Month: November 2009

I was settled in to an evening on my own on Friday night as Vero was off to a reading of a new play that she’s taking part in. I decided to crack open a beer while perusing this week’s new comics that I had just picked up. This was going to be an excellent night to relax. Heck, I even put in a Hitchcock film (Shadow of A Doubt) to watch for awhile.

However, it was not meant to be as Vero showed up and let me know that her cousing Melissa was coming over to watch a film. A whirlwind of tidying up the house occurred just in time for Melissa to show up. I didn’t mind at all…we had some fun chatting it up for a few hours.

On Saturday, I awoke and watched The Notebook. Now, ladies out there, you’re probably saying “Yes! Palmer has a romantic side! I can’t believe he wakes up on a Saturday morning to watch The Notebook!” Guys out there are screaming “What the heck man?!”. I had downloaded the film since Vero and Melissa would probably want to watch it last night, but in the end, no film was shown so I figured I should at least watch what Holly has proclaimed as the ‘greatest love story ever’. I also knew Rachel McAdams was in it. Meow. Foxy lady.

The film itself deals with some classic themes amongst romance stories…poor guy meets rich girl, falls in love over a summer, but then rich girl’s mom doesn’t want to her to waste her life on a poor guy, rich dad is indifferent as long as she’s happy. They separate, he writes to her, rich mom intercepts letters, they don’t see each other for years, rich girl gets engaged, rediscovers poor guy and you’ll have to read the novel/watch the film to find out what happens next. See? See what I did right there? I probably described a multitude of love stories right there.

Anyhow, half way through the film, I felt the need to make pancakes for Vero who was still sleeping. Yes, that’s right, The Notebook renkindled some romance into this gentleman’s heart. Luckily, the pancakes turned out alright (as I am not one to know what to do in the kitchen. Heck, I was worried that without any eggs, the pancakes would have been ruined!) and all was good in the world.

I then headed out to Costco (aka the Zoo) to pick up a gift for Maren as it was her birthday on Saturday. Her thirtieth birthday in fact. I am going to assume that she has done a lot of thinking in the past week about her life in general and what she has accomplished within the first thirty years of her life. I’m hoping she is quite sastisifed with where she’s at!

Vero and I headed to the Chateau Laurier where Maren and Allan-Paul had rented a room for friends to have some wine before heading out to a restaurant. The room was packed and the wine was a flowing. In fact, I witnessed the largest bottle of wine I have ever seen in my life. Maren’s father had purchased this behemoth of a bottle. I was surprised we got through it all. Maren also brought out some Chateau Pipeau wine which was the wedding gift that Vero and I bought her and Allan-Paul a few years back. She said it was the first time she was cracking one of the bottles. I must admit it was quite amazing. Bordeaux FTW!

The rest of the night was spent at the Metropolitaine Brasseries which is next to the Chateau Laurier. I had some excellent coq au vin (which is chicken in wine) and Vero had the salmon. All in all, we were impressed with the place…heck, they even had some Mill Street beer on hand for us. Shenanigans ensued as we sat along with fellow Northerners at our end of the table where we traded insults about our respective hometowns.

Looking for some more fun to have, we headed back to the hotel room where we were promptly kicked out due to noise (wasn’t it only 10:30?) and we went searching for somewhere else to have a drink. We ended up acquiring a board room which on one was using. By the time I left, no one had kicked us out so I can only imagine the party went on all night after Vero and I left.

All in all, an excellent night out for Maren’s thirtieth birthday celebration! Thanks for the invite and I hope you had a wonderful time.

Sunday morning brought me from my slumber and I put the Christmas lights up. I can’t seem to find the extension cord I usually use so for the moment, they have no electricity. Granted, I refuse to plug in lights before December 1. I also proceeded to start cleaning out the garage but then I twisted my leg awkwardly (I had done the same thing while assembling the BBQ a few weeks back) and couldn’t move around too much so I decided it was a sign to relax for the rest of the day. Vero had gone to work for a bit and was going to the Lady Gaga concert with her sister so the house was mine. The afternoon/evening consisted of reading some comics, eating a feed of moose meat and catching up on some Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I’m trying to finish up the final season but I find it hard considering I know the show got cancelled so I’m wondering what’s the point? Either way, it shall get done!

All in all, a busy weekend. Everything is starting to ramp up…Christmas gifts need to be purchased, Christmas party needs to be organized (second Saturday of December people!) and we have guests coming over this coming weekend which will undoubtedly involve a massive cleanup of the house. Joy.

