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We've spent most of the day continuing with the ongoing renovation of our kitchen. (See a recent post on when we put the pantry in.)
First job this morning was to continue removing the T & G (tongue in groove) wood which has probably been in the house since it was built just under a century ago. Though this looked tough and non-removable at first, it proved to be fairly easy going, as a lot of the wood that held it on was borer-ridden, and gave way quickly. That left huge amounts of mess, and we wound up with borer-discarded wood dust in our hair, eyes and all.
My wife bought a scaffold system on Thursday which seemed at first to take up most of the kitchen, but in fact, even assembled it isn't too overwhelming. And it's certainly helpful for getting up to the ceiling and into tight corners. (Though I dreamed at one stage last night that she wanted the grand piano in the kitchen, and I couldn't figure out why she wanted it almost stuck up against the dining table and chairs, leaving only a narrow gap between them. We'd all have to have taken to the Phenphedrine, or some other diet tablet to deal with it!)
She'd also bought a couple of plastic sacks of pink batts, and we've got almost two walls filled with those already. We had to make some new dwangs, as the old ones had pretty much given up the ghost, but because we keep pre-used wood from other projects, we were able to make these without buying any wood. (In fact most of this wood came from where we'd had the wall up between the two rooms previously. How's that for being eco-friendly?)
Both of us are worn out from the effort, and thankfully, our younger son (who's living here at present) was around to do some of the lifting and shifting. We had to go out and get some gib-board as well, so he came in handy for moving that...
Not sure if I've mentioned on here that we're doing some renovating in the kitchen here at home. We've removed the wall between the kitchen and what was most recently my office (formerly the smallest bedroom in the house) and done all sorts of pulling and shoving and removing and replacing. Still a long way to go, especially as the project manager got knocked off her bike a few days after she began this latest process.
Anyway, today we went and picked up the kind of kitset corner pantry that we'd ordered last week. Must say they were very quick off the mark (Kitchens 4 Less) and well priced.
They do a standard pantry at about 1100 mm, but we thought that might be a bit loose in the space available so we opted for 1200 mm. Should have stuck with the former! 1200 is fine except that when that's all the space you have, you're going to have some problems getting the thing in the area. Even more so when you have to push it in under an 'arch' between the kitchen proper and what would have once been a back porch, perhaps, which came with the house and isn't likely to be removed any time soon.
And there was another problem. The pantry has a 'lid' or ceiling on it, but given the height
The pantry in the process of being done; with some kitchen utensils to make it feel at home, and the remaining shelves unshelved as yet.
we'd gone for and the height of the arch, and a certain piece of old-fashioned conduit piping that can't be shifted, there was no way we were going to get this lid on and actually fasten it into place.
My wife had already woken up thinking about this problem, and so, by the end of the day, in order to get the pantry into the place available, we had 'employed' my mid-twenties son who lives with us at the moment, my daughter who lives upstairs, my other daughter and her man - and of course, ourselves....neither of whom are getting any younger, even though we don't admit it.
There were times when we felt like the game wasn't worth the candle, to be honest. But we persevered, pulled off the lower part of the archway - the only bit that could be removed without the house falling down; sawed off an obstructive bit of wood that was hanging down, pulled off another chunk of wood beside the electric range, removed a chunk of gib that we'd put on some time back, got the lid of the pantry on with some actual screws holding it in place, avoided leaving anyone stuck forever in the corner behind the pantry, heaved and shoved and pushed and pulled, and got the darn thing in place.
What a job!
Umair Haque is a regular writer on the Havard Business Publishing page, and the other day wrote an article telling us that Twitter is one of the world's most radical management innovators.
He goes on to list ten rules for radical innovators - Twitter, of course, being the subject of the article, fits the bill in every case. What he's trying to say, most of all, is that Twitter, in spite of seeming to be a trivial kind of mechanism for all those drongos out there who have nothing better to do than tweet all day, is actually a superbly simple machine for both personal and business users alike - in fact, point three says: simplicity beats complexity.
