Master Bedroom

...such as it is.
Just displaying some of the slow progress we have been making over the last few weeks.  The Wife's assistant quit after wrecking a company truck while on post, while talking on a cell phone, while stoned.  My boss is out of town and I am left in charge of the Aid Station.  So we have been justifiably sluggish about home improvement projects.  Still- we do have something to show.



This was how the front half of the under-construction-master-bedroom looked at the beginning of the week.



Now more of the prep stuff is done.  We got the last of the wallpaper and popcorn ceiling (may you burn in hell for eternity) off, yanked out a couple more studs, and tore out the carpet and padding.  Hopefully the next pictures of this room we send out will have the beginnings of a closet framed up.  


Here is a little treasure we found when pulling down a little piece of wall.  A 40 year old 7-Up bottle.  It was covered in cobwebs and dust when we found it.  It weighs at least a pound.  Cool huh?



Make 7 up yours!

Fruits of our Labors.

So, here is an update on the garden situation.
Gardening is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.  We are battling record high temperatures, drought, birds, legions of ants, groundhogs, birds, cats, and hardcore gardening ignorance.  And yet- we have actually managed to reap a little of what we have sown.



We have really lucked out on this stuff.  Cantaloupe loves Tennessee.











Everything we have eaten so far has been Delicious!  I half expected that everything would just die.  It was quite the pleasant surprise when stuff started growing!

Does anyone know any tricks to getting rid of night-time garden visitors- short of shooting them?  Not that I would mind, but I don't stay up that late.

Dumb name, dumb idea, so much fun.

Spelunker (noun) a person who explores caves, esp. as a hobby.

From obsolete spelunk, cave, from Middle English, from Old French spelunque, from Latin spēlunca, from Greek spēlunx.

spe'lunk'ing.

Twice in the last two weeks the Wife and I have been spelunking.  I prefer "caving" because "spelunking" sounds so stupid.  And to my folks- the whole thing sounds stupid.  Snooping around in dark, flooded, muddy, unstable, bat and possibly werewolf-filled caves a hundred feet underground.  You would have to be an idiot, right?  Sorry Mom and Dad, we ARE that stupid.  Here are a couple pics and a short clip from our recent adventures.



Occasionally, a raccoon, or a dog chasing a raccoon, falls down the 65 foot vertical tunnel that is the entrance to this cave.  We found a few of these around the bottom of the pit.



My wife in front of a monstrous cave formation we called "The Rocketship" was at least 30 feet tall.



Us after a nice little underground swim.

Check out our 30 sec video clip.  It took a lot of worming around through really cramped, tight spots to finally get somewhere with enough space to actually stand.  Everyone was really excited about that.

More St Louis Pics

Meet Me In Saint Louis

This weekend we went to St Louis.  A first for both of us.  We had a great time.  This trip was engineered by my wife- who came into possession of a pair of major league baseball tickets.  A friend of hers from work had the tickets but the game was rained out. But the friend couldn't go on the reschudualed date.  He offered them to said wife instead- woohoo!  We drove the 250 some miles Saturday morning to beautiful St Louie.  Downtown was really impressive.  The new Busch Stadium and The Arch are both next to the river and only a couple blocks away from each other.  We watched the game- Cardinals vs Brewers.  

 

We were almost the only people NOT wearing red in the entire stadium.  There were 3 guys in the same section as we were- Milwaukee fans and all wearing blue jerseys- resolutely cheering against the overwhelming boos that erupted every time the Cards got spanked.  No booing from the boys in blue though.  We were a pretty long way up though.  They were probably scared of getting thrown over the railing.  At least they weren't Cubs fans.  The second-most-popular apparel at the game behind Cards paraphernalia was "Cubs Suck" shirts.  So the game was cool.  Our seats were in the shade.  And there were lots of entertaining little blurbs and gimmicks in between each inning. I was disappointed that there wasn't any free stuff getting passed out for the early birds- like they did at the Oakland A's games I went to as a kid.  It costs $4.50 for a bottle of water.  Gay.

 
I touched it!  I touched it!



