Sunday, August 30, 2009

Welding, Grinding, and 5Ks

Ok, I know I said I would be timelier with updates, but unless you're reading this within a few minutes of me posting it, then you may have the same excuse/reason I have: you're busy.
I have a few moments of respite before my next semester starts so I thought I would throw my last big project for the house up here and maybe a hint of what's to come (hopefully). The last update left us half way finished with the gate. Well, I'm happy to report that it's complete as of the end of May. Right, right, that was 3 months ago and the start of my summer break from school, blah, blah, blah. I have my reasons (couldn't find the pictures being one of them).


The big thing I got out of the project was now I know how to weld. Well, at least I know some of the basics and my welds were getting better after having to do 24 of them per gate side. Three things I learned about wire-fed welding: Gloves are a necessity (not an option), the speed of the wire is your friend or a deeply despised enemy, and finally that the light from the welder WILL give you a sun burn so wear long-sleeves. About grinding: If you weld well, you don't have to grind. The more you need to grind your welds, the more practice you need welding. All-in-all a very worth-while skill to have and I'm very thankful from my Dad and Steve's help for the pointers and not laughing at me too much or at least so I couldn't hear.

There was much work with getting the frame of the gate constructed and welded together. The next step was to wipe it down and prime them and paint them the final color: white. Here is when another time thief conspired against me. Most times I had available to paint, it was too windy. Finally after a month or so of waiting I just started. I must say, waiting for a non-windy day for spray painting would have been much less maddening. After a couple of days of priming, waiting for paint to dry and then painting a couple of coats the gates were ready and that's when I call my Dad and Steve back to help. The process of removing the old gate when remarkably quickly (regretably so fast that I don't think pictures were taken) and next start the mounting of the gate portions to their respective hinges. We opted for welding the hinge to the gate as that is more permanent and sturdy than just a bolt. I took a few extra minutes to weld shut some holes in the hinges to eliminate any issue with standing water. After the gates were mounted, I took a small strip of wood and screwed it with non-rusting self-tapping screws creating a fascia board of sorts to which I could mount the fence boards. A short time later, the gate was finished!



In other, maybe less interesting, but still about me news: I've started back into the fitness after taking about 8 months off and thinking that since I was eating right and exercising that I could relax that train of thought. I must say that I was wrong. The weight does come back when you stop the exercise and eat what you want for a few months. It wasn't horrible, but I did notice it and for the past few months have been turning up the dial for the exercise and maintaining the healthy eating. The weight loss is slow, but steady (only about 5 pounds in 3 months), but I've lost about 2-3% body fat so there is some good progress there. Another change from my prior exercise regimn that I'm doing is that I'm doing my cardiovascular around my neighborhood and not at the gym. One thing I found out is that my normal jogging pace is about 20% faster outside than on the treadmill so I'm getting more out of my time jogging. I've pushed the distance and pushed for doing the shorter distances quicker resulting in interval training. Now, keep in mind, this is from the same person that hated any kind of jogging in high school and didn't know much about how to pace yourself for jogging distances. My HS mile times were routinely around 9 minutes. I'm up to 3.5 miles non-stop for distance. The recent heat waves have put a damper on my attempt to run it with any type of pushing for speed. Two weeks ago, I entered my first 5K run and had a few goals for this. Firstly, I wanted to finish and I wanted to finish without walking any portion. The second goal that I may have had little control over myself was that I was hoping to finish in the top 50% of the racers and in top half of my age bracket. I must say I was successful and reached everyone of those goals! In fact, out of the 58 males between 35 and 39, I finished in 18th place. You can see the stats (and pictures of me on the course!) here: http://www.afchalf.com/cgi/results.pl (Do a search for race bid 10146 for the 5K). Those results definitely aren't going to win any medals, but this was a very significant achievement considering what my health status was a few years ago. I drug Kari down there with me and she was very supportive and I loved having her cheer me on when I started and she looked so happy when I finished. It really gave me a boost of energy having her there. I hope she can make it to more of these events with me. I'm doing my next 5K in October for the Light the Night Against Crime and I've conscripted a couple of friends to run with me. Gradually I will be increasing my mileage and am working towards doing a half-marathon hopefully in April or possibly late January, if I can get the training down (10-weeks, hard work). Stay tuned for an update to a December charity request from me for another 5K; either in the form of joining me on the 5K or chipping in for a worthy cause.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Food Poisoning and Chinese Power Tools