This was amazing article in Wired magazine where Evan Ratliff, a writer for Wired Magazine attempts to become untraceable for the period of one month in a traceable world we live in. Everything we do can be tracked. He looks at the logistics of going on the run from the readers of Wired Magazine (who were offered a reward if they could find him in a month) and the thoughts that go through your head when you are on the run.

Enthralling read…it’s a long one but very interesting.

http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/11/ff_vanish2/

It’s 8:58AM on a Saturday morning and I’m waiting to get U2 tickets for the Montreal show on July 16. They are building a freaking stadium for this show and then tearing it down! Upon closer inspection to the virtual snapshot of what the area at the Hippodrome would look like, it looks like a bunch of bleachers are being built.

The other day I was trying to get Bon Jovi tickets and they sent me to this new website I have never seen before. www.geg.ca (I believe it’s managed by the Bell Center). It looks like they have incorporated some form of queue system where you wait inside a queue (or the waiting room as they call it) until you get your tickets.

Now, we all know this is what happens with all other websites. They virtually put you into a queue and you wait and when your turn pops up, if they have tickets still available, you nab em. I have developed some strategies over the years to make sure I’m in the queue. First off, if I log in a few hours before the sale, I tend to find that I can make it into the queue. I theorize that it tracks the fact that I have been sitting on the web site for awhile and allows me access before the people who log in…15 minutes before they go on sale.

www.geg.ca does this quite well. Last night I logged into the site and let it sit. This morning I surf to the home page and there is a big banner indicating the U2 concert is on sale this morning at noon and I should click buy tickets. Upon clicking it, it says I am entering the waiting room and this process should take a minute or two. Sure enough, I am now sitting in an area where I can look at the proposed stage design, look at the different price levels and enter my account information. It also says that while I am in here, I have reserved my virtual ‘place in line’ and I shouldn’t move from this page.

If this works, I must say that I am quite impressed with it. Sure, some people may cry foul because they didn’t realize that they could log in around 9AM and get a spot in the virtual line. But I compare it to the souls who physically camp out in front of the box office in order to get some highly sought after tickets!

Now that I know this website uses this method, I will definitely set my alarm earlier in the morning to see if the waiting room opens up earlier.

In the meantime, I’ll spend my morning doing what I usually do and around noon, hopefully I will come back to the computer and it will say ‘Congrats! You just got yourself six tickets to U2!’

Update: Well the software is quite useless.  It turns out that members in the ‘waiting room’ are chosen randomly.  Karilee logged into the waiting room area around 11:50 and managed to get us all tickets (awesome!) but I was still left waiting until after the entire show was sold out.  I hope I don’t have to use this system too much more in my lifetime!  Unless they change the process so that it is a true queue, it’s quite ridiculous to have a random choice system.

These are some amazing finds. Internet Gold FTW.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/35-amazing-science-fair-projects

http://www.flickr.com/photos/st3f4n/sets/72157616350171741/

If there is ever a book of the 365 StormTroopers (which you know there will be!), it shall be on my coffee table.

Special thanks to Andrea and Stephen for sending me these.

At 3:16, Eastern Standard Time on Sunday, November 15, 2009, an event of epic proportions occurred.

My front step finally got some laminate attached to it.
This has been a long time coming…the laminate flooring was laid down in June and an acquaintance of mine mentioned how his step took him eight hours to do. Mentally, I was not prepared for such a project. To look at something as simple as a step and imagine it taking you eight hours to complete…how does one prepare thyself? With a lot of procrastination!

Finally, with an entire weekend to myself, I decided enough was enough, I am tired of hearing Vero’s comments about how the front step isn’t done and I must do something about it! Ha ha.
The problem has been acquiring the stair nosing for the laminate. First try involved going to Home Depot where they didn’t carry the nosing and I had to request it from the supplier themselves…but all they had was a fax number. No luck there. Then we finally went back last week to ask for some different nosing and the woman working there informed me that in the past 2-3 weeks, the wooden stair nosing has been disappearing and they don’t really know why. They assume some form of Consumer Report has been released saying that it’s dangerous to have the wooden nosing on stairs as you may easily slip down the stairs. This does not make a whole lot of sense to me considering years ago when stairs were wooden, there were not tracks to prevent slipping on them. Nonetheless, I realized that we would need to either put down some vinyl nosing or some aluminum ones. Vero and I chose some brushed aluminum ones. I must admit that I find that the aluminum nosings are ugly compared to what could have been with the wooden ones.

