"Probably the best Bloody Mary"

On a recent trip to San Francisco for meetings over a few days, the sign drew us in.

The Bloody Mary itself was incredible, and provided enough vegetable matter to constitute lunch.

Backfill We Must!

Happy, happy, joy, joy.

The toilets flush, the rooms downstairs are dry and we’ll be looking at carpeting in a week or three.

All is well.

Oh.

There’s still this hole in the front yard.

I watched it for a few days and didn’t notice any leaks, so we started to backfill.

For this task, I had a little help.

When we finished, this was all we had this to show for it:

The ten-slide process to voiding your Wii Warranty

I guess, if ya gotta, ya gotta.

Actually, from the picture, it looks like you’re void in step two.

Thanks to CNET for "Cracking Open the Wii".

I’m sure no one in Anaheim is happy about this ..

Los Disneys is a fictional Magic Kingdom set in the year 2015. The current release is version 2.0 .. how do I always miss the cool stuff?

Oh. I’m uncool. Gotit.

Ahem.

As the story goes, the United States government sells the Florida peninsula to the Walt Disney Company in an attempt to reduce the national debt.

Your job, in this first-person shooter is to infiltrate the Magic Kingdom in an attempt to locate and destroy the frozen head of Walt Disney.

You’re armed. Who can stop you?

Think about it: pirates, ghosts, tourists and I’m guessing, teacups. Mickey too, I’m sure.

Of course, if you do destroy the head, a doomsday .. whoops. Spoiler Alert!

Trench Warfare

A few quick snaps of the trench and the mound of dirt. The vertical white PVC is the cleanout. It’s about four feet high, giving you an idea of scale:

The Evil Coffee Maker

These nasty devices are turning up in hotels most everywhere I stay:

It’s a two-cup monstrosity that pours directly into the paper cups (I’m guessing this saves the housekeeping staff from having to clean the urns).

However, it doesn’t allow for reheating, or a second cup.

Conquering Mount Sushi

A quick snap of a sumptuous sushi mountain (well, more like a plane) served to us during a customer meeting:

Dry We Must!

Adding to the drama of the sewer back-up into the basement, we have to deal with the carpet and sheet rock that got wet. First the smell, of course, but more importantly: the risk of mold and rot.

The fine folks from a carpet / wall drying service arrived within minutes of our calling them. They have a cool device that they hold against a wall and it tells them how wet they are. Sheetrock acts like a sponge; some of the walls were wet up to 12-inches. Further, boxes of magazines and old books in both rooms (one was my office) were soaked at the bottom, begging to be unpacked (I did a lot of recycling).

With a $500 deposit, they were busy at work, pulling up the old carpet and hauling it away. Turns out the indoor / outdoor carpeting was glued to the cement floor (why would anyone do this?), so no hopes of drying it out and reinstalling it.

No matter. It was hideous anyway.

Once the carpet was up, they wheeled in 10 air movers (big fans, in the shape of a nautilus shell) and two massive de-humidifiers to pull moisture out of the air. They hooked a 220-110 volt converter to the dryer plug so the load wouldn’t blow all the circuits in the house (the de-humidifiers alone pull 10 amps each).

It sounds like planes are taking off and landing in the basement at the moment, but the air is definitely more dry and the concrete floor is no longer moist. They come back for their gear on Tuesday.

I am not looking forward to the power bill this month.

:: shudder ::

Dig We Must!

Ah, the joys of home ownership. Was quite a wild week at home for us.

The sewer backed up into the basement Tuesday night, requiring an after-hours (and thereby, even more expensive) call to a plumber.

By the way, plumbers have the coolest tools these daze. Besides their old standby, the snake, they have this camera device that runs down the pipe so they can see therein to help diagnose the problem. Suffice to say: I’ve seen enough of the inside of my sewer pipes to last me a lifetime. Even better, the camera can be detected from above ground with a divining rod-like device, identifying the location and the depth of the pipe. Note that my sewer pipes aren’t metal, making this kind of detection invaluable.

Did I mention that the house is on a private road? Hence, the fine folks from the planning office in the city have no liability for what goes on, until it reaches the city sewer main (about 250 feet from the front of my place). The were pretty specific, but not in a bad way.

2-1/2 hours later, we gave up, having traveled 125 feet into the pipe, without clearing (or even hitting) the blockage. Happily, drainage via "seepage" meant we could risk a few flushes and fast showers the following morning, but it’s dishes by hand and careful monitoring of the floor drain in the basement.

The guys helped me locate the pipe on a non-paved corner of the property, where we planned to install a ‘cleanout’. A cleanout is an access point to the sewer at a point further down the pipe (about 80 feet from the basement access point). Once installed, we’d use the cleanout to send the snake and the camera further down the pipe.

Being an action-oriented kind of guy (and having an excess of frustrated energy over the situation), I set out to dig the 3′ wide x 5′ long by 5′ deep trench on my own (my mind was telling me I’d be saving on digging expenses this way).

In a word: pain. I am feeling muscles I didn’t know I had.

Eight hours of digging later, I gave it up. I was five feet deep and three wide, but had not found the pipe. The little green line the plumber had chalked on my lawn 60-odd cubic feet of dirt ago wasn’t quite in the right place, and to make matters more interesting, the location of the pipe based on the ‘as-built’ plans from City Hall suggested the pipe was a few feet to the southeast, underneath the driveway. Ouch.

In another word, stupid. Why the hell was I doing this by hand?

Did I mention sunburn? Yes. You can get sunburned in Seattle

Turns out, I’d missed the pipe by only a few inches, and it was actually to the northwest of where I was digging. On Friday, the diggers came and found it in about thirty seconds. Within minutes, they had the trench widened using a backhoe. In another 60 minutes, they had the cleanout installed and we were ready for the plumber and his magic camera and snake.

A few hours later, the plumber found a root ball (concentration of tree roots) a ways further down the pipe and chewed through it in a matter of minutes.

We flush, therefore we are.

Sir Elton wants to shut down the Internet

Rocket Man or Space Cadet? You decide. From the article:

"Instead they sit at home and make their own records, which is sometimes OK but it doesn’t bode well for long-term artistic vision."

"We’re talking about things that are going to change the world and change the way people listen to music and that’s not going to happen with people blogging on the Internet".

"Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the Internet".

"Let’s get out in the streets and march and protest instead of sitting at home and blogging".

"I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span".

The Sun: "Why we must close the net".