So the ol’ blog here hasn’t seen much action from me, and that isn’t entirely my fault (even though I’m the only one that can post). So, after my glorious and self-gratifying accomplishment of hacking apart my bathroom wall to insert a metal box with a mirror on it (see previous entry from medicine cabinet installation) as a surprise for Kari while she was away on her first business trip I apparently ate something with a touch of The Nasty. Tuesday (2/10) started normally enough with me having my workout before school. But during class, my stomach didn’t feel all that great. So, before heading straight into work, I thought I would stop by the house and take a swig of pink, chalky, bismuthy, vile liquid to settle my stomach. Well, I never left the house. For the next 4 hours I spent equal times either in bed or in the bathroom trying to guess if I had to kneel in front of the toilet or sit on it (or both). Hmm… I don’t think I’ll be able to pick up Kari at the airport. She happened to call shortly after my first bout of porcelain yodeling and she just happened to be in a fish market and wanted to know what type of smoked salmon I wanted since I had asked her before leaving to get some. Well, you can guess that with the current state of my stomach, I really didn’t want to think about that choice at all. I told her my current situation and told her that she’d need to contact her mom to get a ride from the airport later that evening. I returned to my shivering and dashing to the bathroom right afterwards. OK, sparing the details, I was laid up for a couple of days and my muscles were so wore out afterwards that I was in no mood to tackle any projects that weekend. However, that didn’t stop me from cleaning out the garage and actually having enough room for Kari and I to both park in it! Sure, we couldn’t get out of our cars, but there’s enough room for both of them in there! Ok, that was to be the extent of any projects that weekend. However, some light had been shone on a possible project to come soon during my throes of agony earlier: my dad had called and based on some plans I had drawn up to replace my current side gate with a metal framed one had priced the 2-inch square tubing and had come up with a very reasonable figure. So, after cleaning the garage and noting I had enough space to store interim progress on the gate pieces, I called my dad and gave him the green light to get the metal.

The next weekend on the 21st, my dad came up with some welding equipment and metal cutting tools. My brother-in-law, Steve, was to show up shortly after with the metal tubing. So, my dad shows up around 9:30 (early for him, as I think his bed time can sometimes be just a few hours before this) and we start laying out the equipment. Lo and behold, he’s donating one of his small welders to me and will be teaching me how to weld! This will be a very useful skill in my new role as a home owner I’m quite sure. About 30 minutes later, Steve shows up and we unload the three 20-foot lengths of 0.090 wall thickness, 2-inch square steel tubing. After a few minutes of discussing the plans and defending choices I made arbitrarily on the plans and changing a few others, we decide to get work. Steve had to take off and actually go to a paying gig, but not a big deal, this was not a major project by either my dad’s or Steve’s estimation. Today’s task would be to create the two frames for the gates and then paint them to seal them from the moisture to prevent rust. We measured our top pieces and made the first few cuts. The cutting on my dad’s metal chop saw was slow going so he decided to change to a new cutting disc that was a little larger and we started again. This time the cut went much better. However, as we were nearing the end of cutting off the end at a 45° angle (the second cut after changing the disc), the saw started to slow down no matter how hard I squeezed the trigger and then I saw the magic smoke come out of the motor housing. Well, this was just no good. My dad at this point, PC as ever (as some of you know), started extolling the virtues of foreign-made equipment especially Chinese. He wasn’t too upset as he only paid $20 for this particular tool. So, after a few minutes of discussion, we decided to pack everything into the garage and head to Home Depot to look for a replacement. There weren’t too many choices, but the ones we did see were about $200. He said he was going to see if he can find one on eBay or something for less. Now, at this point, I’m thinking he already learned not to go “cheap”, but I’m not going to point that out to someone who’s donating time and teaching me something to boot. As it turns out, my friend Taylor’s family has a mill shop and he mentioned that he could loan one his to me for the job if my dad can’t find a replacement. So I got that going for me … The saga will continue probably on 3/7.

