The Age Flip-Flop

For some reason, it occurred to me early on that the older I get the faster I rush headlong into being "comparatively older." That is to say, as each year goes by my comparisons for age distance themselves from me by two years. Of course, I need to not sound like Wooderson when talking about this ("that's what I love about high school girls, man – I keep gettin' older and they stay the saaaaaame aaaaage").

Let's take a look at the more-awesome-by-the-minute Boston Bruins on their championship run. I've loved the Bs since I was a kid, when they were all old guys. In this year's playoff roster, I'm older than everyone but PJ Axelsson, Manny Fernandez, Shane Hnidy, Mark Recchi (well, duh), Tim Thomas, Aaron Ward, and Stephane Yelle. That's 28% of the roster. More than I'd thought, actually. Milan Lucic, the baby of the team, is 11 years younger than me.

I'm not saying I'm old, either – I'm a ripe 32. That's the crazy thing, too. And it's not just sports heroes. I realized that eventually instead of seeing that Bea Arthur died (bless her soul, of course), I'm eventually going to see people like Trent Reznor and Kim Deal pass on. David Bowie and Stevie Nicks. I'm going to see the rest of Skinny Puppy leave this place.

I don't mean to focus on death. God knows we've had enough of that around here lately. It's not just that, anyway. As I get used to seeing my doctor every year (instead of just when I was sick every three years in my 20s), I realize that he's going to retire before I'm done seeing a doctor. Come on, he's awesome. I don't want to have to find another one.

Point being that I'm rapidly approaching the age where I'm older than my sports heroes, my favorite musicians, my doctor, my dentist, etc. Of course, this is going to sound ridiculous to anyone older than me. But hey, we all learn some time. It's just going to take some getting used to.

np: Tegan and Sara - Where Does The Good Go?

Downstairs Flooring Project: Moved In

This is the last one, I promise. I assured myself I'd write about something other than our downstairs before we settled in and moved things down and started living there, which of course would come with pictures and the like. Partially because I'm lazy and partially because we ended up doing a whole lot today, this was not meant to be. And hey, these entries are easier!

Above: What was passing as the family room upstairs.

Long story short, we spent today cleaning the rest of everything – damp-sponging the walls, scrubbing the wide shelf around the whole area and the shelves on one wall, vacuuming, and getting rid of crap – and then moving the chaise, the couch, the TV (which proved to be hardest of all), all of the electronics and video games, plus all of our books, DVDs, and video games down and set up shop.

Above: I've been dreaming of filling those shelves with books and DVDs for
a year and a half. It was terribly satisfying to finally put crap on them.

We ended up fulcruming the chaise over the railing to get it down, which is probably the smartest idea I had all day. We thought that would be heaviest and hardest, but it turned out to be rather easy. The love seat afterwards was slightly more difficult, and the TV, left for the end, of course turned out to be the worst – it's a 42" plasma; you'd think it'd be easy to move but even with handles on the back it's heavy, front-weighted, and awkward. We got the speakers off the sides and it got a lot easier to manage. Everything else was batches of small stuff – DVDs, books (OK, a lot of books), video games, etc.

Above: It's not perfect, but we're getting there. Then again, it may
not ever look "professional" to me when I'm the one setting it up.

Of course, re-wiring a TV, cable box, and three video game systems is always more fun than it looks. It's a bunch of crap back there, but it's all hooked up. I wish there was some sort of cable-tangle-coverup, though I suppose the solution is a media cabinet, which is in the cards eventually. Step one, move down. Step two, get some real furniture.

Above: Who'd have thought that the biggest piece of furniture was the easiest to move?

In the meantime, I think it's about time for a housewarming party.

Downstairs Flooring Project done!

OK, we've gotten the obligatory depressing post out of the way. Let's hope we don't have to go there again.

In better news, the downstairs floor is done. It's been done for a couple of weeks but, as the back of my mind predicted, the idea of keeping a blog current is much easier than actually doing it in real life.

I said a ways back that I'd talk about the choices we made, so here goes. We wanted to keep this project as green as possible, so as we looked to materials and contractors we kept that at the forefront.

Above: A close-up of the carpet plus a look at our sloppy paint job.

For contractors, it was a pretty easy decision. We do most of our materials shopping at Green Depot so we asked them for some recommended contractors and they said that whenever possible they go with Boston Green Building. We gave them a call and they said their flooring guy, Ray Bumpus, is certified in Marmoleum installation (we were originally thinking Marmoleum for the hallway) and likes to work off-hours which was fine with us. We met with him and went over our ideas and concerns, all of which he listened to and lent his expertise where needed.

Above: Another close-up, carpet on the left and cork
on the right with a nice transition.

At this point, we got serious about materials. We visited Harry's Carpet One in Quincy, in part on Ray's recommendation and in part because Green Depot's selection wasn't terribly big. We spent quite a while there and came down to some finalists, though in doing so realized that Green Depot's selection isn't terribly big because, when you get right down to it, green flooring materials is still not too big a business. There are options, but when you're going green you're definitely limiting yourself to certain styles, colors, and materials. It's still important to us, though, so we found it easy to make certain concessions. We wanted natural wool carpet – I leave out the word "organic" because we learned that it's incredibly hard to actually certify wool as organic; much like corn it can pick up non-organic contaminents on the wind in the growing process – and while looking at options for hallway tile we started to consider natural cork instead of Marmoleum. Both are quite eco- and health-friendly, but cork ends up a much more earthy look and it started growing on us.

