It’s the weekend, can we talk about project that start as a discrete thing with a clear beginning and ending, but then of course they create a different project?
My most recent is replacing the patio bricks that have been there since the house was built in the 50s. To say they were a hazard is not an exaggeration.
Well, it turns out that when you get to the end of what was the patio, there is a huge drop-off to the yard, which has a very low kind of scooped out area, so now it’s turned into adding dirt and leveling the scooped out part and raising that whole section of the yard to the height of the rest of the yard – and the height of the bricks when they end.
What’s your project? We all have these, right?
Baud
My project is procrastination.
Shalimar
Elon Musk could be ousted from US government as lawmakers blast ‘enormous harm’ caused by DOGE
I suspect this was always a possibility. DOGE destroyed a few important independent agencies that weren’t under any Department, but mostly they didn’t do anything that the Secretaries couldn’t have done to their own spheres of command. DOGE gets the blame for cleansing government of all suspected liberals, then everything goes on as horribly as before.
Shalimar
@Baud: I have been thinking about doing that too.
WaterGirl
It’s Sunday morning, if we could get a little bit of time to talk about normal things before we get into The Horrors, that would be much appreciated.
edit: Although I guess some house projects could be considered The Horror, in a different sense, but you know what I mean. :-)
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
rikyrah
Peanut wanted to watch Dreamgirls last night.
First, next year it will be TWENTY YEARS OLD 😳😳
I realized that I am still bitter about Eddie not winning that Oscar.
And, after all these years, JHud still gives me chills during the Oscar Winning song…
And I am telling you…….
Peanut loved it🤗
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: How old is Peanut these days? Probably off to college soon? Is she still good with being called Peanut?
Shalimar
@WaterGirl: understood. you can delete 2. it isn’t something that won’t still be relevant for the next few weeks at least.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Jerry
We definitely want to see the yard when you are done with the leveling and all that. We also will want to see how buff you’ve become after moving all that dirt and whatnot.
Barbara
Lo these many years ago I set out to update my kitchen and ended up with a two-story addition. Basically, the kitchen only reno was so expensive on its own that it made no sense. My husband heard a contractor say that the four most expensive words in the English language are “while you’re at it.”
WaterGirl
@Shalimar: That’s kind of you to say that. My Thursday afternoon looking ahead to something positive thread turned into a shit show of doom, which was discouraging.
brendancalling
Projects up the wazoo.
Practice w/band 1 (rock band) from 11-2 pm.
Then head to venue to set up for band 2, which plays 4-7 pm ( Fergie’s Pub, 1214 Sansom St in Philly if anyone is in town).
Maybe start edits on the new podcast episode tonight.
And then job applications all week.
rikyrah
Don’t know if any of you are on TikTok, but the United States really should have left China – The Phuck Alone.
The way that my FYP on TikTok has been flooded with videos of Chinese manufacturing. Spilling all the tea of what is actually made in China.
How those luxury brands must me punching the air and cursing out the Orange Menace for being exposed like they are.
I don’t even shop those brands, but it’s been hysterical 😂 😂 😂
China woke up and chose violence. It has been hilarious to watch.
Barbara
@rikyrah: We watched Diner last night because no one else had ever seen it (also we met while working in Baltimore). It was made more than 40 years ago!
I think it aged pretty well. What do you think about Dreamgirls in that regard?
WaterGirl
@Jerry: I’m not sure how my nice neighbor across the street will feel about my posting a photo of how buff HE’S getting from moving all the dirt. He’s a great guy who was out of work for awhile when the company he worked at closed, so he has credit card bills to pay off, and I’m not 30 anymore so I am happy enough to pay someone for the work.
I’m not laying the bricks myself, either!
Mo MacArbie
Sounds like all my computer projects. I try harder lately to be disciplined about just improving the code without also adding features, but…
However, inspiration waxes and wanes. You can tell that I’m avoiding that stuff when I comment on the current thread here.
rikyrah
@WaterGirl:
She is a Junior.
Time has flown. 🥹🥹
And, she is okay with being called Peanut 😊
WaterGirl
@Barbara:
We might not be able to top that one!
Barbara
@WaterGirl: It’s nice when you can help solve someone else’s problem at the same time.
Jerry
Smart. Just keep Barbara’s most expensive four words that you can hear: while we’re at it. LOL. We will still want to see after photos, though.
Scout211
So many projects, so little
timeenergy.The biggest one with the most frustration is the dry well we are digging to capture the back wash water from our well water filtration/softener. The company that does our well service finally talked me into getting a filtration and water softener system installed (on top of triple ozone filter in the storage tank and the chlorine injector. So finally after many years, our well water is really great.
The problem that we are now trying to fix is the filtration has a scheduled backwash to clean itself. They added a water line to drain that backwash water to an area away from our plants and trees to drain into a culvert. It was great and worked well. But once the grasses around here started to turn green after our dry summer, it was clear that the backwash was killing my neighbors grass on the other side of our fence line. 😳
So we started to dig a hole for the dry well and only had about a half a foot to go but then our rains started up in February and March (late for this area) and the darned hole keeps filling up with rain and then drains super slowly. And that means we are getting closer to hard pan. And that means the hole will have to go deeper than three feet. And that means we need to use the demo hammer to dig through the hard pan. So we were just about ready to add the landscape cloth and crushed rock and now two months later we have to wait for the water to drain and then haul out the digging equipment. Ugh.
Fair Economist
Our ongoing project is cleaning the garage. My husband is a partially recovering pack rat. At one point we had so much stuff in our garage that it was starting to border on hoarder – floor space was limited to pathways through stuff piled to shoulder height, plus stuffed shelving all along the walls. He decided he wanted a clean garage, an over a period of literally years, we have disposed of enough stuff to park one car and almost park the second. But somehow we are not quite finishing the last bit.
This does throw off a lot of side projects, basically figuring out what to do with all the assorted stuff we (mostly he, but not entirely) have
I say partially recovering as there is still a lot of excess stuff in the house – clothes, model cars, old papers, kitchen towels, etc. Not hoarder-y anymore, but I have trouble closing some drawers from the amount of stuff shoved in.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: A junior in high school, or a junior in college?
