Terrible Decisions update: The Big List of Lists

On December 5, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy10 Comments

So… remember the bathroom update? I haven’t mentioned it in a while because school started and we had to push everything back to when I had the time and the sanity to do it: in other words, winter break. Which is in three weeks, which means that the planning has shifted into high gear. I put this together tonight; I’m sharing it with you guys because 1) I think it might be entertaining to see just how unprepared I am to do this right and 2) I’m hoping people smarter than me will spot issues that I might not be aware of yet.

Copied and pasted from Evernote, here you go:

Project 1: Eliminate bulkhead

1) Clear insulation away from inside attic.
2) Remove existing bathroom fan.
3) Demolish bulkhead.
4) Secure/install new bathroom fan.
5) Install new cement board ceiling.

Potential issues: 1) Electrical incompatibilities; 2) structural incompatibilities; 3) Incompatibilities with position of vent ductwork.

Necessary purchases: 1) Cement board; 2) Screws; 3) drywall mud 4) mudding tools/sandpaper

Possible purchases: 1) 2x4s for structure? 2) possibly something to extend/move vent ductwork. 3) moisture barrier 4) new wiring (hopefully not)

Timeline: 1 day.

Project 2: Demolition of existing bathtub surround.

1) Pull down tile.
2) Pull down drywall.
3) Remove existing shower fixtures.

Potential issues: 1) Mold issues behind wall; 2) leak issues behind wall; 3) plumbing incompatibilities with new shower hardware (call plumber for this if necessary)

Necessary purchases: None for demolition, but we should have shower hardware before doing this so that we can compare it to what’s behind the wall.

Possible purchases: None.

Timeline: A couple of hours for demo and clean-up; possibly a couple of days if we have to wait for a plumber (can do other two walls while waiting)

Project 3: Construction of new bathtub surround/ installation of new shower hardware.

1) Install moisture barrier (???), cement board, second waterproofing layer?
2) Measure/drill holes for shower hardware
3) Mortar, tile, grout.

Potential issues: I probably suck at this. Measure thirty times before tiling once. Make absolutely sure we have carefully researched every step before doing the work; only one chance to do this right. Terror. Do we mud cement board before putting tile on? Assume no, but find out.

Necessary purchases: Cement board, screws, possible sheeting for moisture barrier/waterproofing layer (spread-on?), shower hardware, tile cutter (borrowed/rented), mortar, grout, mortar/grouting tools

Possible purchases: None I can think of.

Timeline: At least a full day; probably two, especially if we need a plumber before doing one of the walls.

***WORK CAN STOP INDEFINITELY AT THIS POINT***

Project 4: Demolish rest of bathroom

1) Carefully remove mirror from wall; take downstairs
2) Remove hardware from walls
3) Demolish sink/vanity (plumbing will be a pain in the ass, since I don’t know how to remove it)
4) Drain & remove toilet.
5) Tear out drywall behind toilet, where tub was leaking
6) Remove tile kickplate around base of walls
7) Remove door and door…frame?
8) Remove floor tile.
9) If putting in floor heating, pull drywall on wall that we need to run wiring through.

Potential issues: Removing the floor tile is expected to be a pain in the ass. Dealing with the plumbing to remove the sink could potentially be difficult. Hopefully do all this with as little damage as possible to existing drywall other than the piece we know we need to replace. Removing the painted door frame without damaging the drywall seems… optimistic.

Necessary purchases: None, unless a special tool is needed to remove the linoleum floor tile; unexpected.

Possible purchases: None that I can think of.

Timeline: Please, God, don’t let this take longer than a day.

Project 5: Fix rest of bathroom.

1) Install floor heating, if that’s happening. Possibly replace power switch on wall if needed.
2) Install new drywall as needed. Mud, sand, etc.
3) Install new tile floor
4) Install new vanity, including necessary plumbing hookups. In process, attach new sink to new vanity. Also attach new sink hardware to new sink once it’s attached to the vanity.
5) Install new toilet
6) Cut door to size for new flooring; reinstall
7) Install new framing for door (match old, if possible)
8) Repaint (before or after vanity installation? Hmm.)
9) Hang new mirror and new hardware

Potential issues: I have no idea how to do any of these things. Timing on painting. Electrical work necessary for floor heating may be problematic. Tile must be measured and cut perfectly the first time, and I’ve never done it before. Plumbing hookups on vanity must be leak-free. Toilet must be leak-free. New door framing must line up. Drywall needs to be proper size and look right when mudded. No good way to cut door down.

