Sunday, July 5, 2009

How not to paint a bathroom


1) Ignore wife's choice of yellow shade, and get something called Buttercup which is several shades darker, to use for both kitchen and bath, because you're being so cheap you forgot the landord's paying for the paint anyway.

2) Realize Buttercup = Mustard

3) Keep painting anyway, hoping it'll grow on you.

4) Get the right color yellow, use it in kitchen, and get the Main Harbor blue that wife wanted for the bathroom in the first place.

5) Repaint.

See? Painting is simple!

Forgot the moral of the story: Never question wife's choice of colors. Just say, "that color would be perfect." and buy the chosen paint.

Friday, July 3, 2009

Goodbye Blues

So, we're doing the cleaning and painting on the rental, with no power, thanks to the electric company screwing up and disconnecting the meter instead of reverting the billing back to the landlord when the previous tenant moved out.

We said we'd to the painting, because we always wanted to have walls that weren't "rental white." There were some nice colors already done, and some that aren't so nice. We're going to be reimbursed for the supplies. We hit Big Lots, KMart and Walmart for cheap paint stuff. I already have so much painting supplies from the WR house refurb that I could start a second career - but that stuff is currently making its way out here in a shipping container on the back of a truck.

We said we'd clean, too, since we're eager to get in and I need a place to work from. Otherwise, we have to wait for the cleaners to come out after the power gets turned back on. The landlord changed the lease to start from 7/15 instead of 7/1. Nice.

So, it turns out there were three blue rooms upstairs - one bedroom is nicely done, and we're keeping it. The blue goes nice with the hardwood floors. The adjacent room is the same blue, very poorly applied, and it clashes horribly with the dark green carpet (which kind of clashes with itself!).

The paint in the bath was nice, except for a couple of strange purple splotches. There was some leftover paint from the bedroom, which at first looked the same shade as the bathroom. We thought we'd just touch up the splotches, but it turns out, when the two are combined, the nice purple shade is produced!

Today I got a coat of primer over the blue that we're redoing, since we're going with a lighter color. I hope to get the rest done tomorrow.

Goodbye blue in bedroom:













Goodbye blue in bathroom:

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Huge abandoned things seen from above

Reserve/Mothball Fleet - Suisun Bay, Benicia, CA. Used to live near this one. There are more US Navy Reserve Fleets scattered about the US.

Aircraft Boneyard - Tucson, AZ. More on aircraft boneyards.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Environmentalists are not Conservationists

Harsh, but true! Don't hate me. I watch Planet Green. :-/

"Which is all to the good as far as environmentalists are concerned. To understand environmentalists, you have to understand that they are not scientists. They have contempt for science. Nor are they concerned about human wellbeing or even the environment itself. Environmentalism is not a scientific movement; it's a political movement. Environmentalists hate capitalism. Their goal is to destroy capitalism and all of its benefits. They'd like to see all of us living in mud huts and starving to death before we could have more children. Children are, to environmentalists, the ultimate pollutant. As Heinlein observed, environmentalists hate their own species."

~ Robert Bruce Thompson

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Circular Feeds

This could get ugly. I added a feed through Twitterfeed to post my blog entries to Twitter. But, I have twitter tweets fed to my blog through a blogger widget. Not to mention blog posts are fed to Facebook, and I have a FaceBook badge on my blog.

Well, here we go....

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Tweet la Revolution


Can what's going on in Iran be considered a long-delayed counter-revolution to the fundamentalist Islamic revolution of the 70s? Or is that just wishful thinking?

Twitter has proved to be very important in getting word to the outside about what's happening in Iran. So much so, that they were asked by the US Govt. to delay maintenance on their site so Iranian's wouldn't be cut off from the service.

From Reuters: U.S. State Department speaks to Twitter over Iran

Twitter has a comment about it on their blog.

Here's an idea from the Twitterstream:
doctorowRT @johannes_mono Change your Twitter settings to GMT +03:30 Tehran as your timezone & change home city to Tehran to confuse Iranian censors

I may do this, just so I can say I participated!

Update (6/17/2009):

Follow IranRiggedElect on Twitter for updates from Iran.

Example of Courage!

Official Iranian Government Reaction
(More related political humor)