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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
No rain here either Brenda! I did just check my unofficial ball-jar rain gauge and between the last 2 storms I got around 3.5". So far so good for us! I hope it keeps up into 2020.

And speaking of which
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY !

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Thanks for the videos SIX. I'm going to bookmark them so they dont get lost!

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Originally posted by Brenda:
It will be a very soggy New Years eve where I am but since I will be in there are no worries.

Flipside got quite a bit accomplished today. Got a picture frame that I am putting friends photos into. Also reorganized some books meaning binning them as I have read them and where they were, they were in my way. Some paper recycling done and another box got rid of. Took the wobbly shelf down and now have to see if I can find another shelf for the items that were and are on it. Also vacuuming done.

Now tired.

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Originally posted by Brenda:
Canadian firefighters heading for Brisbane Australia to help with fighting the wild fires. Fighters going from BC, Alberta, Ontario and PEI are heading Down Under.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Originally posted by Brenda:
It will be a very soggy New Years eve where I am but since I will be in there are no worries.

Flipside got quite a bit accomplished today. Got a picture frame that I am putting friends photos into. Also reorganized some books meaning binning them as I have read them and where they were, they were in my way. Some paper recycling done and another box got rid of. Took the wobbly shelf down and now have to see if I can find another shelf for the items that were and are on it. Also vacuuming done.

Now tired.

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Lot of progress there BRENDA! Hope a good rest will dispel the tiredness and you can look around and enjoy your hard work!

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Originally posted by Brenda:
Canadian firefighters heading for Brisbane Australia to help with fighting the wild fires. Fighters going from BC, Alberta, Ontario and PEI are heading Down Under.

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Saw about the fires there. They looked just awful.

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Too bad you're not by me Brenda. I got plenty of shelving in my garage that I could give you. Only kept it when I was de-hoarding because I know I'm going to use some of it when I do the closets, but I won't be using all of it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Well, today I took my cat in for (yet) another vet trip today. His backstory (which I'm sure I posted before ... nevertheless ...) ...

Where I used to work has multiple locations over the whole of SoCal. At one of the locations, employees found three feral kittens, seriously dehydrated and underfed, with no mom in sight, who they rescued by running off to Kmart to get a large Rubbermaid bin and lid out of their own wallets. Yanno, it's one of those things that doesn't make it into official records. Under the radar ... out of the eye of Sauron.

They were a scrawny 3 weeks old, as estimated by the vet. So I fostered them for the first ~5 weeks, got them all their tests, vaccinations, and flea treatments, and home care; and after that, fostering was then taken over by someone else with a better place. 2 kittens I had not too many worries about. One was completely healthy and normal. One had asthma and was the runt, with some gut issues. And then there was my guy. He never looked, or behaved like a normal, healthy kitten. I won't go into all that was different and concerning things about him, besides asthma, gut issues, and small seizures. (But wait! There's more!)

In any case, I found good homes for two, but kept my guy. I was wondering who might possibly provide him all the care I thought he might need.

Five years later, it appears his large intestine has completely stopped working. I believe he's on an inevitable path to surgery, but there's one more medication to try (available from a compounding pharmacy), and after that, the last step is surgery.

Why would go through this for a cat? I ask myself that. But he's a living creature in front of me, in need. It's one abstract step to be concerned over things you read about that are distant and far away. But a living creature in front of you, that you've already established trust with, is an immediate call for involvement. To not respond is to betray that call in me to commit to care I already took on.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
So, I'm looking in my freezer. I have

- 'leftover stew' that has potato, onion, some Tuscan kale and riced cauliflower, and chicken thighs
- 'marinara' which is intended to be a complete meal, it's savory tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, spices, herbs, aromatics, and ground beef
- mashed cauliflower that's like mashed potatoes, with chicken thighs and gravy.


I have room for one more batch of something. I'm thinking maybe stir fried beef and stir fried peppers and onions (of course with all the flavor of home-made teriyaki sauce, ginger, garlic, and green onions!) Or maybe potato+ frittata. Or pork, cabbage and potato stew! Or ham, bean, and vegetable stew ... They all sound so good! Oh dear. How do I decide?

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I have to share this joke about Alaska I just saw on TV -


It's so cold I saw my lawyer with his hands in his own pockets.

