I love the smell of latex paint in the morning...

To all of you who think that maybe someday you might want to take up smoking, I beg you not to. Everyday across the globe cigarette smoke is killing hundreds if not thousands of innocent ceilings. Three years into this house and we’re finally getting rid of the “natural” orange khaki color the nicotine and tar made our ceilings throughout the living room, and I assure you it is not an easy process. We bought a 5 gallon tub of Kilz2 which pours out with the consistency of a smooth milkshake and after the first coat the ceiling was a whiter shade of tan. KILZ!!! Its name states its objective quite clearly but even it couldn’t stop it from bleeding through the first coat! The stain also infected the roller causing the nap to turn into a disease-laden yellow after only a few passes. Towards the end of the first coat just as I was loading the roller up for the last little section I started smelling cigarette smoke. I think it was the ceiling letting me know that it would not go quietly into the night, and it most definitely has not gone quietly…

I’d also like to say that to all of you with a house built after the Harding administration and have sheetrock walls, know that you are a blessed people. A consistent surface texture, the ability to cut new outlets into it with ease, simple to patch, and relatively inexpensive; your world is foreign to me. Our walls are made out of shiplap or horizontal wood boards that have a thin covering of heavy paper glued over them. That’s it. Of course on top of that we have a veritable (potentially toxic) stratum of paint and wallpaper layering the surface. Two to three layers of wall paper (not including the top one I stripped off), three layers of paint, a thin layer of pure evil with a white primer on top. This does not create the smoothest of surfaces even if there weren’t eight-five years of cuts, gouges and scrapes riddling its ancient shell.

Spackle is a cruel mistress! Did you know that? It tempts you into thinking that if you just put a dab here and a skosh there that all your troubles will disappear. Lies! You’ll find yourself coming back time and time again to get your fix only to find that the more you use it, the worse it gets! You sand it down to try to smooth it out but that creates some dips in the surface so you add more but now there’s a bump in the middle so you sand again, over and over this cyclical life flows until your fingers are so caked with spackle that they form a sort of mitt and when you sneeze a white unidentifiable substance comes out!

If I can get through this experience without painting the furniture, floor, or animals, without falling off the ladder and without sanding my way through a wall I will consider it a success.

Is it bad that no matter where I am I smell paint?....

Lego Cake FTW!

I love that my generation is now influential and productive in our society. Geek movies abound, being a nerd is almost trendy and lego related products are flooding the market. It's a glorious time!

Baby hand soap

creepy...really really creepy. I think I might have to buy some...

Spiderweb repair

I love this! Its a very whimsical kind of art. I also love the fact that she would always find her patches rejected and on the ground the next day with the web fully and beautifully repaired by the resident spider.

maybe they don't like the color red...

Legos on ice!

I'm not a big consumer of ice. I typically don't drink soda, and even when I do I find that my refrigerator does a decent enough job of cooling my beverage because, well it refrigerates. I find ice annoying and impolite because of the following;
First off ice has the nasty habit of stinging my upper lip when I go to take a drink. It pushes its way to the front of the glass and tries to bully its way into your mouth, smashing into it with its frosty brawn! Secondly, it's Arctic capacity is such that it cools the refreshment to the point that it hurts the teeth! It's frostbolts of pain shoots through my skull like a thousand needles and show no mercy to the parched party. The final and desperate act of the doomed ice is to dilute the very beverage that you are enjoying! Does it's rudeness know no bounds!? to pollute the refreshment, to throw off the balance of it's perfectly measured qualities is abhorrent! Thus, I chose not to use ice and instead trust my refrigerator to do what it was made for, what it was named for, and keep the temperature of my liquids chilled.

If however I felt that my refrigerator was not holding up to its end of the bargain and that my drink needed a cooling supplement I would form my glacial foe in this! This product is genius! A impish grin appears on my face when I think of the possibilities...