Tomorrow will see my first Physics 301 (Digital Electronic) test and I’m a little anxious about it. I feel comfortable with the material, but I don’t know how the instructor tests, so we’ll see. It’s a mixture of hands-on circuit building and then some problem solving exercises. It shouldn’t be too bad. So far the work we’re doing in the class is very interesting. I’ve built a 4-bit parallel full adder circuit with 2’s-complement correction on the fly with LEDs for its binary sum, overflow, and an LED to indicate whether the result is a negative number not. It’s a great thing to be able to add and subtract numbers from -16 to 15 with just TTL chips, a 5-volt DC power supply, some resistors, and a whole bunch of wire. Yeah… now I can have the machine do that part for me! One less worry! My other class on the history of early modern Europe is still interesting as well. We’ve been reading about remission requests (pleas to the king of France for grace to avoid execution) in 16th century France and I’m now starting to read about witchcraft and the legislation behind the accusations. Lots of seemingly unrelated issues that are all tied together by social and legal thoughts of the day. Interesting…

Well, as long as I don’t have any more of The Nasty, I’ll be posting again soon. This weekend may not see much in the way of house work as we’ll have guests all day on Saturday.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Business Travel and How I Decided to Put in a Bathroom Medicine Cabinet and the Aftermath Thereof

So, Kari’s work has decided to spend some bucks on her and send her up to Seattle/Everett/Renton for a few days to look at how part of her company does business up there. I think this is great that they’re investing money in her to see her do her job better. Well, they’re not putting her up in the Ritz Carlton and flying her first class. She actually is flying on SouthWorst. In fact, at the time of this writing she is currently up there. It was a balmy 42 last night and rainy when she arrived according to the almighty Internet. So, when the cat’s away the mice will… well, do home projects on the sly to surprise the wife, err, cat!

My cunning plan started a few days before her travel when I figured I’d install a ceiling fan in the master bedroom. We went to Home Depot to pick up the never-ending list of items and I just happened to wander near the ceiling fans. Huh, funny that. I found out what she liked and mentally recorded the model, looks, etc. and then picked up the rest of my list and headed home. The process of determining that I would do the ceiling fan is mainly a product of frustration. I find that as my (or Kari’s) frustration level rises regarding a project; it tends to bubble its way to the top. Meaning, that this point, any light would be good in that room as it is lacking anything in the ceiling. This would be a hurdle to overcome, obviously. But, months ago at a garage sale I picked up a mounting brace meant for ceiling fans, so I just needed to drill up from the center of the bedroom into the attic space above and stick a little something up through the hole to see where I would be working up in the attic. One issue is that we both want the light switch on the right wall as we enter. However, the previous owners had a pocket door installed there precluding us from mounting a light switch there. There will be one there eventually as I plan on removing that pocket door which means tearing that wall down and framing a new one. Fun for another day obviously. A friend at work suggested just surface mounting a remote switch there, which I will be doing in the interim. Another concern was finding out if I had power up there. So, I grabbed the ladder and poked my head up through the attic access point in the master bedroom’s closet. Popping my head up there, I didn’t like what I saw. It’s all loose fill insulation. I don’t have much in the way of protecting myself from that, so I’ll need to invest in some of that or investigate replacing that with rolled insulation (or find out if I even want to). The good news was that I saw plenty of cables running through the attic space for power. Climbing back down and realizing that a ceiling fan may be a job that’s better suited to working with someone to help, I scraped that idea, for now.

The other project that’s been on my plate for a while now and has slowing been percolating its way to the top has been the lack of a medicine cabinet in the bathroom. We had already purchased the cabinet and I had previously marked where it needed to go. The reason it isn’t in already is because I found there was a stud running straight through the middle of the hole I’d need to cut and also that there were at least two electrical cables crossing that area too. I knew that would be a potentially long project to start with all the caveats there. One thing I noticed, however, whilst in the attic was that the wall I would be cutting into was not load-bearing. So, I would not have to worry about boxing the medicine cabinet in with studs.

