Still missing Mom...

07.01.2009

Today at lunch I ran some errands. Errand #1 was running by Movie Stop to trade in 4 seasons of MASH that I no longer needed since racking up on a one-day sale at Amazon for the complete series. I lucked out and got double what I thought they would pay, and with that managed to to get 2 movies that I was putting off for the "I'll wait until they're $10" time frame (so I get to watch the latest John Cena movie as soon as I want! Yippee?).

Errand #2 was a trip to Bed Bath & Forever in search of a glass shelf for the master bathroom. I had tried Lowed & Home Depot, but their shelves were 24" and I really needed less than 22" for the wall I had in mind. Searching Amazon I found some that looked nice and were the right size, but they cost anywhere form $55 to $160. I was just looking for a cheap $20 shelf! The Bed Bath Etc website showed some 24" shelves, but I was betting they carried some different sizes in the store.

When I walked in the store I was immediately side-tracked by a clearance shelf (no, not a glass shelf). On it were some Febreze Closet Renewables which Gina had told me about. They were on sale for $2 for a pack of 12 sheets. Booyah! I picked up 2 packs and went about my way in the store.

I got to the bathroom section and perused the glass shelves. They had a variety of sizes: 24", 22", 19.75". That 19-one looked about right. They came in a variety of finishes. One of those finishes happened to be the brushed satin that would match the faucet in the target bathroom. Booyah! And it was only $20.

I was having a lucky day running these errands, so I thought I would chance one more leg. BB&Forever has a comforter/sheet set that I've had my eye on for damn near 2 years, waiting for it to go on sale. As I headed to the back corner of the store I saw a yellow CLEARANCE sign where the comforter set I always looked at lived. I got closer and saw that not only were the sets 35% off, they still had a king size. Booyah! I'm glad I stuffed a couple of 20% off coupons in my pocket before coming in!

As I grabbed the bag of bed goodies and turned to head toward the registers, it hit me. Out of the blue, all at once. Yeah, this is poor sentence and paragraph structure, but it doesn't matter - Mom should have been there with me. I remember looking at the comforter set with her and asking what she thought about it since it had a pattern, and I'm never too sure about patterns. She told me the design looked like something I would pick, and I told her I was going to wait until it went on sale. Everything in that store eventually goes on sale, you just have to be patient. Plus, you could use those 20% off coupons even on sale items.

Mom would always bring me the Bed Bath & Beyond coupons she got in the mail. I somehow managed to sign up my address under 2 different names and would get double coupons. Once we saved up a handful of coupons me and Mom would head out to the Beyond and pick up something: cleaning stuff, kitchen gadgets, whatever. I was never the best at cleaning so that's when she would help pick out things that make it easier for the I-don't-care cleaner to do a better job.

I stood there surrounded by sheets for a minute as I remembered all of that. I've been in that store 4 times since Mom died, and everytime I get caught off guard and start thinking about her. I don't mind missing her and thinking about her, it's how it keeps catching me off guard that throws me off.

I composed myself (yes, I was a little teary eyed back there amongst the sheets) and went to check out. By looking at my receipt I managed noticed that I managed to save $130 between clearance prices and coupons. I told Mom that it just took some patience to save some money in there. I just wish she had been there to hand in the coupons.

Permalink mom rambling

New Damn Mower!

06.28.2009

After all the hassle with the lawn mower over the past week, I went and got myself a new mower.

Troy-Bilt 20-HP Automatic 46" Cut Lawn Tractor

The reviews that I've seen for the Troy-bilt mowers with the Kohler engines are horrible. To be honest, I don't really care right now. The inaugural mowing went ok. There area couple of new things to get used to with this mower. I have to admit that I really like the cup holder and the padded seat.

I also got off the mower, shutting it off, 3 times. It started right back up afterwords. That was nice.

Now the challenge will be to remember to change the oil as recommended after the first 5 hours of operation. That should be in about 2 weeks.

