Photos

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Ice Cubes in Inferno

The kitchen is done.

NO!

Really! I’m serious! Everything is FINALLY done! (Expect for minor touch-ups)

Look!

OK, technically, the dishwasher hasn’t been re-installed. But that’s happening today. I don’t think we could be happier about the way the concrete countertops turned out. They took forever, but very nice looking, we think.

Again, technically, the sink doesn’t work and the water isn’t hooked up to the faucet, but again, that’s happening today. (I didn’t want to take the plastic covering off the sink until the plumber was done mucking around). See the spray thing over there on the right? I think that is my favorite thing of ALL time. It is SO pretty. The whole sink extravaganza is my favorite thing. I’ll be fighting anyone who tries to take over dish washing responsibilities from me. And the sink is GINORMOUS. You could baptize a baby elephant in that trough of a sink. Though I’m not sure why you’d want to do that.

We were kind of torn about the placement of the sink. We toyed with nestling it and the faucet into the right corner so there would be more counter space on the left, but in the end we just centered it. Reason #478 why our contractor is full of awesome: he MADE the wood countertop the basin sits on. And he twisted the arm of the kitchen cabinet guy to make us a vanity. Seriously, he just grabbed some spare wood flooring and whipped that out. Totally cool.

This is in the master bath. The sink is cool, but kind of odd. To plug it up, you have to screw the little stopper down. Funky. And there is no overflow, so all 12 of are children are banished from ever using the sink. Although I had some fun last night playing “sink the boats!” with the swiveling faucet.

Both Reha and I have been very busy in the evenings, so even though we could start moving our stuff back upstairs, we haven’t had the chance. Plus, I think we are a little a-scared to occupy the space. It’s so lovely and pristine. Humans would only ruin it. :-]

Monday, November 19, 2007

Skipping Down Memory Lane

Again, I know it’s not Sunday, so I’ll just go ahead and get this out of the way: I hereby am NOT posting pics from my junior high yearbook on Sunday afternoons during the month of November. I’m just going to do it anytime I feel like it and as I see fit.

I’m also not going to comment extensively on these. Best to leave some things to the imagination.

But let’s start off with the Most Important Thing Ever.

Me!

Looking Surprised!

I CAN HAZ A COCA_COLA?!

Any one of those people could and would have kicked my booty if I’d ever looked at them askew.

Same thing on the booty-kicking here. Although I wouldn’t even have to have looked at the tall girl. She might have come looking for me. Just ‘cause, you know. I remember her as kind of a “meanie.”

I think anything I could add here would just be fanning the flames. Putting kindling on the fire. Piling on. Just doesn’t seem fair.

A photo taken in Metal Shop. I never took metal shop. They look like they are having fun, don’t they?. But don’t let this photo fool you. After the photographer left, these boys went right back to what they were previously doing. Making a pot pipe. Really, that was the only reason anyone ever took shop, metal or wood. Make themselves a nice pipe for their “doobage.” Trust me on that one.

Another pic of a crowd to which I did not belong. And dig that lovely “Journey” tee-shirt on the girl on the right. Funny thing. I bet people would pay decent money for that on ebay these days. A vintage Journey 1980 tour tee? I might even but that, just for fun, even though Steve Perry always bugged me and I didn’t really like Journey. Ohh! Bonus! One of these girls got pregnant the next year. I can’t remember which, but it was quite the scandal I can tell you that.

Previous Junior High crap fun here and here. And I almost forgot about this one.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

May Early 80s Hair Style Never Darken Our Doors Again

I know, I’m four days late on the Junior High Yearbook Photo-a-thon. Gimme a break, I had stuff to say about strip clubs and other forms of public nudity. I’m a busy, busy man.

But now it is time to break down the walls of pain and shed some light on the dark places of the world. Scans from the “Jaguar ’81” yearbook, straight off the glass of the scanner, baby. Valley View Intermediate, Pleasant Hill, California All hail!

In the interest of fairness, I’ll start out with a shot with me in it. Try and pick out our hero! (That’d be me!) Hint: Very short. Very blond. Somewhat dorky. (Yes, I know, there are a fair number of folks in this picture that fit that bill, but give it a go)

Front row. Fifth from the left with the plaid flannel shirt on. Yes, they spelled my name wrong in the caption. Bastards! And look at that kid fourth from the right on the front row! It’s hard to even believe that he and I are the same species, never long the same age. Dude had a MUSTACHE! In 8th grade! They must have been putting growth hormones in his Grape Nuts when he was a toddler.