That would be a tough day if she asked you not to call her Peanut anymore. :-)
rikyrah
@Barbara:
When I think that the musical is over 40 years old, I think that it has aged well.
It wasn’t just a musical,but a history lesson of Black people in the music industry…
I think it does very well.
It helps that all three of the original Broadway stars are still active in show business today.
rikyrah
@WaterGirl:
Junior in High School
BretH
New (old, built in 1974) house, so projects to keep me happy for years. New vanities in bathrooms, kitchen update, deck preservation, siding repair, gutter work, gardening, and hopefully building an ADU in the front yard. Whooppeee! But it’s a lovely house on a lovely yard in a special neighborhood so all is good.
Jerry
We watched the first two episodes of Your Friends & Neighbors (with Jon Hamm) on AppleTV. They were enjoyable enough. So many business jerks. My wife texted this joke to her friends: Do you think Jon Hamm calls his penis a Hammbone? But…ummm…she texted it to me and our 15 year daughter instead. LOL
Omnes Omnibus
I never post in them because the topic really doesn’t interesting me at all, but the lack of an AL garden post is a little concerning.
WaterGirl
@Jerry: Then you’ll be happy to hear that I’m not trying to get that part of the yard perfectly level, and don’t even get me started with the rest of the yard, but on this project, at least, I am smart enough to know that “good enough” will be good enough.
I think! Check back with me in a month or so. :-)
Jeffg166
I cleaned the kitchen.
If I feel ambitious I might write the electric bill and walk it to the mailbox.
Barbara
@rikyrah: Yeah, like Diner it was already to some extent looking in the rear view mirror. I’ll suggest it for next week’s movie night.
Jerry
@WaterGirl: Just be mindful of the flow of water. Remember: *away* from the house. LOL. One of my brothers is a civil engineer and he went into great detail with me on how everything slopes away from the house and into a certain part of his yard and how much time he spent on the calculation.
caroln
I really like the pattern of your bricks. We did random and well, it just looks random.
Chief Oshkosh
I’ve recently discovered that good old-fashioned weeding by hand, pulling one weed at a time, calms me after my morning exposure to the news. So, in the past week, I’ve completely weeded the front and side yards and half of the back yard.
Combining the rate of weeding that I’ve developed and the amount and quality of news being generated, I may end up weeding the entire neighborhood by the time of the mid terms.
Scout211
@WaterGirl: That’s so nice you have a neighbor you can hire for big jobs. I have a neighbor like that, too.
We try to do projects ourself but my husband isn’t able to do as much as he used to do so I hire my neighbor for the big jobs. He has all kinds of equipment, including a backhoe and multiple chainsaws and a bobcat. He spent hours cutting up the huge oak tree that the PG&E contractors cut down. He brought his chainsaws and splitter and then hauled it all away for me.
Maybe I should hire him to use the post hole digger on his bobcat to dig our dry well through the hard pan. Hmmm.
WaterGirl
@Scout211:
First, I laughed out loud. Literally. Then I cried out “oh, no!” also literally. Now I’ve settled on a wry chuckle.
And this is only after reading up to the part quoted above. I may be in for another round of emotions when read the final part of your post
edit: read the final part of your post and I am back to “oh, no” What a nightmare. And I’m certain that each additional thing you run into costs more and more money. sigh.
When I bought my house, I still believed that “now I can save money because I won’t be throwing away all that money on rent”. Ha!
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Our lives are nothing but projects.
My warm weather project is reglazing the south facing windows–it probably hasn’t been done since the house was built in 1905.
Our collective project is gear fixing, organizing, inventorying, for Girls Rock Denver, a summer camp for girls 8-17. Their gear management was a wreck coming out of the Plague Times as we learned last year. So we have a new storage unit, are getting things sorted and into there while checking all the gear.
And we have a lot of gear, 11 full size acoustic drum kits, 2 small ones, one e-kit. 11 keyboards. I think we have about a dozen each of guitars and bass guitars and the amp collection? We haven’t even gone thru that yet.
Scout211
I agree. Very zen.
narya
My project today is buying some seeds for the back porch planters and doing my taxes. I’m usually faster on the latter, but (a) I have some stupid extra forms this year (if I understand correctly) and (b) I’ve decided to just let my return serve as my first payment on this year’s self-employment taxes. Oh, also, I have bread rising, and eventually I’m going to make a test batch of pretzels to recreate this in prep for a Beer from the Basement gathering in two weeks. Dinner is going to involve coconut and shrimp and lime (if I can find that cubes of juice I froze at some point) and something else.
Ed to fix link
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: whew!
lowtechcyclist
@rikyrah:
Want some anniversaries: 2025 is the fiftieth anniversary of:
Dylan, Blood on the Tracks (released 1/20/75)
Springsteen, Born To Run (released 8/25/75)
and
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (released 4/3/75)
1975 was one hell of a year!
WaterGirl
@BretH: Lovely house, lovely yard, special neighborhood, where do we sign up?
What is ADU?
NotMax
Aware it won’t be everyone’s cuppa.
Weekend l-o-n-g watch. It was a much, much more innocent time. Pleased to see who it appears was the winner.
(Also, dig those wild neckties.)
WaterGirl
@Jerry: oops! LOL literally, again.
A few weeks ago I was really frustrated about something with John, so I vented about him in a text to a friend.
Only I inadvertently sent the text to Cole instead. Not my best moment!!!
Oh well, I guess now Cole doesn’t have to say “tell me how you really feel”.
Scout211
@WaterGirl: What is ADU?
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Yep, me too. Hoping we are just being taught a lesson for not sending in Garden Chat photos. :-)
Layer8Problem
My project is replacing a six-year-old laptop with a spiffy new laptop, while concurrently switching the operating system from Ubuntu Linux to Arch Linux. All my dated configurations which had accreted over years like lichen need to be tweaked or rebuilt. And one fix or upgrade can lead somewhere you didn’t expect, so something new needs doing.