Necessary purchases: Mortar, grout, drywall, mud, screws, acquire circular saw (borrow), door framing, paint, new hardware.

Possible purchases: Floor heating unit.

Timeline: God help me, hopefully only a couple of days.

In which I dodge a bullet

On December 5, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

Had a bad moment with the boy the other day.

He’s been throwing things lately. This, in and of itself, isn’t such a big deal; toddlers throw things. We encourage throwing when it’s a ball, so long as he’s throwing to and not at, and discourage throwing just about everything else. Generally, something along the lines of “Don’t throw things!” or “We don’t throw books” or “You’ll hurt the dog” has been good enough to get him to stop. Rarely– I mean, it, rarely— we have had to tell him twice.

He is almost 2 1/2, just for the record.

The other day, he threw his fork at dinnertime. This earned a sharper reprimand than usual as throwing a metal fork is somewhat more dangerous than throwing many other objects. We picked it up off the floor and gave it back to him and he threw it again. This time, he missed my head by maybe an inch.

I… reacted somewhat strongly. Verbally only, mind you, but more severely than perhaps he’s used to. He was done eating anyway, so we washed him up and then told him to walk around the table and pick up his fork and give it to me. Which he did– mostly. He walked around the table. He picked up the fork from the ground. I held out my had for him to give it to me.

And he gets this look on his face.

Oh hell no, boy. Don’t you even think what you’re thinking right now, because goddammit I’ve never spanked a kid in my life and I swear to god I may not be able to stop myself if you throw a fork at my face right now.

Out comes the teacher voice.

“Give. The fork. To me. Now.”

He very clearly spends a moment considering his options, and hands me the fork.

Which… good, because I really didn’t know where I was going after that, and heading into a potential You Really Need to Understand I’m Serious Right Now moment without a game plan is never a good idea, either in my classroom or in my house. I’m ambivalent about spanking right now; I don’t see that in general it’s going to do much good with a 2-year-old who wouldn’t know what “I’m going to spank you if you do that” even means, and in general I’d prefer to never hit my kid. But given a choice between hit my kid and have him believe that throwing sharp things in my face is okay… well, I’d prefer to dodge the issue altogether and not have to face that choice, actually.

I may need to spend some time reading up on discipline with toddlers.

You remember the tree that came down in the storm, right? Our insurance company estimated the cost to have it cut up and hauled away at $700, which doesn’t hit our deductible. The first estimate we got was two grand, and even getting that guy out to look at our shit was a huge pain in the ass because of all the much-more-important bigger jobs that were available all around the northern part of the state.

I’ve got a guy coming out tomorrow who will do the job for $575. Which is nowhere near $2000, and makes me very freaking happy.

Cue the normal concerns that you have when you get lowballed, of course, but if they do the job well I’m going to be recommending the guy to everyone I know. I may knock down other people’s trees to drum up more work for him.

In which I solve mysteries

On December 4, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television5 Comments

1) Yes, I’m still talking about The Walking Dead, and yes, this is three posts in a row. Shut up.

2) SPOILERS, GODDAMMIT. Go away right now.

3) Seriously.

4) Last chance, goddammit. Even if you read as fast as I do you’ve had a chance to tear your eyes away by now.

5) Okay, one more thing: I can’t take full credit for this; the wife and I put a lot of the details together in twenty minutes of exhaustive frame-by-frame last night and there’s also that .gif floating around of Tyreese running. But:

6) Tyreese has Judith, and I can prove it. Or at least I can come as close to proving it as one can reasonably be expected to do given that I don’t write the show.

All of the images ought to be clickable to make them bigger, but they’re not terribly high quality because I took them from my computer monitor with my phone; I can probably find a way to take screenshots from iTunes video but didn’t want this blog post to take a week.

This is the only shot of Judith we actually get in the episode. Note one really important detail: she’s buckled into her car seat. She’s also way too big for it, but we’ll let that slide on account of zombie apocalypse.

This is Tyreese. Just note the clothing and the gun:

This, a minute or two later, is also Tyreese. I’ll recommend blowing this one up; note the following details: 1) He’s running toward the orange truck; a moment later the walkway above him is going to be blown up by the tank. 2) His gun is on his back (more obvious when you see it in motion, I admit) because he is 3) carrying something. We can’t see what, of course.

Important fact about TV: No shot is ever an accident. This shot serves no purpose at all unless we’re supposed to notice something about it. We see the walkway blow up, and then, a moment later, we see the tank, which never moves again after firing this shot, because Darryl blows it up moments later.