I started the project at 2:00pm after dropping Kari off at the airport and a little lunch at home (salmon burger and chicken tortilla soup, yum!). I was able to cut through the dry wall pretty easily after scoring the perimeter with a knife to prevent peeling the paper/paint past the cutting point. Now, the big part: I had to cut the stud and the problem was that there was a hole drilled through the stud to allow the electrical cable to pass through. Using my handheld circular saw, I was able to notch above and below the hole to avoid nicking the Romex cable and then used a chisel to finish it off. Ok, now that the wires could be moved out of the way I had the job of cutting the stud to get it out of there. My circular saw would only cut to a depth of 2.5 inches so I needed to call in for the big guns. I called my neighbor and asked if I could borrow his reciprocating Sawzall and its blade was the perfect length to cut the stud without poking through the other side of the wall. Within a few minutes we had cut the stud and pulled it out causing minimal damage to the other side. Looking at the other side of the wall in the hallway, I was able to see we had only one patch to work on as the nail from the stud had pulled through as we pulled the stud out. No big deal. I would have to move the security system panel over a few inches which meant I had a 1.5 inch diameter hole to patch for that. Again, no big deal.

After pulling the stud out and cleaning up the hole to allow the cabinet to fit snuggly, I taped the electrical lines to the far wall so it wouldn’t cause the cabinet to warp if it got stuck with a twist behind the cabinet. I also cut a notch in the top of the bottom stud so I could lay the electrical line across that and have the cabinet fit over it. At this point, it was just a matter of screwing some studs to the sides of the hole to allow for the side mounting screws of the cabinet to have something to, well, screw into. With those in place, I put the cabinet in the hole with some minor adjustments to the hole size and screwed in one screw to keep it in place. I grabbed my level and saw that it was level. I then proceeded to screw in the other three screws, inserted the shelves and cleaned up my mess. Looking at the time, it was 4:30. Time for Kari to be arriving in Seattle soon. Not bad. 2.5 hours to complete something I thought would have taken much longer. Albeit, if I had done more with framing the hole (if it were load-bearing) and/or messed with the electrical cables (if they couldn’t be routed or made to cooperate), it would have taken some more time. As it was, I was in the middle of putting tools away when Kari called and said she had arrived and was waiting for her luggage. I wished her luck and fun (and warmth!) and proceeded to clean the bathroom and make everything pretty. I patched the hole on the other side and let that dry over night. I’ll be checking that out when I get home to see if any further touch ups are needed and then hopefully painting tonight so she’ll have no clue when she gets home that anything was done until she goes into the bathroom. I’m looking forward to her surprise. The only other clue should be the relocation of the security panel, but she’s usually not that observant. We’ll see.

In other slightly interesting news: the physics course this semester is covering digital circuitry and we’re building circuits to cover basic logic in preparation for our class final project of building a 4-bit computer. Sounds archaic, but that only sound archaic until you’re faced with making one yourself =). I’m enjoying it so far seeing how these things work is fascinating.

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Lights, delays, and school!

Even the best laid plans have to have some problems, right? Like wanting to update this blog every week =). So, no update from last week, but I did get a small home project done. I added a motion sensor light above the back door to the garage so that Kari and I have light when we walk out of the house and to the garage. That project slowly was moving its way up the priority list as we both were getting more and more frustrated fumbling with keys at the door.
I’m still eyeing the project of adding the medicine cabinet and after my slight foray into the world of electrickery again, I’m a bit more confident I can re-route the power that I’ve spotted running through the 2x4 where the cabinet is supposed to be installed. Maybe I’ll do that one next weekend. This is a relaxing weekend. I can have one of those every once in a while!

Kari is going to be going on business travel next week. I think this is good news. If the company wants to spend money on her to travel just to get her job done better, it means they're investing in her future. All around good in my opinion.

