Bogieblog

It Was Only a Matter of Time

The gig is up - the basement is no longer off limits to the kittens. Oh, not by choice, well not by MY choice anyway. I blame do myself though.

See, yesterday I was talking to Cop Car on the phone and was sitting at the top of the stairs (best reception area for long distance calls). To sit there I had the partially gate open, but I thought I had it blocked with my body. The last thing my mother got for conversation was this, "Spot, what the hell are you doing down there?" and the explanation of why it was a surprise. I'm assuming Spot went behind my back as I was leaning against the door frame.

I retrieved Spot and closed the gate and all was well. Until a while ago. I went downstairs to start a load of laundry. Shortly after coming back upstairs I saw Spot looking thru the gate on the wrong side. I assumed she had slipped by me as I was taking the laundry down the stairs. BUT, then when I went to change the wash to the dryer, I made extra effort to make sure no cats got thru the gate and the gate was closed. Coming back up the stairs, there was Spot. She turned back up the stairs and climbed the gate - argh!

The reason I blame myself is that she probably would not have climbed the gate if she hadn't gotten by me yesterday and got the lay of the land of what was on the other side. Rainey has not figured out the climbing part, but was trying to open the gate by sticking her paw thru and pushing/pulling while Spot was on the other side. Decided to just open the gate to keep it from being damaged.

Not happy as they are still small enough, and naïve enough to get into lots of trouble down there. But, don't want to put the door in place as it is a major PITA for the workings of the house. The bright side is that I should be able to transition them to using the litter boxes downstairs which does 2 things;

• Keeps the smell down there when they do their business
• I don't have to clean both morning and night (only one litter box upstairs for all 3 cats but there are two for downstairs),

Anyway, here is the culprit taunting Rainey as Rainey is reaching her paw thru

Rainey trying to figure it out - Spot is on the second stair down on the very left - she is descending so unless you know what you are looking for, you can't tell. Rainey always figures it out once Spot has shown the way (yes, Spot is usually the trouble starter), so now I have an open border house :).

Cleanliness Is . . .

Sunday I decided it was finally time to clean the desk, which according to some of the paperwork I found, hand't been done for QUITE some time :O

Before picture was taken 11/11/18 so it doesn't include the regular monthly accumulation plus any of the stuff from the two weeks of green belt training I went thru.

This morning the cats were taking full advantage of the added room

The shoe box is holding holiday/BD/greeting cards that were stacked in the cubby on the right. I decided it would be good to have there for cleaning up the Christmas cards next week.

And just because I can, here is a picture of Spot and Rainey making sure the dishwasher doesn't try to wander off before finishing its job :). Naturally, when I saw them both were sitting very still. Bring up the camera, and Spot just has to move.

More Car Pictures

I took more pictures of the car yesterday while I had it pulled out of the garage

And yes, it is a fairly tight fit

Definitely not getting the bike in/out while the car is in there. That is fine, it can spend time in the tent garage when the bike is here and the truck will be in the yard.

Merry Christmas 2018

In with the New

On the 7th of January I will be starting a new job. This job will add another 40 miles per day to my commute (on top of my present 60 miles per day). That adds up to a minimum of 25k miles a year - if I only go to work and back. I started taking stock of what my vehicle situation was in preparation. The 2014 Explorer is good, but it has 107k miles. Hard to believe I bought it at 99k, not quite 8 months ago because I only put on about 7k a YEAR on my 2004 Explorer. And, the time of year that I need the 4WD is still to go. The 2007 Focus, well hmm:

• Mileage - 2015,500
• Clutch will need to be replaced in not to distant future
• Oil leak
• Plate light is out (got stopped the other morning) and it is an electrical issue not a bulb issue
• Uncomfortable seat from the years of use
• No modern amenities - can't even plug in an MP3 player
• Heater & A/C work good but can only get it at the windshield ($500 fix for a $15 part)
• Although the motor runs good on surface roads, and up to 60 mph short term, it struggles and is VERY loud at 70 mph (I will be traveling highway for about 20 miles)
• 3 out of 4 doors the outside door handles barely work and usually take several tries to open. Not that that is a big deal since the back seat isn't used unless I need to put objects back there but it doesn't help the shoulders to be yanked like that.
• Windshield pitted and had a couple of  small star cracks
• Headlights very dim - partly because the plastic lenses were yellow. In order to fix that, I would need to disassemble the front end to get to the inside of the lenses.

Oh sure, the 2007 has it's good points:

• Good gas mileage averaging 30-32 mpg
• Standard transmission (although driving it too many days in a row bothers my left hip)
• Small so I can fit bike and car into garage
• Fun to drive
• Beat enough that I wasn't concerned if it should get any dings, dents or scratches

Taking all that into consideration, plus realizing I didn't drive the car very often (15k in 3 years) because of weather (foggy, rainy, very cold, and of course slick roads), I decided I needed a change. A couple of weeks ago I started researching used vehicles. I started looking at 2012- newer, under 40k miles. It would seem I could find a lot of vehicles to like, but after researching (to death - LOL), different years for various makes/models, the list of possibilities shrunk. I also wouldn't consider anything that had an accident on record, which shrunk the field further. Last Tuesday, I had the day off to attend a couple of appointments, so I stopped at a couple of dealerships and test drove some used cars in my price range. I was unimpressed and some of them I downright disliked.

