House Beautiful

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Guess what I did this weekend. No really, go ahead and guess. I’ll wait. (Doo doo dee do, duh duh duh doo…) (That’s the sound of me humming to myself waiting for you to guess.) Have you guessed yet? OK, whaddaya think I did?

Nope, wrong. I trimmed my toenails.

Ha! I kid! This isn’t about me trimming my toenails. I mean I couldmake it about that, but why would I? I mean the title is “House Beautiful” and you’re not supposed to have misleading thread titles, so it won’t be all about me trimming my toenails. (As special as I am, I still have to follow the rules around here. Even the “No misleading thread titles” one.) I mean after I got done with protective eyewear and the time my dog came in the bathroom right as I was snapping through my big toe’s nail and it ricocheted off the sink and hit her right in the ribs and we had to go to the vet… well, that would be about it. And it wouldn’t be all that interesting. I try to make these thing interesting, I really do.

Something else I’m not going to go on about is my thoughts on the big budget, live action “Bob the Builder” movie. Owen Wilson could be “Bob” and Sandra Bullock could be “Wendy”. I think John Malkovich would make a dandy “Spud”, but I don’t know who should be “Pilchard”. Yet. But that’s enough about that.

What the real focus of this week is my house. As it turns out, someonedecided it’s time to move. The Casa del DeDay isn’t everything we need in an abode as it seems. Something about “school systems” or something, I’m not sure. To be honest, once I heard “move” my brain shut down from the sheer horror of the prospect. But my shut down brain doesn’t change the facts. It looks like we’ll be moving soon. Huzzah.

(Speaking of “huzzah”, did you see The Simpsonsa couple weeks ago. It could have been just last week, I’m not sure. Anyway, Homer gave Mr. Burns a list of things to make the plant better and more efficient. And Mr. Burns said “Huzzah!” Well, the Little Woman turned to me and asked “Isn’t that what you were trying to get people to say? Huzzah?” And I said “Yeah. And look! It’s on network TV! It’s only FOX, but still…”

And I’ve already gotten people saying “Jake” for “good”. So ha.)

Now, while we’ve been living here quite happily, it’s been decided only some deranged nut-case would want to actually buy this pile of rubble. Thus the To Do List of Doom was born. (Duh duh duh duh duuuuuuhhhh…) (That’s the sound of ominous music.) Yes, the To Do List of Doom. Man! I didn’t know there was so much wrong with this house! It’s a little scary.

One of the things on the T.D.L.o’D. is the yard light. Namely that the yard light doesn’t work. It stopped working months after we moved in and it wasn’t important enough to fix. I mean the yard light at the last house never worked. The whole time we lived there, no working yard light. And we were OK with that. This one needs to be fixed though. But first we needed to dig it out of the ground. The digging went much better than I thought it would. Not so well I thought we should have gotten on it sooner and had a working yard light while we were still happy to be living here, but well enough.

Now we had the option of sticking in a new yard light (Did you know you have to buy the pole separately? Really. You buy the light you want then you have to buy the pole it goes on. Two purchases for one yard light.), or get those real cool low voltage light sets that run along your walk. Personally, this was my choice. And as it turned out to be the cheaper… more economical choice, it’s the way we went. We popped off to the hardware store and picked up a big ol’ box of low voltage light kit. It was a pretty good kit, all the pieces were in there and everything. You just have to put it all together. For the most part, everything just snaps together. No problem. That’s for the most part. What the instructions (Yeah, I read the instructions. Wanna make something of it?) don’t mention is that this one step, the one where you jam the contacts for the light bulbs into the plastic contact-holdy part takes special tools. Yeah, you can stuff them in there without special tools, but this would turn the whole procedure into a Sisyphusian… Sisyphian… Sisyphudlius… a task like unto that partaken by Sisyphus. (You know Sisyphus? The rock-pushing guy?) And you scrape up your fingers some too.

The special tool you need that no one tells you about is a 2mm “Precision Screwdriver”. As the Fates (Norn if you prefer) would have it, I had a 2mm “Precision Screwdriver”. Why would I have a 2mm “Precision Screwdriver” you ask? I’m not really sure. Maybe I had little screws to drive this one time, or I was browsing through the hardware store and saw them and thought to myself “Cool! A “Precision Screwdriver” set. I need it!” And I bought them. What’s important here is that I had the 2mm “Precision Screwdriver”. So I could jam the contacts into the plastic contact-holdy part without scraping up my fingers.

After that, the job went quite smoothly. Until I had to drill a hole into my house. Luckily I had a set of masonry drill bits. Of course everyone has at least one set of masonry drill bits, so I don’t have to explain how I came into possession of those.

After that it was just jamming the lights into the ground and clipping them into the power wire. Here’s a tip: When you put low voltage lights in at your house, don’t do it first thing in the morning. Then you have to wait all day to see how they look. It makes for a long day.

