So Slappy is outgrowing her crib. Ready to move to a big-girl’s bed. But the girls’ room isn’t that big, and the other “bedroom” is being used as an office. So we think, aha!, bunk beds!
Angela starts poking around on the web and ends up at playhousedesigns.com, which is a pretty cool site. It features a bunch of themed bunk and loft beds, and we settled on the Abbyville Collection Bed Loft:
The only problem? Cost: $2795 painted; $1595 primed; $1395 unpainted and unprimed; and $850 for a kit, which I guess includes pre-cut boards and assembly instructions. But I wouldn’t know, because we didn’t buy that.
No, Angela says, hey, the plans are only $85. We can build it. And by saying “we” she of course means me. And I think, hey, with my vast experience in carpentry (none), my great amounts of discretionary time (close to none), and with my extensive collection of tools (I have one of those plastic toolkits with seventeen kinds of screwdrivers and a crescent wrench in it, and a circular saw, which I actually used . . . once), I think, I can do that. And then I utter the two most famous last words ever spoken: “No problem.”
Well, I had to buy a jigsaw. But first I had to figure out what a jigsaw was. A router saw may have been better, but then again I wouldn’t know because I don’t know what a router saw is. And I had to buy, so the plans told me, 7 sheets of MDF board, but of course I did not know what MDF board was. If pressed, I would have said some kind of wood. I also didn’t know, until later, that I would have to rent Home Depot’s truck to get the MDF home. Here’s a free tip — MDF is heavy.
So in only four short weekends, I had cut 21 pieces of MDF board and decided the “D” stood for dusty. I started out trying to use the jigsaw for straight cuts, but, alas, I was not that straight. I then cut some boards using the circular saw, without a guide, and I ended up with the straightest crooked lines I’ve ever seen. Another free tip — use a guide. Measure it, clamp it down, and make sure there’s nothing underneath the cutting line. Oh, and make sure you are not going to have a deadly (but hilarious!) see-saw type chain reaction when you finish cutting through the board. Hint — if the cut is not supported on both sides (but not directly underneath!), the middle will cave in when the cut is complete, and you will be sandwiched by heavy, dusty MDF boards flying at you from both directions. You’ll be squished like a grape, except that grapes generally do not hold smoking power tools. Not that that happened to me , mind you.
So, take the time to set up the cut. Then, start the video camera, and make the cut. It takes ten minutes to set up a cut and ten seconds to cut it, but it’s the best way. Oh, and don’t breathe while you’re cutting or for fifteen minutes afterwards. Alternatively, you can wear a mask. (We now know why Michael Jackson started wearing masks in the 90’s: he was cutting MDF board in his garage.) Dusty! Dusty! Dusty! Had to invest in a shop vac, and in seeing how well it worked, I considered attaching it directly to my face to suck out all the dust I had inhaled. After all, the instructions did not specifically warn against such use.
So I started putting the thing together. The instructions, while decent, were not exactly precise. I’m used to assembling computer desks and things that are made by companies like Sauder that specialize in consumer kits, but only experts and fools try to make something like this from scratch. And if you haven’t figured it out already, I’m no expert.
So I made mistake after mistake, but things finally started to take shape. Here’s me (notice the dust!) hooking the two sides and middle partition together with the loft bed deck.
The most exciting part was getting the gable up. As the next few pictures show, I let the kids get up there and look around at this stage. Hey, they wanted to, and besides, I figured that it was better (for me) if the thing collapsed with them in it instead of while I was underneath it with a sharp screwdriver.
[replacement pictures forthcoming]
Having avoided death or serious bodily injury to this point, I pushed my luck and attached the roof, and once again placed my eldest daughter in imminent peril to test my work . . .
[replacement picture forthcoming; maybe]
. . . and then attached the roof to the bookcase gable.
And, ladies and gentlemen, that’s where we are today. Actually, I put in the bookcase shelves and attached the corbels (is that a wine?) this afternoon, but I don’t have pictures yet. I’ll update this post shortly.
Right after my lung transplant.
The next installment of The Sundry Perils of Bunk-Bedding here.
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The last session of the American Health Lawyers Long Term Care and the Law Conference got out at 3:40 today, so I finally had some time, and a little bit of sunlight, to take some pictures. This really is a gorgeous place.
