The basement apartment has been an on again / off again project for years. I make some plans, I make some progress, and then I get distracted. Rinse and repeat.
I put in the drainage, and then I took a year off.
I put in the framing, and I took another year off.
I plumbed it and wired it, and that was years ago.
The project du jour is the basement shower, and I kinda started it in February, and then it kinda stalled.
We had to pick a tile, and the one Mary liked was $45 per square foot. I didn’t like it.
We tried again at another tile store, and I found a tile I liked with random gray stripes which, I hope, will blend in with soapy drippings.
The clerk, who turned out to be Mary’s long lost first cousin, gave us a low, low price, and we took the sample home with us.
We looked at the samples in-situ, and we liked the color, but I noticed that the sample looked cracked. And I over-thought to myself: “I wonder if it’s beat up because it’s cheap and can’t take a beating?”
Nah, I convinced myself, It’s beat up because it’s a sample. It gets handled a lot.
Yup. That’s it.
So we bought a bunch of boxes of it, and I moved them downstairs, and I prepped the shower and I opened the first box, and ….
The pattern’s got faux cracks, and every tile’s got a few. They are a feature, not a bug. The tile is designed to look beat up.
And I totally missed it.
That is so wrong on so many levels.
It’s a work in progress, but I embedded a motivational motto into the floor.
In morse code.
I took apart the better part of my spiral mill so I could do some upgrades, and everything went back together smoothly. If it weren’t for waiting for Amazon, these upgrades would go twice as fast.
So now that I’ve got Z-axis control, a 3 horse 3 phase VFD spindle, and dust collection, I’m itching to find out how long it actually takes, now, to turn out a dresser.
But that will have to wait until we come back from vacation.
Can’t wait to fire this sucker up.
For her birthday, I gave Mary a trip to Hawaii.
This month, we went.
We had a layover in LA. So we spent a day with Ella, which helped soften the jet lag. She’s got a spacious, funky studio apartment near downtown, and a highlight was a trip in a driverless Waymo. It was impressive to watch it navigate traffic, avoid pedestrians, and select a spot to pull over in a chaotic stretch full of traffic cones. There was a white knuckle moment when it darted between cars to make a left turn, but then, I was holding onto my hat watching Ella drive on the freeway, too.
Your robo taxi is at your door.
Fasten your seatbelts.
We got to Hawai’i fine, and stayed in a high rise in Waikiki, right on, and facing, the beach. You can only do so much in a couple days there and, aside from moseying around the tourist-soaked city center, we visited Pearl Harbor and took a fairly strenuous hike to the top of Diamond Head, where there’s an old military lookout and dynamite views.
If it weren’t for the torpedos (which were duds), Pearl Harbor would have been a dud.
I kept telling her:
We’re almost there!
Made it to the top.
Made it to the bottom too. More than once.
We flew to Kona, on the Big Island, and stayed at a resort, where our room wasn’t quite ready, so they upgraded us to a suite with 2 bathrooms and 2 private decks. Which was nice, but overkill.
We took the Saddle road across the island, and drove up to 9200 feet on the Mauna Kea access road. Another 4000 feet would have taken us to the top, where a slew of big telescopes are perched, but we’d have needed a 4WD vehicle, and Mary was already feeling the effects of the altitude. We continued on and stopped at a small cave and a big waterfall. We ate in Hilo, and worked our way over toward the Volcano.
Less impressive than it looks.
(Turns out the world’s highest fall is 5x taller than this.)
We had a hard time finding the Lava Lodge, because check-in turned out to be in the local True Value hardware store, and the room itself was a mile way. I would not call it a dump, but the potable water was in a jug in the refrigerator, the breakfast was a dime store donut, and the ice machine was a bag of ice we stored in the shower. We found some breakfast at a lunch hut down the road.
The volcano park was impressive, and we drove all the roads and looked over most of the overlooks. Lava tubes, steam vents, ginormous craters. The whole works.
There had been an ‘event’ 12 days earlier when it ‘rained rocks’ and they’d closed the whole park for 3 days, and the ground was covered with tufa – porous rock. By the time we got there, they’d swept all the roads and paths into neat piles. This was not their first rodeo.
By the time we got to that night’s hotel, another ground-shaking event had kicked in and, the morning after we left, lava was fountaining at a vent near where we’d been.
Just missed it!
More impressive than it looks.
We stayed at the southern-most ‘resort’ in the USA, had dinner at the southern-most restaurant in the USA, had breakfast at the southern-most bakery in the USA, and, for all I know, shat in the southern-most toilet in the USA. The road back to Kona meandered northward from there.
We’d saved the best for last, and we signed up for a night-time snorkel outing to ‘swim with the manta rays.’ Our flight the next day was to leave at the crack of dawn, so the early outing was the only outing we could do. Sadly, not enough people had signed up for it, and it was cancelled at the last minute. We drowned our sorrows at the pool and in the bar.
Impressions:
* The natives have hospitality down cold. There was none of the sullen disinterest you get from so many service workers in the mainland.
* Warm and mild weather throughout.
* All the place names start with K. Apparently, that’s because that was how early missionaries transcribed a sound that’s really more like a ‘P’.
* We saw chickens everywhere, wild goats, a feral pig, and some kind of a wild weasel I had to swerve to miss.
* No bugs. Not a single mosquito. Not even in the jungle.
* Everything is expensive. Maybe 30% higher than in Vermont. Say Hello to the $24 burger.
* ‘Ono’ is the best fish for eating. And the cheaper the eatery, the better they cook it.
* Zero out-of-state license plates. Duh. Gas was about $5.69. And the drivers don’t drive crazy.
* No potholes in the roads.
* Signage is very often in the native language, though it’s not clear how many people speak it.
* Everything comes in on ‘the boat.’ When anything is unavailable, it’s because ‘the boat’ hasn’t come in yet.
* Macadamia nuts don’t grow in Macadamia.
Our return flights went off without a hitch. We stayed again in LA for a few days, and admired a traveling mummy exhibit at the science center, ate at an upscale motorcycle-themed bar, watched a guy with a knife cut up a tuna, and splurged on an upscale tasting menu at a the Club Hoity Toity.
I wanted to take walk, and Ella told me where to go to avoid the dregs of the neighborhood. But the minute I walked out the gate, I got disoriented, took a wrong turn, and gave myself a self guided tour of LA’s extensive skid row. Which, I’m told, was stupid. I tell myself that I am a 6’3”, 210# bruiser, and nobody’s gonna fuck with me, but Mary and Ella told me I look more like an old white guy.
I stand corrected.
Eight flights into the program, we are tired and glad to be home and, God willing, we’ll both have a good poop in the morning.
You can take me away from my bird feeder,
but you can’t keep me from feeding the birds.
Forget the birds. Check out the Macadamian bees.