N = C + {fb (cm) . fb (tc)} + fb (Ts) + fc . ta equals bacon goodness

I love the British. They had a team of experts from Leeds university research the best way to make the perfect Bacon Butty. I have never had a bacon butty but I can say with utmost surety that since it consists of bread, butter, and bacon I would love it like I've loved no other sandwich before... Okay that might have gone to a weird place... I think it's great that the "American" version of the butty is the BLT. Ironic that us, the fatties of the world take a perfectly brilliant sandwich and destroy it by adding veggies. horrible.

I for one will be going back to the old country ways, removing above mentioned abominations and eat the butty the way it was supposed to be, the way science intended it! Bread! Bacon! Perfection!

Super Wedding Cake!!

This is the coolest wedding cake I've ever seen! Its really well done too. The details on the shells and bricks are amazing.

More photos here

Pool shark

Good Googly Moogly!
Could you imagine just hanging out in a pool one summer day, you dive under the water and you see something heading towards you, your eyes focus and you're faced with this?! It makes me wonder what my scream would sound like underwater.

I'm a tad concerned by how much this picture reminds me of our cat Pounce. He likes water more than the average cat and frequently walks the edge of the tub, slipping every now and then only to catch himself just in the nick of time. When I take a bath I have a tendency to wear my goggles so that I can do some deep tub diving and I'm worried that sooner or later this photo will become a reality in the Trapp household, and all Tanis will hear will be a splash followed by the muffled screams of her late husband.

"we're gonna need a bigger boat..."

incognito...

On my way home from work a few weeks ago I heard about a story on NPR that made me laugh. The concept to me is genius and was lucky enough to find the original article written by a journalist at the Washington Post.

During the early morning rush in the entrance to the L'Enfant Plaza building in Washington D.C. a man in his late thirties wearing a t-shirt, jeans and a baseball cap pulls out a violin, throws some change into the case and starts to play. This is nothing out of the ordinary as street performers are a dime a dozen, but this one is different. His name is Joshua Bell and he's "...one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made."

Let the social experiment begin...

the full video can be found here

Like sands through the hour glass...

So are the days of my life...

I blame my mother for knowing that intro as well as the cheesy melodramatic music that is now playing in my head!....I wonder if Bo is still alive....

So anyways back to the point of this post. My life has switched gears. I'm not really sure if it's a downshift or an upshift or maybe it's both! My lovely, beautiful, amazingly awesome wife is with child which means that the measurement, the very gauge at which I tally my life has switched from the universally accepted years to the rather diminutive unit of weeks. Everything is in weeks now. Months and years are no longer an object that can be quantified by your brain. It's really a rather strange phenomenon! You wake one day up and everything is normal, you're 26 years old and you have about 8 months until your next birthday. The next day however you wake up to find that you're 1352 weeks old and you only have roughly 32 more weeks until you're 1404 weeks old! People come up to you and ask you, "Hey what are you doing next month? Maybe we can get together and have lunch." and you're still stuck trying to figure out what "month" means....mon...monnnnthhhh. Okay so its not actually that bad and I totally understand why its broken down that way for the first nine months, I mean during those 7 day intervals amazing things are happening! In one weeks time your soon to be prodigy goes from looking more like Kermit the Frog's earlier years to a micro-machine version of your great uncle Harry. Its unbelievable! My kid is growing his/her arms in a week and I can't even get my dirty dishes off of my desk and into the dishwasher in that time! He's 8 weeks old (inside-womb-old) and already he's more efficient than I am!!

Here's where I really don't understand the whole week thing though. The baby is born and they're 4 months old but no one says they're 4 months, no! They say, "He's 16 weeks" Why? Is it because 16 is a larger number and it makes the parents feel like the baby is older than he/she actually is, or is it because the parents have forgotten how to use the month and year measurement and it takes them a bit to get back into the habit of using them.

In any event I'm sure these next 32 odd weeks will go by quick.

We live in a Harry Town!

