Xiaoniu 小妞

I always find myself full of random thoughts that I want to get out of my head, but to me they are not worthy of a post on their own. So, here are a few more.

Fukitol
Here’s a prescription most of us wouldn’t mind having:

A guy at work sent that to me.

John Deere (again)
One of our other neighbors stopped by the other day. I finished mowing the lawn earlier and Amy and Mike showed up. We put James on the mower and he loved it. So, I took him for a ride around the yard. Well, the neighbor’s kid saw me and ran over. His mother followed him.

She spent a few minutes talking with us while I let her boy sit on the tractor. He was three and was very impressed. He’s really into lawn tractors and was very happy to see a green one. His mother kept saying, “We don’t have a John Deere. We can’t afford one. They must have a lot more money than we do.”. ??? That was a little disturbing. I was uncomfortable. Oh well. She was nice overall, but her comments made me fell weird.

BTW it took about 30 minutes to finish the lawn on the tractor and I wasn’t rushing. I did 75% of it. The last bit on the side didn’t get done for two reasons. One, I have lots of sticks and leaves to clean up over there. Two, the grass didn’t grow enough in that spot. It only grew long enough in spots around the yard. Oh well.

One good thing did come from our conversation with the neighbor. She mentioned that I had a John Deere. I said that we figured the yard was too big to push mow. She agreed and said that everybody in the neighborhood has a lawn tractor. Mike pointedly asked, “Does he have to shovel the driveway in the winter though?” She said, “No, he should get a snow blower like everybody else in the neighborhood.” Sue was very quite the whole time. We’ll probably shovel this coming year, but after that we’ll probably look at a snow blower.

Driveway
The damn driveway is falling apart. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I took a closer look at it a couple weeks ago. I thought it had too much dirt and gravel on it so I got a broom and started to clean up. After agonizing hours of work I had huge piles of very heavy gravel/dirt. I also uncovered a large number of big cracks.

You can see that the original owner patched the cracks and sealed the driveway, but that was long ago. The sealing is just about gone. The piles of gravel I swept were actually the driveway. I was hoping to reseal it, but just driving on it seems to erode the driveway further.

Now, I’m stuck with disposing lots of useless gravel and a slightly thinner driveway. I’m not going to waste time on sealant. I’ll just wait it out until we can replace the driveway. Damn, another big, expensive project. We’ll just have to see which wins out first: gutters, driveway or roof.

Fan
I installed the second fan we bought in the spare room last night. It looks suprisingly good. I was skeptical. I’m really impressed by the Hunter fan in our room and not so sure of the Hampton Bay one for the spare room. Both are very nice looking, but the Hunter is so quiet. I didn’t think the other had a chance in hell of being as nice.

It installed fairly easy. It doesn’t come with spaces (between the bracket and ceiling, like the Hunter so I made my own. I don’t like doing that, but it had to be done. Everything was up and installed before it was dark. I ran it for 10 minutes (like the instructions said) to balance the fan and it doesn’t even shake on high. You can hear the motor when it is going fast, but not bad. It’s not as quiet as ours, but who cares. It’s a spare room. Our is most important.

Electric Boxes
I had a hell of a time getting new boxes for the switches in two rooms. After yanking out the originals, I saw how much trouble they had getting them installed. If I wanted two switches I had to get a two-gang box, but it had to be shallow. Nobody sells them.

I ended up buying a couple of fairly shallow metal boxes that were gangable. The place was in the getto part of Schenectady. What a joy that was. The guy that was “helping” me wasn’t too bright. He kept getting the wrong stuff. Couldn’t answer any questions. I ended up waiting for the other guy to get done and I asked him.

What a chore. At least they fit. I’ll have to do a little repair work in the blue room. Sorry pop. I had trouble getting the old box out. It isn’t too bad though. Just a little patching and touch up painting. Not much more than I had to do in the master bedroom.

Vacation
I’ve been reading about Sarah’s vacation at her site and I’m starting to get the itch to go some place. We weren’t planning on a big trip this year. With going to China last year for a honeymoon and buying a house we’d like to keep spending to a minimum. I’ll have to plan on something local. There should be something we can do close to home. I just have to take the time to find it. Or I could try talking Sue into going back to Maine.