Permalink random

My Damn Mower

06.24.2009

In April, when the yard was first in need of mowing, I thought about trying to sell my mower and buying a replacement. I've had the mower for at least 8 years. Except for a problem with the gas tank leaking I really haven't had any major problems with it. At the end of the last mowing season I had a feeling that he mower was just getting old - 8 years for a $1000 mower from Wal-Mart felt like a good run. The first "I've really got to get out and mow this grass" came too quick and I decided to try and get one more year out of the mower.

Even though I don't have major problems with the mower, I do have minor ones that pop up. These week, all of the minor ones popped up. Sunday I decided to mow. After 10 minutes, minor problem #1 popped up.

Years ago, the mowing deck bottomed out in a dip in the yard (since filled in by handyman Mike) and snapped off pin that holds one side of the mower deck onto the frame. Instead of trying to find a replacement pin, I stuck the bar from the deck back on the post on the frame, then slid a hose clamp onto the post and tightened it up. This would work until the deck bottomed out harder than normal sometime later and the hose clamp would go shooting off. Whenever I get the mower tuned up, they generally replace the hose clamp with the proper pin, but eventually the whole breaking-replacement sequence would start over and I would end up with another hose clamp. Sunday I got a little too close to something (I think it was a root near the front of the garage) as the mower deck shuffled from left to right, then I heard the distinct sound of the left side of the mower deck riding on the driveway.

Enter Problem #2. Putting on a hose clamp to fix the mower deck problem is easy. I've done it a dozen times so I know the steps, I have hose clamps at the ready, and I know how to twist my arms around the rear tire to where my arms will actually fit. Problem #2 is that whenever the mower turns off, the engine gets flooded and it won't restart for at least an hour and a half. The mower can be running for 5 minutes or 2 hours, it doesn't matter. Maybe it's not really flooded, maybe it's overheated or got oil up the wrong tube, but it smells like too much gas in the air when I try to restart it. So after fixing the mower deck, I've got to wait 90 minutes to continue to mow. Thanks to starting late on Sunday to try and avoid some heat, it'll be too dark to finish mowing in that time window.

We now move on to Monday (day 2 of mowing). 5:00, at least 2&amp12; hours before it gets dark - plenty of time to finish what is usually a 2 hour job if I get detailed and mow and weed-eat every nook and cranny. The mower cranks up, the mower deck isn't dragging the ground. I start circling the yard, the grass gets shorter on each pass. After about 20 minutes, the blades stop spinning.

The grass discharge gets clogged when the grass is thick, or wet. Most of my ways of fixing this are a combination of:

• going backwards for about 50 ft
• turning off the blades and going full speed for a lap around the yard (I think the rough terrain jiggles things loose)
• run over part of a branch (a nice solid chunk of wood can break things up!)
• using the deck height lever while on the drive way, slam the deck up and down (as one would coax ketchup out of a bottle).
  • I know that's not a good way to do things, but when you're pissed off and frustrated you'll do anything

Monday none of those solutions were working. Whenever the blades were engaged, the blades were so locked up that the rubber on the belts would start to smoke as they tried to spin the blades. Something was messed up down their, so I pulled into the garage, turned the mower off (getting us back to Problem #2 eventually), and propped one side of the mower up to where I could poke under it. I got a screwdriver and started chipping away at grass that had dried onto the bottom fo teh mower deck over the years, but none of this should really be interfering with the blade movement. While feeling around, I came across a chunk of grass that had gotten wedged between one of the blades and the mowed deck.

A chunk of grass. How does a chunk of grass get caught by a blade? This wasn't wispy grass though. If this were hail, it would be golf ball sized and held together by a clump of dirt. This chunk was stuck good, too. I'm not a wimpy pansy man like Jerry, but I had to pry and grunt pretty hard to get the chunk out. But I got it out. Once again it was going to be too late to mow once the "waiting for the mower to restart" window opened back up.

Tuesday afternoon (day 3 of mowing) I thought would be the day I finished. My normal problems had all been accounted for. I was starting a little before 5:00, heat be damned! In the previous 2 days I had managed to mow possibly &amp14; of the yard. As I went around the yard mowing it bit by bit, I was keeping an eye on the height of the mower deck, making sure grass was flying out of the discharger, and trying not to go tto fast (because that's when things break). I had gotten almost &amp34; of the yard mowed when I heard the blades stop. I looked down and saw one of the belts that drive the blades sitting, snapped, on the mower deck.