It’s hard to explain, so think of it like It’s like gutting the home office down to the studs and rebuilding, but RIGHT this time, dammit. It’s also fun, like tinkering with a car without the grease.
WaterGirl
@Jeffg166: Please don’t overdo.
Elma
@Barbara: The same thing happened to me. We needed to replace a screen door and wound up with a garage addition. “And since you have the slab poured, you might as well add a second story.” Husband and his buddy the Contractor kept designing as they went. And then there was the sub-zero day in January, while I was at work, when they decided it was time to open the wall between the house (right next to our bedroom) into the unheated new addition. No jury would have convicted me.
mvr
We’ve mostly done projects ourselves, restoring our kitchen, bathrooms, several windows and stripping lots of paint. But we tend to hire out earth moving work. 28 years ago when we moved into this house it had only a gutted galley kitchen that the person we bought it from was “renovating”. We bought it unfinished (the guy who was working on it was a menace slumlord speculator) with a condition of sale being he put back the toilets he’d torn out and stop work. Then we got someone to add a crawlspace foundation and did the remaining work of adding some room to the kitchen ourselves. So we had ten months of cooking in a hot pot and microwave until we had a stove and sink again.
3 years ago we wanted to dig out the crawl space to add shop space. That became replacing the block foundation on 90% of the basement while we lived in the house. The crew who did it did a nice job. I helped out with the carpentry that needed doing here and there and also with moving the plumbing. We lived for 6 or 8 weeks with 1/3 of our house balanced on stilts.
I suppose the most pressing house project is getting the vegetable garden planted. But it is still too early for that.
WaterGirl
@Jerry: Good reminder!
Matt McIrvin
@rikyrah: Oh, I think China saw this coming miles down the road and are just putting the plans they had queued up into action.
WaterGirl
@caroln: Thank you! I was really pleased that the colors turned out to be just what I thought I was getting, too. Which isn’t always the case!
lowtechcyclist
@Jerry:
The guy who did our home inspection before my wife and I bought our first house made a point of educating me on water flow. Fortunately, that house had really good drainage and it was never an issue for us, but when we were buying our second house, I made sure we were buying a house with good drainage. We’re still in that house, and have never had any issues.
WaterGirl
@Chief Oshkosh: I just sent you my home address by email! :-)
WaterGirl
@Scout211: Wow, backhoes and bobcats. Those projects are huge next to mine.
Scout211
@WaterGirl: Yeah, we live on 5 acres. I love it but the outdoor projects tend to be big. LOL.
prostratedragon
@Barbara: I have learned that the only things to do “while you’re at it” are on the order of cleaning up the few extra dishes in the sink when washing a cup. Anything more opens the gateway to hell.
WaterGirl
@Scout211: Thank you!
A house I pass on my regular route across town did that, and it was a “mini-me” version of the actual house on the outside, and it was really charming.
I’m sure the neighbors were relieved, because it would have been a jarring eyesore.
VeniceRiley
I need to make a list of my current procrastinations so I can keep track of what I’m not doing.
Rickrah omg that JHud number. Wrenching. 20 wtf.
BretH
@WaterGirl: scout211 beat me to it. A place for my wife to work, and maybe later a caretaker for us and maybe later where we live since it’ll be 1 story.
We also have an 8 foot deer fence all around the old established perennial garden so I sense a garden post in my future.
rikyrah
@BretH:
For family, or for extra income?
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: I’ve occasionally mentioned that I’m something of a fan of roller coasters, though I’m too old and worn-out to ride them as obsessively as these kids on YouTube.
But I’m fascinated by the history, and 1975 was an absolutely pivotal year in roller coasters: it was when they started going upside down.
That’s not strictly true–there had been attempts to make looping coasters ever since the 19th century, and a bunch of parks had one in the 1920s and ’30s, but these rides were not particularly safe or comfortable and had low capacity–by the 1970s, people cared more about these concerns and nobody was building them. It wasn’t a trend that really took.
But in 1975, Arrow Development came out with their Corkscrew model, a compact ride that was just a drop leading into a double corkscrew inversion, with some turns folding it into a small footprint. A bunch of parks put one in.
They weren’t great rides. They were kind of janky by modern standards (the one I’ve ridden is the old Canobie Corkscrew at Canobie Lake Park, which they took out a few years ago–it was originally built in ’75 for a short-lived indoor park/shopping mall in Illinois). But they proved that you could make a rideable modern coaster with an inversion, and the next year, rides with vertical loops started appearing–and from then on, coasters with inversions were a permanent part of the landscape.
HinTN
I live in the country. The nearest neighbor is 1/2 mile away. The driveway is 100 meters and the house is at the place where “the first bench” breaks to the creek, which is twenty feet below. Before the house is as much flat ground as one could want to mess with. Projects? Fifty years worth of holding Mother Nature at bay. 😂 It’s been entertaining.
Nukular Biskits
Good mornin, y’all!
As some of you know from my posts yesterday, I’m assembling a play center for the grandkids. Pics to come later but just about dark last night, I was putting up a horizontal board and couldn’t figure out why the left side wouldn’t mate up with the holes in the vertical support.
Turns out the board immediately to its left was installed upside down, sliding it over about a 1/2 inch. And that board was one to which all the the “second floor” floorboards were connected.
Dammit.
Barbara
@Elma: Yikes! For us it was that required structural changes for the kitchen made the base cost so high that we naturally thought about what other changes we wanted to make. We lived without a kitchen for six weeks!
WaterGirl
@BretH: I see that you are a long-term planner! :-)
One thing about the TV show LOST that has stuck with me all these years is recognizing the people that I would want to be on the island with if the plane crashed. Sadly, I am not a “handy” person, so I’m not sure anyone would look at me as one of those people. Kind of humbling.
WaterGirl
@Nukular Biskits: Bummer. Like digging a hole and filling it in, and then digging it again.
Math Guy
Collecting villanelles. After retirement, just 9 weeks away, I plan to try writing some villanelles.
WaterGirl
@Math Guy: Trying to write one of those sounds like punishment. Nice reminder that we humans are all built so differently from one another. As my dad used to say, it’s takes all kinds.