So Amazon.com is doing a contest to find the Harry-est town in America. The town that on a per capita basis, is pre-ordering the most copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows wins! The winning town receives a $5,000 Amazon.com gift certificate to a charitable organization of its choice. Currently Snohomish is number 10! Our town rules!! Now if you'll excuse me I have to go order our copy...

The Happy Couple

Tanis is playing WoW!!! (World of Warcraft for all you non gamers) She's currently a level 9 Night Elf Priest named Shaelea but she'll be higher in no time. This is a picture of the two of us. (We're happy I swear) I started a new night elf hunter named Frogurt so we could level up together. We're also getting her into the Liquid Courage guild which I and many others from Seed church are apart of. It's the best guild ever! Anyways its really awesome that she's playing and I'm super proud of how well she's doing. I have the best wife!

So if any of you start playing WoW and/or you're on the server Cenarius look us up!

Watch your back!

Frogurt and Shaelea

360 ethernet

Tanis and I purchased an Xbox 360 a couple months ago and with that came the need to hook it up to the interweb so that we can destroy our friends in a friendly game of Uno via Xbox Live. Since our house was built in 1922 (just a few years before the Internet really took off) we don't have a nice network (Cat 5) outlet like many of them new fancy schmancy homes come with, and because our home network is not yet sans-wires I knew I had a interesting home improvement project in front of me.

We had a two prong outlet right next to the TV outlet so I figured the best place to install the network port would be in the existing TV outlet. They have this sweet multifunctional system out there now that allows you to do just that. You get to pick and chose the ports you want (CAT 5, phone, TV) up to six different ports and put them into one outlet! It took a couple trips to the hardware store to get the ones I wanted but I think it turned out pretty good.

The problem I ran into was that the TV outlet wasn’t installed correctly. The guy that put it in decided that drilling straight through the wall from the outside instead of feeding the wire under the house and up the wall was a better way…or at least easier. This meant I couldn’t follow the tv cable as a guide to help me feed my CAT 5 cable up the wall. The other issue was that the hole didn’t have the appropriate non-electrical box that allows you to screw in a standard face plate and wasn’t the standard size to even fit the box in the first place. Our walls our made out of wood ship lap which made expanding the hole a little more difficult. (also excuse the state of our walls. We're in the process of removing the wallpaper.) In the end though I was able to feed the wire up the wall and connect the 360 to Xbox Live.




While I was at it I replaced the two prong outlet because as you can see from the pictures, it was a little scary looking.

I love a good cutaway!

I just ran across these retro cutaways and I think they're really cool. I have the book Incredible Cross-sections which is really well done and looks great, although the artists fascination with bathrooms is a little odd... Anyways I just love to get lost in the details of these kind of drawings, and these old ones illustrated by Frank Soltesz are the bees knees! To see how a 1940's department store operated back then is really interesting to me. I mean I'm pretty sure Nordstroms doesn't have a "fur Vault" above their bakery, and I had no idea that frozen orange juice was "...made by a fascinating new process that removes water without affecting taste or vitamins."

I was also absolutely unaware that Armstrongs Corkboard and fiberglas* was so incredibly important to just about every industry in this great nation of ours. Armstrong, I salute you!



Also in the photo set is this random picture Soltesz did. I think it's great! As a man I hate it when I'm scuba diving and taking pictures of the tropical fish when a giant squid comes up and attacks me! Curse them! Luckily like the man pictured I carry a knife for just such an occasion. It'll be calamari for dinner tonight!

*OCFCorp.