OK, onward, to the goofy bits!

This one was apparently taken at a dance. They used to have school dances right after school and only once or twice at night. So you’d get out of class and then go straight to a dance. Which struck me as bad tactical planning. “How can I get my hair to flip back and feather PERFECTLY, if I can’t have access to my Remington Pro Series hair dryer?!”

What you can’t quite make out in this photo is that poor blond girl wearing the overalls is also sporting headgear for her braces. You can see the shadow of the wire cutting across her chin, poor dear. Yes, she went to a dance in junior high wearing her headgear. I’m pretty sure she still hasn’t forgiven her parents for that trick. This was also back in the days when Kool and the Gang had hit singles. And not just hit singles, but MONSTER hit singles. You couldn’t walk out of a building without that horn riff smacking you in the face.

I choose this next one not only because the hair on these ladies is spectacular, but the lipstick on the girl on the left scares me pretty badly.

I don’t know the name of the girl on the left with the moose-like lips, but the girl on the right is Francie Maguire. I have almost zero recollection of her. Short nerdly boys who played D&D on the weekends didn’t get to talk to “women” like this.

There was this strange little “store” the student council people ran in between classes. You could buy paper and pencils and at lunch, chocolate milk or these frozen Carnation milk shake things. Those were tasty. Kind of a weird thing, but it was usually staffed by my two favorite girls, Beth Portello and Monika Heinritz.

As you can see, they were also the favorites of a number of boys. That’s Beth in the background on the left and Monika mugging for the camera on the right. Who the hell cares who the guys are? Seriously, I don’t.

Oh man, did I ever have the HUGEST crush on Monika.

Can you blame me? She’s adorable! Although now that I’m in my forties, I have to say that I don’t really find her attractive in the same way I did back in 1981. As I’ve noted before with my youthful crushes, I consider this a good thing. It’d be creepy if I still found her hot, you know? Ew. You can pretty much bank on a story later this month talking about her. Oy vey, the drama!

Finally, we have the pièce de résistance for this round.

The lovely (in her own way) Linda Dowling. Lots and lots of guys were very hot for her, but she never did it for me. Although, she has 1981 fashion and 1981 as a lifestyle completely NAILED with this ensemble. Hair feathered to within a millimeter of its life, bad plastic-y iron-on tee-shirt depicting a marijuana as palm trees motitf and a caption that reads “Touch of Grass,” and pants that are SO tight she can’t even get them buttoned up properly. Just flat out spectacular.

I am out of words. 

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Sisyphus Looks Over and Takes Pity on Me

I’m sure you know who Sisyphus was. Ancient Greek mythology dude, condemned for all eternity to roll a big ol’ boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down the other side. I’m sure ol’ Sisy had it bad with the huge rock and everything, but I’m also positive home boy never had to re-model a house. Because that is a curse for the ages, man.

Anyway, Sisyphus and his rock is an apt metaphor for what been happening around here with the remodel. I know I said I wouldn’t talk that much about it, but I just had to share a small sample of The Crazy with you.

We have become the Death Zone for paint, paint cans, paint related accessories and of course, my soul. There are over 30 empty paints can in the garage right now, waiting to be disposed of properly. Thirty! I’ll have a picture up later. Our house is only 2400 or so square feet! In case you are doing the math, that much paint is enough for 14 houses our size. To put it simply, we (and when I say we, I really mean my wife) have changed our minds about wall colors a couple different times during this whole beastly extravaganza.

Observe:

This is the color of Jonah’s room now. The color is called “Blue Grey” but depending on the light it either looks purple or a different shade of purple. Which is bad on many, many levels, but mostly because Jonah has been known to be slightly volatile on occasion. We have so far fooled him into thinking it looks like the color of a battleship. If anyone comes over and tells him it looks purple, I can not be held responsible for my actions.

But Jon, you should pictures last week and the room was a completely different color! Light Blue! Bright! A happy color! Well, yeah, it looked great in the room, but from the outside it looked pretty crappy. And for reasons that are far too tedious to go into now, looking like dooky from the outside was NOT an option.