RevRick
My project is nurturing a Climate Hope Affiliate in the PA-7 Congressional District, which aims to promote a sustainable climate future through various media and by lobbying our Representative and Senators to protect the climate legislation in the Inflation Reduction Act. Our final training will be this Wednesday evening, and then we will be fully launched.
The primary learning we have gotten is that we have got to build relationships with our elected officials, even when we completely disagree with their positions, and that the way to do that is not by marshaling arguments, but by telling stories.
After all, nobody likes to be yelled at or bombarded with criticism.
UncleEbeneezer
This is pretty much the process of writing every song I’ve ever written. By the time I get to the point that I’m finally solidifying the arrangement and happy with the overall arc of it from beginning to end, I always have ideas for another one and start working on those. It’d frustrated the hell out of bandmates because I’d often run in with “oh forget that one, I wanna show you this new one” in the midst of refining/rehearsals and even recording.
Currently struggling/bummed about band stuff. I really want to have a kick-ass band (or actually a couple- one on drums, one on guitar) but it takes time to 1.) figure out what I want to do and what is viable based on the local players and 2.) what type of music local venues book/pay. It all takes time, I know that. When I moved to Los Angeles it took me almost three years to really connect with some like-minded musicians and start some projects I was really passionate about. I already am pretty well connected with a bunch of the musicians in Taos so that part should help quite a bit, but I want it NOW!!!
I’m also irritated that I haven’t gotten my Guitar Center claim paid yet. I have several important instruments that I need to replace that should be covered/replaced by GC but no idea when/if that might happen. I guess I just need to bite the bullet and shell out my own $ to replace them and if GC eventually pays/replaces them I’ll deal with that headache later. But’s frustrating because the whole thing is just another reminder of the fire…
Nukular Biskits
@WaterGirl:
IKR?
And I had a clue early on when all the holes on that first board lined up but there wasn’t a hole for one screw.
Having dealt with “pre-fab’d” kits before (holes offset, missing/wrong hardware, etc), I just knew they had failed to drill the hole so I drilled one myself and continued.
DOH!
Math Guy
@WaterGirl: I love the symmetry of the form, but that also makes them challenging to write.
One Art
BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Kristine
Swedish Death Cleaning. I need to buckle down and just do it.
I’ve wanted to have a new front door installed for a while now. New outdoor lighting. Garage door painted. Relatively inexpensive but they punch above their weight when it comes to improving the appearance of the house.
Dorothy A. Winsor
It’s our son’s 49th birthday today, so we’re going to his house.
eclare
The project for today is doing my taxes. It shouldn’t take too long, and I should get a nice refund.
Just reading about y’all’s projects exhausts me!
schrodingers_cat
My personal project is to do 100 pieces of original art in a year (April 1 2025 – March 31 2026) using all the art supplies (including sketchbooks, different types of paper and canvasses) I have amassed over the last five years. I now have most major media except oils.
I am doing
Landscapes
Nature and Still Life
Patterns
Lettering
Portraits (Humans, animals and birds)
Progress so far: 3 done, 2 WIPs
frosty
@Baud: That’s a good one, definitely. I’m procrastinating on Getting Rid of Stuff these days.
it’s not that easy! I don’t want to throw away something that’s still useable but finding a buyer or even posting it on Freecycle takes time and effort. Thus we’re back to procrastination.
eclare
@Nukular Biskits:
Oh no!
eclare
@WaterGirl:
You can cook, not everyone can or will.
Nukular Biskits
@Math Guy @WaterGirl:
Your conversation about poetry reminded me of (what I thought was) an excellent dad joke:
Dad: “Knock knock!!!”
Son: “Who’s there?”
Dad: “Hike.”
Son: “Hike who?”
Dad:
WaterGirl
@UncleEbeneezer: Picking up and moving on a minute’s notice in the middle of a traumatic event … I’m sure everything is complicated and it’s hard to be patient.
You’re doing great but I’m sure it’s still harder than hell, and it takes time to process an event like that. Make that a series of events, all in the middle of the current shit show.
Nukular Biskits
@eclare:
It’s not a real project if something doesn’t go wrong. LOL
WaterGirl
@Nukular Biskits: Rememmber, kicking yourself for not figuring it out sooner is not helpful. :-)
WaterGirl
@Math Guy: That made me cry.
A Ghost to Most
Among myriad other projects, and sporadic forays into improved functional and non-functional art, the Goliath that still awaits completion is the rolling escape cabin I started in 2022. Functionally complete, the list of stuff left to do is long. Being commandeered as a catlap by not my cat has cut into it.
WaterGirl
@Kristine:
I don’t know what that is, but I don’t want to google it because I don’t want all the ads that would surely come with it.
eclare
@Nukular Biskits:
And something always goes wrong.
eclare
@A Ghost to Most:
What is a rolling escape cabin?
UncleEbeneezer
@WaterGirl: About the ONLY upside of it all is that I feel pretty justified in not-following/obsessing over all the bullshit Trump is doing. I just don’t really have the mental energy to do so while also processing the fire, relocation, new job etc. My head isn’t entirely in the sand (I’m well aware of the worst of it) but I’ve given myself permission to check out as much as I need to, and I don’t feel guilty at all about it.
p.a.
If it hasn’t been raining here in S New England it’s been 45°f highs, or 45° WITH rain, so garden prep is still “on the clock”. Some exterior painting to do as well, but I’d procrastinate that anyway…
At least we won’t be dealing with rock hard soil when we are able to turn and fertilize…
Monday is supposed to be nice. And then rain again…
WaterGirl
@eclare: I have $10k sitting in my checking account waiting for our corrupt government to take it out for my taxes. I prefer to pay the fine than give them my money throughout the year. But finally this year my tax guy talked me into doing the quarterly payments, and now I’m pissed that I did it because I don’t want those bastards to have my money to play with as they destroy the country.
Barbara
@WaterGirl: It’s the name of a book by a Swedish author who prescribes doing the work of clearing out your things in advance of your death so your children or other loved ones don’t have to do it.
eclare
@UncleEbeneezer:
That sounds like a good plan, the stress you’ve been under the past three months has been intense.
