UTMC

Bigshankhank wrote:Renovation on the house continues only slightly abated! Removal of the offensive popcorn ceiling happened last week.

That fuckin' '70s style that points down from the ceiling and is impossible to paint? We had that in the old house. How do you get rid of it? Belt sander?

--Jaeger

Jaeger wrote:

Bigshankhank wrote:Renovation on the house continues only slightly abated! Removal of the offensive popcorn ceiling happened last week.

That fuckin' '70s style that points down from the ceiling and is impossible to paint? We had that in the old house. How do you get rid of it? Belt sander?

--Jaeger

Watch the vidya. You spray it with water till damp, then scrape it off. It practically falls at the slightest touch once it's wet. We had a contraception going with the scraper taped to the end of the shop vac hose and it was brilliant, but for the high ceiling it meant having a 2nd person holding the vacuum up so the hose would reach. Without it we just dropped a tarp on the floor after moving all the furniture and rolled it up when done. Super simple.

Our new place has the same stuff but with SPARKLE!!!!!
It screams 1970.
Has big gold glitter mixed in with it.
<not my actual ceiling but representative>

That image host is no great fan of hotlinking, it appears.
But I've seen it.
You SO totally need a golden disco-ball in there.

Bigshankhank wrote: Watch the vidya. You spray it with water till damp, then scrape it off. ... Super simple.

OOOOH ok I get it now! Shit! Wish I'd known that a decade ago.

--Jaeger

'been doing this again for the last couple of weeks.
As I post this here, youtube is still busy with the uploading and processing, but it can only be a few hours before the video works.

[media]https://youtu.be/YBUahbZWe1M[/media]

Have I complained about the previous owner of my house yet? Because if not this has come to a head. I can forgive the neglect this house suffered because its all simple things that I can fix and not everyone is handy. I can forgive the lack of taste in keeping the 80's style alive like rebuilding the engine on a 1983 Chevy Citation because hey, its your home so just paddle your own canoe. However when he left, he left behind his collection of prized cats. And he returned every day and fed them in the neighbor's driveway. So every day at the same time his cats, along with a growing cadre of other neighborhood cats (a glower? A cloister, whatever the fuck they are called) would gather and eat the food he would leave out. When my wife asked him politely to go ahead and take the cats, who were aggravating my dogs, he was polite and took them away. Except now there is no more food left outside, and no natural predators to the local rodent population. So guess who discovered a triumvirate of rats in his kitchen? Oh fuck no, this is a bridge too far. So far I've managed to trap two and smashed their shit-eating little heads on my driveway, and I think the other ate some of the poison I put out for them. The rat poison. The poison specifically made for rats. Rat's poison. But of course they are legion and I just because I witnessed three, I cannot assume the three is all there is, kind of the opposite of the Holy Hand Grenade skit. I have literally been jumping out of bed at every little noise the past four nights, wishing I had a little silenced .22 pistol to mete out some agony, especially now that I am running on little sleep but a ton of coffee and rat's blood. No sense in wasting it.

Yikes. Rats. DO NOT WANT.
Seriously, I don't.

I recall reading someplace that [collective noun]s of rats will have a "tester". Anything tasty they find, one of their number nibbles first. And only if he lives will the others dig in.
On top of which, a poison that worked on one generation of rats won't likely work on the next. That's not just evolutionary, they are smart fuckers.

Good luck getting rid of these fuckers. I mean it.
Rats.
DO NOT WANT!!!

All the holes in all the walls inside the house were patched over the weekend. We kept hearing one little bugger frittering about in the spare bedroom so we trapped every corner with various baits and lo and behold come Xmas morning we received the greatest gift of them all, a dead fucking rat. Now that they are all out of the living areas, we can poison and trap the living shit out of the downstairs garage spaces and hopefully bring this dark chapter to a close. Up next, destroying all the Porgs we can find.

'been working on this ever since I finished the last one.

[media]https://youtu.be/nDUBOwKbE0Q[/media]

BTW, youtube-likes would be appreciated!

ugh, sorry to hear about the rats.

I am also working about the house, this weekend installing flooring (one of the few remaining tasks of hurricane flooding repair left from August)

What kind of floor are you using? New floors are on our list, as well.

The flooring pictured is NuCore (https://www.flooranddecor.com/nucore-flooring" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;). I've never been big on laminate flooring, but the "waterproof" and "lifetime warranty" claims were enough to get me to at least try it. In my opinion, it looks a lot better than a lot of laminates I've seen (close to a real wood appearance) and it requires no underlayment, so the $2.99/sq ft price is the true total price of the flooring.

That floor is looking gorgeous. This have cork backing? Just for sound insulation, or does it provide some appreciable impact-dampening when you step on it?

I'm curled in my little basement oubliette with the doors all closed and the space heater humming behind me. It's fuckin' cold out there, and we're supposedly getting some Minnesota-like temperatures here in the near future.

That said, I just got back from the pet store in preparation for a new cat! Woo hoo! (I had euthanize my last cat, the legendary Charlemagne, in the summer of 2014. )

Stay warm, y'all.

--Jaeger

I just slept through most of alien covenant, I never got who those people were, what was their point and why they were reenacting scenes from all the other alien movies that I liked and why it was shot like an episode of magnum, PI with zero concern for realism.