Saturday morning I awoke and got the tools in order and started cutting strips of laminate to go on the stairs. The morning was going great until I hit upon Mistake #1 which involved angles. My step has a 45 degree angle in it. Knowing what I know of cutting angles with the mitre saw, I automatically set my cut for 45 degrees and voila, I had two pieces that put together resulted in a glorious 90 degrees!

Wait a minute, that’s not right! Turns out that I had forgotten some basic geometry and that if I have a 45 degree bend in my step, then I need to divide that in half to make my cut on the laminate…22.5 on each of them. This was not a big loss and I wasn’t upset at my ineptitude as I realized that carpentry is an art that you must practice. Some phone calls to Dad (alright, MANY phone calls to Dad over the weekend) reassured me that I was perfectly capable of figuring out how to get these steps done.

After that hiccup, I cut out the plank which would become the top of the step with little problems. I was on a roll!

However, the gauntlet approached me quickly and I had no idea how hard it would be. I will attach pictures at a later date to show you some specifics of what I’m about to talk about.

I cut the aluminum trim to run along the laminate and the edge of the step. No problem. I then cut another piece that would run along the angled edge of the step. The problem we encountered is that we couldn’t figure out how to cut the two pieces so they would align to each other on an angle. At first I thought I could just leave one edge straight and the other would be cut on a 45 degree angle to snap into place, but that didn’t work. I literally spent 1.5 hours looking at these two pieces wondering how it could be possible to make them align together. At one point I gave up and decided to finish the rest of my work and cut some laminate pieces to finish the rest of the job. An hour later I was back at my original problem. I threw in the flag and called Mom and Dad and sent along some photos to illustrate my point.

After some careful examination of the problem at hand, we arrived at a solution and I was excited. It sounded like it could work! For those arriving at this page due to some Google search for this term “angle cut aluminum nosing”, I present to you the method in how you can make the angle cut.

1. Lay down one piece. Lay down the other piece so that it intersects and overlaps with the other.
2. Mark where the two pieces meet and then cut the overlapping piece so that it cuts from the mark to the corner of the piece. Wow, I just realized that this is really hard to explain in text. I really need to add some pictures later.
3. Once the overlapping piece has been cut, return it to overlap the other piece, then draw a line (using the cut piece as a guide) and cut the piece which is on the bottom.
4. If all goes well, they will match up perfectly!

I will tell you that I used a hacksaw to perform my cuts and it is in a pain the ass. If you have a mitre saw, go to your local hardware store and purchase a blade for your saw which can cut through aluminum. It makes a better cut. Case in point, because I used the hacksaw, I was off the mark on the first attempt and I had to wait until morning to purchase some more aluminum nosing.

The next morning I picked up the necessary pieces and I tried it again. It took awhile to change my blade on my mitre saw but with a little help from Dad, we managed to figure out how to go about it (where the heck did my manual go?). The aluminum cutting blade is a great thing to use, but be warned that litte bits of aluminum fly everywhere and my garage is full of them now. Also, take your time making the cut. The nosing buckled at one point because I was cutting too fast.

Success was had early afternoon on Sunday as the pieces I cut matched! It wasn’t a perfect job, but it couldn’t have been any better than what it was. With all the pieces in hand, Vero and I glued the laminate to the floor (a method recommended by Home Depot which I still question…wouldn’t it simply be easier (and easier to those in the future trying to tear up the laminate?) to nail a few corners of the laminate to the floor? Either way, we took Home Depot’s advice and glued the pieces to the step and then attached the trim. I must admit that after a day and a half of working on this step, I was quite relieved to finally see it done.

Renovations are interesting in that you are always striving for perfection but sometimes your eye is the only one that will ever notice an imperfection. It’s like painting. If you take a close look at anyone’s house, you will notice imperfections (mainly where the wall meets the ceiling) but for the most part, no one really catches those mistakes (unless you are blatantly looking for them). So I wonder if I will always look at my step and notice the mistakes that were made, or if I will accept it for a decent job that it is? Either way, the step is done and all is good in the world.