Damn.

It.

To hell in a handbasket full of molten hot shrapnel that I want to shove into somebody's eyes.

So now I've given up and am taking the hint. It's time to replace the mower. Everything that's wrong with the mower is fixable, I don't deny that. But, in all honesty, the mower has pissed me off. I don't deal well with mechanical things that piss me off. I don't fix them, I replace them. I'm about to make someone at Lowes, Home Depot, or Sears happy.

Permalink rambling

Yo, July 22!

06.22.2009

I am so going to get the complete 1980's GI Joe cartoon!

It's $145. I'm 40. Neither of those numbers makes a difference to me.

Must just wait for another month....

Permalink

I'm not gay, but...

06.10.2009

Way back in August of 2004, I tried to learn how to paint in one of my spare bedrooms (not the master bedroom and not the computer room). It didn't go well. By the time I claimed I was finished, there was paint on the walls, in many places you could see where the runs in the paint had tried. There was paint on the door frames. There was paint on the window frames. There was paint on the ceiling. Even though I had used old sheets as drop cloths, there was paint on the gray carpet. For the majority of the past 5 years I haven't gone into that room more than to toss some crap in or go digging through the crap looking for something I had tossed in. One of my goals of this year was to fix that room to make it usable. I even had an idea for how to make it super-usable!

Over a couple of weeks I started to accumulate the tools I would need to prep the room for painting. Masking tape, various sanding implements to get rid of those dried up runs in the wall, etc. One weekend day I found myself with some free time and noticed most of the other things on my chore list were marked off, so I set out to prep the room! I grabbed some sandpaper and started sanding a run on the wall. And I sanded. For a long time. A long, long time. The run never really went away.

It didn't take long before I decided that while I originally thought this was a job for me to learn how to paint properly while fixing my past mistakes, it was really a job for my to call handy man Mike and get him to fix it. I called him up, showed him the disaster I needed fixed, then I went off to Jamaica for a week. When I got back, the disaster was fixed. Walls were painted. Ceiling was painted in the proper places. Carpet had been replaced with the laminate flooring I have in the rest of the house. I believe I've learned my lesson - whenever I get the urge to paint, call Mike.

I had been thinking for a while of what to do with that room. Most people have a spare bedroom for visiting guests. I don't have visiting guests, so setting up a proper bedroom would be a waste of space. I had originally (when I first painted the disaster) thought of turning the room into a small library - bookshelves, a chair to read in, cozy lighting - but how often do I just sit around and read?

One thing I've discovered, or maybe just admitted, over the past year is that I'm a clothes horse. When I find clothes in my size, I tend to buy the regardless of whether or not I really need another blue polo shirt. My closet is stuffed with clothes. Plus, my big-n-tall clothes takes up loads more room than most people's normal sized clothes. I hang most of my clothes, but it seems they were all crammed into the closet hanging up. Grab one hanger and pull out 3 others when you take a shirt out. It was here that I realized I could make my disaster room into a closet. I big honking closet!

Closetmaid makes closet furniture, cool furniture you see on tv shows with fancy walk-in closets. I had gotten a couple of units from Lowes/Home Depot about 2 years ago and set them up in the bedroom to replace my old dresser. The Closetmaid units are modular/stackable pre-fab kits, so I'm all about putting them together. By the time Mike fixed the disaster room, all I really needed where some hanging rods and I would be in business.

Over the course of a week I moved furniture into my new closet. I made a couple of trips to Lowes/Home Depot to fill in some missing gaps. I found that Closetmaid no longer makes the furniture I have, although Sauder makes something similar. I replaced my amalgamation of multicolored Wal-Mart plastic hangers with cool-looking wooden hangers. Overall, I think it turned out pretty good.

So far I'm the envy of every girl that's seen it :)

Permalink renovation/remodelling