This is one of the halls leading to the main lobby. As you can see, the place is richly ornate.
I took this standing on the second floor balcony just above the main lobby. I love the ceiling.
The elevator is one of those old-fashioned things, complete with an elevator operator in a red suit. Here’s the cage, sans elevator and operator, again from the second floor balcony above the main lobby.
As one would expect, the entire campus is immaculately landscaped:
The sign in front of this Dragon Tree reads:
Native to the Canary Islands this unusual tree was planted at The Del prior to the turn of the century where it thrives in our temperate Southern California coastal climate.
The Dragon Tree was used as a backdrop in the Marilyn Monroe movie Some Like it Hot, which was filmed at The Del in 1958.
The beach looks pretty good from the hotel, despite the lack of good sunlight this day. But notice the berm.
Cresting the berm rewards one with this fine view:
As Freaktoe would say, “Eeeeeewwww!” What is that, anyway? Oh. “Eeeeewwww!”
Luckily, a sewageless area isn’t too far away, and getting there gives you a nice view of the hotel.
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Long-time friend Gene Reynolds emailed earlier regarding the posting of comments:
How do I post a comment if I don’t have a blog? Is there some kind of impenetrable blog world?
Of course I told him that the blogosphere didn’t want his kind. I mean, he’s a pastor, and me, as a former timeshare salesman and current nursing home lawyer, well, I have to have standards. And so I proceeded to ridicule him:
Seriously, I’ve never posted a comment. But, wonder of all wonders, Angela has, and she doesn’t even use email. She just learned to use the web a couple of months ago. So, I think you can do it, too. I think she told me she had to sign up for an account w/ blogger.com or something.
Nothing gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling like publicly poking fun at a pastor.
But during lunch I was experimenting, and I came across an option to allow anyone, not just readers registered with blogger.com, to post comments. So I changed the settings, and now anyone should be able to post comments.
joelhollingsworth.blogspot.com — Ending Discrimination One Class at a Time.
Comments, anyone?
UPDATE: Apparently not.
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This meme is getting more and more attention. I’ve been meaning to post on it for some time now, but haven’t had the time to get my thoughts together on it. So intead of waiting any longer, I thought I’d just go ahead and link to it. Basically, it’s a really interesting and continuing discussion of the coming rift in the Republican party between libertarians and social conservatives. If the war/terrorism issues diminish and something else moves to the front burner, (something like transhumanism, for example,) then the differences between those who banded together to give W the victory in 2004 will become more evident. As Drudge says, developing . . . .
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Below are some pics I took yesterday when I returned from the American Health Lawyers Association Long Term Care and the Law conference.
This is where I’m staying. Cabana Building, Room 4329.
The view to the East:
To the North:
And, a bit later, to the Northwest:
As you can see, the sun came out in the afternoon. And although it was a bit cool, it turned into a pretty nice day.
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Just returned from the AHLA Long Term Care and the Law conference. Thanks to Shawn Driscoll and his monkey arms for telling Shawn Anderson, devoted father of adorable twins, about this blog. And thanks to Anderson for his online promotion of the link to The Perfect Circle of Spotlessness. Oh, and to Kris Anderson for leaving the first comment on this blog. Y’all should win a prize or something.
It’s weird to get “home”, early even, at 5:20 and realize that at your real home, your kids are in bed. Or, more probably, in the bedtime routine. Tried to call, but no one answered. Hope Slappy and Freaktoe didn’t kill their mother.
Conference was good; lots of info and all that. First order of business, though, is finding cheap food for the rest of the trip. So, back later.
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Science Blog has an interesting article on what some refer to as the Oops! region of the brain.
Following the Asian tsunami, scientists struggled to explain reports that primitive aboriginal tribesmen had somehow sensed the impending danger in time to join wild animals in a life-saving flight to higher ground. A new theory suggests that the anterior cingulate cortex, described by some scientists as part of the brain’s “oops” center, may actually function as an early warning system — one that works at a subconscious level to help us recognize and avoid high-risk situations.
Okay, I’m assuming most of the tsunami victims did not see herds of wildlife stampeding inland. Because I really don’t need a scientific explanation to answer the question of how a person “somehow sensed the impending danger” upon observing “wild animals in a life-saving flight to higher ground.” I mean, where’s the Duh! region of the brain? So, not to minimize the tragedy in the least, I’ll bet most didn’t see such a sight.