The orange truck is obscured , but would be on the right side of the screen. Various carnagey things happen, Rick finds Carl, and then they go looking for Judith. This is the first shot we get of the car seat:

Note the direction the tank is facing– Rick and Carl are walking in the same direction Tyreese was running– in other words, Tyreese was running away from the tank, but he was also running away from where the car seat was.

Here’s the next shot:

Note the orange truck in the background. This is indisputably where Tyreese was coming from (he’s even on the right side of the walkway, running away from us, which makes sense given that he was coming from the car seat.)

The final bit of proof?

Gross? Yes. Bloody? Yes.

And the straps are unbuckled. Not torn, not ripped; in fact, other than the blood, and who knows what condition this car seat was in before they acquired it, there’s no damage to it at all. I would like to submit that 1) zombies aren’t great with the manual dexterity, and I know grown adults (ahemmeahem) who have trouble wrestling kids out of these goddamn things, and furthermore 2) zombies aren’t big on wandering off with their food. They eat right then and there; we’ve also just seen a shot of one crouching down to eat somebody.

Now, I know the argument that they’re not gonna show a half-eaten baby on TV. Okay, fine. But: they’ve already shown two completely destroyed car seats (T-Dog found them) with much clearer evidence that infants were brutally killed in them, and they’ve had at least two children actually literally shot in the head on-screen so far. This isn’t just “avoid gore,” this is “avoid any proof at all.” They didn’t have to show us what was in the car seat. A zombie over the car seat would have been enough.

Why the blood? Who knows; maybe she’s injured, maybe the seat was already stained with it and Tyreese got more on the outside. But there’s no way all of this is an accident.

Judith is alive, and Tyreese has her.

The end.

In which I’m still on about this

On December 3, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Teaching3 Comments

So. Yeah. The Walking Dead.

I’ve read the comics, right? Got all nineteen or however-many-there-are trades on a shelf in my living room. So I was already pretty familiar with the ongoing storyline and had a pretty good idea of What Was Going to Happen in this mid-season finale. In fact, I’ll go this far: if you’d have asked me to describe, beat-by-beat, what was going to happen in this episode, I’d have gotten damn near everything right. I was expecting one person to die who didn’t. That’s it.

And it was still one of the best goddamn hours of TV I’ve ever seen; my pulse was still noticeably elevated hours later. And it was positively unsafe at several points during the actual show. Wow.

(And, as much as it surprises me to say this, bonus points for bringing back “Where’s Carl?” for the first time in, like, a season.)

My kids took the second Acuity test of the year, which is supposed to be a low-stakes look at how they’re doing and how on-target they are to pass ISTEP at this point in the school year. I’ve found previous iterations of Acuity to be pretty useful, so I emphasize with my kids that I want the test taken seriously, and generally they do.

It takes a bit of time for the results to come through. Right now I have data on two of my three classes. One has generally shown pretty good progress. One has backslid pretty substantially since the first test– i.e., the kids are getting lower scores than they got in August, which is kinda the opposite of what I want. Unsurprisingly, the special ed class is the climbers and the class with the big behavior problems is backsliding. I’m not terribly happy about it but at least my suspicions are confirmed. It’ll be interesting to see if a few weeks without Jihad lets me correct that or not. I’m betting that it will.

Either way, I’ve got some work to do. There are numbers to be crunched! Wheee!

In which HOLY SHITBALLS

On December 2, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews3 Comments

JESUS FUCK WALKING DEAD JUST KILL ME WHY DON’T YOU

In which I never knew you cared

On December 2, 2013December 2, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching5 Comments

I have spent all day Avoiding Spoilers for… well, something, and so I’ve been entirely cut off from the Internet. Hopefully nothing blew up or fell apart or became interesting in any particular way since yesterday afternoon or so, because as of right now I haven’t heard about it.

One thing I did hear about before the blackout started, and which you’ve probably heard about as well: Paul Walker died. This is, I’ll admit, entirely meaningless information to me; I couldn’t pick Paul Walker out of a lineup if you paid me to– in fact, I’m not even a hundred percent certain I’m getting his name right, but I’m not about to go Google it to find out. I’ll find stuff. I know I will.

(I will also be ignoring comments on this blog until after I’ve viewed The Program in Question, so if any of you are of a trollish bent, you can’t get me.)

Anyway. I bring up Paul Walker (God, I hope that’s actually his name) not to preen about my lack of exposure to popular movie culture but as an intro to this: no less than four different kids came up to me today to ask me if I’d heard he died. There were also secondhand reports of a couple of arguments starting in various places in the building related to various kids’ opinions on how he died.