Jaeger wrote:my last cat, the legendary Charlemagne,

Did you call him that, actually?
"Come here, legendary Charlemagne, here kitty kitty, I have a treat for you, legendary Charlemagne!"?

DerGolgo wrote:

Jaeger wrote:my last cat, the legendary Charlemagne,

Did you call him that, actually?
"Come here, legendary Charlemagne, here kitty kitty, I have a treat for you, legendary Charlemagne!"?

Well, "Charlemagne" was often (but not always) shortened to "Char," but both suited him quite well.

The new cat is apparently going to get stuck with "Chip," short for "Chocolate Chip," which I find dull. Nevertheless, the kids are insistent so...

--Jaeger

Bigshankhank wrote: We had a contraception going with the scraper taped to the end of the shop vac hose

Jaeger wrote: The new cat is apparently going to get stuck with "Chip," short for "Chocolate Chip," which I find dull. Nevertheless, the kids are insistent so...

--Jaeger

Not sure what is up with kids naming pets after food. Our oldest wants a bearded dragon for her 5th birthday and decided it's name will be Lemonade.

Jaeger wrote:The new cat is apparently going to get stuck with "Chip," short for "Chocolate Chip," which I find dull. Nevertheless, the kids are insistent so...

--Jaeger

Heh, that reminds of when I was 12 and we got a new dog. And my sisters and I were told to chose a name.
We were all very much into the "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strips at the time (published in album form in Germany). My father, an over-educated economist himself, became surprisingly supportive the moment we suggested "Hobbes" as a dog's name. Yes, Hobbes in the comics was a cat, a deadly tiger, the stalking death of the jungle. But he was also cuddly, so for my sisters and I, that was a perfect dog name.
It would be many years before I learned about Thomas Hobbes, or about John Calvin, for that matter.

working on finishing up the playlist for the Jan. CD. I'll post the youtube playlist when I get ready to mail out disks, but hope to have them burned and in the mail by Friday. I sure have a weird assortment of music going here...

jae wrote:working on finishing up the playlist for the Jan. CD. I'll post the youtube playlist when I get ready to mail out disks, but hope to have them burned and in the mail by Friday. I sure have a weird assortment of music going here...

You fucker, you're gonna beat my distro of December's mix! Aaaaugh, I suck!



--Jaeger

Jaeger wrote:

DerGolgo wrote:

Jaeger wrote:my last cat, the legendary Charlemagne,

Did you call him that, actually?
"Come here, legendary Charlemagne, here kitty kitty, I have a treat for you, legendary Charlemagne!"?

Well, "Charlemagne" was often (but not always) shortened to "Char," but both suited him quite well.

The new cat is apparently going to get stuck with "Chip," short for "Chocolate Chip," which I find dull. Nevertheless, the kids are insistent so...

--Jaeger

Rest easy on the cat's naming. They have two names. The one you give them and the real one, the one they go by. And they're not going to spill the beans and let you know. They could give a flying fuck in a rolling doughnut about the name you pin on them because it isn't the correct one that they'll dignify with a response other than "hey, look at my little pink asshole, stupid human."

Bwana wrote: Rest easy on the cat's naming. They have two names. The one you give them and the real one, the one they go by. And they're not going to spill the beans and let you know. They could give a flying fuck in a rolling doughnut about the name you pin on them because it isn't the correct one that they'll dignify with a response other than "hey, look at my little pink asshole, stupid human."

That's a fair point. Then again, they use the "look at my little pink asshole, stupid human" response for basically everything so sometimes it's hard to tell.

I think we finally settled on a name. He's now "Pooka." It seems to fit, though goddamn if I don't want to just call him "Spooky." I've had a lot of cats but I've never had one that's quite so invisible! He's black-gray and super fluffy, which breaks up his outline enough that if it's less than fully lit he just disappears. If you're lucky all you see is eyes.

He doesn't like me very much but he likes the kids and the Mrs. so it's all good. I'll convince him soon enough.

--Jaeger

and soon enough, you will be known as the guy who walks down his front door to yell "POOH... POOH !"

Jaeger wrote: though goddamn if I don't want to just call him "Spooky."

???

"Spooky", as in the bringer of destruction?
Whatever he knocked over, I'm sure he'll learn from it. And do it again.

finally got my new video camera in last night, and thinking about following problemaddict's lead and starting up a youtube channel. biggest hurdle now is coming up with a name and narrowing down the focus to something that keeps it from being a channel of just completely random project videos. maybe just a bunch of random DIY project videos IS narrow enough. all I know is that I don't have any intention of doing a stupid daily vlog where I never actually do anything but talk to a camera for 30 minutes about nothing. ah the "problems" of modern society.

jae wrote:finally got my new video camera in last night, and thinking about following problemaddict's lead and starting up a youtube channel. biggest hurdle now is coming up with a name and narrowing down the focus to something that keeps it from being a channel of just completely random project videos. maybe just a bunch of random DIY project videos IS narrow enough. all I know is that I don't have any intention of doing a stupid daily vlog where I never actually do anything but talk to a camera for 30 minutes about nothing. ah the "problems" of modern society.

What about a channel of videos were you watch problemaddicts's channel?

an MTBS reaction channel?