Poison Ivy

I thought I still had resistance to poison ivy. You can actually build up a tolerance to it if you’re exposed enough.

Moving off the farm clearly hasn’t been kind to me, I never remember getting actual, weeping hives after handling the stuff. The worst was I used to get a rash and just make a mental note not to touch it.

We’ve got ivy (decorative) going up the trees in the yard and used as ground cover. I personally hate this, the previous owner had no idea that while it makes fantastic ground cover, it also chokes the hell out of all the trees it grows on. Of course, whoever built this development many years ago also put it in everyones back yard. While I feel like we’re doing the woods behind the house a disservice with it, I also feel like it’s impossible to clean up.

All of the trees on our property I gave a quick walk around and if there was climbing ivy on the tree, I cut the stem. My buck knife was significantly duller by the end of this process (10 trees worth of ivy total) and one tree in particular just outside the fence is completely dead. The other trees may end up following suit shortly, the ivy was mature enough to have grown out along the branches and it covers the trees leaves. There may be quite a bit of firewood this fall depending.

The ivy gets under the bark with it’s suckers and still has managed to stay green (but drooping) a week later. This, to me, is wild because in the spring and summer the roots are generally pumping as much as they can to the leaves. Cut the vines low and I would expect the leaves to die in short order. What I am suprised at is the ivy wood itself hasn’t bled anything. Either the ivy has god’s own pulmonary system for a plant or these guys weren’t working too hard. It’s also possible the plants have become so ingrained in the tree that they don’t need roots anymore.

This fall I plan on rubbing what low stems are left with gasoline. The gasoline penetrates the oily layer present on all ivy leaves, gets transported to the roots and poisons the whole system.

All this work wouldn’t be complete without a walk through the woods to survey what other ivy is out there. Upon my return I took a shower but made the mistake of taking a hot shower before checking to see if I had picked up any oil. Oh what a tragedy, I missed a legitimate opportunity to rub alcohol directly into my bloodstream via my open wounds! The next day the familiar rash appeared and I didn’t think anything of it. Two days later, it’s weeping hives.

Thankfully, I can give COLLOIDAL OATMEAL positive reviews for getting rid of the itch but more importantly drying out the sites which broke out. Now, if only I could get rid of all the ivy in the first place, I would be set.

The Worst Part of Neverland

Michael Jackson's Neverland

I think the saddest part of Neverland is that I would love to live there.

Oh God, Housework

Thankfully my inlaws are awfully crafty people. Things I’ve learned about houses:
1) Some people are masking-tape people, some people can do it freehand. I’m a masking tape person. I would rather put on 2 widths of tape and waste time doing that so I can use a huge roller than delicately try to paint small parts.
2) You will learn awesome things at every breaker box you work on. Every single house I’ve done any electrical in has had fun ideas about how all this works.
3) Your wife will buy color samples and use them everywhere. Including surfaces you hadn’t previously thought about painting.

Stuff we did this weekend:
Toilets
The one toilet needed a new float kit. It would fill but periodically leak. If you lifted the float up just a bit it would stop drawing in the water. When I went to bend the plastic arm, I broke it.

The upstairs toilet was a write off. The fatass who owned the place before me broke the porcelain around the water tank where it connects to the bowl. When we bought the place I turned it off. As I was trying to flush it with the water off to drain things, the water tank broke around the handle. Still waiting to see if the trash service here actually picks up the mess. Of course, as we’re trying to remove it, it’s breaking more and more and more and we finally realized it didn’t have any structure. We just tapped it with a hammer until it came up, which was fine because the closet bolts (what holds the toilet to the flange) were rusted fast anyway.

The wax ring which came with the new toilet was too shallow, but we had enough foresight to buy a new, jumbo ring which did the trick.

Electrical
WHY DID HE PUT THREE PRONG OUTLETS IN WITH NO GROUND? We ended up figuring out there was a ground wire run for a distance and fished our stuff to that. However, 11 outlets later and we figured out that not only were some of these hot splices with no breaker on them aside of the mains, some of them were plain wired backwards. Which is fine if you have a lamp, but plug a computer in and kiss it goodbye.

Painting
’nuff said. I suck at spackle. I am, however, the king of using the large roller without runs. I also prefer to mask with tape rather than freehand paint the edges.

Oil Tank
The clowns who sprayed the basement for mold, mildew and whatever else sprayed over the sight-glass on my oil tank. As I was crawling my way back there I realized there was a shallow pool of kerosene under the hard line to the tank. These guys had managed to step on the line between the heater and the tank as they were spraying. Not only did I have to clean off the sight glass but thankfully some messing around with the compression fitting got it to seal. The bad news is that the next time it happens, I need a new compression fitting.

