So kinda big news = I have a new blog. My thanks to my brother for hosting me on his site these last couple of years, but it's time to move on. It's all about the formatting, afterall.

Eventually, I'll have gone through this entire blog and reposted any worthwhile entries to the new one (I think there are a couple I'd like to save), but that'll take a little time. In any case, thanks to those who actually read this thing even though I just always figured no one except my brother, dad (sometimes), and a couple of friends read it anyway so it's always been just for me since it was easier than real journaling (even though I do that from time to time, but usually only for really big moments).

Well, that's about it I think.

Um, my new blog is on blogspot and can be found here (http://halflightphotography.blogspot.com/).

cheers

Last night I went with some good friends to the Radiohead show at the White River amphitheater (setlist). It was weird, I haven't seen them since they toured for Hail To The Thief back a few years ago when - instead of seeing them there - I opted to drive to Vancouver. That show was good, despite also being an outdoor venue.

What struck me as odd I think was just how apathetic I was to this show last night. As in totally could have cared less about being there. It wasn't because the sound sucked from the lawn. It wasn't cos it rained sideways the last half hour and I stood shivering under Gore-Tex. It wasn't cos I couldn't see squat. But I stood thinking while they droned on and on to songs that used to be etched in my brain and that I relied upon to get me through some real shit that now standing there I just didn't care. It was odd. I lived and breathed Radiohead for years. And years. But I guess last night it just hit me that, that. That I'd grown up and didn't need them anymore. I wasn't in that place. Not near it, which I guess is good. I'm still not sure really what it all means but I'll spend some time wondering I'm sure.

Admittedly though, a flicker in me liked this song they play here in a basement somewhere called All I Need.



I'm the next act waiting in the wings
I'm an animal trapped in your hot car
I am all the days that you choose to ignore
You are all I need
You are all I need
I'm in the middle of your picture lying in the reeds
I am a moth who just wants to share your light
I'm just an insect trying to get out of the night
I only stick with you because there are no others
You are all I need
You are all I need
I'm in the middle of your picture lying in the reeds
It's all wrong
It's all right
It's all wrong

~ Homer, The Odyssey

~ Everett Ruess, A Vagabond for Beauty; Ruess had a craving to connect with the natural world in which he found himself, and an incendiary passion for the wilderness

"Even when we were little," says Carine, who was born three years after Chris, "he was very to himself. He wasn't antisocial – he always had friends, and everybody liked him – but he could go off and entertain himself for hours. He didn't seem to need toys or friends. He could be alone without being lonely."

Into The Wild, Jon Krakauer, published by First Anchor Books © 1996

Wow, I woke up out of a dead sleep last night at 3:37 to the crash of the loudest thunder I may have ever heard (definitely since living in Washington) - there was a huge lightning storm going on! I had all the windows/blinds in the house open and the bright flashes of blue light flashed throughout the house. I got out of bed to unplug all my stereo and computer stuff cos the thunder was right on top of us and really, really loud. It was all coming from the south and west, so I took turns between my kitchen and laundry room windows watching the flashes and the arks of lightning. It was super exciting!

What I really love about summer, even on these days that seem to be getting darker earlier and earlier (as in, before 9 o'clock) is on the weekend when I spend the entire day working on my house (which usually doesn't start before noon cos even when I'm good and get up early I enjoy the morning running or reading on the couch or something) and I have a snack when I get hungry but never lunch and finally usually around eight or nine or so (after a full day's work) I stop, unwind and sit down on my porch with a freezer mug of Simply Lemonade and just listen and watch the neighborhood wind down and listen to something on the stereo with the windows open so I can hear it and one song that always reminds me of these kind of evenings is this song called Don't Fade Away by a band called Dead Can Dance.



Long live summer and remodeling and relaxing and warmth and open windows and pale evening light.

