The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 392): Blue Tape Universe

We started the day off by going over to the house because I wanted to throw away an old toilet and sink that the contractor has been forgetting to get rid of for months now. I got tired of waiting. I also threw away a roll of chain link by climbing into the dumpster and pulling it up one foot at a time. Then, thinking I was Hercules, I decided to try to throw away eight fence posts and a bunch of metal that has been in my yard for months. The fence posts were coated in concrete so they were heavy enough that I wasn’t going to be able to press them over my head to get them in the dumpster. This is where I got proud of myself: I jammed another post into each one of them and pole vaulted them into the dumpster. I was using physics like an ancient guy who had to get rid of ye olde refuse because he got tired of asking his castle craftsman about it.

#1GF! was in the house marking off all the problems with the paint because they wanted a punch list by Monday or Tuesday. By the time I was done, she had stickers nearly everywhere. The place really is a giant fucking mess. I went in to help, but I was covered in dirt from being in the dumpster, so we went home so that I could get cleaned up. I made some chicken salad out of some leftover chicken and then tried to calculate what sized radiators I’d need for different rooms because I wasn’t sure if the old radiators would be too big now that we’ve insulated. It also looked like a four foot tall radiator was going to be placed in front of a window, so I wanted to see if the one short but giant radiator could be shortened to fit. Unfortunately, the plumber won’t take it apart for fear of owning a giant mass of useless iron. I wasn’t really surprised.

We went to a furniture store grand opening which was overcrowded with both annoying shoppers and salespeople. Even though I hate the maze that keeps you trapped in one of our local furniture stores, the disorder that comes with having chairs tables everywhere didn’t seem to work very well either. It was hard to figure out where to go, and once you had been through a section, you weren’t really sure if you’d seen all of it. The trip didn’t work out that well, and off we went to a local home store to get the model number of our vanity top.

We then headed back to the house to mark off the problem areas with painters tape because the post it notes that #1GF! was using earlier were falling off. We used a lot of tape. A lot. It was almost a joke. Once we photographed all the stickies, we went out for Mexican food and then home to type up the list of issues to make them more orderly for the contractor. Oddly enough, I typed while #1GF! dictated even though I really don’t know how to touch type. Sure I do it, but I do it more by accident than by having my fingers resting on the correct keys. I guess that’s what I get for writing all day.

A list of issues is the last thing that I can think of doing short of freaking the fuck out to get the house issues under control. It seems like every time someone goes into the house, they make it worse than it was when they got there. Everything has to be done at least twice, and even then, you look at it and wonder if you could’ve done a better job. Just about everything beyond the framing seems like it needs to be redone, and we’re a month over our time limit. That’s plaster, trim, paint, bulkhead, brick, windows, and they scratched up some very fucking expensive cabinets.

Will it all get fixed? Yes. Who will do it and when? Those are the questions.

To end the day, we watched a shitty American show that tries to emulate Ninja Warrior, but it really wasn’t worth watching. Both shows features people trying to get through an obstacle course, but that’s where the similarities end. The Japanese show does not tolerate failure or coddle the contestants with helmets or padding. The American show allows contestants to fail multiple times and they are covered head to toe in various forms of protective gear. I find the Japanese version to be immensely more entertaining, and the American version to be shamefully worthy of network seppoku.

Monday (Day 393): Stopping The Job

I started the day by going to the house early to send the painters home. I didn’t want them moving forward on a job that needed a lot of the underlying aspects redone. They said that they couldn’t sand or fill a lot of stuff and the woodwork needed to be pulled, so I sent them home until I could talk to the contractor about it. Whether it was the carpenters or the painters who were messing up the job didn’t interest me. What I needed to do was stop the job from getting worse.

I went home, checked my stats and made Sewer2d2 to distract myself. I was happy with the C-3P0 in the background, but something about the lighting of the R2D2 didn’t look quite right and I couldn’t figure out why. I ended up showing my couch to someone, but they decided that it wouldn’t fit in their house.

#1GF! made dinner because I was busy fixing my Feedburner feed which broke thanks to another plugin update, and we ended the night by watching The Bucket List.