Cheese.                                                                                                                                    

After the game we walked around the waterfront and checked out The Arch.  Elevator tickets were sold out for the next 5 hours so we didn't go inside.  The weather was sunny and HOT.  We splashed around in a fountain to cool off a little and went down to the free St Louis Zoo.  It was small as far as acres go, but they had a lot of really neat animals. It had a suprising number of endangered and nearly extinct animals- like the Amur Tiger, and the Mountain Gorilla.  
We tried to see all of these first and take their pictures in case they are all gone by the time my kids are old enough to start appreciating them.  The one constantly crappy thing about the zoo were the people in it- and especially the kids.  I look at going to the zoo like going to a museum.  There should be a little respect and reverence observed for all the poor captive suffering animals.  Especially the ones who are on the brink of extinction.  At one point a little Hispanic boy and his fat mommy were hitting the glass on the other side of which was leaning a pair of resting chimpanzee.  I dearly wanted to pound on the glass with her fat stupid face and then feed her kid to something.  There was a shirtless white trash hill-billy whooping and hollering into the gorilla enclosure, and a black all-girl family big enough to pass as a school field trip in which every member litterally screamed every pithy, ignorant thought that passed through their narrow, closed minds.  (I am not racist- I hate all stupid people the same)
 

  My wife taming a black mamba.                                               

Otherwise- It was an amazing experience.  Almost all the enclosures were clean, dynamic, and inhabited.  The grounds were beautiful, and the animals inside all looked healthy, and only slightly dazed and neurotic.  The highest point for me was getting to feed a giraffe.  I wished my wife got to as well.  As soon as the other patrons saw what I did, there was a tsunami of children.  Some were literally climbing over the fences and into the pens to hold up handfuls of grass.  Concerned parents assuage this with- "Billy, do you really think you should be inside the giraffe cage?"  Nice job, dad.  We split quickly before anyone got trampled- and have it pinned on my bad example.  My other favorite thing was getting to watch the chimps from really close up.  They are awesome- and seem so smart.  After watching them for a while I half expected them to look up and start talking.
We didn't get home until almost two in the morning on Sunday but we had a great time.  Hope you like the pictures.  We finally got our camera replaced.

Home-made Rootbeer

I tasted my first home-brewed root beer this afternoon and it was GOOD. Sunday afternoon The Wife and I turned our kitchen into a brewery and cranked out a gallon of root beer and a gallon of cherry soda. They have been in the basement fermenting since then and I pulled one of each tonight for dinner to check how things were coming along. The cherry is still flat and tastes like NyQuil. It even has a gross menthol taste. I don't know where all that came from but- oh well. The root beer is awesome. It has a thick foamy head and its not too sweet and soooo good. It's so good I don't believe we actually made it ourselves. We are keeping it in the basement for one more night and then moving them all in the fridge after that. The cold is supposed to slow down the fermentation so the glass bottles don't all explode. The cherry stays for another 48 hours I guess. Hopefully it will improve with age. If not can give them to friends we don't really like as gifts. Either way, we had a lot of fun making them, and will do it again soon. It's easy and kids could even do it. We spent about thirty bucks on bottles, a capper, caps, and a bottle brush. We spent another fifteen on three different flavor extracts-Root beer, cherry, and cream soda. Each little bottle is good for 4 gallons. And the champagne yeast we used is less than fifty cents a packet. We got our ingredients and instructions form this website.

Our Cheap Heap.

This one is about the house.  We decided to put some focus on the attic today.  Our house gets so hot during the day, and its just a puny little thing anyway.  We figured the roof is the culprit.  We figured right.  We discovered the our attic has no vapor barrier between the ceiling and the woolly blown insulation.  There is no outlet for the vent in the bathroom- and it was covered with black, moldy insulation.  The insulation ranges from 10 to zero inches.  There is no mesh under the spinny roof vents, so we found lots of bird "evidence", and most of all- no soffits.  Soffits are vents along the eaves that allow outside air to enter the roof space, and replace the super-hot air inside the attic.  Our house doesn't have a single one.

My wife was able to secure a 6-foot wide roll of fiberglass from a job site that we used to cover the bathroom- after digging out all the nasty molded stuff- and a couple other bare spots.  She spent the most time working in the attic.  Hours.  It was easily over 100 degree and really humid.  But she made a lot of progress.  I didn't do very much work.  We started out trying to do it together- but ran into creative differences.  In the end she threw me out.  I still got to help with cutting up the new padding, forcing my wife to drink an occasional glass of water, tinkering with our chainsaw, and setting fire to a bunch of junk in the back yard.

Like most projects ion this house- we start a "small" job and find ourselves up to our eyebrows.  As my dad puts it- "The joys of owning a home!"