Keeping Score

Keel me now

You need to say the title with a fun Jamaican accent, mon.

I hereby swear to god that I will not set foot in a Home Depot, henceforth to be known as The Fucking Money Pit for another week. Eight trips to The Effing Money Pit later, our bathrrom is nearly finished. It's mostly finished, but there's a couple of things left that we can't quite figure out how to manage. Here they are in no important order:

1). The fucking walls aren't square. This is a huge problem because the sinktop (countertop/sink combo platter) won't sit flush in the corner between the walls. It shifts between the two. I have no idea how the old sinktop was sitting flush in there. Oh wait, yes I do. They did a half-ass job of it. That's why we wanted it out of there. I've had a few recommendations from the guys at The Effin' Money Pit, but all of them are messy and involve massive amounts of silicone. I want something cleaner; tighter; finely engineered. I don't just want to inject silicone behind it and hope that it glues itself there.

2). The mirror had to go. Turns out that the height standard for vanities and countertops has changed in the past 20 years. Surprise! So we had to remove the mirror that's glued to the wall. This brought up a new problem: What the hell are we going to put on the wall? Actually, this brought up all sorts of new problems. Patch the wall. Sand the wall. Patch and sand the wall again. Say "fuck it" and just paint over the patched wall, even though it needs one more patch and sand coat, because you're going to hang shit there anyway. Then you paint the wall, and say "fuck it!" (this time with feeling) when you realize that you've been using the wrong color white. Don't get me started on how I could possibly be using the wrong color white. Just trust me that I was. So after two coats of the wrong color white (hey, it's sublte). Wait for a re-dry, then paint it AGAIN. So anyway, now we're trying to figure out what kind of mirror we need to buy to put up where the old one went, because I ain't gluing a mirror to the wall. After the eigth trip to The GDMF'n Money Pit, we decided to go to The God Damned Money Mass Burial Strip Mine, otherwise known as Expo (a Home Depot company!) to find a decorative mirror for our bathroom.

[Tangent]: Has anyone been in the inside of an Expo? Because it's the exact opposite of The Home Depo--sorry, The Effing Money Pit. While The Home Depot is "Driving Down the Cost of Home Improvement," Expo's motto surely must be "Gauging Out Your Pockets With Giant Cash Speculums." Cold ones at that. That place is amazing. We're talking showers that even the most crazy porn director couldn't envision. You like to stand in a jaccuzi tub up to your knees while you get sprayed on the torso by 8 misting nozzles while taking a shower, all the while watching television and looking at yourself in two different mirrors inside of some giant contraption that looks like it belongs on a sci-fi set? They've got that. For twelve thousand fucking dollars. That shower/jaccuzi/entertainment center cost almost as much as my car. And yes, I still want one.

3). Because the mirror/wall thing is still a tossup, we're holding off on installing the light fixture we bought. Actually, we bought two, decided on which one we liked best, and the other one is going back. So the light's not up. So we have this Taj Majal of a bathroom, with some piece of ass light that's a throwback to the 70's. And cheapo 70's at that. I should send a picture of it to Lileks. I'll be posting three pictures of the beginning, middle, and end later. So you can see the old and the new fixture. Aren't you lucky? Next time maybe I can bore you all with some vacation photos or something.

So, to make this long story longer, it's pretty much done, and we're exhausted.

Just in case I wasn't exhausted enough, I went tree-hopping again today, and took a royal header down a 30 degree slope. It's one of those things where I somehow got my bike off the trail and aimed straight down the hill towards the river below and off to our left. Exactly where I didn't want to go. It was some sick and twisted self-fufilling prophecy. Even though I was moving very slowly, there was just no stopping the bike. Here I am, skidding not even remotely wildly yet still entirely out of control, watching as the 30 degree slope is about to become a vertical cliff, where I will drop exactly three feet to land ungently on another 30 degree slope, and will most assuredly crash into the river at that point. So I decided to just ditch everything and fall, thereby increasing my surface area to something greater than the soles of my feet and the bike tires. The fall stopped me from going over the edge (just barely), but now I've got road rash all up and down my right side.

The funny thing is, the rash doesn't even hurt. I wanted to scan my arm for all to see. Maybe I will tomorrow :). My back is pretty good and sore, though, and my shins are killing me from when I jumped/rode over a two foot mound of logs, and my foot flew off the pedal while I was applying a lot of pressure with the other foot. The loose pedal came around and smacked me good right in the shin-bone.

Ow.

One last thing: I've been lax in doing art updates lately, so here's one of Witchblade's Ian. Unfortunately he looks a lot like a Christ. He's actually supposed to be doing one of his "Ian" jumps off of a building.