Above: He even joined it to the crappy old carpet in
the storage room so we can take our time with
whatever we end up doing in there.

With some finalists, with notes and photos, in mind, we returned to Green Depot to compare what we'd originally looked at. In the end, we both realized The One was there after all and ended up ordering Jamaica Bay in "Night Owl" by DMI, one of the leaders in natural wool carpet. We also ended up with Coreia by expanko for the cork.

We had to do a moisture test to be able to put the cork down, so Ray set up a kit that essentially places an uncovered canister of calcium chloride salts on the bare concrete, sealed under a plastic dome. It sits for something like 60-72 hours, after which you pull up the dome, seal the container, and weigh it on a scale accurate to 0.10g. This turned out to be rather difficult to find, and we ended up taking it to our local pharmacy to weigh. We had to take that weight and do calculations with that, the original weight, and the number of hours the test was run to determine how many pounds of water per 1,000 square feet it absorbed. expanko doesn't recommend installing at anything 3.3 or above, which would also be a problem for the carpet, and we came in at a perfect 2.015.

Above: Denali inspects the finished cork installation.
And yes, we need to add a door sweep on that door.

From there the install went pretty quickly. As with any renovation job, it's always the demo that takes so much longer and this was no different. After pulling up the carpets and working on the old, dessicated pad and adhesive with scrapers and buffers, it was finally determined via group decision that we had to get into some sort of chemical solution. Ray had a product he'd used before that is about as gentle as one can get while still being effective, so we OKed that and things got easier. Once they started laying tile and carpet, they were done in a total of 6 hours or so (spread over two days as they were working nights and weekends).

Above: The finished carpet install. Homeowner-tested, Murphy approved.

All told, we love it. We still have some cleanup to do from our sloppy paint job and some residual dust from the buffer work, but we're getting there. Coming soon: housewarming party!

Invincibility

Sorry for the drag.

It's easy to feel invincible. ...Until X. Until someone gets sick. Until you hit NN years old. Until someone has a baby and you start to understand that there could possibly be someone more important than you, or your wife, or your parents, or your brothers. Until whatever.

Then it happens. And this is an ABC after-school special. You're in a young company, been there forever; suddenly everyone's getting married, then everyone's having kids, everyone's buying a house. Life is good. Might not be great, but life is good. Hell, life could be fantastic. Future post, perhaps.

How do you, collectively and individually, deal with what has to be the absolutely ultimate tragedy? I don't even know the extent of this. And I'm serious. I pretend to understand -- by which I mean I dread to understand -- the feeling. I'm operating on the inability to process. In absence of the ability to process it, I have to pretend I can process it. That leads to all sorts of thoughts ranging from expected to "what the hell."

I don't want to admit it, but I generally don't know how to act, or react, when I get bad news. It goes way back to the fact that I need to play a role, be a protector, than anything else. Of course, the fact that I'm disturbed by that fact only serves to disturb me more. Why aren't I crying? And I've only gotten bad news twice in my "adult" life beyond grandparents when I was 13 or younger or a buddy that we lost in the military a number of years ago. Aside from those, though, it's been twice in the last week. And it's been a hell of a week to grow older, actually. We all grow older, we form bonds, we make babies, we lose babies, we gain friends, we lose friends, we gain life, and we lose life.

That right there is too introspective to dwell upon.

Downstairs Flooring Project, day N

So I absolutely fell off the wagon as far as keeping up with this blog goes, though in my defense we rapidly jumped from our original plan of a weekend and one week of nights to a more scattered schedule and, as such, there's been less to talk about on a daily basis. We near completion, though!

Ray came by last Wednesday and they did both the tile install and most of the carpet. There's a chunk between the two that comprises the extra 10 square yards I failed to order. After some last-minute scrambling last Friday, we managed to get the missing 10 square yards of carpet delivered to the house in the afternoon before heading out of town. Ray's coming today to finish the install of that and then I think we'll be set.

It's weird to think that it's almost done down there. We spent 5 hours last Sunday removing all the painter's tape that's been up for about a year. It was a painful, annoying process but it's done. We also put in a new lighting fixture on the wall plus a new chandelier in the foyer. We need to do some cleanup down there of the trim and woodwork, as I'm sloppy with a roller and everything's speckled with latex paint, but it should come up pretty easily. It's also dusty from the buffer that removed the old pad and adhesive, but that's nothing a vacuum and wet rag won't fix.

Above: In my classic OCD way, I rolled the tape I removed as I went.
The perspective is screwy, but the roll above is about 6" x 8". You
can see the new lighting fixture in the background, too.

Above: The princess surveys the damage to our collective sanity.

Above: The new chandelier in the foyer. We're big fans.

Pics of the end result to come soon. I promise. No, really.