WaterGirl
@Nukular Biskits: Good one!
Two snakes, slithering through the woods.
Baby snake: Mama, are we poisonous?
Mama snake: Why do you ask?
Baby snake: Because I just bit my tongue.
WaterGirl
@UncleEbeneezer: Silver lining!
eclare
@WaterGirl:
I worked at the public accounting firm Arthur Andersen in the tax dept for seven years. We always advised clients to pay the interest but not the penalty. If you send an apologetic letter, say the underpayment was inadvertent, etc. usually the IRS will waive the penalty. Interest you can’t get out of.
BellyCat
@Nukular Biskits: Directions are only as good as the people who write them. Keep that drill handy and proceed apace!
WaterGirl
@Barbara: I appreciate the explanation.
WaterGirl
@eclare: I don’t think that would work since they send me a notice every year saying I should do quarterly payments. :-)
Nukular Biskits
@WaterGirl:
I’ll have to add that one to my collection.
Ms. Biskits gave me a box of dad jokes for Christmas – probably a hundred cards, each with one dad joke on it. Some are awful.
I share/inflict the daily dad joke on my daily mgr’s meeting.
They Call Me Noni
No big projects left on our home after 10 years of non-stop construction of one type or another but the oldest grandson and his wife bought a new spec home late last year so lots of opportunities there. First order of business is painting the inside. Naturally the builders used the cheapest paint available so cleaning the walls is futile and drives them nuts. Mr. Noni was there most of yesterday helping to get the spring yard chores/maintenance done. They have lots of plans for the inside and outside, not much money and no tools to speak of so we feature heavily in said plans. But we are retired, have lots of experience, all the time and all the tools. They are eager to learn so that’s good.
Nukular Biskits
@BellyCat:
My problem with this particular project is that the directions keep changing the perspective, repeatedly forcing me to do 3D rotations in my head extrapolated from a 2D image on paper.
And, like I said yesterday, they offer an app you can download to help with construction but I’m too manly for that silliness.
Matt McIrvin
@Shalimar: But these are Democrats calling for his head, which makes it less likely that this is some shell game concocted to make Musk the fall guy for all the destruction.
Musk, meanwhile, has been tweeting about the agenda to eliminate “low-productivity” knowledge-worker jobs in favor of “high-productivity” low-skill factory assembly jobs and… mining. This is our glorious future, workin’ in the coal mine. I hate to say it, but some of the left bloviation about “bullshit jobs” feeds into this, though the people making it probably imagined replacing them with UBI instead.
eclare
@WaterGirl:
Well if you ever miscalculate them…
WhatsMyNym
@Matt McIrvin:
I rode on it when it was at the shopping mall. I thought it was great, but then I must have been only 14.
Matt McIrvin
@WhatsMyNym: In between it spent a few years at the Alabama State Fairgrounds. I recently saw a video pointing out that this means that one roller coaster had the first coaster inversions in three states (Illinois, Alabama and New Hampshire).
There won’t be any more, I’m afraid, since it’s scrap now… They haven’t even put anything into the plot where it was, though the logical thing would be to make the water park bigger.
frosty
I already have one of those! It’s called my To-Do List. I need to update it though … maybe later today.
rikyrah
Looking at the fallout in the bond market..
they thought that they would be slick by doing all the insider trading in the stock market, because they arrogantly assumed that nothing would happen to the bond market.
instead, they put a torpedo on the bond market
because they are right….
the UNITED STATES IS NOT A SAFE PLACE TO INVEST IN RIGHT NOW
NOBODY ELSE IS GOING TO PUT THEIR FAITH IN THIS COUNTRY LIKE HIS PHUCKING CULT.
THE REST OF THE WORLD DOESN’T BELONG TO HIS PHUCKING CULT 🤬🤬🤬
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: He just torched the concept of the risk free rate, that is the foundation of modern finance
And the idiots who want to destroy capitalism have really no idea of what they seek. I think this country is the least prepared to be the one to tough it out from the fallout of the Orange One’s self destructive policies. China on the other hand…
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
Suzanne
@Barbara:
The joke we have in my office is, ” The contractor says, ‘Here’s my yacht, it’s called ‘Change Order’.”
My kitchen is my mushroom project.
Princess
@Omnes Omnibus: I did see her on Bluesky last night, sounding cheerful. (I’m pretty sure it was last night)
Baud
@Princess:
AL had a post here last night. I assume she’s just taking it easy until she’s 100%.
Almost Retired
We made the decision last year to age in place. So we decided to start a complete (but mostly cosmetic) overhaul of our house last October. New flooring and bathrooms, molding, kitchen, upgraded furniture (now that we no longer have small boys and large dogs), some built-ins, etc.
Hey, I thought with yet another of my always brilliant ideas: Rather than move out for a few weeks and have everything done at once, let’s do it in stages and stay at home. Sort of a one room at a time strategy. That will be less painful, right? RIGHT??!?!?
Also, we can gradually pay for it in stages by drawing as necessary from our soaring 401ks, right? RIGHT?!?
Plus, I couldn’t imagine that there would be any reason why the costs of materials would soar in 2025 or that there would be any sort of artificially-created labor shortage, right? RIGHT?!?
Happy to offer my consulting services for your own home improvement project.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
True. But the prize goes to actual capitalists who supported Trump over Harris and Republicans over Democrats.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: True but they have more of a $$ cushion to save themselves from their stupidity.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m still here! Life stuff is *complicated* & I’ve temporarily lost access to the garden-photos email account, is all. Plus, the weekly covid/bird flu posts will be update-as-essential for a while, but that’s probably good for all of us.
Thanks for asking
schrodingers_cat
@Anne Laurie: Good to see you commenting. Get well soon.
frosty
I’ve had to think hard to come up with a “mushroom” project (love that!). All of our big ones have been done by contractors. I guess the one that added time and money was the two-story addition to our 100-year old foursquare. The contractor was taking out one of the walls and came across some knob-and-tube wiring. Told us “I’m not doing anything else until all of this is replaced.” and skedaddled to work on one of his other jobs, leaving us with his nephew who was an electrician. A couple thousand dollars later the contractor came back and finished the job.
