Framing goes quickly. Really. The framing is already almost complete! We went downstairs to see what had been done so far. It's going to be nice. The floor plan is taking shape, and rather quickly too!

As we looked around, we noticed that the HVAC guy had been there too. The ductwork that brings in fresh air from outside to the furnace had been moved so that it would remain in the same room as the furnace. But as we continued to look around, we started noticing all of the additional ductwork.

WHAT?? Additional ductwork?

Um...

We're doing radiant heating.

So now they're going to have to remove all of the ductwork and patch all of the holes they made in the system to attach the ducts... That'll cut into their profit.

Oops.

Hopefully, that's also the LAST big glitch.

On Friday morning, a flatbed loaded with wood showed up and dumped its load.  On Saturday night, it snowed on the wood.  On Sunday morning, I brushed most of the snow off of the wood.

This morning, I was expecting the workmen to show up and start installing said wood into what will be the walls of the rooms in my finished basement.   I left before anybody showed up.

However...  My wife  saw someone outside waiting when she left.  I decided to stop by during my lunch break and check things out.

About half of the wood was gone!  There was a truck up by the house!  The framers had started working!  WOOHOO!!!

I went inside and found one cat (the indifferent one) sleeping on my bed.  The other cat (the neurotic one) was hiding under one of my boys' beds.  There was plenty of banging and sawing and other sounds coming from the basement.

I'm excited to go down after they leave and check out what they've done!

The project is now underway!

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. :)

After a weekend of complete technical stupidity, I had to tackle something technical... maybe just to prove to myself that I wasn't completely technically inept.

When I moved to my new house, I couldn't believe the ugly mess the phone connection was. My father-in-law did telephone connections for his career. He told me that this mess was rather unbelievable.

See for yourself:

Upscale Downstairs came today and chalked out the basement walls today. They will start framing next week. I figured that if I wanted to do something about this ugly mess, I would have to do it VERY soon.

I bought a Leviton media center enclosure this morning and organized this tangled mess of cable and phone connections into this:

VERY nice! Expandable! And it will be accessible after the basement is finished!

See! I'm not COMPLETELY technically inept. I'm pretty sure it works too, because I'm connected to the Internet right now via DSL, which is now running through this new media center.

Oy...

I'm supposed to know this stuff. I'm supposed to be good at this stuff. It is, after all, a large part of my livelihood. I'm a geek.

Sometimes, however, it's the simple stuff that comes back to bite you in the butt.

Yesterday morning, I was having some quirky problems with Internet access, I rebooted my DSL modem. The problem is that it wasn't actually rebooting. So I asked my son who was upstairs by the modem, to unplug the modem and plug it back in. That usually fixes the problem.

This time it didn't. As a matter of fact, from that moment on, I didn't have Internet access. The DSL light on my DSL modem kept flashing on and off. It's supposed to do that for a few minutes, then light up solid green.

I finally gave up and called Qwest. We went through several diagnostic steps before the tech asked me if I was using a green cable or a grey cable. I said I was using a green one. He asked me if it was plugged into the green "line" port or the grey "phone" port on the back of the modem. I looked. It was plugged into the wrong port. Problem solved. Apparently, my son had unplugged the data cable instead of the power cable. I should have noticed that. I should have checked that.

Boy did I feel stupid.

Then, when I got online, I noticed that my main domain had one of those temporary advertising placeholder sites instead of MY content. WHAT THE??

Then I remembered. I had received notices that the domain was about to expire. I must have ignored them, because, SURPRISE! My domain expired.

Fortunately, it was still renewable. But oy. I'm feeling pretty stupid today.

My stupid tooth.

I didn't take any kind of pain killer today.  Nothing.  Not so much as a single ibuprofen tablet.  I didn't NEED anything.  I think maybe it knew what it was getting itself into and decided that causing excruciating pain was tantamount to tooth suicide.