Last week:

The problem is that his room is visible from the living room, all the way down the hallway. So according to certain members of my family and the contractor, it may as well be in the same room as the living room. And bright blue is not on the menu in the living room, to say the least. Bit crazy making, I have to say, but I love my wife, so I’ll re-paint the world for her. (I like the contractor just OK, I’d only re-paint a small continent for him, like maybe one of the smaller ones, like Europe or Australia)

Final Score for the Weekend:

Trips to Home Depot or paint store yesterday: 5 (a new record!) I am now so close to the people at the paint department at Home Depot that I’m godfather to one of the attendants’ kids.

Number of times we have painted Jonahs’ room: 3

The living room: 2

Hallway: 2

Tomorrow we are deciding on the FINAL, FINAL FINAL color of the flooring. And by final, I mean second to the last choice. 

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

I’m So Glad You Asked!

What’s that you say? You want an update on the house re-model? Really? I always thought those were boring!

Whenever I talk to people about the re-model I know that all I ever do is complain about how much things cost, why isn’t everything done yet, it’s all so much money, I hate having to make all these decisions about colors and fixtures and man, this is getting so incredibly expensive!

But since you have insisted, I guess I just have to let you know how things are going. Who am I to argue?

In reality things are progressing very nicely. We had a bit of a setback when we discovered that our house is shaped like a freaking corkscrew. Now, most older houses (ours was built in ‘64) settle over time and things get a little out of level and plumb. But not our house! It seems to have gone to great lengths to make itself taller in some areas and much shorter in others. I’m not real clear on its motives for doing this, but over the years, it must have devoted all its energy into contorting itself into a yoga pose. Yes, our house is doing “downward facing dog” and so we had to go to some pretty extreme measures to level everything out. Lots of planing and shimming and sweat on the part of my contractor.

Somewhat surprising in this whole drama is the fact that I still very much have a hetero man-crush on our general contractor. He’s been more than fair with us on costs and rolls with the punches when certain people who are NOT me, but are my truly awesome spouse, changes her mind about the paint colors from moment to moment, bless her heart.

So the upstairs floor was out of level by many, many inches. And because we removed walls and made the living room/dining room/kitchen into one ginormous room, the place had to be leveled. When you come over for dinner (yes, you! I’ve invited EVERYONE for a HUGE dinner party), you’d be able to see the place dip and dive from one end to the other. Not so great and particularly bad for the wood flooring.

As you can imagine, this took a while.

But we got back on track in the last week or so and have now completed the painting and RIGHT THIS SECOND, very industrious people and putting in the hardwood flooring.

This makes me happy on so many levels that I can’t even begin to to describe the joy of seeing some guy’s booty crack as he bends over to nail-gun our über-ginchy recycled rubber tree hardwood planks down. Of course, seeing the guy’s butt crack isn’t pleasant in a purely aesthetic sense, but in a symbolic sense, seeing that guy’s fuzzy booty is a source of ineffable elation.

We are almost done.

The cabinetry gets installed this week after the flooring guys leave and then the concrete countertop people show up and perseverate and sweat `over measurements and moisture content and sealers and then we are done. Like really done. The concrete countertops take an extraordinary amount of time to fabricate. Something about curing. But we can see the end of the line, so a couple more weeks isn’t that bad.

Reha said to me the other night, “When the house and kitchen are done, I’m not going to spend more than $100 at the grocery store per month. We are going to cook EVERYTHING from scratch. No more frozen dinners or take out for a YEAR. It’s going to be so great.”

Now, I don’t believe that for a second, but I totally understand the sentiment. Late the other night I was downstairs in the garage, fondling examining our new and incredibly lickable and sexy double oven and gently whispering to it, “I’m going to bake cookies in you, my darling. You are so hot. Perhaps even a pot roast. Would you like that? Yes, you would, my dear. How about a turkey? Maybe for Thanksgiving, baby. Ooooh, brownies, let us make sweet, passionate brownies together.”

And then Reha walked in, while I was in a “compromised state” and I had to explain that I really do love her more than I love our new oven. I was just flirting and messing around. It meant nothing, I promise.

More than a little embarrassing, let me tell you.

Anyway.

Let me show you some pictures to satiate your clamoring for details and then be done with it until it’s all done and I can make a dreadfully boring slideshow you can use for those nights when you have insomnia and there isn’t anything good on TV. You’ll hit play and the soothing and boring tones of pictures of our remodel will lull you into peaceful slumber. I know, I can’t wait, either.

