research guppies online, and learned that they have live birth, and that they eat their young! The best way to breed them is to isolate the pregneant female from the males, and then to isolate the babies from her after they are born. Of course, I did not to this, and the fact that i could not see any baby fishies swimming around made me assume they had all been eaten.

On Friday night I was feeding the fish and noticed a teeny little guppy hanging out in the dark areas behind the filter intake tube. He was about 3mm long! Actually, over the past 48 hours he seems to have grown to almost 5mm. I tried to take some photos, but it’s hard to take pictures of fish.  In the foreground is a blurry adult guppy, and just below his back fins is the baby (he looks weird because you can see his reflection on the surface of the water)
Incidentally, the half-grown guppy named Stewie has gone missing, which makes me think the others ate him.

Anyways, this new baby seems to have evaded being eaten for a week or so, and seems good at swimming away quickly when the big boys come around. We’ll see if he makes it to adulthood.

-Chris

I at dinner at DuClaw last night (which for the longest time I thought was called “DUCLAVY” because of their weird, scripted logo).  I got the Penne, which was pretty good…  I must say I was disappointed by the happy hour nachos…  with all the good food they serve, they get their nacho cheese from a bag.

So, as an indicator to the world that I was home and rearing to give out candy, I strung up orange lights on my stoop railing.  I also had two pumpkins, but fate decided that carving them was just not in the cards this year.  Even with all that prep, I only had two trick-or-treaters on Halloween!  I would have had 3, but I did not make it downstairs fast enough.