Find your peculiar aristocratic title here.

Mine is:

Milord Sir Lord Mister the Larger of Much Moulding upon Carpet

Consider yourself meme-tagged and tell me what yours is.

Look!

http://flickr.com/photos/misterme/sets/72157594525302078/show/

A virtual tour of the basement I keep talking about!

Things are moving along quickly.

The basement "infrastructure" is all in place. The walls are all in their proper places. All of the plumbing is done, including all of the water pipe for a radiant heating system. The electrical work is finished. Conduit and speaker wire has been run for my home theater system. I even built a mount for my projector between two floor joists... twice. (The first one was one joist left of center. OOPS!) Insulation has been placed in the walls and in the ceiling. The basement even passed inspection.

Throughout the whole process of getting the underlying structure in place, I was probably a pretty big pain in the butt for the contractor we hired. I meddled. I complained. I made sure that everything we had discussed was done and was done according to plan. I even replaced two light junction boxes with ones that are rated for ceiling fans because, honestly, it's a LOT easier to do BEFORE the drywall goes up. I figured that if everything wasn't done correctly before the drywall started going up, it wouldn't be corrected at that point. EVER.

Yesterday the drywall people showed up and did a surprising amount of work. The entire ceiling is done and about a third of the walls are done. They're scheduled for seven days of work. I believe that today, they'll finish putting up the sheet rock. Then comes the not-so-fun process of mudding, taping, and sanding. Doors and trim are scheduled for delivery a week from Friday.

The drywall makes everything look smaller. I can no longer see from room to room. Everything feels closer, nearer. I was expecting that to happen.

I'm breathing a bit of a sigh of relief, for now. How bad can you mess up drywall? Well... They've covered up a junction box for a wall sconce light. They pulled two of the four speaker wires through my home theater wall and left the other two buried. No, not really a big deal, because they cut holes for the speakers anyway... But all of this stuff is fixable, at least until they paint. I'm sure I'll be down checking and re-checking, and meddling until it's the way I want it.

We're getting more and more excited. After the drywall people are done and the doors and trim are installed, it'll be time to texture and paint. But starting yesterday, the finished product is becoming more and more visible.

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 plumber is done and has left the building.

The electricians started working on Friday afternoon. They've done a lot of the rough electrical work, including things like putting in electrical junction boxes in their proper locations and pulling lots and lots of wire through holes they drilled in the framing. They also put in some can lights in the family room area.

The interesting thing to me is this: When they build a house, the framers come through and put up all this wood. It's beautiful, new, relatively unblemished wood. Then the plumbers come through. They have to drill holes in the wood to put pipes through. Then the electricians come through. They have to drill holes in the wood to run electrical wiring through. So right after the construction, the demolition begins!

It's all well and good. Eventually the wood will all be covered up with sheet rock anyway. Then layer upon layer of purely cosmetic stuff goes up... tape, mud, texture, paint... So the "holey" wood will all disappear into distant memory anyway.

I AM going to vacuum all of the wood shavings from behind and inside the framing before the sheet rock guys get here. I know it would never be a problem, but knowing that it's there MIGHT drive me just a tiny bit crazy. Then again, I doubt anyone vacuumed all of the wood shavings from inside the walls UPSTAIRS, and that doesn't drive me crazy. We'll see. Who knows how much time there will be between the end of the electrical and the beginning of the sheet rocking. They tell me THAT depends entirely on the 4-way inspection that has to happen before they can legally sheet rock.

*happy sigh*

I'm just glad it's all getting done.

*excited geeky sigh*

The DVD player is already here and the projector will arrive on Tuesday. Wednesday, the THX-certified Dolby Digital 7.1 receiver will come. I'm sure I'll blog more about that geeky stuff when it gets here.

I was still smarting from not getting roles in my last two auditions and had almost decided to take a break from theatre.

Then I found out that the PG Players was going to produce "The Odd Couple" and that a great character actor, Dennis Purdie, had been pre-cast as Felix.  I decided to audition for the role of Oscar.  It was the first time that I ever put on an audition form that I wouldn't accept any role... that I would only accept a specific role.

And I got the part!

Woohoo!

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.

Incredible.

I really don't know how long it would have taken me to do that. I'm sure it would have taken MUCH longer than two days!

The HVAC guy came back. He finished the vents for the dryer and for the bathroom fan. He patched all of the holes in the furnace ductwork that he made yesterday. (I'm sure he was excited about THAT.)

The framing is complete. They were able to put in the double french doors like we had originally planned. They're off-center in the wall, but it had to be that way. They couldn't take out the roof bearing supports that go all the way to the basement. I have NO problem with that. None. At all. To be honest, it's better that way. It'll provide a more ideal location for the desk in the office on the other side of the doors.

It's fun to walk around down there. It's nice to see what things are going to be like. Yesterday, we freaked out a little about the problems with the HVAC. Today, it's pure excitement!

My wife asked me something tonight that freaked me out for a minute though: Can we get the ping pong table out of the cold storage?

We put it back there because it was one more 300-lb thing that we didn't want to have to cart uptairs to store. But now there is a new wall between the cold storage and the family room. I couldn't remember the width of the new doorway!

A quick trip downstairs made my heart beat normally again. The door to the cold storage and the new doorway are exactly the same width. There will be plenty of room. *whew!*

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.

I just finished upgrading WordPress. They had a major release (called Ella, after the great Ella Fitzgerald). Unfortunately, the blue curves theme that I was using was somehow not compatible with the new version of WordPress, so until I have time to find a new one, this is the look of my blog.

It really looks like a good release so far. I'll try it out for a while, and after I'm sure it's going to work well, I'll migrate the other WordPress blogs that I maintain.