School started last week as well. I’m taking Digital Circuitry (3rd year physics course) and a social history course focused on early modern Europe (mid 14th to 18th century), which should be the last of my peripheral classes supporting my major that I need to complete. Well, there are two more math classes and the other six will be computer science courses. But, I’m not concerned overly much about the math classes. Those are just fun and besides, I’m opting for the harder of the classes offered (4th year classes over the 2nd year ones) because they satisfy the last of the requirements for the math minor and if I decide to go back for a master’s degree, I may go for mathematics over computer science. We’ll see. I’m just happy that I’m getting closer to finishing. Ten courses left and I’m in two of those right now. I can only hope that the schedule for the classes they offer over the next couple of semesters allow me to take more than just two classes a semester. Of course, if I decide to continue on and get my physics minor as well, then I’ll need to take two additional classes. I’ll see how “burnt out” I am at that point. I may just want to get out with my diploma and go back after taking a semester or two off. There are only seven classes after the BS in Computer Science to get the MS in Computer Science. That doesn’t seem too bad, but then again, there’s that whole thesis project/paper. I’d have to check with the math department to see how many classes I’d need to take to qualify into the graduate program for math. Something to look into I suppose.

Thanks for reading and I’ll try to be a bit more timely on my updates here.

Oh, and HDTV rocks!

Monday, January 12, 2009

Romans, Water, and Gas

Well, this last weekend saw a couple of minor improvements to the home. Nothing that will boost its market value mind you, but something that will build wife-equity nonetheless.

The beginning of the weekend started with a nice little D&D game with friends and some beer. After the past week at work, it was a very nice time. Saturday I visited my past with a friend whom shared that past. I went and talked with the leader of my former Roman war band Sean Richards (Siridean to those in the SCA). Seems the reasons that I left the group many years ago have continued to act as a cancer within the group and the gather is a mere shell of what it used to be in the glory days. Well, we're trying to see if we can get those days back and I'm set to discuss more with Sean tomorrow evening. I'm still a bit apprehensive based on prior feelings and experiences, but we'll see. I'm open to the idea at least and will to see where it leads. There seems to be more of a focus on reenactment and historical accuracy which is fairly exciting.

Sunday saw my foray back into the world of home projects. I/We had taken some time off due to the holidays and busy schedules. I had a few projects to choose from including installing a much needed medicine cabinet in the bathroom, relocating the shelves in the entryway closet, wiring up a motion sensor light over the back garage door, run a line from the reverse osmosis filter system under the kitchen sink to the refrigerator, and dismantling the gas dryer hookups so it's actually up to code.

I started Saturday night but researching what I may be getting into if I actually cut a huge hole in the drywall of the bathroom. Because it I didn't get the medicine cabinet in for some reason (usually ignorance of what I'm getting myself into), then I would definitely lose wife-equity with the gaping hole there until I could a) patch it, b) install the medicine cabinet safely, or c) buy her something pretty. It turns out that I need to find out if the wall I'm going to carefully hack apart by needing to remove a portion of the stud is load baring or not. I'm not a structural engineer and have no idea whether that wall is or not, so I'm postponing that little upgrade until I can get some more information and not risk caving my house in.

I started with the easiest one that I could think of on Sunday morning and worked on removing and relocating the shelves in the entryway closet. I've come to realize and get more confirmation with every project I work on in this house that the prior owners put in things half-assed and without much care. So I now have a closet that the shelving is actually useful and you can actually access most of the space. The only drawback is the prior mounting location has the closet walls looking like so much Swiss cheese. I'll add the patching of those holes to the project list. After replacing all the items in the closet and having a bit of lunch I decided to dive into routing the water line for the refrigerator. This could have been a very frustrating experience but I was clever (if I do say so myself) about routing it. I was prepared to drill a 3/8" diameter hole in the bottom of my cabinet to route the line but found a 1/2" space between the kickboard and the cabinet that I was able to run the line. Great! Now the line won't be inside the cabinet and get banged around by the pots and pans. The next hurdle was to get it past the dishwasher and into the sink area. This was going to be the big challenge. The hole from the sink to the dishwasher area is only about 3-4" and the line I have is in a tight coil and is not going to want to cooperate getting through that hole. Going the other way I wouldn't be able to reach the line from the sink from the other side of the dishwasher as I would be trying to cram myself in the cabinet. This is where the clever comes in. I grabbed a wrapping paper tube and, from the sink side, fed the tube behind the dishwasher. Looking from the cabinet side, I could see the end of the tube. I was able to stretch and get the water line into the tube and starting feeding it into the tube. A few seconds later it popped out of the other end and into the sink area. Viola! The rest was the fairly mundane task of stopping the cold water, bleeding the reverse osmosis tank in to some water bottles, installing a T-junction in the line from the tank to the faucet that would supply the refrigerator with RO water and then just plugging everything in.