On another note, is your Oops Region more developed if you make more mistakes? Hmmm. I’ll bet it is. So let’s go make some mistakes!
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Yeah, I know. I know. My picture links keep breaking. I’ll get it fixed, but it’s going to have to wait until I have some time to figure out why my URLs have turned into moving targets.
Back later.
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Slappy turned 3 on Tuesday, but we had her party today. Princess theme. Taking care not to stress out about something that’s supposed to be fun, Angela and I made the cake, which I think Slappy liked. Mostly, though, she just wanted to stick her fingers in it. It turned out pretty well, I think. And anyone who had a piece can expect to holler New York in three to five days.
It only took me ten minutes to put together her Princess scooter — which Slappy keeps stroking affectionately, saying “I love my bike, my beautiful bike.” — but it took me about a half hour to figure out how to make her helmet fit. Which is really pretty funny, since she never got her scooter up past half-walking speed. If we’re worried about her falling down, shouldn’t we be consistent and make her wear a helmet around the house?
Anyway, Happy Birthday, Slappy! You’re my Princess!
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Creative urns! Some crazy artists are exhibiting their own creations for their own cremations.
Take, for example, the Ego Machine, David Sullivan’s pre-post-mortem opus:
Sullivan said he wanted to create an urn that was visually interesting, allowed some user interactivity and referenced the physical body. He decided that his remains will be integrated into a computer processor. A virtual agent running on the computer that contains his ashes will scour the web for mentions of his name. As the mentions increase, an on-screen image of Sullivan will morph into an image of his younger self. But if the mentions decline, Sullivan’s image will age, deteriorate and eventually fade away.
I’ll go out on a limb here and say that this kind of “user interactivity”, or any kind for that matter, is the first major innovation in urns in centuries.
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James Lileks is a columnist for the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, but don’t hold that against him. His blog — The Bleat — is excellent, and I don’t read it often enough. Lileks is a stay-at-home dad, and he often writes about his daughter (I think she’s pre-school age), whom he refers to as Gnat.
Today, The Father of Gnat Fisked (a blog term that I’ve gathered from the blogosphere refers to the line-by-line or piece-by-piece destruc, uh, refutation of someone else’s story or statement; I assume it’s derived from someone named Fisk, but I don’t know the whole origin. Ask Instapundit.)
That parenthetical was so long, I’m going to have to start that sentence again:
The Father of Gnat Fisked this story from Newsweek about mothers’ complaints of insanity.
The Newsweek piece is, apparently — I didn’t read it — basically about how working women who have become mothers have stressed themselves out by transferring corporate ambition to the mothering role. One woman was apparently pushed over the edge by her inability to coordinate felt piece textures for a school function. To this, Lileks says:
Raising Gnat is the most important thing I do. But she’s a child, not a project.
I don’t get a bonus if she exceeds quarterly projections.
Gnat’s dad concludes that:
The article makes a point despite itself: the perfect is the enemy of the fun. Maybe I’m the wrong person to comment on this, since I am a guy in a rather unique position. But I’ve given up great acres of work time to be here with Gnat, and the amount of free time I used to have – time I spent recharging the daily batteries – has dwindled to zip. But it’s all a trade-off. So it’ll be a couple more years until I can wander downtown again; so it’ll be a while until she’s in school and my day is my own. So what. Nothing beats the time we spend together, the look on her face when she shows me a magic trick, the hug and kiss I get when I leave her at school. Today she beat me at UNO again and I explained how Barbie glitter cards are made and we looked at a website about the solar system and ooohed and ahhed at Saturn. And that matters more than anything because she is mine and I’m her Dad, and qualifying those definitions just seems petty.
I could teach The Father of Gnat a few things regarding UNO. It’s pretty easy to win against a pre-schooler because they tend to spread their cards face-up on the table thereby enabling the adult with larger hands and better coordination to cheat. James, that’s a freebie. You can return the favor by telling me how Barbie glitter cards are made.
Read the whole thing — it even suggests a remedy to the ever-present problem of Polly Pocket creep in households with young daughters.
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