So I finished installing the pedestal sink today after what ended up being -

1) the single worst project I have had to do on my remodel to-date
2) straight out of hell
3) something that instead of taking an hour or so to hook up the plumbing from the sink to the wall and connect the drain, it took roughly eight hours to complete that simple task (I had already finished all the plumbing in the wall earlier this summer, so all I had to do - literally - was connect the faucet plumbing to the supplies coming out of the wall and hook up the drain)

Granted, hooking up the drain took the expected five minutes or so, but the other 7 hours and 55 minutes was mostly spent trying to get the f•cking hot water supply to not leak. I went through -

- 8 brass ferrules
- 2' of supply line, each cut about six inches (the math isn't that hard then to figure out how many iterations it took me of cutting and bending pieces of pipe)
- 4 nuts (three of them stripped from torquing them too hard)
- um, 2 faucets (yeah, that was lovely)

I felt like Chevy Chase in European Vacation where he laughed and said he just couldn't get right in a traffic circle in London where he apparently spent the entire day trying to do so -It just would not either drip or spray out every f•cking time I turned on the shutoff. Seriously. Last night at 3AM I was livid to the point of tears, cursing my house and everything about this remodel. I just could not get it to work and had to force myself to go to bed not having finished.

But alas, finally, earlier this afternoon (I think) I got it, although I'm not convinced at some point it won't just completely fail and start shooting water all over the bathroom. I really, really hate plumbing. Really. Really. Really.



The final plumbing - I never, ever want to have to look back up at it again. Ever.



The sink. I have to admit, it does look a lot better than what the old sink used to look like -



But I still cannot believe just how difficult it was and why that f•cking hot water supply wouldn't just work ... the only thing that I think could make it better would be to find out it would have cost like a grand to have a plumber come in and install a pedestal sink.

Even though it's quite not finished yet, I think this room is a good example of why I wanted to find a small Arts & Crafts house from the 20's that hadn't been remodeled because I wanted to do all the work myself. Clearly, sometimes it's difficult and frustrating - but those last two pics show a room that was totally gutted (literally, I even removed the drop ceiling and hung a new one at the 9' height like the rest of the house) and is all me. My paint color. My fixtures. My flooring. Etc. etc.

In the kitchen last year, I couldn't afford to gut it (not yet - that'll be a few more years) so I just updated it and only painted the existing cabinets. I did redo the flooring, but am stuck with the same old range and fridge (I got a new dishwasher off Craiglist) - but the point is I couldn't gut it and make it totally me like I could afford to do in this bathroom and it shows. Cos it's not totally me, whereas this is and I really like this bathroom. I made a few mistakes, but for the most part it's turned out pretty good (uh, still learning as I'm going on everything).

And I was reading in This Old House about things to keep in mind when remodeling which is what I'm definitely trying to do - keeping the remodel classic and in-line with the style of the original house, and in doing so making sure nothing gets dated (like a bamboo-looking faucet or the finish of the day, so-to-speak) and will be attractive to a future buyer cos even though I love, love, love my house (I apologized to it for having cursed it the night before), I don't plan on dying in it so some day I'll move.

Well, today while painting my bathroom I decided to create a different kind of Smart Playlist in iTunes - based on the track number.



I've found that track 4 is often the best song on an album (or at least one of the better songs), as evidenced by the following:

You And Whose Army? | Radiohead | Amnesiac
Fake Plastic Trees | Radiohead | The Bends
The Wild Ones | Suede | Dog Man Star
Map Of The Problematique | Muse | Black Holes & Revelations
Minimal | Pet Shop Boys | Fundamental
How To Disappear Completely | Radiohead | Kid A
Exit Music (For A Film) | Radiohead | OK Computer
The Rip | Portishead | Third
Everbody Hurts | REM | Automatic For The People
The Scientist | Coldplay | A Rush Of Cold Blood To The Head

Then, for fun I created one for track 1 and track 10, although their aren't many albums that actually have ten songs (the idea of course would be that track 10 would be the last song on whatever album and therefore perhaps one of the best). And although iTunes has seemingly an endless supply of options in which to tailor a Smart Playlist, the last song doesn't seem to be one of them -



Although, it looks like a workaround would be to go and manually add some arbitrary description (like 'last' or something) for the last song on all the albums I have in iTunes and then sort by that description, but that would take a bit of time. Maybe someday ...