Tuesday (Day 394): Alexa Top 75k

I started the day by working on Sewer2d2 some more, and still couldn’t get it right. I updated my the top posts lists in my sidebar, and then started cleaning out feeds out of my feed reader. I finished up on a retouch and sent it out to a reader who wanted the scratches from an old photo removed. I got the scratches out, set a better skin tone, retouched the guy’s hair, and did a few other little enhancements before sending it back. I don’t think the guy was really happy with it because the background turned out a little dark, but the background was a table full of empty glasses, so I didn’t think it mattered. Also, he thought the faces were too grainy, but they were already suffering from JPEG compression and I didn’t want to spend too much time on them. I tend to err on the side of normal rather than glamor when retouching regular people because glamor can end up looking weird in normal situations.

When I checked my stats, I found that I had a spot in the top 75k sites on Alexa. That doesn’t seem like a big deal considering the arguable validity of the Alexa stats, but considering the millions of sites available worldwide, it still felt pretty good.

I started on a second retouch that I had promised to a reader, and tried a few new tricks. One was that if you copy the original photo into a new layer, invert the colors and set the layer to grain extract, you end up with a saturated and relatively smooth photo. I wouldn’t say it works all the time, but I thought it was a neat and quick fix.

Wednesday (Day 395): Alexa Top 50k

I cracked the top 50k sites in Alexa somehow, reaching nearly the 32k mark. I have no idea how. I did the food shopping, cleaned the dishes, and left a message for the contractor that we all needed to get together to talk about the house again. I felt like I should be outside, but did some more photo editing and posted a game.

We watched Be Kind, Rewind, which was unexpectedly good, but only for about thirty minutes. Then, it turned into the pile of crap that I expect from Jack Black movies. That guy is going to star in something funny one day. If he does, I hope someone lets me know, because I don’t think that I can waste another two hours on the guy without proof of humor.

Thursday (Day 396): Our House Is A Wreck

The contractor called and set up a meeting with us with fifteen minutes notice in the morning. I was the insane one in the situation, and had a hard time containing my frustration, so I wanted to make sure that #1GF! came along to balance things out.

I tend to give people a lot of leeway, but once I hit my boiling point, I have a habit of feeding people shit sandwiches. When I really get going, that simple shit sandwich can turn into a twelve course shitstravaganza. #1GF!, on the other hand, will at least throw in enough ice cream on the side that you stay at the table.

I did my best to stay calm, but I kept coming out of the kitchen with course after course of shit plates, and #1GF! would give me little looks to let me know that I was using my outside voice and my adult words. The contractor is a nice guy, but the subs have done substandard work and I’m not sure that he’s been watching them very closely, so errors are being made on top of errors. Whenever people are working on the house, I don’t know if it’s going to get better or worse at the end of the day. When you’re dealing with that level of error at a point where the job should be finished, it’s incredibly frustrating.

The good news was that the contractor isn’t one of those guys that pretends that bad work is good, so he called a finish carpenter to come in to see what he could fix next week. Unfortunately, the contractor was going to be on vacation all week, leaving me to stop by to check on things.

I went home to write and #1GF! headed off to work, both a lot less frustrated than we were. I looked for some new web games to post, but didn’t find anything worthwhile. Finding good web games isn’t always easy, but it’s almost always a time consuming hunt.

Once #1GF! got home, I made burritos and we watched I survived a Japanese Game Show, which is better than the mundane pace of American game shows, but I’d really rather just watch Japanese game shows without the American injection. A friend called during the show, and I told him about being in the top 50k of Alexa for the day. He started comparing sites to mine, and pointed out that I was pulling down 5x the traffic of my old company’s website. Considering they are a multinational company employing a small city of people, I thought that was pretty funny. He also pointed out that I’m more popular in Sweden and Canada than in the U.S., which is a little strange.

Friday (Day 397): Fourth of July On Grass

We were supposed to go to a cookout, but the weather was crappy, so we stayed home and played cards all day. Most of the time was spent playing Grass, which is a game that we’ve been avoiding learning how to play because it always seemed too complex. The directions require that you play four test hands adding new cards to increase the complexity each time, and every time we’ve brought it out in the past, we’ve opted for something simpler. Once we got the hang of it, we played for about nine hours, checking the rules at various points to make sure we were playing correctly.

Grass is a card game in which the players take on the role of drug dealers, trying to sell and steal pot, while trying to get the competition busted by the 5-0. The game was varied enough to hold our attention, but with two players, it always seemed to turn out to be a slaughter for one player or the other. It was rare to have a close game. It would be interesting to play with four players to see if the game turns out differently.

Once we couldn’t take it anymore, we switched over to Mille Bornes, which is very similar to Grass, except the players are trying to complete a race without getting flat tires, running out of gas, or getting into accidents. I used to love the game, but after playing Grass, it seemed like it was lacking in complexity and fun.

