Quiet

Take a nap and eat cake. It’s biblical.

I'm not sure if I have fallen into a pit or I am just relaxed. 

We got the siding project done on John's house just in time for it to start raining, so the paint is going to have to wait for spring. The project cost twice as much as originally estimated, which was half what the contractor wanted, so it ended up costing the same. However, having Osmany do it meant the house was practically rebuilt. When he pulls off the old siding he finds 3/8" sheathing of dubious quality, which disgusts him, so he rips it off. Now that he has the sheathing off, he can insulate the walls before he puts new 1/2" OSB sheathing and then new cedar siding. He also did the demolition and disposal, which weren't included in the original contract. He made enough money to make a sizeable down payment on a late model Toyota pick-em up truck, so everyone is happy.

We had a couple of inspectors from the Portland Building Department come out and look at the new house a couple of weeks ago. Their performance did not match my expectations which disconcerted me a bit. I stewed on it for awhile and now I think I have a better understanding of the situation so we can go ahead with nailing down the subfloor and framing in the new kitchen. That should keep us busy for a couple of weeks. Then we are going to have to talk about drywall, and I expect that is going to be expensive. I'm hoping it will be under $25K, but that might be wishful thinking. Whatever. We're making progress and we'll eventually get this bitch finished.

Determined daughter bought a house not far from here. It needs some work. Of course it does. She might have a plan, but she is going to need to hire an engineer / architect to see about removing some walls. That's going to cost. There are some things she doesn't mind spending money on, but hiring professionals at $200 or $300 an hour just grates on her.

Property tax bills showed up this month. Tax bill on the new house went up like 15% even though the value only went up 3%. Seems Portland voters voted for a couple of new tax levies for some kind liberal feelgood bullshit, stuff that I probably would have voted for 30 years ago. I am really having a hard time imagining a typical Portland voter. I mean there is a cluster of rich folks surrounding downtown, but the eastside goes on for miles and it's mostly working class, isn't it? All I can surmise is that the Democrat's propaganda machine is more effective than the Republican one.

My big computer display died a while back and I've been limping along on this tiny little 1600 pixel display. I keep saying I should take a look at the dead display, but I'm pretty sure that's a waste of time. If I open it up, I might find some damaged component, but more likely not. I mean, even if I find anything broken, it is extremely unlikely I will ever get around to trying to fix it. If I fiddle with it and get it working, it might work for a day or a week before it fails again. I should just chunk it in the trash, but that pains my inner miser so much that I haven't been able to do it.

I am getting very tired of my Linux computer. It takes forever (a minute or two) to boot and then another minute or two to load the Chrome browser. My Chromebooks takes seconds to do this. I started looking for Chromeboxes, but wading through the crap to find what you want is painful, so I am avoiding that as well.

I have a couple of computer programming projects I would like to see completed, but I'm not making any progress on them and I am not sure what it would take to get me going.

I also want to study up on rockets and bitcoin and magnetism, but I'm not making any progress on these either.

All I really want is a piece of cake and a nap.