Modern Stupidity

I always get a kick out of high end pet toys or furniture. Paying an exorbitant amount of money for something your cat or dog is going to destroy is hilarious to me. Spending over $250 on an item they're meant to destroy...even better. I found this on a Modern Contemporary design(aka: snooty) blog. For those of you who don't know much about cat accessories let me explain. Cats like to claw, particularly nice expensive furniture. I have a theory that where some animals in the wild kingdom can smell fear, cats can smell money. This is a game to them. They have a running tally in their heads of the gross retail value which they've maimed and/or utterly destroyed (more points for the latter of course). After destroying an item or items they go hang out with their cat friends and compare to see who has done the most destruction that week. I'm not sure if the winner gets a prize or if its purely ceremonial but never the less a winner is chosen and that cat can hold their head even higher for that one week. Dogs have a similar game but typically aren't allowed in the cat's league for obvious reasons. At any rate because cats like to claw furniture someone came up with the great, environmentally friendly, and semi-inexpensive alternative to a wood or carpet scratching post by gluing cardboard strips together to form a nice flat scratching surface. You can find these at pretty much any pet store and they're relatively cheap, although for the materials they should be cheaper. Cats love them! The moment they step onto the cardboard they start scratching like mad, it's great! They're happy, your furniture is happy, its a win win. Within a couple weeks to a month however(depending on how many cats you have and how often they use it) the board starts to become worn and gross looking. The cat(s) have attacked it with all the fervor of an Italian leather ottoman and it shows. Gaping craters are all that remains of once uniform cardboard strips and brown confetti shrapnel litters the floor in the surrounding blast zone. Which is where the idea of spending forty plus dollars on any cardboard-esk cat item becomes ridiculous. The Cat Cocoon as I believe its called retails for $298. $298!!! It's cardboard! Granted it's lazercut cardboard and it does look pretty cool but it's still cardboard and any cat that receives this hip little item will go Edward Scissorhands on it not only because its made out of cardboard but because they can smell the retail price, and this potent combo will send them into a contact high that even Cheech and Chong would admire. So to the people out there who actually purchased this item I laugh at you and your Modern Contemporary Stupidity, but at least your cat was the winner for that week...

You know my name...

So I finally saw the latest 007 movie and I have to say its probably my favorite new one, and when I say new I mean post-Connery. The new one does do away with a lot of the typical Bond shtick but the cool thing is that you don't really miss them. The gadgets were always cool but this Bond doesn't need gadgets...although I'm sure a set of armored undies would have been nice. The one liners that would make just about everyone gag are gone and have been replaced with intelligent and witty banter.

Daniel Craig does a great job as Bond. I'll admit that when I first heard about him being selected as the new Bond I was less than enthusiastic. He didn't look at all like what I thought Bond was supposed to look like! He had blond hair, blue eyes and I didn't think he was all that attractive looking. Well I'm man enough to admit that I was wrong. Craig acts the part by being debonair and smooth when he needs to be and cold and calculating when in danger. His physique is pretty nice too. Its good to see a bond who is in shape, which is probably why there are so many scenes with him running at top speed instead of jumping into his Aston Martin to chase people down.

Vesper Lynd. I really liked this Bond Girl. I don't think you once see her in a bikini or skimpy outfit, in fact I think you see more of Craig then you see of her. This isn't exactly a good thing but it is very different from all the other Bond flicks. What I liked about Vesper was that she was supposed to be an intelligent accountant and what with Eva Green's acting ability and her well written dialog it makes you think that this is actually possible, unlike Denise Richards playing an American nuclear physicist in The World is Not Enough. I mean come on! She's not physicist! She probably can't even spell physicist! I really enjoyed how Vesper played off of Bond and from time to time got the better of him.

So what didn't I like. I didn't like how it felt like there were multiple endings to the movie. At least two times you think, "Oh now everything is good, they're safe, they won!" but no... Something else happens and everything revs back up. The only other thing I didn't like was that about a 3/4 of the way through the movie kind of goes chick flick on you. Luckily this doesn't last too long and its back to the bullets flying and people dying motif that I enjoy.

The only other thing I'll mention is that in the film Bond has to endure one of the most painful torture methods I've ever seen. Now its not that there's blood or that its graphics in any way because its not, you don't see anything at all really. Its just the method that is used that is just painful to watch. For me anyways...

In any event I recommend this movie. Good story, good action sequences, good acting and a sweet theme song by Chris Cornell.

first post!

Well it will have to do but I don't like it. I wanted my blog to have a different style but as my html skills aren't the best this will have to hold me for the time being.