Saturday (Day 398): Macadamias And The Mexican Train

We were scheduled to go over to our friends’ house to play some games, and I wanted to make some macadamia nut cookies to take along. Unfortunately, I don’t keep a supply of unsalted macadamia nuts laying around, so we had to go to the store. #1GF! wanted to drive all the way to the big supermarket a couple of towns over, but I suggested that we try to get the nuts locally first.

In the first market, we found out that the owner no longer stocked them because people kept stealing them. I couldn’t imagine who these high brow punks were who needed macadamia nuts badly enough to risk prosecution for them. We went to a second store, who has every overpriced gourmet hunk of crap known to man, and they didn’t have any, either. #1GF! suggested that I give up and make chocolate chip cookies, but we are only compelled to chase those that run away, and the nuts, they were running.

We ended up driving all the way to the big supermarket for those damned nuts, and I couldn’t find any. The only thing that I could think of is that they were somehow out of season or something. #1GF! eventually found them in a place where I had missed, and I couldn’t remember how much I needed. I made a guess at a cup, and headed home to make them. Luckily, a cup was all that the recipe required.

It was only after baking six dozen of them that I realized that not everyone likes macadamia nut cookies, so all that running around might have been in vain. I was prepared to make a second batch of chocolate chip cookies, but #1GF! said she liked the cookies, and she’s not a vanilla fan, so I concluded that I wouldn’t need another batch.

We went over to their house, and I think I inadvertently might’ve made one of her daughters mad. First off, I told her that something she said was, and I quote, “the gayest thing that I’ve ever heard”. From an old person to a teenager, this is extra negative because if an old person picks up that what you said was gay, it’s probably super gay because old people like me are clueless and uncool by the very nature of their existence. It’s also not good practice to use “gay” as a negative adjective, but being old, sometimes things like that accidentally slip out.

Second, I was nearly doubled over laughing at her willingness to drive around with the cup holders in her car full of a liquid formerly known as iced coffee. I had to take a picture so that I could prove to myself that I wasn’t exaggerating when I wrote this. They were literally half full, with no cup in site. I still chuckle when I think about it, but I probably should’ve acted a little more like an adult. This may be one of the first signs of the loss of control that people experience as they get older, and it shouldn’t be long before I’m yelling “BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS!” at the guy who drops off the pudding.

We were there for games, so I had pocketed Fluxx in case our friends didn’t have a game in mind, but soon realized that Fluxx and any quantity of booze is probably a little too complex. I also thought about bringing 1kbwc, but the game really requires five or more people to get going, and I figured that her kids would be out doing whatever teenagers do, so I left a set at home.

There was already a game chosen, and we learned how to play Mexican train dominoes. In college I carried a set of regular dominoes everywhere I went because if you can’t be a pimp of the nation, dominoes give you an excuse to say things like “Domino, motherfucker”, which can sound pretty pimp-like to your non-pimp of the nation friends. Mexican train dominoes had a lot more fancy trinkets and a distinct lack of swearing, but it was a fun variation nonetheless. I ended up winning, but it was chalked up to beginner’s luck before I could get out a single “Arriba!”

What I Learned

• how to play Mexican train dominoes
• how to play Grass
• I have accidentally developed my own version of touch typing.
• One of the main reasons that I want to get into the house is to have a table to play games on.
• Americans have no idea how to run a Japanese game show.
• Shit sandwiches taste better with a side of ice cream.
• Finetune will not answer any bug reports or feedback that I send their way. I don’t know if it’s me, or if that’s normal.
• It’s difficult to know when to stop on a photo retouch. You can go on forever, or not do a lot, and in both cases there are justifications that you’re doing the right thing.
• Finetune Friday is still being kept alive out there on the internets.
• This site is more popular than my old employer’s site, although they make more in a minute than I do all year.
• I’m huge in Sweden and Canada. I wish I could say that they really liked me, but I suspect that the amount they like me may be overinflated. I think it may have something to do with the weak dollar.
• I actually rank higher in Sweden, Canada, South Africa, Venezuela, Mexico, and Chile than in my home country.
• I can now make macadamia nut cookies.
• I know a basic calculation for sizing radiators to rooms.
• Mille Bornes just isn’t all that fun anymore.
• As annoying as the maze format of furniture stores is, the non-maze format is more annoying.

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Posted in Leisure