In which my day refuses to start

Hellaciously busy evening last night; I didn’t get home from OtherJob until after midnight, then got up a bit after 8 this morning and spent some time lying on the couch and moaning.

Most of today will be spent tiling, and I mean that f’reals this time, since the measuring that took up most of Thursday is already done.  One big difference: today will involve cutting tile, which gives us a whole new way to screw stuff up.

So… whee?

Whee.

Pictures and the usual as the job goes on.  Or, y’know, the sudden ending of all life on Earth.

Terrible Decisions: The Hard Part

Okay.

I’m tiling my bathtub surround today.

I can do this.

No one is going to die.

I am not going to fuck up.

I will still have two bathrooms at the end of the day.

I’m good enough, and I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.

Expect pictures and swearing as the day goes on.

In which I do the math

keep-calm-and-do-the-math-25Okay.  That’s a 3.5 gallon tub of RedGard.  Per Google, 3.5 gallons is 808 cubic inches.  Let’s assume that between the rollers, the paintbrushes, the paint tray, the sides of the container, etcetera that a full third of the RedGard has ended up wasted in some way or another.

Therefore there are 808 x .66 = 533.28 cubic inches of RedGard on the walls.

The two side walls are roughly 32 inches wide by 80 high; the back wall is 58 inches long by 80 high.  That’s 32 x 80 x 2 = 5120 square inches on the sides and 58 x 80 = 4640 square inches on the back for a total of 9760 square inches.

Divide the RedGard’s volume by the wall’s area to determine the thickness: 533.28/9760 = .0546 inches thick.

One mil is 1/1000 of an inch, therefore the coating of RedGard is 54.6 mils thick.

The coating is supposed to be 30 mils thick.

We good.

The most important thing you’re going to read all day

JellyBellyBeansLet’s talk about jelly beans.

You may recall from a couple of days ago that we just coated the tub surround in RedGard.  This is a waterproofing membrane; it goes on like paint although it has a slightly thicker consistency, and dries to a rubbery membrane.  It’s supposed to be put on at a certain thickness to be effective; we lack the tool (a wet film thickness gauge) to properly determine how thick the RedGard is going on the wall and thus have been using “paint it until you can’t see the words anymore” as a handy Internet-suggested shorthand.

Six fuckin’ coats of this Pepto-Bismol lookin’ shit later, I’m ready to say fuck what the internet thinks and that this has got to be thick enough by now.  Take a look at the size of the bucket in the middle picture, here.  That bucket’s almost empty and every bit of that shit’s on the walls right now.  The tub’s not that goddamn big; hell, I’ll do the math if I need to to figure out how thick it probably is.

(Hmm.  Maybe I should just do the math…)

(Just not right now.)

Anyway.  Jellybeans.  There’s an Ace Hardware near our house; we tend to try and frequent them whenever we have any sort of tool/hardware/home improvement needs because hey, local business, and also because they tend to have employees who know what the hell they’re talking about and are nice about finding out if they don’t know.

We’ve had to go to Ace a lot lately because this stuff is waterproofing material and thus doesn’t really do being rinsed out of brushes very well.  And we keep having to add surprise coats, thus two or three trips to Ace in just a few days to buy more brushes and rollers.

Our local Ace Hardware keeps a giant rack of Jelly Belly Jelly Beans right by the cash register.

They are demons, Ace Hardware.  Demons, I tell you.  Because the Jelly Bellies… I cannot resist them.  And so every trip I have made to Ace Hardware for the last several days has led to me scarfing a bag of jelly beans on the way home, because why the hell would I try and wait until I was actually home?  Who does that?

Anyway, on the way home on the most recent trip it hit me that jelly beans are really the perfect food of the future.  I don’t know what kind of Nazi-inspired demon-magic taste thaumaturgy goes into these fuckers, but any time you hand me a little nugget of gelatin small enough to fit in my nose and I eat it and I can taste every individual element of the best cheeseburger I’ve ever had in my life, you have either solved all of the world’s problems or doomed it; I’m not sure which.