Car Fun
Of course, the Camry’s ignition system finally quit while I was out running down paint. Thankfully it only needed a new cap and rotor but the igniter is obviously not put in a user serviceable location.

Carpet Cleanup
I thought those carpet scrubbers were busywork until my father in law brought his over. I was going to replace the carpets myself but that thing really does a fantastic job of getting stains out of carpets. We’ve got one of the hoovers (second or third hand at this point) and we have a light blue carpet upstairs. The den carpet doesn’t look so hot because it was next to the mud room, but it lifted the mud right out of it (although it needs a second pass) and the upstairs light blue carpet with coffee stains (I hope) came right up with only one pass.

TODO
1) Refinish hardwood floors
2) Powerwash the deck, seal it
3) Repoint the chimney

Then at around 7pm last night I came down with a 100.7F fever and promptly collapsed.

My Lawn Tractor is AWESOME

First, it has a top speed of 15mph. That alone makes it awesome because I could drive it to the store if I could explain to the police WTF I was doing.

Second, there are no police where I live but state police, and they don’t get off the highway.

Third, the cargo sled attachment works really well and doesn’t get me weird looks at the farmers market. It does get me weird looks at ACME.

If you buy one of these – and I highly suggest you do since a 42 inch wide cutting deck makes really quick work of the yard – BUY AN EXTRA SET OF BELTS. The ones that come with it from SEARS are crap, and the sales reps dug out the wrong part number three times before figuring it out.

Also buy a cup holder. I have flashbacks to the MR2 every time I try to drink a beer while riding it.

Anyway, in terms of construction – everything is well built where it needs to be well built. The body work is only so-so but it’s steel where it counts. Sometimes it’s overbuilt – the pins and posts under there range from oversized to oh-god-why-did-they-bother size. The belt routing for the accessories is a bit hairy depending on what you put on there. For instance the cutting deck actually requires you pull two of the pins (throttle and elevation) to route the belt around them, but otherwise it’s an OK design. I generally wish the spring for the idle pully were harder but I won’t knock it.

The aerator attachment is hilarious. Any speed over 3rd gear throws plugs of dirt (which looks a lot like dog shit) about 10 feet into the air.

The Roads to Here

Good god if you’re coming to visit keep your wits about you. Quick rules for driving around here:

• Everyone is stupidly aggressive. I just about ran down a motorcyclist today because he pulled out of a gas station while looking at me. Protip: Just because we make eye contact doesn’t mean I’m letting you out. I’m especially not letting you out if I saw you drive into the gas station from the other side to avoid the traffic I’m sitting in.
• Keep your windows up while driving by the park. The mosquitoes here will kill you. And the deer take “window down” to mean “food here!”
• The speed limit on 422 is there for a reason. Don’t be the guy who nails a deer.

Also Paradise Pizza is really good – but also really expensive. An “XL” pizza with everything on it + coke is $18.99.

I’M NOT DEAD

I was closing on the house.

Quick rundown of life in general: The vandalism happened, the fight did not, and someone figured out I was out of communication and sent some e-mail announcing my death from my comcrap account. SMTP is easy enough to fake, but if you got mail from me announcing that I was dead – they use DVORAK keyboards in hell.

Fathers Day Dinner

Wooo first fathers day dinner CO my lovely wife – SURF AND TURF.

Delicious red meat, T Bone steaks, and shrimps. Of course it was with rice and corn and it was extra delicious because I didn’t have to cook! OK because it was made with love.

THEY ALLOW ME TO REPRODUCE

Halfway there. Meet baby Alex.

Painting the Doors

The FHA is lulzy as hell. They made a “thorough inspection” and said that we had to fix the garage doors because the paint was peeling. Nevermind the garage door on the one side is cracked and needs to be replaced, but they noticed the peeling paint.

The Home Depot stripper works pretty well. The problem, as we found out, is that the Home Depot stripped only seems to work well on paint which has primer under it. If there’s no primer under the paint, you have to use more of it. A lot of it. Actually I’m glad we got it in gel format because we ended up slathering it on. We also found out it’s so caustic it melted the plastic rollers and brushes we used. PLUS IT BURNS LIKE THE FIRES OF HELL ON YOUR SKIN.

The first door I figured would take about two hours start to finish. The stripper is supposed to work in 15 minutes. Or it would have had it not completely welded the brush bristles together. Fine, we can just slap it on. 15 minutes later we’re trying to take it off with a wire hand brush and we’re not making great progress. I broke out the wheel brush and the drill and the first few panels came off fine. The stripper, however, was refusing to work on the bottom two panels. We tried more of it.