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So I asked unto the shopping lord Amazon. "Alexa, please grant my wish to eradicate the unstoppable nemesis crabgrass in my 1/4 acre rock garden which has been a plague on my back and chemical supply for years". Alexa in all her glory bequethed onto my humble being the actual finger of death incarnate.
With whistling, hissing, flame throwing glee the finger vanquished all foes (along with a few pine shrubs who were accidental victims of the wrath) in a fiery blaze of glory. In what felt like an instant, hours upon hours of weed pulling work was eradicated as I laughed manically and my neighbors ran inside in fear.
Thank you my dear Alexa for granting me this wish and providing me with the funnest (and admitedly most frightening) tool in my arsenal of weed destroying troopers. I have roasted an entire bag of marshmellows in your honor, [and] even though it only took 5 seconds my sacrifice was genuine.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Wow, that door trim looks great! I think that those three doors all together would be tricky, and (if I'm interpreting the picture properly) especially where two trims meet.

Nice work!!

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So at this end I did finally get to sell the car to our sometime gardener for real cheap. I hope it's useful to him, and our driveway is cleared out. Also finally sprayed the weeds with that concentrate that you suggested, SIX. Will have to check to see how effective it is over the next few days.

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Give it a few days. It worked really quick for me, but being the terrible cook that I am I'm not one for measuring stuff. That concentrate was so cheap there is no way in hell I'm getting as many gallons out of it that the bottle states. I may have used quite a bit more in a gallon of water than you did if you actually followed the instructions.

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But yanno, I'm getting a hankering to get one of those weed torch-type things. With the recent rains this would be the perfect time to use it.

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Ye gads! Be careful! California and fire doesn't mix, don'tcha know?

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You have to read some of the reviews. they're a hoot!!! Here's my favorite

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So I asked unto the shopping lord Amazon. "Alexa, please grant my wish to eradicate the unstoppable nemesis crabgrass in my 1/4 acre rock garden which has been a plague on my back and chemical supply for years". Alexa in all her glory bequethed onto my humble being the actual finger of death incarnate.
With whistling, hissing, flame throwing glee the finger vanquished all foes (along with a few pine shrubs who were accidental victims of the wrath) in a fiery blaze of glory. In what felt like an instant, hours upon hours of weed pulling work was eradicated as I laughed manically and my neighbors ran inside in fear.
Thank you my dear Alexa for granting me this wish and providing me with the funnest (and admitedly most frightening) tool in my arsenal of weed destroying troopers. I have roasted an entire bag of marshmellows in your honor, [and] even though it only took 5 seconds my sacrifice was genuine.

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Hey Brenda - I might have mentioned one of my favorite scifi authors (LeGuinn) here and there. She lived in Portland, Oregon and once wrote about having to get used to being more or less continuously damp. I always wondered about that. It seems like if one's place is warm enough, one might actually dry off at home. That's why I keep mentioning how toasty your new place seems like it is, especially compared to your old one that seemed both damp AND chilly.

Are you able to get dry at home?

Anyway, I hope you stay warm and dry!

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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Hey Jack

I too have doors and windows with placements (like right next to interior walls) that make fitting trim and baseboards tricky! So I've seen people have to fudge the fitting, sometimes better sometimes not so well. Your work looks terrific! If you think you might enjoy it, maybe you could do work as an interior trim carpenter?

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Yeah... I don't know how much people around here would have the kind of money to pay that. On the flip side, I know how much rent goes for in the big cities since my brother used to live in LA (or was it San Fran...?), so I know I'd have to be asking a lot less for my work.

I know with the right tools I could speed up the work. I'm also very good at finding the quickest way to the best results when I do something repeatedly, so even if I was slow at this at first I would get much faster at it over time.

I already know I wouldn't paint pre-primed trim before I put it up since that's essentially a waste of time and needs to be done a 2nd time. I'll have to see how my dad's stuff looks in his back porch that he did on his own years ago that way. I don't think he even had a brad nailer. I never noticed anything wrong with it over the years, but then again I never really paid it any mind either. There must be nothing glaringly wrong with it though, and that's what I would expect since even though he's a novice I get half of my perfectionism from him.

And at the rate my step-mom likes re-painting rooms in the house, it probably has a brand new layer of paint over everything now making any imperfections even less conspicuous.

I'd also buy a few sets of really nice saw horses that are easy to fold up and tuck away. I've got one set of the ones you build yourself with 2x4's after you buy the brackets, but they are difficult to store anywhere without being in the way and are a pain in the ass to bring in and out through 30" doors without banging things.


