Happy Canada Day!

to all our canadian friends, a happy Canada Day! Wish we were up there to celebrate in person.

Short night on the blog tonight; dinner with a friend (He showed up in a red Roots track suit, Laurie had her Victoria Commonwealth Games T-shirt, and I grabbed a Calgary Stampede hat), down at Red Sea for Ethiopian. It was an old standard during the days at National Semi, and we’re slowly working it back into the rotation again. Almost 20 years later, still there, same typos on the menu. Then back here for various discussions and some time out back with the binocs (too lazy to pull the Meade) looking at Jupiter. Mars is coming, and I swear, I’m spending time with the scope. I’m still irritated I never had one free night where lack of work and lack of clouds coincided during Saturn’s run….

We’ve finished getting bids on getting the house painted. will likely call the contractor tomorrow to schedule. It’s more than we wanted, but the work the house needs to get prepped is, too, and we’re not willing to cheap out to save dollars, only to need to repaint in five years. If we do it right now, we can have something that’ll handle 10 or more years, and make the repaint much nicer…

And we’re starting to talk about concrete guys about the patio work, although given what we’re spending on the paint, it’s more for planning purposes than getting it done now, unless some miracle happens (say, Apple realizes what a great, useful contributor I am, and… oh, yeah, right… *grin*). We’re figuring up to $5K in hardscaping work front and back by the time we’re done. Be interesting to see how close we come to the real estimate — we were about a third low on the paint (2500 vs. 3500), but in retrospect, with the amount of prep work needed, I’m not suprised.

The nice thing is, once the paint is done and the hardscaping, the only major work left is replacing the electrical service ($2000 for the upgrade to 200 amp circuit breakers, plus, probably, another grand moving a sub panel into the garage and rewiring the garage up to snuff for the workshop. Maybe another grand plus drywall work to fully upgrade the wiring…). And then the bones of the house are finally done for the next decade, or longer. I still have a bunch of internal projects, but it’s mostly cosmetic and cleanup and rethinking usage, at least until we get to the kitchen, and if you don’t start with the bones, doing the cosmetic stuff is silly (part of me thinks the electrical should have been done by now, but we got tired of spending money on stuff hidden behind walls, and our current system is working fine. knock on wood)

picking a contractor is a subject of its own. Was going to write about it tonight, but we sat and talked instead (about penta-quarks, politics and the future of the British royal family, among other things… Until I did my normal and mixed up a couple of shakespeare names and ended up with the play Richard V, which of course doesn’t exist. So we invented it.

We gave up once we hit “Richard V: a tragedy about a man, the crown he gave up, and the sheep he gave it up for”.

I don’t think Ashland’s going to produce this one any time soon…

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