After this successful project, I decided to get involved in something more serious, dirty, and aromatic. The gas dryer line as originally installed upon dryer deliver wasn't that safe, definitely not up to code and causing me to lose wife-equity. So, I measured (twice) the lengths of iron pipe and all the fittings I'd need and purchased everything a couple of weeks ago. Iron pipe work is very dirty, I must say. I was able to replace the 15- to 20-year old installation of piping with something a bit more modern and definitely up to code. There was no cleverness in this project, just a matter of the time, inclination, and the matter of getting dirty.Next project will be the motion sensor light so we can see in the back yard when we come home and try to get into the house from the garage.

This morning, I checked for leaks everywhere in the water and the gas hookups and I'm happy to report that I now have homemade automatic ice in my ice cube tray and the garage doesn't stink from the natural gas works.

If I brave the wall-cutting project, I'll be posting pictures.

Friday, January 2, 2009

Introduction: Risk Taking

Not much of a risk, mind you, just a small one: the risk of riding the coattails into the blog-o-sphere of my friends. Kevin has been blogging his trips on his globe-trotting adventures and Bryon musing on being an aspiring author (I don't know if you can still be called aspiring if you've been published... interesting). Bryon just started blogging a few days ago and I've always been meaning to but never had, well, the time to be honest. I'm hoping my efforts here to share my occasional experiences will be of interest to friends and family.

Well, enough of the intro and I'll dive into my first posting here about what's going on with me.

Tribulations of Television
Kari and I have been trying to secure the purchase of a new TV for a little while now and have been saving up money. It came as a shock to us as we're usually accustomed to spending 300-500 dollars for a new TV. With the advent of HDTV and Plasma vs. LCD, those cheap TV days are experiencing its death knell as technology advances. So, using Consumer Reports as a guide we have (or I should say, I have) settled on the brand and model. Armed with this, I've been watching prices and I have been encouraged as I've watched the prices drop a few hundred dollars as Christmas was approaching. Those good times seem to have ended as just this week the prices went up either $100 or $200 depending on where you're looking. I had a verbal agreement from one salesman that I could buy my TV when they received stock (today) and indeed they did have them when I went in, but $200 more than when I was in the store just a few days before. I challenged them on this and they said that I would need to have had a raincheck in order to get the cheaper price. Bastards, I tell ya! So, now I'm confined to watching the ads again and I'm hopeful that the Superbowl is good for TV prices over the coming weeks.

Other news: School starts again in a few weeks and I'll be finishing up my stint in physics unless I decide to do the minor which would need two more classes. This should be the last semester I take something on the fringe of my major. I'll be back to the Computer Sciences courses soon! I've been contemplating the master's degree as it is only seven classes beyond the bachelor's. Interwoven into this is my desire to take more math classes too and possible get a master's in math. Beyond just the joy of more math (math is a four-letter word for fun as everyone knows!), it would allow me to skip out of the corporate world either through desire or once I decide to retire and I could teach at community college.

Random topic change: The house projects are coming along nicely and I'm starting to know exactly where everything is in the Home Depot and Lowe's near my house. Latest addition was the reverse osmosis system in the kitchen. I'm getting set to change the shelving layout in the coat closet, add the water line for the refrigerator and redo the gas line hookup for the dryer.

The bread pudding in the oven is starting to smell realllly good. Time to start making the hot rum sauce topping...