The nephew? I don’t think he was licensed. He used new work boxes instead of old work boxes so they aren’t attached firmly to the wall. He couldn’t figure out how to run a neutral so that the three-way front hall switch would work upstairs. And didn’t finish all the K&T replacement.
I’ve got a scope for an electrician that I started three years ago that includes this stuff and a bunch of other things. I need to get that finished without procrastinating much longer LOL.
@Suzanne: When I saw WG’s topic my first thought was your kitchen!
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: Dare Obasanjo just pointed out that the economic rhetoric is reminiscent of nothing so much as Communist purges–less Hitler and more Mao or Pol Pot. Eliminate all the bullshit useless government activity performed by effete bourgeois intellectuals–science, education, regulation of industry–and get everyone back into manly jobs like resource mining and factory manufacturing. Let’s build a million backyard blast furnaces!
The interesting thing is that the Big Tech guys keep finding reasons to sign on to this. Maybe just because they imagine they can use AI to keep going without workers.
Barry
So here is a project that I and a couple of friends are working on.
A mutual friend is getting out after 5 years for a violent felony.
We are trying to find housing. He will have a job upon getting out (unless things change).
Does anybody have any suggestions?
Sincerely,
Barry
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie:
Okay then. That’s a relief.
karen gail
@WaterGirl: House projects are horror stories; back in late 80’s bought an old house, needed windows replaced and insulation added. Then went to family reunion and one person asked just how old house was and what was foundation? So everything was put on hold, house had been gutted for preparation for insulation; while basement was dug and built. Ended up taking 11 years of living with remodeling before was done enough that no longer had to live in construction zone. For the most part it was do it ourselves as most contractors wanted arm, leg and firstborn child to work on place.
Baud
If this wasn’t a baby, I’d swear he or she was an actor.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Nominated!
Kayla Rudbek
@WaterGirl: there’s a book about this so an Amazon/Barnes & Noble/Bookshop/Thriftbooks search is safer
Spanky
@Anne Laurie:
I agree, and consequently hope we see them rarely. Be well!
Bruce K in ATH-GR
I’m not in the best position to have major ongoing projects at the moment. Flying out of the Free World and back to the US on Thursday; I guess I can observe how thick a veneer of morality covers the encroaching fascist police state when I pass through border control with my American passport and pasty white face. Then the following Tuesday, under the knife. Surgeon says only a 2 percent chance of something going wrong. Then about six weeks of healing. Then I can think about major projects once again, once I can return to the Free World.
Suzanne
@frosty: We have gotten as far as the fridge replacement and removing the upper cabinets. In my entryway are the tile samples, and I did the new kitchen drawing and found a GC. But we are getting new HVAC this week, FSM willing, and this the kitchen will have to wait.
My current strategy is riding on winning the lottery next month!
Professor Bigfoot
I just need to get to the main project: adding soil to the back yard to raise the level up so that it no longer slopes down and wets the basement.
This will involve pulling up pavers, taking down fencing (also repairing said fencing from the piece of tree that fell on it three… no it was… oh, nevermind.
Then there’s emptying the toolshed, moving the toolshed, and FINALLY get a few cubic meters of soil delivered.
Stoop labor. <sigh> I am not a lawn and garden kinda guy; that was my dad, that’s my daughter but it ain’t me.
GOOD MORNIN’, Y’ALL!
narya
@Barry: See if there is a group of formerly incarcerated folks who are doing re-entry services. I read an article recently–NO clue where, or I’d link it–and connecting with other formerly incarcerated folks seems to be really important for not being re-incarcerated. Also, they all recommended therapy, STRONGLY. There may be a group living situation those folks are aware of, if housing is the immediate need. Good luck to you and to your friend; here’s hoping that they’re committed to making the changes necessary and get the support they need for that.
WaterGirl
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: Yikes that is coming up fast! It’s been so long in the planning, and then, boom, it’s here.
So will the anxiety about the travel make for less anxiety about the surgery? Hopefully so, and not anxiety squared. :-)
Kristine
@WaterGirl: @Barbara:
Yup. Although the main reason I would like to do it is so that I can experience living in a neat, organized house for a while.
The main thing I’ve done recently is thin out my clothes and shoes. The last pass was pretty granular—yes, it fits and is fine for around the house but do I actually like it? The county waste management agency recycles textiles and they take just about everything.
Books need to be thinned by at least half. Spare room cleared out/bedroom set donated.
And then there’s the basement…and the garage.
Ruckus
I haven’t owned a home for a few years, I live in a seniors apartment complex. We have gardeners that do all the outdoor work every Monday. Place always looks great. Very few young kids, any one with young kids are likely watching their great grand kids. Like one of my friends. And empty apartments do not stay empty long. The manager once told me that there were 14 people on the waiting list, most people that live here are single, the oldest I know is 98, with a few in the their 90s, most are 70s and 80s.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
I’ve made several comparisons already of Trump 2 to Pol Pot. (I was aware of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in real time, but too young to bother paying much attention to it.)
frosty
Please report back. I will probably be doing the same thing this summer.
NotMax
@Suzanne
Landlord sprung for a new fridge in the cottage, installed in mid-January. The new one has an Energy Star rating, and since it was plugged in my electric bill has been slashed by 25% each month.
And it is much quieter when running than the old one, too.
lowtechcyclist
The big project I need to get to is finishing the basement. I’d ordered some home renovation books awhile back, but they’re mostly about re-doing already-finished spaces, and didn’t seem to apply particularly well to this project. While reading this thread, the idea occurred to me that there might be books out there that are specifically about finishing a basement. And there are, so I ordered a few from ThriftBooks.
Matt McIrvin
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: The thing I’ve noticed over the years is that CBP is always pretty nice to me, and the process for that has become increasingly streamlined, but the line has been slow at times because they’re harassing someone ahead of me who doesn’t look like a corn-fed white grandpa. They’re not particularly subtle about it.