Twitter has recently got itself an excellent search engine, so that it's no longer so useful to use one of the various pieces of software that link together a variety of tweets, such as hashtags, or Tweetdeck, both of which are just more 'stuff' to add to your life. Twitter's relatively new search engine will pick up anything that's been tweeted - which is pretty scary. I put in Gran Torino yesterday, after writing a post about it on another blog. and immediately dozens of tweets on the topic came up, including a whole bunch of them that had been twitted in the hour or so since I'd sent my tweet. I just searched for Las Vegas hotels, and though there weren't as many as for Gran Torino, there were plenty of possibilities.
What you do with such search results is another matter, particularly since most of the Las Vegas ones are plainly some sort of advertising. But that's partly the ppoint Haque is making: business can boom via Twitter - it's just a matter of working out the best way to do it.
Snow in South Dunedin - at sea level
Snow, snow and more snow. Such a statement may not impress many people, but here in Dunedin, where the North Island weather forecasters are always threatening us with snow down to sea level (and which seldom turns up) we've finally got ourselves a day when the snow has settled well and truly, and half the town isn't at work, or school, because the roads are treacherous and it keeps on snowing.
I got up at 5 am to go to the loo, and, looking out the bathroom window, found that the world had turned white enough for it to seem like a dim kind of daylight outside. Not having heard the weather forecast the night before (which I would have repudiated anyway, as I always do) I was unaware that snow had been threatened yet again. But here it was, and the weather forecasters managed to pick a winner for once
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I began to watch the Google Wave video the other day, in which they demonstrate, very gradually, over an 80-minute period, just how striking this piece of software is/will be, but 80 minutes is a good while, and I didn't really have time just then to watch it all. In fact they'd barely got into it before I had to stop.
Consequently, I didn't really get hold of the concept. However, I mentioned it to my (geek) son after I watched some of the video, and today he began to enthuse about it while we were having lunch, (and trying to control his two-year old
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I've more than a little irritated. Just over a month ago, my wife got knocked off her motor scooter by some bloke who somehow wasn't looking. The form to renew the bike's registration arrived a few days ago, so I made a trip down to the place where the bike now resides and got the plate and registration sticker off the now-defunct machine.
Filled out the form and my wife signed it (as usually happens at our house, my wife not being enamoured of forms) and took it into the AA (Automobile Association) today to have the bike de-registered. The young girl behind the counter first tells me it wasn't valid because my wife's motor vehicle license wasn't on it. When I pointed out that the form said either the identification details OR the license, she told me that my wife had to come in and present the form, to stop fraud
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Back to the hospital today for x-rays on the kidneys.
Which meant an intravenous dose of liquid (Omnipaque350) so that the camera could see whether there was anything untoward in my kidneys - there wasn't.
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Searching Content from across the Universe? Well, that's what Social Mention claims.
I came across Social Mention on a blog called SAMBA (the six months MBA that Seth Godin ran recently). SAMBA is a place for those who were on the MBA course to blog about ideas, innovations and the like, and it has some
very good posts and some fairly ordinary ones. But it's a place to keep an eye on for ideas
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It's very strange listening to the guy on the twibes help page as he explains how twibes work and what you can do with them. It sounds as though he's got some sort of odd lisp whenever he says the word, twibes.
Twibes is yet another development of the twitter phenomenon. To quote the site: A twibe is a group of Twitter users interested in a common topic who would like to be able to communicate with each other. On each twibe's page, there is a list of twibe members. There is also a tweet stream that lists tweets from twibe members which contain key word tags. Tags are set by the twibe founder and are listed just above the tweet stream.
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While I was in the middle of the week when we did the performances of the play, When We Are Married, I bought a book called More Chinglish. It consists of page after page of photographs of weird and wonderful signs in various Asian languages with the English 'translation' underneath. Some of them are hilarious, some of them just plain peculiar.
I was reminded of this book when I came across Discounted Air Beds, which is an American Company, and therefore might be expected to be able to produce a website that's in English. Or at least in American English (!) But one of the opening statements is: Buy Better Number Bed & Save More Than $1700. Okay....but what's a number bed? As if to answer my
question, I'm then invited to click on sleep number bed, which seems almost as Chinglish as many of the signs in the book
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Comment by Mike Crowl
on Batts and Borer
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