We start in Ellis’ room. Because she is quite possibly the most excited I have EVER seen her about anything, except for that time when I said she could watch Dora DVDs ALL DAY LONG and eat Toaster Strudel frosting packets until she threw up. That was a good day for her as well. She really likes what will eventually be her room.

We hate the color.

We tried, and I mean strongly tried to convince her that she might not always be so into pink. “Look at Carrie, she’s a girl and she has a BLUE room, Ellis.” Nothing doing. And then we went the rounds with her about the shade of pink. We wanted to go with a pale pastel flavor of pink, just the barest hint of pink, but we made a strategic error. Two errors, really. A) We told her at the beginning that she could choose ANY color she wanted for her room. B) she found out one of the colors was called “bubble bath” and latched on to that color like an Idaho Senator to a toilet stall and would not let go C) we had her in the first place, that was our FIRST error and I know I said there were only two errors, but I suck at math. My idea was to just pick the color that we would like, lie to her and say, “This IS the bubble bath paint color, E. It’s lovely. You chose a very nice color!” Reha wasn’t hearing any of that; she has this crazy policy that we shouldn’t lie to the kids. Or beat them into submission. She’s a softy.

The one saving grace of the color, really the only good thing about it, is that we’ll know when our Pepto-Bismal has gone bad. We can just check the color against her walls. “Yep, I think this bottle is still good.”

Next we have Jonah’s room. Turned out nice, though the blue is bit too bright for my tastes, he’s fine with it.

We are very happy with how the dark trim looks in all the rooms. Reha’s incredibly daring with her color choices. The dark trim made me a-scared, but it really does look beautiful.

This is the “daring” that I’m talking about. This is the stain and wood for our cabinets. Cherry wood, stained to within an inch of its life and dangerously close to ORANGE.

We think it’s beautiful and you are dumb if you don’t like it.

We got all new interior doors, too. Love the color, not too happy about the panels, but we had to choose them in 4.5 seconds and these were the least offensive options presented to us.

It’s a Forest of Doors! They are nailed together at tops and make a big accordion right there in our kitchen. So the paint dries properly with them standing up. Very clever.

This is the master bedroom, looking into the master bath. The wall color in here is totally funky. Depending on the light it looks either gray, green or blue.

We absolutely love the way it turned out.

More of the master bedroom.

Doesn’t everyone want a toilet in the middle of the room? I want to keep it this way, but apparently it presents a “plumbing challenge.” Whatever. No one listens to my genius.

OK! No more pics or updates until the frickin’ place is DONE! We shall not speak of this again until late November/early December. OK?! And we really must never speak of that incident with me and the double oven.

Favorite Entries

If you are new around here, the following entries have been reasonably well received. You might want to peruse these.

• From the Office of Mis-directed Email
• Jon’s Report Card circa… A Long Time Ago
• Dear Gratuitously Naked Conversationalist at the Gym:
• A Peek Inside the Writer’s Guild and Producers’ Negotiations
• We Regret the Error
• What I Did There
• Hermaphrodite Administrative Assistants and Receptionists Need Not Apply
• Giving Me an IM Account Was Obviously a Huge Mistake
• Official Ransom Note Typography Vista vs. Mac OS X Shootout
• I Need a Real Hobby
• Beat Down
• Big Fat Lies
• True Love
• Now MY Ovaries Hurt
• Don’t Get Her Started
• Disturbing Trend
• Had to do it
• Mooshy stuff
• Ransom Note Typography End User License Agreement “EULA”
• Diva-licious!
• Just so we’re clear
• PETA may have a point

Holy Crap! Look at all this STUFF down here. It's awesome!

 

Really, I'm glad you made it down here. Almost no one ever comes down here. I'm like in a freaking dungeon down here. I get lonely. But not you. YOU made it all the way to the end of the page. For this I think I've a little crush on you. I don't know, is "love" to strong a word to use in this situation? Well, if it's not "love," then it's very strong "like." I'm totally in like with you for coming down here. You are awesome. Please love me back! I know, I know, I shouldn't be all needy, it's not attractive at all, but you don't know how it is to be stuck down here. Who scrolls all the way to the end of a page anymore these days? Anyway, thanks for shedding some light down here in the depths. I appreciate it. Shoot me an email and I'll send you a dollar, OK?

©2005-2008 Jon B. Deal All Rights Reserved. I'm not kidding around here, I know people who know other people who would be willing to beat you up or similarly infringe on your rights, should you happen to infringe on my rights.