YY_Sima Qian
@Matt McIrvin: The current US tariff scheme is actually promoting the industrial transformation underway in the PRC. The labor intensive, low value added goods are still subject to 145% tariff, which the PRC government over the past decade has been facilitating Chinese businesses to offshore a significant portion to SE & S Asia, only what could be significantly automated are being kept in the country. It is doing so because the blue collar semi-skilled & unskilled labor force is rapidly aging & set to decrease significantly in the coming decade.
The consumer electronics & computing goods just exempted represent the higher tech sectors that the PRC is embracing, given that the college & technical school educated cohorts are set to expand rapidly well into the 2040s. Of course, the final assembly of mobile phones & computers is actually low valued added, & some of that has been & will be offshored from the PRC to places such as Vietnam & India, & what is staying in country is increasingly automated.
The Trump-Biden trade war from 2018 onward precipitated a lot of rerouting of PRC exports to the US through 3rd countries, whether via transshipment, relabeling, or final assembly. To the extent that Western MNCs pivoted to a “China+1” supply chain strategy to reduce their exposures to geopolitical risk, they’ve often done so by asking their Chinese suppliers to shift/expand assembly work from the PRC to places such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, & India, filling their new factories w/ a lot of Chinese made equipment, significantly staffed by Chinese managers, engineers, & initially even technicians & operators. This had the effect of binding the PRC’s trade partners in the Global South even more closely to the Sino-centric pan-Asian supply chain, than when these goods were assembled in the PRC & exported directly to the US.
In most respects, the trade war was an abject failure in terms of “de-risking” from the PRC. The supply chains became longer, more opaque, more complex & more brittle (because there are now more links in the chain), increasing cost (because of the additional shipping & customs clearances, & the fact that for many products & production processes these new countries are in fact more expensive than the PRC, in spite of much lower labor costs), all w/o actually reducing dependence on the PRC (which still provides critical components & production processes).
The new tariff landscape, after the walk backs, will cause some painful adjustments for parts of export oriented parts of the PRC industry directly serving the US market, due to the suddenness of the changes, but in the grand scheme of things they complement the PRC’s long standing & overarching industrial & geopolitical strategy.
Probably not what MAGA had in mind…
feebog
We have a new avocado tree to plant. But first the area has to be cleared of old planter boxes and the soil in them spread around. That’s mostly done, so off to buy some pavers to put around the hole and then actually plant the tree. Don’t know how far I will get today, going to watch the last round of the Masters at some point.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
The orange menace knows so little about anything but because his brain functions on maybe a 1st grade level (and not the sharpest pencil in the room – or world series baseball stadium – actually pretty much any room or square mile he’s in..) he believes he’s the smartest whatever he is in the room. And as an ex mental health counselor I can reasonably attest that he’s not the sharpest anything, anywhere. The part that “likes” him I believe does so because of “the money.” He has some and flaunts it so he must be smart! Aww the power of “money!” For some it overpowers every other concept of life. “One must be great if they have more than me!”
lowtechcyclist
@NotMax:
BGE (formerly Baltimore Gas & Electric), our electric utility, offers free energy audits, so I took them up on it a couple years ago. It’s weird, they never said anything about heating or cooling or the hot water heater or any of the major appliances. It was all ‘this power strip will save you $7 a year’ and ‘replace your few remaining incandescent bulbs with LEDs, and that’ll save you another $12.’
What made me think of that is that we’ve got an extra fridge in the basement that dates from the early 1990s. The energy audit guys were in the basement, along with everywhere else, and they didn’t say a thing about the fridge. But your comment makes me wonder just how much electricity it uses, and whether it would make sense to replace it.
prostratedragon
@YY_Sima Qian: “Mind?”
p.a.
@lowtechcyclist: WikiP:Chinese Shadows is a book written by Simon Leys, which is the pseudonym for Belgian SinologistPierre Ryckmans. It was originally published in the French language in 1974 under the title Ombres chinoises, and was then translated into English in 1977. The book is about Leys’ six-month stay in China, which he made in 1972. Leys discusses the cultural and political destruction of the People’s Republic of China by Mao Zedong, who was the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party at the time.[1] He wrote under a pseudonym since, like other academics and journalists who refrained from criticizing China, he did not want to be barred from future visits to Beijing (Peking).[2]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Li Zhensheng (Chinese: 李振盛; pinyin: Lǐ Zhènshèng; 22 September 1940 – June 2020) was a Chinese photojournalist who captured important images from the Cultural Revolution.[1]
His employment at the HeilongjiangDaily, which followed the party line, and his decision to wear a red arm band indicating an alliance with Chairman Mao Zedong, allowed him access to scenes otherwise only described in written and verbal accounts.
His 2003 book Red-Color News Soldier exhibits both the revolutionary ideals and many of the atrocities that occurred during the Cultural Revolution. The Heilongjiang Daily newspaper had a strict policy in accordance with a government dictate that only “positive” images could be published, which consisted mostly of smiling revolutionaries offering praise for Chairman Mao. The “negative” images, which depicted the atrocities of the time, were hidden beneath a floorboard in his house before he brought them to light at a photo exhibition in 1988.
A private museum, dedicated to Li’s life and work, was opened in 2017 in Sichuan Province as a part of the Jianchuan Museum Cluster.[2]
They Call Me Noni
@Baud: Yet keeps going back for another bite! So stinkin’ cute.
YY_Sima Qian
@prostratedragon: Yes, warped minds, detached from reality, & w/ the attention span of a sparrow, & limitless capacity for self-delusion.
MagdaInBlack
Almost, WG. Almost.
(my project was short term: get up, drink coffee, get groceries. I am done )
YY_Sima Qian
@Matt McIrvin: I have posted this note from Adam Tooze before:
He presents an interesting framework for different kinds of populist political economies:
“Positive sum populism” of national reconstruction that promises a better life for the vast majority, excepting for specifically identified “Others” & other “enemies of the state”. He posits Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan & New Deal US of the mid-’30s in this group.
“Zero sum populism” of national distribution, either redistribution from the elites to the masses (the Left Wing version), or defending/extending the existing distribution favoring elites over the masses (the Right Wing version). He posits Italian Fascism of immediate post-WW I era in the Right Wing zero sum populist group, & I suppose the Bolshevik Revolution of Russia belongs in the Left Wing group, certainly Progressive Era US.
