Month: July 2025

July 2, 2025 – Summer Projects

July 3, 2025 /

For the last couple of weeks, stuff has been piling up in our foyer. The reality is that a lot of these projects are not really necessary but as my wife is fond of saying, ‘happy wife, happy life’. It doesn’t say that much for me, but the optional things are relatively easy. It is the necessary ones that are going to be a lot more work.

We have lived in this house over 20 years. That entire time, we have had a heat pump downstairs but no air conditioning upstairs. We had our bedroom upstairs for at least 13 of those years and the truth be told, I only found a handful of days a year to be too hot. Nevertheless, we are having house guests in a couple of weeks. My wife wanted to ensure they were comfortable.

I suppose where it finally cracked, my son’s room is south facing. I won’t lie that it does get hot. But, over the years he has declined the offer for air conditioning. Our exchange student was staying in my son’s room and he spent several nights sleeping downstairs in May when we were in the 90s. Now that he is gone, we are cleaning up the remnants and my son is moving back into his room. It is the perfect time to get the new AC unit installed. I have a second one to install in the upstairs family room.

Speaking of my son’s room, he is also getting a new ceiling fan. My wife says that it needs to be replaced because it is old. What? Remember ‘happy wife, happy life’. The truth is the pull string has been broken pretty short. The reason is the kids would jump off the bed and pull on it breaking it. I know because I have caught them doing it.

This could be repaired for a couple of dollars; I have also done that before. But, it is best not to fight it. I have to say it does look new and more contemporary. The new fan is significantly inferior to the old one. This one has two lightbulbs where the other one had four. Also, the access to remove the globe requires you to reach your fingers up and over the metal fixture, inside of a channel.

The worst part is that I had to completely take the whole fan apart twice. Once because the blade was rubbing on the switch. After that was fixed, I found out that one of the supply wires was rubbing on the fan motor. That is done now.

Now that we have had the dry rot repaired and the new windows are installed, that has spawned two projects. The first is all of the replacement work has to be painted on the exterior. The second project is that I need to do drywall finishing on the inside.

I guess that because those are separate trades, then that is why they do them. It does seem like for two days of work and $5000 in labor that I would have a week’s worth of effort to finish. They did do the initial mud and tape job and it was pretty sloppy, so they did me a favor by stopping and not charging me more.

But wait, there is more. For my wife’s birthday (and anniversary) she want’s a new vanity and light fixtures in the bathroom, bedroom and dining room. This definitely makes my shopping easier but I already had a plan for what I wanted to buy. Now, I am going to have quite a bit of work to get all of this work done. Keep using the phrase ‘happy wife, happy life’.

I think that is enough to do this summer. As I have already stated in my podcast there is still plenty going on in life the summer as well. I am assuming that I can complete all that in the summer time frame. You can expect that there will be periodic updates on all of the work. The fan and AC are done now, at least my foyer is clear of boxes at this point for now.

End Your Programming Routine: We are currently in a holding pattern for cancer treatment. There have been some mixed results on the testing and so the doctors want to wait and retest in a few months. My wife really wanted to wait until the fall to get started anyway, looks like there will be no choice now. Hopefully, I can get the projects finished before my life is turned upside down again.

July 1, 2025 – To Be a Kid Again

July 1, 2025 /

When I was a kid, I loved Legos. Between my brother and I, we didn’t have a ton of them but certainly enough to be creative. There wasn’t the plethora of different lines that they have today but I was partial to the ‘Space’ series. A couple of those kinds of sets along with a good foundation of basic blocks gave us enough to build lots of things.

The pinnacle of what we built was a clipper, sailing ship complete with cloth sails and rigging. My only regret is that we didn’t have enough of the same colors to make the ship really look proper. I was pretty proud of that back then and if they had allowed Legos in the state fair then, I think we could have won. I have a picture of it somewhere, maybe I will try to find it some day.

The Legos of today seem to have tons of specialty parts. I feel like that takes some of the creativity out of the process. For one thing, after I built the model and threw away the instructions, that was the one and only time the actual structure was built as intended. Everything else was improvised.

I know that when I built my Ford GT500, all I did was follow the instructions. Everything was in unit bags and all you had to do was open the unit bag and follow the instructions sequentially. It certainly took several hours but honestly it was easy. I see no reason why the most advanced kits are labelled for ages 18+. Honestly, a determined 12 year old should be able to follow directions and complete the model without breaking a sweat.

My wife bought me this set for Father’s Day. It is from the ‘Botanical’ line. I am taking my time building one type of flower a day. This is just to extend the enjoyment that I am getting from doing this. I don’t think it will ever get disassembled and my wife wants to display them where we currently have a Lego cityscape.

There are certain pastimes that I did as a youth that I honestly believe were highly influential as an adult. Those things would be reading, Legos, G.I. Joes, Dungeons and Dragons and drawing. Some of things I have written or spoken about before and some I have not. I am pretty sure this is the first time I have written about Legos at least.

We had this old, brown fleece covered bean bag. That thing became army base, moon scape, race track etc. I remember times when it would be all setup and then it was time to put stuff away for the night. I instructed everyone in the family not to touch the bean bag because it would then ruin the scenario that was setup for future play. You know what? It worked more often than it did not.

Not having a build plan, not having a bunch of specialty parts, not having access to mind numbing TV is what made this so beneficial. I had to look for pieces, I had to estimate scale from a picture, I had to figure out how a bunch of squared off blocks could make a curve of a hull. I think that another thing I learned was that if I didn’t have the exact part, it was going to be OK.

We like puzzles in this house. I think puzzles and Legos share some common elements. But more so than that, I believe that puzzles are good for the brain. This is especially true for analytical skills. There is pattern searching and recognition as well as visualization involved.

One other thing I notice with puzzles as well is that the efficacy diminishes over time. I attribute that to brain fatigue. I think that awareness with puzzles can help you become cognizant of when you are starting to see brain fatigue.

End Your Programming Routine: We often do a puzzle during a break time like Thanksgiving or Christmas. That has become a mixture of Legos or a puzzle over the last ten years. As I stated above, I think that they provide similar kinds of benefits albeit puzzles are significantly more difficult and cheaper. The next time you are wanting to go back in time a little bit, try building a Lego set.