So I spent the whole day wondering what I was going to do.  I went outside and breathed in cold air just to see if that familiar pain would return.  It didn't.  I swished cold water around in my mouth.  Nothing.  I put pressure on the tooth.  No pain at all.  I tapped on the tooth.  It was tender, but strangely enough, the tooth pain I had been suffering through was gone.  Occaisionally, I would have a dull ache, but it seemed residual, not new.

Great.  What was I supposed to do?

I figured that the dentist would be a good person to talk to about that, and since I had an appointment, I would show up and discuss it with him.

We discussed it, and, refreshingly, he didn't push me to have the root canal.  I told him I was worried about the pain coming back.  He said that it was likely that we would still be doing a root canal treatment on that tooth in the future.  But if I wanted to wait and see if the pain came back, that he wasn't going anywhere.  We could take care of it when it needed to be taken care of.

It was my choice.

My fear of the pain won and I told him to go ahead with the root canal treatment.

Honestly, the procedure wasn't any worse than having a cavity filled.  Novocaine shots are novocaine shots whether you're having one or the other.  The same sickly smells come from the drill.  The same whiny vibrations penetrate your skull during either procedure.  The filing out of the pulp and nerves was a new experience, but to be honest, it wasn't a big deal.  It wasn't as bad as the drilling.

The dentist told me that I had made the right decision.  The root was nearly dead.  He said that the root canals usually bleed when they're being filed out and that mine were almost dry.  This pain would have only been the first in a continuing cycle of pain.

I have to go back in a couple of weeks.  They still have to fill the cleaned out root canals and put a permanent filling in the crown they had to drill through.

Now I know why people hate root canal treatments though.  The pain afterward is bad.  Much worse than with a filling.  I'm aching, even though I took lortab earlier this afternoon.  I'm aching and loopy.

But at least I know that this is the beginning of the end of the pain in this tooth.  *WHEW!*

Yesterday, I got MOST of the rest of the way ready for the basement construction project.

Before work, I dismantled the treadmill and went to Home Depot to buy a locking doorknob for the door to the downstairs stairway. Sure, it's not going to stop a REAL burglar, but it will help keep honest people honest.

During lunch, I went to a rental center and rented a furniture dolly.

After work, one of my brothers came over and helped me move a cabinet up into the bonus room, the treadmill into the piano room, and the freezer into the garage.

I spent the next couple of hours defrosting the freezer, building shelves in the garage, and rearranging stuff in the garage.

Then I took the doorknob off of the downstairs doorway, but before putting the new one on, I discovered that the supplied key in the new doorknob didn't fit. *ugh*

All that's left I can do on Saturday. I'll move my tools and associated stuff out into the garage in the space I cleared out when I rearranged out there. This morning, I traded the doorknob for one that has a working key and I bought plastic sheeting to cover the stuff left in the cold storage. I think the car top carrier is still downstairs, but it's light and easy to move.

The very last thing I'll do is change the furnace filter and then we'll not be allowed to occupy the basement again until the work is done. It's scheduled to be done by 27 April.

A little over a week ago, my tooth started hurting.

No, actually, this story goes back a lot further than that. Before I lived in my current house, before I lived in my first home, before I lived in my "town home" apartment, before I lived in my basement apartment, I lived in a trailer park. Not just ANY trailer park, mind you. I lived in Wyview trailer park, the married student housing at BYU (Breed-'em Young University), fondly known as the "rabbit hutches."

I was a BYU student. I was young. I was married. Life was good. Rent was relatively cheap. I was studying electrical engineering and working as a teacher at the Missionary Training Center.

One fateful night, I was flossing my teeth and the floss caught on something. I pulled a little harder and the floss broke. Floss is NOT supposed to break! I got another piece of floss and tried again. This time, it worked. Whatever it was that caused the problem came out. It turned out that the "whatever" was a piece of a filling.