It's been a long time since I painted anything, and I rarely ever paint anything with a brush this extensively. Whenever I get to the remaining 6 doors in my house, I'm going to do those differently too. I will put the primer on with a short nap roller first, which will be about 20 times faster at least, since I sand the doors down after the primers up anyhow. While I was primering the doors in the garage, the primer behaved differently than I've ever dealt with before.

I was going in a left to right pattern a few feet long, while taking time to give the tops, sides and bottoms a little cover as well. But when I'd start my next left to right sequence below the 1st one, it would not cover the original paint very well and in fact seemed to pull it up a bit if I wasn't careful. A few variables could have caused that... There was still veneer on the doors since they weren't sanded completely bare.

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It was anywhere between 35 and 42 degrees in my garage while I was doing it.

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The primer is 6 months old from back when I painted windows and the columns in the front of my house, but seems to still be good.

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I made sure when I put the 2nd coat on to overlap these areas where the brush strokes were apparent, and although it was doing it again the 2nd time, it was hardly noticeable at this point since a lot more paint was up and I made sure to cover the first occurrence with the second layer.

I think the trickiest part of a job like this is time management. Not necessarily worrying about how long something intricate is taking (because that would only make me screw up cuts and throw money in the trash bin), or worrying about how much quicker I'm naturally getting by doing it more often, but minimizing downtime by planning things out smartly and having other things that can be done while paint is drying.

I always thoguht that if I could get into doing something like this and have a somewhat regular stream of work, I'd be able to undercut the competition fairly easily because of my own financial situation. I've got quite a bit of wiggle room there to at least get myself started and not worry that I'm not making a ton of money per job while I'm honing my skills and building a portfolio of work.


But am I ambitious enough to do that and not just settle for a weekly paycheck doing work I hate?

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
If you're painting water-based over oil-based you could have a problem with adhesion

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I'm not saying that isn't the case here, but it shouldn't be. Although I did not sand the doors down to complete bare wood for lack of proper tools and the temperature outside, I completely de-glossed them and was as thorough as I could be. I did a lot of research on what primer to buy and it just so happened that I already had half a gallon of it in my basement already. Zinsser does make gallons of primer that are even better for $40 and $50 as well, but once we get up to those prices it might have been a trigger for me to just look into brand new doors on sale instead.

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ALSO a problem. There are temperature limits on painting; it's not just evaporation of water that's happening but the little beads of acrylic (assuming water-based) have to meld together into a solid film, and that reaction might be delayed in the cold.

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Yeah. This is the more likely culprit. The primer is rated to work as cold as 35 degrees, but it does say that drying/curing times will take longer if it's too cold. I had to find a whole bunch of other things to do in between the first and second coat because it took about 4 hours to be ready for a 2nd coat instead of the 1 hour that it was supposed to. If time between coats is 4 times as much, it's probably around that much longer to fully cure as well.

They were definitely dry to the touch when I brought them inside, but I should have just put something in between them when I stacked them up like an old rag. I did have the foresight not to put them flush together, but I wonder if that was my mistake as well. With all that surface area it would have hardly been any weight per square inch resting on the one below it. When I put just the top onto the bottom door, I distributed the entire weight of a leaning door to a very small surface area, which also happened to be an angle which likely had quite a bit more primer on it than the sides of the door as well.

Not a huge deal... Just a little part came up, about 1/4 the diameter of a pencil eraser. It just makes me know to be a lot more careful with the final coats is all.

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Should be OK provided it hasn't frozen in between.

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Yeah. No freezing here. I'm never storing paint in the garage again. What a waste of paint.

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The biggest problem is breaking into the field and finding customers. They won't just come to your door, you have to advertize and put yourself out there. Our sometime gardener does a fantastic job, and anyone would be lucky to have him work there, but just getting those first few jobs and building a rep is tough! I keep telling him he needs a T-shirt with a company name nd phone number when he's working here ... "XXX's Precision Gardening 213-XXX-XXXX" .... or some such. I've recommended him on NextDoor but so far no nibbles. That decision about which job to take? It might not be yours to make, you might be left with the weekly paycheck as the only choice!

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
But yanno, keep the whole "finish carpentry" in mind. You might also do well being a one-person geek squad: there are a lot of people who need help just loading updates or cleaning heat sinks and replacing fans. Yanno stuff that seems so simple to you that you couldn't imagine paying anyone to do it.

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