Category: General

I did glorious battle with the plumbing in the downstairs kitchen last night. Yes, I installed the dishwasher.

First, I had to arm myself at Home Depot. I needed a power cord and a water supply line. I forgot that I also needed a clamp for the drain hose.

I attached the power cord first. That's electrical. Electrical is easier for me than is plumbing. Then I attached the 90-degree elbow that pretty much every single dishwasher in the world needs, but no dishwasher manufacturer supplies. Then I attached the drain hose to the dishwasher. The dishwasher side of things was done.

The battle really began when trying to feed both the drain hose and the water supply line through the hole that was drilled in the cabinet. After a good deal of pushing and pulling and tugging, I made them fit.

I attached the water supply line to the provided place and turned on the water. I could immediately hear the bubbling... I hadn't tightened the 90-degree elbow thingy enough. I was afraid of overtightening it, I guess. I shouldn't have been. Two full turns of the elbow later, I re-hooked it up. I turned on the water again and saw the slow dripping. Either the supply line was leaky or I had damaged it when pulling it through the slightly-too-small hole.

Ugh.

I left it alone and went to rehearsal. The dishwasher was gaining the upper hand, but the battle was not yet over.

On the way home from rehearsal, I stopped by Home Depot again to re-arm myself. I bought another supply line, and this time, I remembered the clamp for the drain hose.

When I returned to the battle, I used my reciprocating saw to make the hole a little bigger. Now the new supply line and the drain hose fit through perfectly! Hooray! I hooked up both the supply line and the drain hose, turned on the water, and began to taste victory! No leaking! It was time to make the final push and turn on the dish washer.

I put some detergent in (because it had been sitting for a while and needed to be washed out) and turned it on. I could hear the dishwasher filling with water! Another victory! I was almost done! The battle was almost over...

...or WAS it?

When it came time for the dishwasher to drain, I heard noises like it was TRYING to drain, but no water was leaving the dishwasher. None. WHAT?? My first thought was that there was something wrong with the dishwasher. Without a big bucket, I wasn't going to test that theory. My second thought was more correct: There was something wrong with the installer of the dishwasher.

I turned the dishwasher off and unhooked the drain hose from the garbage disposal. I put my finger in the drain hole and found a blockage. Garbage disposals have a plug that has to be removed BEFORE the dishwasher drain is hooked up. Oops! At least I knew that there were no leaks in the drain hose!

I tried to break the plug out with no luck. I was going to have to remove the garbage disposal. The drain pipe came off easily. Since I had installed a disposal before, I knew how to remove it from the bottom of the sink. Then I could put the disposal in my lap, put a screwdriver in the dishwasher drain hole, and hit the plug with a hammer. A couple of hits and the plug came loose. I had to fish it out of the disposal, but I did that while the disposal was still in my lap and WASN'T plugged in. *shudder*

I re-installed the disposal, hooked up the disposal drain hose yet again, and turned the dishwasher back on. It started draining! Victory was mine!

Well... almost.

Drip... drip... drip...

The drain pipe from the disposal was dripping. I re-fitted and re-tightened a few pipes and the dripping stopped.

I located and installed a couple of screws to hold the dishwasher in place, installed the kick plate, and I was done!

At 1:00 in the morning.

It was a glorious battle! I was victorious!

Apparently, the city of Pleasant Grove won't issue an occupancy permit for my basement until at least the dishwasher and the range are installed.  Why?  Your guess is as good as mine.  Hmmm.

So today during my lunch break, my brother and I are going to go to my house and move the range from the kitchen upstairs to the kitchen downstairs.  I also happen to have a spare dishwasher, so I'll install that today as well.  Then we'll get the occupancy permit that we need.

Who knew?  We certainly didn't.  We weren't ready to buy a new range yet.  We haven't done our usual over-researching of ranges.  We still don't know whether we want gas or electric upstairs.  Too many things to decide!  Who knows?  Maybe we'll end up buying a new range for upstairs, and maybe we'll end up dragging the old one back upstairs again after inspection passes.

You'd think by now I'd know
What a mess you'd make of me.
You'd think by now that I would see.
But I'm a slow learner.

And we always seem to start
At the beginning of the end
Some things are hard for me to understand.
'Cause I'm a slow learner.

Everybody knows, everybody sees.
I guess everybody's just smarter than me.
Some things you just can't teach
A slow learner.

You'd think by now I'd try
To learn from my mistakes.
But my heart bends, it never seems to break.
I'm a slow learner.

Everybody knows, everybody sees.
I guess everybody's just smarter than me.
Some things you just can't teach
A slow learner.

-- Boo Hewerdine

I'm a little later than normal this year.  I don't know why.  I usually file as soon as possible, especially when I'm receiving a refund.

Last summer, I got audited.  It sucked.  But I had all of the documentation, so it turned out okay.  It could have been MUCH worse.  So in order to prevent another audit, I really wanted to go over the numbers a couple more times, just to make sure.

Tonight, I finally had the time to go over everything one more time.  All of the numbers matched up.  Everything looks right.  And in going over the numbers one more time, I found a few hundred dollars' worth of refund that I wouldn't have otherwise gotten.  I had forgotten to check the "points" box on our primary home mortgage, and since we paid points instead of closing costs, it's all tax deductible.

It'll be nice to get more than $6,000 back from the government.  I usually try to not get such a large refund, but since I cashed out stock options, received a large-ish severance package, AND overpaid Social Security Tax last year, we ended up giving Uncle Sam an interest-free loan for a while.

It's going to be helpful, especially since we put so much money in the basement.  It'll be nice to start building savings up again, just in case.