We didn’t want to stop there so we laid down some transition pieces along the laminate flooring. The pieces into the bathroom and the basement were simple to put down. The ones transitioning the kitchen are another story and have not been completed. You have to have enough space to lay down a metal track that the wooden transition piece lays into. This means that I had to cut some laminate to make space for the track. The first cut went fine with Dad’s zip saw (a handheld saw which is amazing. Everyone should have one). I encountered some major problems on another section to the point that the bit broke and I can’t get the nut off to put another bit in. Ouch. That was not a good ending to the day. No matter…I will find another way to cut a notch out for the steel track and the kitchen will be pretty well complete!

Back in 2006, I had picked up the first DVD set of Thundercats. I remember it being a pricey set…$60+ if my memory is correct.

Yesterday I received the final DVD set in the mail from Ebay. Cost: $15 with shipping. Beauty.

It’s interesting to see that over the past three years, I managed to pick up the three remaining sets under the same price that the first set cost me. Actually, Maureen and John got me one of the sets now that I think of it.

So it seems that Ebay may be a great place to pick up DVD sets of TV shows. However, caveat emptor…I wouldn’t think that Thundercats is all that popular and that’s the reason I can find them cheap. But if you were to find a season of Magnum PI, perhaps that would cost a pretty penny!

Here’s a link to the flooring we purchased.

Yesterday afternoon, we headed to Home Depot with Vero’s parents as they have a better eye for how to match colours.  Specifically, we wanted to get some kitchen flooring that would look good next to the laminate flooring we put down in June.  We weren’t planning on purchasing it right away and had not even measured the kitchen.  We were merely looking at styles/colours.

OF COURSE there had to be a flooring sale on (10% off) and we found an excellent looking style of Cyprus in the TrafficMaster Plank Flooring section.  Months ago, I was at Krista’s parents house in Peterborough and her father was showing me the new flooring he had installed and how easy it was.  It was a floating floor in the form of vinyl planks.  No need to glue to the existing floor…simply place the plank down, make sure it fits snugly to the other planks and voila, you have yourself a floor!

So we then headed to BMR to compare (they had none) and we brought Vero’s mom to Costco and then I realized that we better get home soon if I were going to make it back to Home Depot in time to take advantage of the sale.  Vero and I measured the kitchen and I picked up 5 packs of flooring.  At $50 a pop, it was a good deal.

When I got home, Vero’s Dad had returned from visiting his brother and I could see he shared the same twinkle in our eye…we wanted to see how easy it was to lay this stuff out!  We decided to rip open a pack just to see how it worked.  I had to return to Home Depot to get some two-way tape (which in fact, we did not use if anyone is reading this wondering if they need to lay out the two-way tape) and when I got home Gaetan had laid out a few strips and was in the process of measuring an angle cut.

Let me tell you, for those wondering how easy this process is…it’s quite easy.  Especially when we brought out tin snips to use instead of the utility knife.  Tin snips probably saved us an hour of work.  We got into a routine of measuring the cut, passing the plank to me, I cut it while Gaetan measured the next piece.  Once I was done my cut, we laid the plank down so it connected well the other plank, and voila, a row was done!

We literally had half the kitchen done within 1.5 hours and we stopped for dinner just before encountering what may or may not be the deal-breaker…the dishwasher.  After dinner we took a look at the dishwasher and realized that it would be a pain to take it out as there was no give on the hose.  So we decided to simply cut one piece and put it under the dishwasher but if anyone ever hauls the entire thing out, they will see a section of the old flooring.  So be it…it’s under the dishwasher.

After that, it was a fairly simple job for the rest of the night.  We moved the stove and fridge out of the way, laid out the vinyl flooring and by 10PM, we were laying in the last piece.  We had JUST enough flooring to cover the entire kitchen.  We needed another plank for the final piece but we weren’t about to spend another $50 to get one more plank so we used some scraps and if anyone pulls the fridge out, they’ll notice an odd looking piece on the floor.

I don’t think any of us were planning on laying out some flooring last night but five hours later, it was done and the kitchen looks fabulous.  I would highly recommend working with the TrafficMaster Allure vinyl flooring for any project as it is quite easy to work with which just makes the job fun.

Thanks to Gaetan for the helping hand.  I was quite happy to have him there as he has a mind for the trades so it made the job go that much faster.  Whereas if it were just me, I would be a little slower on the uptake, but would still be able to figure it out!

Next up is to paint the kitchen and I am thinking I would like to try my hand at doing a back splash out of ceramic tiles.  Also on the horizon is painting out bedroom as we are receiving a furniture set on Thursday.  After that, I’m hoping that our work will be done for awhile, but I do realize that there’s still that front step to fix up…