15 minutes later – the paint is coming up, but nowhere near as well as we expected. As my brother and I worked the drill, it finally occurred to me that the problem was the paint didn’t have primer under it. The paint was soaked into the wood. Our brush was quickly dulling and getting choked in chemicals as it peeled off the paint, stripper and wood pulp melange. By the time we got to the bottom panel on the door, we were gouging out just as much paint as wood.

Once we had gotten to the bottom of the first door, I took out the thick wire brush and went over the whole thing. Some of the paint came up, most of the stubborn stuff didn’t. Again, the crap coming off the door was paint heavily bonded to wood. Lose-lose every way and my brother had to be at work. We decided to paint.

The primer we used was matte white water based (”aquacryllic”) primer. Thankfully it went on easy, and covered well. While disappointing that it continued to lift the paint up, this is no biggy. It’s just thick enough to fill in all the dimples without being hard to work, and loose enough to roll easily. I am generally impressed with the product.

My brother had to go so we cleaned up the mess and went to my folks place. Thankfully my father understood this needed to be done like yesterday and volunteered to help. At this point my wrist was ready to fall off from steadying the drill on the uneven surface. We drove back. Dad is apparently a man’s-man, he opted not to use chemical stripper and went directly for the aggressive wire brush. Between him using the wire wheel to clean most of the door and me working the hand brush to  knock the rest of it off, he did the bottom panel on the other door and I cleaned up after. We started to do the next panel up and realized once again there was no primer – but this time over the entire door.

The chemicals – THEY DO NOTHING.

At this point it was getting late and we discovered a crack in the second door, and I decided to write off the doors since they are $75ish a pop at Home Depot when they’re on sale for generic aluminum doors. The primer, amazingly enough, will not lift up paint with no other primer under it. The obvious argument here is that primer is soluble in primer, which is why the paint on the other door lifted a bit when we primed over it. Here’s hoping the primer sticks to the paint until the FHA comes by to inspect it.

Politics From the Bayside and Whale Wars

I really like the band RISE AGAINST. However, I hate their support of PETA, and since they’ve enjoined their music, and their profits to PETA, I’m glad I have the ability to not pay for their music via the magic of the internet while still enjoying it.

PROTIP to punk bands out there – also METALLICA – don’t make political statements and then cry foul when people download your music instead of supporting your politics with your money. LOL, CAPITOLISMS!

Speaking of PETA, I at least respect the guy on WHALE WARS. First time he runs across a Russian whaling ship though, expect him to catch an RPG with his face. The fact that he only attacks the Japanese speaks volumes. The worst part about it is he’s taking food off the Japs plates. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sympathetic to responsible management of wildlife, but they fail it quite badly. It’s not like you go to Black Market McDonalds over in Japland and buy a whale burger. This is a land where fishing is like farming to Americans, and the Sea Sheppards really are taking food off the plates of the Japanese.

Now, I do believe they have a point where they accuse the Japanese of writing “RESEARCH” on the side of their boats instead of WHALING. However, I take this as the Japanese meme of avoiding confrontation. On that note, the captain getting shot isn’t nearly as likely as one of their “stink grenades” going off and tagging him. The fact that he’s like “OH MAH BADGE SAVED ME” just lends credence to the idea.

Furthermore the show isn’t forthright with what munitions the Steve Irwin has on board. The crew has tried to create RPGs on their own (photo gallery of expended munitions) and failed. Which is more likely: The Japanese, who are forbidden from owning firearms, shot the captain and somehow missed, or the crew of the Steve Irwin, which is a revolving door of idiots, screwed up an improvised rocket?

More on the point – which is an inappropriate show of force? The Japanese use a “sound gun” against the Steve Irwin (also embarrassing Engrish) or the Steve Irwin uses rockets and hazardous material (acid) against the Japs?

So the next bit to consider is why doesn’t the program show the whales being processed? Why doesn’t it show the rockets? The program wants to perpetuate this myth that somehow “stink bombs” are going to foul up Japanese whaling. (I would speculate if this worked, there would be footage of the Japs dumping the fouled whale meat into the sea). However, you never see the rockets, nor do you ever see whales being processed. Why? Because whales are processed below deck. While it might be unpleasant to work on a whale that stinks, any episode of Dirty Jobs is going to convince you that all dead animals stink, and there’s not much more to be done about it. Since the skin of a whale is pressure cooked to get the oil out, it’s probably thoroughly washed in seawater. A stink bomb might slow them down, but it doesn’t really hurt the Japanese. Hence the rockets.

If you wanted to make the environmental protection argument, ask the crew of the Steve Irwin why they blew the engines (and all the fuel, and all the oil and killed a sailor) into the ocean back in 1997 when they attacked the Nisshin Maru.