Next task is to figure out how to pack a day’s worth of nutrition into one of these little bastards and once you do that I swear I’ll never eat anything else ever again, I promise.  Food pill, Jelly Belly people.  Get on that.

Terrible Decisions: Redrum edition

…and here’s what’s happening today.  This is after one coat of RedGard; there will be at least one more today and quite possibly two, depending on how well the second coat covers.  You’re not supposed to be able to see the letters on the cement board anymore and obviously the first coat didn’t manage that.

(The pictures are really blurry.  Don’t know why.)

photo 1photo 2

photo 3

It was determined that this was to be my wife’s job, as I have never been good at painting in any context, and painting with something that had been described as “runny mayonnaise” did not seem like optimal conditions.  (For whatever it’s worth, the texture is more like pudding– less gloppy than mayo– and Bek says it’s been applying just like paint, only heavier.  She’s not been having any problems.)

Next step is tile, although technically once the RedGard is on the shower is fully usable.  God please don’t let me fuck up the tile.  That should be next weekend.

Terrible Decisions: Well, That Wasn’t So Hard

We made waaaaay too much mortar:

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But! Seams are mortared and taped and the one piece of cement board that looked a trifle crooked in one corner is fixed. Next step: Redgard!

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Terrible Decisions: the rebeginninging

Gonna spend the day smearing mortar on stuff.

Take bets in comments on how bad I’mma screw this up.

Pictures later, probably of a bathroom on fire.

In which I make a thing

photoWhen I got up this morning that planter box was a small pile of lumber in my garage and the 450 pounds of dirt inside of it were in my car in the driveway, so I figure I’ve accomplished all necessary Grown Up Shit for the weekend.  Note the post hole digger in the background; the posts in the corners are six inches deep in the ground, so the box ain’t going nowhere nohow.  (Also note that one two cubic foot bag of soil claims to weigh 40 pounds.  This is bullshit; maybe if it’s completely bone dry, and this soil was very definitely not bone dry.  I’m estimating 75 lbs. per bag based on being too lazy to just weigh the shit and feeling like the internet’s estimate of 12o lbs. is insanely high.)

Anyway, point is, soon there will be tomatoes growing in here.  I like tomatoes.  They’re tasty.  And that, shit, I still have to mow, so I guess I’m not done with Grown Up Shit after all.  God, I hate outside.

I made Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 free again yesterday and didn’t tell anybody.  This was an experiment; I wanted to get some idea of how many sales/downloads I would get absent my own promotional efforts, if I just let Amazon and the whims of the Internet determine how many copies moved.  There’s probably some interference happening from the day of the week, although I’m not sure whether Amazon would be busier on a Wednesday than a Saturday.  (I am less likely to order from Amazon on the weekend because Sundays add an extra day for stuff to get to me; I don’t know if other people think like I do.  The Internet seems to think that Wednesday is slower than Saturday.)

Anyway, point is: there were 84 downloads on the free day earlier this week, which I hyped heavily and repeatedly on every online venue I had available to me.  Yesterday, with literally no promotion whatsoever, there were 21 downloads– all of which, presumably, were to people unknown to me, since unless someone from the blog or from Twitter or whatever just happened to click through and notice it, there’s no reason for anyone to have known about it.

This tells me that Amazon is not going to help me very much with promotion.  This also tells me that I’m probably going to have to invest in some sort of paid advertising if I want sales/downloads to grow beyond the people I have immediate access to– because the first 100 or so copies downloaded (free or otherwise) appear to have gone almost entirely to people either from the blog or from my actual life, which means that my supply of additional humans who I know that might download my book is probably dwindling.  The next time I do this I’ll keep it free for a couple of days and see what happens on day #2 of the promotion.  Don’t hold your breath, though; I’m likely not going to make it free again until I make back what I paid for the cover, which will take a couple more sales if I don’t pay attention to the fact that I have to pay taxes and maybe another ten if I do.

I feel like there was one more thing I wanted to blog about today, so there may be yet another post later tonight.  Otherwise, enjoy the rest of your Sunday.