One of the four was We’ve Never Done Single-Digit Addition in Class kid, which is kind of astonishing, because it confirms that he does actually notice things once in a while. He even followed it up with a question about the train derailment, which I had heard about but only insofar as I knew that a train somewhere had derailed; I wasn’t really able to answer his question.

Now, four doesn’t sound like much, but my kids are weird like this: if four of them directly asked me about it, I know it was likely on the minds of dozens of them today. Which takes me by surprise, but then the cultural cachet of the Fast and Furious movies has always eluded me a bit. It’s one of those “Christ, they made another of those?” type of series; surely somebody has to be seeing them, just not anyone I ever have a reason to discuss movies with.

I don’t know that there was much of a point to this story; just that they still take me by surprise sometimes. I’m sleepy as hell right now; it was a pretty good day, all told, but getting back in the swing of things always takes a day or two.

In which I like things

On December 1, 2013December 1, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews3 Comments

You knew this already: I bought a Pebble smartwatch, intending to let it and the Fitbit Force battle it out for wrist supremacy and then to decide to keep one of them. The battle was swift and decisive; the Pebble won.

Here is what a Pebble does: 1) It is a watch, which displays the date. It has a variety of watch faces that you can choose from or switch on the fly by pushing a button. This last feature is pointless but kind of fun. 2) It has a backlight activated by an accelerometer; I flick my wrist and the backlight comes on. The time is displayed constantly, like a regular watch, unlike on the Fitbit, where you have to push a button to get the time to display. 3) It does silent vibrating alarms; in this it is more or less exactly like the Fitbit. Implementation for this is better (you can do it from the watch instead of having to use a separate app) but it’s still kinda gimped; unlike the Fitbit, however, the Pebble people are aware that their alarm is gimped and are vocally and repeatedly promising to fix it up soon. 4) When I get a notification on my phone, I get a vibration on my wrist and the notification displayed. In the case of text messages, it generally displays the whole thing; everything else is truncated a bit.

I cannot really express how much I enjoy these latter two features, folks. I don’t like alarms in general; I don’t like being woken up by loud noise and my phone beeping constantly gets on my nerves. Now, I’m fully aware that I could just keep my phone on silent and check it periodically (or, God forbid, ignore it) but I’m a bit too tied into my little digital world for that. Silent wrist alarms are perfect– my phone hasn’t made a sound since I put this thing on, because I put it on silent and am relying instead on all my alerts getting piped to my wrist. It’s subtle and me “checking my phone” is no longer as disruptive to things going on around me as pulling my phone out might be. I love it. The only way it could be better is if it had a microphone built in so that I could do voice texts as responses.

Two more things, actually: it also has 5) apps (supposedly; I haven’t actually checked this feature out) and 6) it can remote-control all the music apps on my phone– which sounded useless at first but comes in surprisingly handy when I’m driving; I can check my wrist to see what song is playing (much less disruptive than looking at the phone) and I can pause when I want to, which is actually easier than fiddling with the volume button on my dashboard.

Drawbacks: it’s clearly first-gen tech in a couple of ways; the display isn’t great (but the battery life is) and it’s dropped connection with my phone once in the couple of weeks I’ve had it, for no clear reason. They make a big deal about watch apps; they don’t seem terribly useful or I’d have downloaded it by now. And I had thought it was capable of duplicating the functionality of the Fitbit– counting steps and sleep tracking– and it doesn’t, at least not without one of those apps I haven’t downloaded yet.

That said? Once I figured out that I walk a good 8000-9000 steps a day during the week (about 3.5-4 miles, if I remember right) and substantially less than that on the weekends, the Force kinda stopped being useful. If I want to walk more, I need to… walk more. I’ve got a baseline, which is useful, but beyond that it’s not good for much. Sleep tracking, too, is neat at first until you realize that you already know how much sleep you get or don’t get and quantifying that isn’t terribly helpful.

Winner: Pebble. No damn contest.

Also: I hooked up the PS3 yesterday, and The Last of Us, or at least the first couple of hours of it, is fucking amazing; if it keeps up this level of excellence it will be easily worth the cost of the system. Since I also got a code for a free month of PlayStation Plus, and can therefore get Shadows of the Colossus for free (I’ve never played it; something I’ve been wanting to fix for years) I think I can safely feel good about this purchase even before getting to the Batman game, which I won’t like as much as many others have but will be well worth the initial cost of free.

See, I’m not negative all the time!