Even with the To Do List of Doom to keep you busy.
-Rue.

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I can’t believe I’m awake early enough on Monday to be first in Rue’s Monday thread.

I put my lights together without a Precision Screwdriver.

Is my house less Beautiful than Rue’s? waaaaaaaaaahhhh !

3

I’ve had the same experience with low voltage lights, Rue, and was also fortunate enough to have the appropriate tools to install them.

Though I didn’t need drill bits. Definitely. I wonder if I did something wrong. I didn’t read the instructions. Welbywife did though. Perhaps there was an error in delivery of the proper instructions, for which Welbywife holds sole responsibility.

The contact-holdy part of the installation is definitely the hard part.

And the waiting.

4

Don’t worry Ninety (note proper coding, of which I am quite proud). You’re house is fine. It’s just my fingers are just prittier for not scraping them up on the plastic contact-holdy part. Or they would have been if not for the cleaning out of the gutters. (At least this year there weren’t little trees growing in the gutters by the time I got around to cleaning them out.)

Maybe you had a different kit welby. I’m sure we couldn’t blame anything, including mis-instructionating on Welbywife.

And what’s the deal? She gets a big “W” whilst you must content yourself with your puny “w”. Oh well. As long as you’re secure in your masculinity, who’s gonna poke fun at your puny “w”? Not me, that’s for sure.

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Sorry, I can’t comment on yard or house work. It’s in my contract. I’ll just have to wait for a good hijack.

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You need to start a Tip O’ De Day thread so some of us can plan our weekend activities in advance.

I’d read it. Promise!

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Rue: Just wait until you start working on the inside of Manse DeDay. Do you have any wallpaper? Does it need to come down? Oh, man! And have you painted any inside walls something other than “Eggshell”? Holy smoke, man, you may not see the inside of a drinking establishment for a long, long time!

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Hip Hip Huzzah!! You should come to the Texas Renaissance Festival, Rue, they always say “Huzzah” as kudos. Or they did when I was a wench there several years ago. Several, several years ago. Come to think of it maybe they’ve moved on to other exclamations by now.

Huzzah to you anyway. What a man to tackle the T.D.L.o’D. Being the resident female in my house (the only female) I am the maker of To Do Lists and am in awe of Mrs. DeDay for creating one that inspires such horror as to be the “To Do List of Doom”. Huzzah to her as well.

Hmmm, a yard light huh? That sounds beautiful. I think our yard needs one of those. Yes it definately does. I’m sticking to my own spelling of definitely so as to irritate the upper I.Q.’s And come to think of it, this house is feeling decidedly cramped. It might be time to think about building on furiously scratching out a T.D.L. to rival Mrs. DeDay’s Or maybe moving would be a better option. The resale value should climb if we did build that add-on, though. Hmmmmmm. Mr. Moon is not going to be happy about this. Maybe I should call him at work.

9

I’ve got to house (well, really apartment) clean today, but it’s not a To Do List of Doom type activity, because I don’t have anything to fix. I wish I could vacuum the cat. I wouldn’t have to vacuum the anything else for a week. Yes, I could hold th cat down and vacuum him, but he wouldn’t like it, and if I were going to do it, I’d prefer my cat not to be scared out of his furry little mind.

I’m making a deliberate, and painful, effort not to write like Rue, just to see if I can resist the Everyone-who-posts-in-a-Rue-thread-sounds-like-Rue thing. Unfortunately, it’s not working.

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Rue I had some of those little lights that run along the walkway at Christmas one year. Course I know they’re not the same thing you’re talkin’ about. Mine were little Santa Claus lights and I just plugged em in to the outside electrical outlet on the front of my house. (I also have outside electrical outlets on the sides and back of my house. I can plug in lots of stuff outside if I want.) I bought the Santa Claus lights cause, when you look at em close up, they’re Santa Claus heads on little green sticks. I thought that was cool, err… jake. They kinda died off tho cause there was a bunch of rain and wind and it caused most of the little lights to blow. But, since I only paid a couple bucks for the whole set of 12, I wasn’t too upset. The neighbors on both sides of me got a kick outta Santa Claus heads on sticks so I got my money’s worth. I consider giving my neighbors a coupla good yucks to be a good thing.

Know what Rue? I been thinking about getting another house myself. Well, selling the one I have then gettin another one. I don’t want two houses at the same time. I did that once, had two houses at the same time. Don’t want to do that again. Thing is, I have absolutely no reason whatsoever for buying (actually I wanna build) another house, except I’ve been thinking about some stuff I’d like in a house. When I built this house, I put stuff in it I wanted, but now I’m thinking about different stuff I’d want in another house. What I really need is for somebody to come down here and slap me around til I come back to my senses and forget about this new house stuff.