So in my quest to fall asleep last night, I started thumbing through some catalog I got in the mail the other day from a place called VanDyke's Restorers. I swear, you order one catalog - you get fifteen. Currently, from having ordered (I think originally) a Pottery Barn catalog, I now seem to get a dozen different catalogs about every couple of weeks (including - last week - a Victoria's Secret catalog, and no - I swear I didn't order it).

But what I found amazing in this VanDyke's 300+ page catalog was on page 213 -



Now, this might not look like much, but it's more or less identical to this one from Rejuvenation that I've lusted over for a couple of years -



The thing is, the unfinished (ready-to-prime/paint) one from VanDyke's is all of $149.99 (and it's 20% off until October-something, so that'd make it $119.99), vs. the Rejuvenation one that rings in at a paltry $523. Um, for a difference of four hundred dollars I think I can handle painting it.

Seriously, that made my entire night. Of course, I'll buy two at that price and when I move the guest bathroom I'm just about done remodeling when I'm gutting and reframing the back of my house for a much bigger kitchen, I'll use the second one.

Oh, and the reason it's so exciting is cos the molding on these cabinets mimics the molding around all the windows and doors - exactly.

~ Ansel Adams, 1982, excerpted from Ansel Adams: Letters and Images 1916 - 1984, Little, Brown and Company, in a letter addressed to Alan Cranston, Edward Kennedy, Paul Tsongas, Howard Metzenbaum, Leon Panetta, Philip Burton and John Seiberling

Fast-forward a quarter century ... replay.

I bought this saw months ago on a super deal at Home Depot, but then still had a bit of regret having spent the money.



I had a 10" Craftsman (single bevel) that I bought at a garage sale the first summer I had my house, but had sort of outgrown it (or so I told myself - well, there were definitely things it could not do like cut all the way across the 7" baseboards I installed in my kitchen to match the original ones).

So anyways, I had left it in the box for a few weeks hemming and hawing about whether or not to keep it but then I finally just ended up using it and selling my Craftsman at my garage sale a month or so ago.

As it turns out, today I used my 12" double-bevel to cut all the moulding for my guest bath remodel and I must say - it was well worth every penny! It'll last forever, and it's just a great piece of equipment. The first thing I noticed was I could swing it from 45º left to 45º right and the two mitered pieces of wood would fit together perfectly (which I had to do for the crown pediment and fillet for the window and door trim). The Craftsman wasn't nearly that precise.

And this saw will get much, much more use over the years.

Blogging this mainly because I just like the picture (lights on a dimmer, of course) -



I'm not finished yet, but getting close. Finished the drywall the other day and so finally got to paint the ceiling and the walls today, and then just to add some bling I decided to install the medicine cabinet and light with Julian's help. He was cute and noticed how we were hanging finishing touches - I told him, it's getting close!

I did cut out all beadboard and the trim this weekend, too - so I'll start installing that this week (the beadboard goes just above where the paint sort of ends here).

Here was the light fixture after I bought it, lying on my kitchen floor (linked just for me - set private in Flickr - it's really not that exciting).

The colour is Benjamin Moore® HC-265 boothbay grey (hard to see here with the dimmed lights, but it's a really soft greyish-blue). The medicine cabinet is from Restoration Hardware (found at their sidewalk clearance sale) and the light from Rejuvenation (also at their clearance sale earlier in the year - otherwise, I couldn't have afforded either one).

I still have to:

• finish laying floor tiles where there weren't any before
• hang the beadboard
• install all of the moulding (window, door, along top of beadboard and baseboards)
• install the new Kohler® Archer pedestal sink and toilet
• install the rest of the Baldwin® Stonegate fixtures
• install the Panasonic® ceiling fan, shower light recessed can trim and heat register

None of that should take too terribly long, and I'm on an adrenaline rush to get it done so it should go quick.

Coincidentally, under the dim light in this photo the paint looks grey - which is the colour I'm going to paint our Jack & Jill bathroom when I remodel that one next year (Benjamin Moore® HC-105 rockport grey is at the top of a short list).

And here is the entire Benjamin Moore® Historic Collection palette online, which I'm using for my entire house.