Yesterday morning, while perusing websites once again, I found that some new, 2018 models had been discounted steeply and were just above what my dollar range had been for used cars. I decided to test drive a 2018 Fiesta and a 2018 Focus. Both had the cold weather package (heated seats and side view mirrors - which I love in the truck) and the Focus had heated steering wheel plus a couple of upgrades to digital displays (none of which was a requirement, but nice to have). A list of the features

I drove the Focus first, and decided I didn't need to drive the Fiesta. The Focus was very comfortable and responsive so we struck a deal. Last night I came home with this (only the one picture because it was dark)

It does barely fit in the garage door and takes up more of the interior space than the old Focus. During summer months, in order to fit the bike into the garage, the Focus may be going into the tent garage with the truck sitting out in the yard. But that is okay by me.

So, here is to the old Focus, which always started, never left me stranded and most importantly gave me peace of mind that if my other vehicle was out of commission, I wouldn't be walking. May someone who is handy buy it at auction and be happy with it for years to come.

First picture on the day I got it January 2016

Last picture taken October 2018

Awards, Certs and Prizes

Last Saturday was the HOG Chapter Christmas party. The venue, as usual was lovely and I got there early enough to get pictures of the view out the back windows.

Part of the festivities is the awards for various reasons. I was shocked to get the Die Hard Award. There is a story there, but I won't get into it - just suffice to say, no, I never even met Ray Hamel, so the name is in memory of a person and some of the stuff he went thru.

Had a great time and I left when the dancing started up (as usual).

The week before Thanksgiving I attended the first week of Green Belt training thru one of our customers. This last week, I attended the 2nd week of training. BTW - Please no comments on where the training was done - (CC - you know what I mean).

We had a group project thru the week which involved making "helicopters" out of paper. The hellicopters had to follow a standard template and the only modifications that could be made were by folding and use of paperclips. Out of the 4 teams, my group came in 1st. There were several things that were scored; there was a 10 minute presentation featuring stats and use of Minitab for the project, The team had to build and test 10 identical helicopters in 5 minutes, testing consisted of the requirement that each fly for at least 1 second from a height of 65", then the teams got to pick 5 of their 'copters to compte for flight time and lowest Standard Deviation between the 5.

After the presentation, my team was in 2nd place. Then we made up points during the build because each was identical to the others (seriously, I figured that would be a given for teams, but apparently not). We had a very tight Standard Deviation for our 5 competition flights, which was followed closely by another team. We also slightly beat out another team for longest flight at 1.89 seconds. We did not hit our 95% confidence level for flight time, but none of the other teams did so either, so when all was said and done, our team squeaked by with 1/10th of a point. Each team member received the following prize

Hey, and the first week we had a team competition also. first, each person took a survival quiz. Without scoring or knowing answers, we then broke into our groups (totally different groups than week 2) and then took the survival quiz as a group. Once the scoring was done, I had the lowest score in the class (lower is better - my score was 40), and my team had the lowest team score by about 10 points at 50. This despite the fact that our team also had 2 of the highest individual scores at 78 & 80. So I was able to influence the team enough to lower the score significantly.

Lets see, two team competitions where the only common denominator was me - cause and effect perhaps :D [/JK]

 

Completed Project

It seems that most projects I do, never get entirely completed. Some get about 85% completed, others get 98% completed, but never truly completed.

The front door is one of those projects. I replaced the front door in 2014 but never got it trimmed out. Oh I had excuses. First was that I was going to tear out all the sheet rock and replace it. That got done later in 2014. Next was that I wanted to do it at the same time I trimmed out all the new windows. Well, the windows got done in late 2016 into early 2017. but the door still looked like this:

My next excuse was that I was having difficulty with the trim. The issue was that the old sheet rock was 1/4" and the new sheet rock is 1/2". The door frame had been flush with the old sheet rock, so the new walls were raised. For the windows that wasn't much of an issue, it was just a matter of figuring out what pieces I needed to make the trim work. I assumed once I figured out the windows the door could be done in the same manner. One does not think of the door hinges and strike plate being in the way so 1" wide spacer pieces cannot be used.

I tried several things, but they were either too wide or too thick, or both. I finally came up with a solution which I implemented last weekend. I used a piece of PVC finish, that I believe is actually for finishing vinyl siding

Is it the right color? No, the windows have all maple-like trim and it would look better that way. But it is the right size both in width and in height, so I went with it. I installed the finish pieces and caulked around them last Saturday and left them overnight to dry. Early Sunday morning I installed the maple-look trim pieces that match the windows. I'm not entirely happy with all the white showing around the door, but it is better and I can live with it.

Good thing I had the 3 maple-look pieces downstairs - having bought them at the same time I finished the windows. Because I have waited long enough that this particular color is no longer available (although it was earlier in the summer). Looks like if I ever replace anything in the kitchen it will be real wood with a custom tinted stain, or a different color. Or, I could wait long enough for it to come back into vogue again ;)