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Today, we start work (well, sorta) on our next home improvement project: destroying our larger bathroom and replacing it with something that doesn’t leak. (After that? Destroying our smaller bathroom and replacing it with something that doesn’t leak.) The bathroom has forced us into a cascade situation, where each thing we want to replace has forced us to replace another thing, until finally we’re gutting everything but the walls. And we may still need to pull those down, depending on how successful we are at getting the previous owners’ wallpaper down. I’m guessing we’ll need to drywall. We definitely need to kill an unnecessary bulkhead over the tub, so there’s gonna be some drywalling no matter what; we’ll see if we have to do everything.

The budget is $2500 and I’m betting we can come in at 70% of that– it’s a small bathroom, and we don’t exactly have extravagant tastes. Today’s project is to locate flooring; we’re thinking hard about cork tile and are going to bring the grandparents over to babysit while we hit a bunch of kitchen and bath stores in the area and see what they have available. If you happened to notice the Instagram picture of the tile floating in a bowl of water from the other day, I bought a bunch of samples home from Lowe’s and spent an afternoon trying to destroy them. I’m sufficiently satisfied with cork’s resilience to be willing to use it in the bathroom, especially since we’re planning on glue-down and not snap-together tiling. It should be manageable.

The bulk of the work, right now, is slated to be done over Labor Day weekend, which is– gulp– just a couple of weeks away. We’ve got a bunch of basic decisions made (picked out the tub, the toilet, a new ceiling fan, etc, although we still need a vanity and we haven’t bought anything yet– we probably ought to spend some money today, though, since the stuff probably isn’t going to show up immediately) but there’s still a fair amount of work to be done before we can start actually doing any work. And then all of you get to look forward to the blog post where I describe how I destroyed my entire house while trying to install a toilet.

Whee!

Had to cancel another ukulele appointment yesterday; it’s been two weeks since the first one, which is still the only one I’ve been to. Other things keep intervening on both our parts. I’m practicing occasionally but not really committing to it. Still can’t handle that whole three-finger-chord thing. I suspect when I topped out at Medium difficulty on Guitar Hero and Rock Band that was life telling me that I was never going to be any good at playing stringed instruments.

That said, it got me thinking about what other shit I was terrible at that I didn’t want to be terrible at any more. Here’s a partial list. Add your own!

Cooking. I’m actually making great progress on this so far this year, as shown by the fact that half of my posts are about something I made. But I want to be better. I’m still doing pretty well for someone who could barely boil things at the beginning of 2013. My next target is going to be chicken paprikash; sometime in the next couple of days. In the meantime I need to find some hot paprika.
I have failed at learning two academic things in my life. The first is calculus, which I dropped out of about 2/3 of the way through my senior year when I realized that a) I didn’t need it to graduate; b) I was already admitted to and scholarshipped at my school of choice, and c) I was a goddamn second-semester senior and screw calculus. I took no math whatsoever in college, unless statistics count, and I loved both of the statistics courses I’ve taken– I tested out of all of the requirements my college had. But I would like, as a grown-up, to have at least a vague understanding of what calculus is about and how it works. There is a course on my iPad. I’ve never opened it.
The second thing is Arabic, which I made the mistake of taking my first semester of my freshman year in college, and I wasn’t prepared for it so I dropped it. I’ve learned Hebrew since then so I know I can handle non-European scripts. There’s a course for this on my iPad too. I don’t even necessarily want to learn to speak or understand it; I just want to be able to read and write in it. I can still read (pointed) Hebrew, if slowly, despite the thirteen years that have passed since I had any formal instruction, so I figure once I’ve learned it it isn’t going to go away.
The building trades. I could make this four bullets if I wanted to, but I gotta leave for work in a few minutes. In no particular order: Carpentry, plumbing, electrician…ing, and enough basic mechanical engineering that I feel like I know my way around an engine. I’d like to know enough to be able to wire up a lamp to a switch or build a bookshelf or replace drywall or fix a spark plug or trade out a toilet without screwing it up. It’s entirely possible that I’m already capable of these things if I take my time and am careful about it, but I’d like to know enough to know that what I’m about to do isn’t going to work, rather than my usual method of repeatedly screwing up until I get it right. I’m not completely clueless; I managed to install a new radio in my current car without electrocuting myself, but still. Better is the metric here.
Botany. There’s a bunch of goddamn plants in my back yard; I wanna know what they are.
Music, specifically ukulele and harmonica, and whatever music theory knowledge is required to be able to competently handle those two instruments. I have a story that I need to remember to tell you about going to Guitar City yesterday. I very nearly did something bad.

I’m sure there’s more; I’ll edit if something obvious comes up. What do you want to know about that you don’t?