I was young. Life was good. I was also uninsured, so I hadn't been to a dentist for a while. Through word of mouth, I found a "good" dentist where "good," it later turns out, is translated as "good at selling you dental services, even when you're young and uninsured." He drilled out the old, broken filling and the decay that had gotten behind it. He said that the decay went pretty deep and that there wasn't a whole lot left of the top of the tooth. He would, of course, recommend a crown. It took us quite a while to pay off THAT dental bill of over $700.

But life, again, was good. I was young. Life went on. I left BYU and my Electrical Engineering major to take up Computer Science at UVSC. I moved to the basement apartment, the "town home" apartment, and bought my first house. I had dental insurance. Going to the dentist became a regular occurrence.

Then, one day, not long after Halloween four years ago, I was eating a piece of saltwater taffy and suddenly, the crown that Dr. Marketing Genius had put on many years earlier fell out! Fortunately, in the years since I spent time in the chair Dr. M.G., I found a much better dentist - one who actually (as far as I can tell) cares as much about his patients as he does about the money he receives from his patients and their insurance companies. Dr. Crawford examined the crown (I had bit down on it slightly), declared it free of defect, and re-seated it in its proper location.

I wasn't quite as young any more, but life was good again.

NOW we get to last week.

On Monday of last week, my tooth started hurting. It wasn't awful pain. It was more of an annoyance. It was a tingling, burning, itching sort of sensation that was more strange than painful. During the night, it started to hurt. The hurt worsened on Tuesday, so on my son's 10th Birthday, I went to see Dr. Crawford again.

The assistants took x-rays. The doctor looked at them. He showed me the x-ray and pointed out my sinuses and showed me that the root of the tooth protruded into the sinus cavity. He said that the roots looked fine. There was no abcess or infection to be seen. He thought that the pain was probably caused by sinus pressure on the root of the tooth. He recommended Sudafed (or some other over the counter decongestant) and ibuprofen. If it kept hurting, he said he would give me a prescription for antibiotics, in case there was a sinus infection that the antibiotics could help.

For the past week, I've been using Sudafed and ibuprofen during the day and Lortab at night. It has controlled the pain quite well... Until last night.

Last night, I went down to the basement to bring a bunch of stuff upstairs. The cold air from the basement hitting my tooth was excruciating! Flossing behind the tooth nearly brought me to my knees. I took lortab before I went to bed and STILL woke up from the pain. As soon as I woke up this morning, I went back to Dr. Crawford's office.

They took another x-ray, just to see if there were any apparent changes during the week. There weren't. Dr. Crawford looked at the tooth again and said that it looked good. He then tapped around on different teeth. When he tapped on the crown, it HURT. Other teeth felt just fine. He then told me that clinically, it appeared that it was time for a root canal. Sensitivity to heat, cold, pressure, and waking up at night are all the things that tell him it's time for this always dreaded procedure.

Of course, the first thing that came to mind is "But I don't WANT a root canal!"

However, as I sit here and type this and feel twinges of pain, I realize that a root canal is going to be a welcome relief.

It's under way! I played around with flickr over Christmas and now I have a place to post my pics that won't eat my hosted bandwidth.

http://flickr.com/photos/misterme/

Most of the photos will likely be pretty boring. I figure by taking at least one photo every day, I'll end up with a few very nice ones.

We finalized the floor plan last night.  There were a few small changes, but nothing major.  It's going to be VERY nice.

On Monday, we have a "pre-construction" meeting where we meet our project manager and give them the first chunk of money.  We already paid a deposit of $1000, but at the pre-construction meeting, the check we'll write will have another place to the left of the decimal point.  By then, we'll have to have everything construction-related decided.  How many extra zones do we want on the radiant heating system?  Where do we want carpet/tile/vinyl?  How many light fixtures should go where?  Which home theater package am I going with?  The list goes on and on.

A week from today, we have our "selection" meeting where we pick our carpet and tile and paint colors and fixtures.  What color do we want our countertops?  What color should the toilet be?  What kind of hardware (doorknobs, light fixtures, etc.) do we want?  How about light switches and plugs?  This is another long list of items we have to check off one by one.

I'm glad we never had a home built.  There are too many things to decide!