To make this even worse, I went to a home builder’s trade show this weekend. I shouldn’t oughta have done that. Now I want to build even more. They had so much cool stuff for a house. I should know better than to go look at stuff like that. Somebody stop me before I build again!

Oh, and I cleaned up my yards. Got up all the pine cones and limbs and pine straw and leafs and stuff. I mowed, and edged. I put out weed and feed stuff. I also trimmed the shrubs and stuff growing around the yard. It looks good. Well, better. Well, not as good as my next door neighbor the yard nut’s yard (as in he who measures the height of each and every blade of grass in his yard) but better than my other next door neighbor who is the neighborhood yard slob (as in he who mows when he can’t see his way to his car). Yard nut neighbor (he’s one of my favorite people really. We like to sit out in the driveway in lawn chairs drinking beer) and I were going to burn our yards off but we had a whole buncha rain so we’ve decided not to cause we’re thinking it might be to late to do it now.

Oh, and Rue are the basement bears moving too or do they come as a part of the deal for whoever buys current Casa deDay?

HUZZAH! [sub]that was gratuitous, I know, but I do kinda like the word.[/sub]

11

Shibb, Shibb,Shibb, you want a hijack you can chime in with and you can’t start one of your own? And yet you want to start your own business? (By the way, you need a nanny for those kids of yours? How much you pay?) Makes me worry. A little. It only makes me worry a little.

Tip O’ DeDay

Even though it cuts through the ear wax like nobody’s business, gasoline isn’t the way to go.

(Like that lieu? Now you’r weekend plans gan be brought together in plenty of time for the actual weekend.)

Don’t get me started on wallpaper radar. This house is Jake on that. None to be found. But the lasthouse… gah! Wallpaper on top of wallpaper. One room had it four layers deep. And every other layer was vinyl stuff. (Or whatever. It was way plastic-y.) We used scrapers and one of those little wallpaper scoring things plus an enzyme glue eater plus a steamer to get down to bare wall. Whee! That was some fun!

The wallpaper in the dining room was so ugly we had to keep a swatch after we took the rest off just to show people. They’d always say “Yup, that’s some ugly wallpaper, that is.”

We have one room upstairs that needs some paint and the Little Woman wants to paint the garage (!), but other than that (and cleaning the basement) we’re good. Most of the To Do List of Doom is crossed off now. As far as I know.

Good job staying on track there Copper. You should be proud.

And just how do I write Lissla that you feel the need to purposely NOT emulate me? I mean I just use vowels and consonants like everyone else. Plus some punctuation. You always need some punctuation just so people know when a sentence stops and if it’s a question or not.

And the secret to your cat problem: Nair. Inna sock. And then you whack your cat when he’s not looking. Fun for the whole family!

Light up Santa heads on sticks Swampy? Sounds like some demented headhunters from up North or something.

After the move I need to get some plastic flamingoes. The won’t light up or nuthin’, but what can you do?
-Rue.

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Rue, the place for all yer flamingo needs. Sometimes they even have flamingoes that light up! How’s that for jake?

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Oh, oh, oh - pick me! I wanna slap ya around! Pick me! Pick me!! :smiley:

My house will be on the market this time next year, so I’ve got some painting to do in the meantime. And a lot of de-cluttering. But we won’t have outside lights - don’t need 'em. There’s a very bright street light right at the corner of the yard. You’d never know if the low voltage lights were on or not. So I don’t have to worry about that.

So, if anyone wants to live in Florida in a house where you don’t have to worry about low-voltage lights, drop me a line - I’ll make you a good deal! I’ll be in a really good mood after slapping swampbear!

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Man, Rue, sounds like you are gettin off easy. I thought your big ol T.D.L. o’D. was going to be way heavier. You should be thanking your lucky stars, hey.

15

essvee, was this really your 1111th post? That’s cool. Er… jake, I mean.

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I just scrubbed the kitchen floor on my hands and knees. It sounds much more impressive than it is, since my kitchen floor is about 5 square feet. No, not anyone’s feet in particular, just generalized feet.

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Woo hoo hoo hoo! Light up flamingo stakes (set of 10)! Flamingo garden lights (also 10)! Flamingo Lawn Ornaments (just 2, but still the QUALITY at those prices)! A whole Flamingo Family! And Mini Flamingoes! Swampy, this is so Jakely Jake I can’t stand it. And I was just going to get these. (I’d name the one with its head up “Cecil” and the other one could be “Little Ed”…)

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Anyone else get the feeling that of’ FCM is maybe just a bit to excited over the prospect of slapping me? [sub]Note to self: Buy protective padding before having dinner with FCM in May. [/sub]

Rue, if yer gonna go all pink flamingo on the lawn, go all the way I say.

19

Well, in Thailand we paid just under $100 month, plus room, board and travel expenses. Something tells me we’ll have to go a little better than that here. Just a little.

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This is my new sig line. I have a Rue DeDay designer original sig line. Envy me!