Speaking Of Boobs...

Yeesh

I never thought I'd be on tenterhooks, waiting to hear that G.W. was awake and well and in charge of everything again...

Day 16, Project Five: Hah!

I hung the laundry room door!

First of all, I noticed at some point since I got home that the button has fallen off my jeans, and I don’t know when it happened so I don’t know where I might have been today with my pants all hanging open. Which has nothing to do with anything, I'm just saying: this is my life.

Then Johnny got home and he said the closet door that I've been working on is, too, lighter than it was when it started, and that the bleach is working exactly like he thought it would. (Not like he said it would, though. If I'm not mistaken he said something along the lines of "Spit spot, just like new!") Then he squirted it again (and didn’t rag it off, I might add) and told me I’d have to do it a few more times and then let it dry for three days before I could even think about staining.

But instead of turning inside out and showing him my spleen, I hung the door on the laundry room. I don't know, I must be getting sick or something.

The plan was to wait and stain it first while I had the stain out for the other one, but plan-schman, I couldn’t wait another week. It’ll come down easy enough to stain when I’m ready. And in the meantime -- look!

Open:


Closed:

The bad news (well of course there’s bad news) is this: they sat in the packaging for so long (what day is this? June 15th? okay, so that makes it three years) that they’ve faded in patterns around the cardboard inserts. Actually, not faded, but rather gotten darker. See that light rectangle up at the top? They’re darker where the inserts weren’t and lighter where they were. Go figure. But if Johnny tells me to bleach them I’m gonna punch him in the head.

The other bad news (and of course there’s other bad news) is that there wasn’t room for the springy thingy that goes at the end to save you from having to worry about pulling the door off the track every time you fold it closed. When I put the springy thingy on the end, I couldn’t shut the door. So now I have to worry about it every time I do. That’s okay, though, I’m good at worrying. Lots of practice. And I saved the springy-thingy (for now, anyway, it’s in my bedside table with all the other random parts left over from other things I’ve put together) -- so if anybody has any bright ideas I’d love to hear them.

And then the other bad news (yeah, this third one even surprised me) is that I can’t quite open the door all the way because -- see that grey expanse to the left of it, there? That’s the leftover blueboard from when we built the hall it’s sitting in. It’s been leaning right there up against the wall since, hm, since not last Christmas but the Christmas before that…

Oh, and the final bad news is that the screw they gave me to put the handle on is too long but I didn’t realize it until it poked out the other side of the knob -- so now it looks like my laundry room has a tiny little boob.

Maybe I should get it a little prosthetic handle for the other side. A falsie, like. And then stick pink-ribbon magnets all over the washing machines …

Day 16: Accomplished (for real!)
Time: Oh my gosh I was so fired up I forgot to check. I think about 45 minutes.
Cost: Nothing.
Managing To Make Jokes About Domestic Violence And Breast Cancer In The Same Blog Post: Tasteless

Weeping Camel, Hidden Wagon

Have you seen this?

Actually, if you haven't already followed the link then I'll just tell you, since the website designers obviously thought cute titles and multiple links were more important than actual facts presented in some semblance of order (hey, maybe that's how I can get a bigger hit-count on my blog! Just break everything down into lots of pages and make you click twice through every sentence...)

Anyway it's something they call The Nomad Yurt, and in case you don't know, a yurt is sort of like a teepee only shaped like a boob. They're used by nomads in Mongolia and therefore they are more portable than, say, a Craftsman bungalow but slightly less easy to set up and strike than your standard Coleman two-man.

These folks think they've found the perfect way to capitalize on this ancient tradition -- sorry, I mean found the perfect way to utilize this ancient earth-friendly practice into our modern lives. A yurt as a spare bedroom! A yurt as a new kind of camping experience! A yurt as a fun toy for the kiddies! A yurt as a place to live until the divorce is final!

With a 12' diameter and 7 1/2' ceilings, this yurt is about the size of, and only slightly short than, the actual spare bedroom in our house. So fair enough on that count. And of course it's much cheaper than building an actual second bedroom -- cheaper by almost half.

That's right, the nomad yurt runs slightly dearer than the old kind of camping experience. At $6,800, it comes in about 68 times the cost of a decent tent -- but then again a decent tent doesn't come with its own wooden floor. Then again again, though, a decent tent does come with an actual, you know, tent. You've got to pay an additional $1,300 for the cloth covering on your yurt. $1,500 if you want it water-proofed...

It's portable, though. It is portable. Only takes an hour to set up "with a little practice" (takes two people an hour and a half the first time), and fits very nicely in the back of a truck (a "light pick-up," though -- a small one). So you could take it with you anywhere. If you have a pickup, that is. And if you don't need to fit anything else in there.

Best of all, there's this: "Q: Do you offer a warranty on the Nomad Yurt? A: The Nomad Yurt is sold on an "as is" basis. We do not service the Nomad. And no fitness for a particular purpose is implied."

Hm. You might want to wait until the divorce is final, after all...