He then suggests that Trumpian MAGA is a negative sum populism that aims to tear the existing order completely asunder, in order to build a utopian fever dream from the ashes. The other example he gave was post-Cold War fUSSR, but I think Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution & Pol Pot’s entire reign are good examples, too.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: What I want to know is how long Trump and his friends think the transformation of the US into a giant of old-fashioned smokestack industry and resource extraction is going to take. Does Trump think it’ll happen during the next four years? A few months? It seems more like a 50-year project even assuming it could be done–50 years during which the US would have to be under totalitarian rule to keep discontent at the “short-term pain” down. Some of these guys, the Internet right-wing “thinkers” and the integralist types in the judiciary, probably are thinking on that time scale, but I doubt Trump is.
Matt McIrvin
@YY_Sima Qian: I think Steve Bannon wanted to follow the Nazi model, or saw Trump as a kind of fascist FDR. That was where all those Infrastructure Weeks came from. But Bannon fell out with the rest of them.
YY_Sima Qian
@rikyrah: Are you talking about this?
Not sure if this is coordinated by the PRC government (probably not), but this is effectively a direct assault on the huge US based value added (or rent seeking, depending on how one sees it) on products imported from the PRC & sold to US consumers – design, marketing, distribution, retail, etc., & profit margins at every step, while sustaining the capacity utilization of PRC exporters.
Yes, such goods would be violating IP & licensing agreements w/ the US brands, but the PRC exporters looking to survive will not care.
There is also this:
The closing of the de minimus loop whole was supposed to crimp such transactions, but US Customs probably does not have the capacity to actually enforce the new rules.
Soprano2
It took 6 years to remodel our kitchen. We have an old house, so I’m familiar with how projects grow as you discover things you didn’t know were there. Good luck!
YY_Sima Qian
@Matt McIrvin: You are right on Bannon. In hindsight, crazy as he is, his approach represents the greater risk for entrenching Fascism in America.
No One You Know
Doesn’t everyone find that all projects turn into other projects?
Maybe it’s just me.
YY_Sima Qian
View from Beijing, as relayed by a US think tanker (but one of good faith & w/ decent insight):
Matt McIrvin
@YY_Sima Qian: I do think Tooze is slightly wrong about there being no social base–I think a lot of people have vague misgivings, that are sometimes more aesthetic than practical, about the US moving away from an industrial economy to a services-based one. The idea that it’s all based on fairy dust rather than anything real. This definitely goes on across the political spectrum. If anything, I used to hear more of it from the left.
But it’s also psychosexual, and the whole blather about “manly tariffs” and the horseshoe-left reaction against Hillary Clinton 2016 tie into this. Industrial and mining jobs are real man jobs. Service jobs are woman jobs. The universities they hate are filling up with women. The forgotten man is left behind in a feminized world, etc., etc. That’s the rocket fuel propelling all this.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@frosty:
In our decades of historic restoration work, we’ve always called it “project creep”.
Previous owners of our current 1905 City Cottage didn’t disclose the knob-and-tube, all live. The irony is that it was professionally done in 1905, still worked great…unless you looked at it wrong, then it crumbled.
Regardless, my wife was the one who swam in blown-in insulation in the between spaces of upstairs/downstairs to replace it, redesign the house electric (which was a disaster), etc.
Electricians earn every cent they charge. As do masons. It’s a reason why we’ve done much of the work ourselves. When I was relaying a non-load bearing brick wall in the basement, I learned that if I had to earn a living at it, we’d starve.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Eek! We signed up for a kitchen remodel just before discovering Bemused Senior was pregnant. We had no kitchen during the entire pregnancy. If it hadn’t been for the microwave oven we might not have survived.
Ruckus
@lowtechcyclist:
Don’t know if it would save much but the concepts of manufacturing and the ability to do it far better has increased a lot in the last 50 yrs or so. (I worked in my dad’s manufacturing company for a few years and then owned it longer than he did. We made tools that made mostly consumer items, the names of many most would recognize. My last job was making a few of a part to not many millionths of an inch tolerance. And it was easy. 50-60 yrs ago it would have been almost impossible, pure luck. But it also would have been almost impossible to measure it to that small a tolerance. The parts ended up within half of the given tolerance. My point is that many things in life have changed in the last century. How we do things, how well they can be made, but one thing that’s changed the least is humans.
Bill Arnold
@YY_Sima Qian:
Donald Trump’s policies are more than dumb — they’re stupid, according to stupidity researchers (Jerry Paul Sheppard, April 9, 2025)
Several paper references (links) in the article, though most are paywalled.
An economic perspective:
Ruckus
@YY_Sima Qian:
Probably not what MAGA had in mind…
MAGA’s have minds? Whodaknown?
karen gail
@Soprano2: When we went to redo the old kitchen we discovered that the floor was logs with one side “shaved” to provide flat area to nail boards with square nails. There was also a stone lined cistern and hand dug well underneath; no clue of when was built since when checked with county about permits was in zone that was built long before Wisconsin was state and first time was recorded was when the septic tank went in; who ever put the septic tank in reported doing so to county.
Ivan X
I started inventorying all of my records and CD’s but ended up making the world’s only comprehensive New Order 1981-1989 Versionography & Player. Whether the world needed this is a separate question, but, hey, there’s my project that ended up being something else.
catclub
@Bill Arnold:
Does he write for perhaps… The Onion?
Betty
@Shalimar: I have gone from depressed to terrified about the DOGE damage and I so informed my Republican Senator for what that’s worth.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@frosty: Goodwill is your friend
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Nukular Biskits: this is wonderful!
Denali5
@Math Guy: I love this poem. I have lost many things-including a watch, a camera and an iPad. So I am familiar with losing. I did not know the poem was a villanelle. The things you learn on this blog!
Chris T.
@WaterGirl: You can compromise with a photo of how buff I’m getting doing none of this.
WaterGirl
@Chris T.: So tempting! :-)