Today, I found a link to the newest Audi...  It's the Audi R-8, and it costs $115,000.

But a link from that article led me to this monster:

It's called the Maybach Excelero.

It's a 19-foot-long 700 horsepower 2-seater beheamoth of a car.  And it cost eight MILLION dollars.

What the??

The most expensive car I've bought to date cost somewhere near $22,000.   That's $5500 per wheel.  EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS?

*shaking my head*  It's something I'll NEVER understand.

I like it when I can make an obscure connection.

Like this weekend. We decided to watch the movie Mary Poppins on Sunday afternoon, probably because we were playing the Disney version of Trivial Pursuit that my brother gave us for Christmas this year.

Anyway... when we were playing the game, one of the questions asked for the first name of Jane and Micael Banks' mother in the move Mary Poppins. Do you know the answer? Well, think about it for a minute while I continue.

As we watched the movie, I kept listening to Mrs. Banks' voice. It sounded familiar. VERY familiar. But I couldn't quite place it. About halfway through Mrs. Banks' second scene, I made the connection. It was the same voice as Maid Jean in The Court Jester! I quickly went online to IMDB (of course) and looked it up.

Glynis Johns played both Maid Jean in The Court Jester in 1955, and Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins in 1964. Her unique voice helped me figure out this connection.

So, do you know the answer to the question yet? Did you cheat? Did you look it up on IMDB, even though I purposefully didn't link to it?

Well, I lied. I'm not going to tell you!

I'm kidding. It's Winnifred. Mrs. Winnifred Banks.

And no, I'm not going to connect Glynis Johns to Kevin Bacon.

This morning, I received an email informing me that Altiris was being acquired.

By Symantec.

So when things all shake out, I'll be working for Symantec again.

My first reaction was to be sick to my stomach.  But the more I thought about it, the better and better I felt about it.

I'm not going into the unknown.  I understand exactly what I'm getting into.  It'll take some time to really know how I feel.  But the cool thing is that I'll be working for a company that, had I not been laid off, I would have been perfectly happy working for for the forseeable future.  That's NOT a bad thing!

The windows in the basement aren't very big.  They're also mostly below ground, so the view is... corrugated metal window wells.  When you open a window, it only opens from one side, so really, you get an opening that's less than half the width of the window.  I'm guessing that the opening isn't much more than 2 feet wide.

So now I'm wondering HOW the plumber got a full-sized bathtub in the basement without having to ask us to open a door.  Seriously, he had to have gotten it in through a window.  Yes, a bathtub.  A full-sized bathtub.

When we came home today, we saw where the concrete had been jackhammered/chiseled out.  There's now a nice collar upon which one could put a wax gasket and affix a toilet.  There's another hole where a trap will go for the tub drain.  There's also a bunch of new flexible water pipe.  But this is no ORDINARY flexible water pipe.  No!  This flexible water pipe is color coded!  Red for hot water and blue for cold water.   Neato!  Of course, when it's behind sheet rock, nobody cares what color it is, so long as it doesn't leak.

The water pipes run to the bathtub, the toilet, the kitchen sink, the bathroom sink, and the washer/dryer hookups.  He still has to run a pipe for the refrigerator ice maker.

As luck would have it, tomorrow, there will be no water at the house starting at 9:00 am.  They're doing construction on a nearby street and they posted a notice on our door today that the water will be shut off tomorrow.  It seems to me that it would be a perfect time for the plumber to connect the water pipes that he has run!

I know it's going fast right now.  It's all exciting.  I know it won't always go this fast or be this exciting, but for now, we're just enjoying it.

I enjoy listening to talk radio. It's informative, interesting, and the speakers in my old beater '94 Saturn don't do too well with music.

Once in a while I hear something that cracks me up. For example, during the recent heavy snowfall in Colorado, they reported that the national guard was dropping bales of "emergency hay" to stranded cattle. It brought to mind pictures of a large barn full of hay with "Use Only In Case Of Emergency" painted on the side of it.

This morning's news teaser was hilarious though:

A violent scene in a Salt Lake City apartment this morning: a woman is found stabbed to death, multiple times.

I know I wasn't there, but I'm pretty sure that she died of multiple stab wounds. It's highly doubtful that she died more than once.

Today I took my '94 Saturn for its 138,000-mile service and for the state-mandated safety and emissions inspections. I took it to the Saturn "retail facility" (it's not a dealership) for the service. I like to have the inspections done there, because they don't try to sell me extra services.

While I was waiting, I decided to snap a few pictures. Because of Project 365, I take my camera everywhere with me. There was a blue Saturn Relay sitting partially in the sunshine, so I put my star filter on the front of my lens and started taking pictures.

A couple of minutes later, a salesperson (I assume) approached me. "Can I help you with something?"

I replied, "No thanks. I'm fine."

He left, and then a minute or two later approached me again. "Can I ask what you're doing?"

"Taking a few pictures."  (I should have simply said "no," just to see his reaction.)
Again, he left. A minute or two later, he came back yet again. "What are the pictures for?"

"To post on the Internet"

This response seemed to bother him. This time he didn't leave. "I don't think we allow that."

I said the first thing that came to mind: "It's never been a problem before." Well it's TRUE. It's never been a problem before. Mainly because I've never taken my camera with me before.

He looked at me like he didn't trust what I was saying. "I'll go check with my manager then."

He walked off again, and it must have been okay with his manager, because I didn't see him again.

So here are a couple of the pictures I took:

So there you go. I posted the images on the Internet, just like I said I would. :)