Opening Hours at Target

Shortly before a doctor's appointment this morning I stopped by Target to get a welcome-back-home-from-a-boring-business-trip gift for my wife. To my surprise, I arrived before the store opened at 8am and ended up waiting in the car for a few minutes.

I wasn't the only one there early, though. Standing at the doors of the store, waiting patiently but clearly eagerly, were three late middle-aged men. They stood there, talking in a friendly manner. I didn't think much of it until the door opened and I saw all three walking quickly into the store. I was about fifty feet behind them and could see through the glass doors that they were all walking together apparently headed to the same location. My curiousity was piqued and stepped up my pace so as not to lose them.

It wasn't until they turned into the toy section that a light went off in my head: these are collectors. I had a good friend in Boise who was a Star Wars toy collector and he also happened to work at Target. He educated me in the ways of the toy collecting culture and one of the prime strategies these guys (and they are mostly men) use in furthering their hobby is early-hours toy-aisle scouring. My friend Jason, having insider knowledge concerning delivery dates and times, was quite adept at picking up the hard-to-find items and had literally a room full of Star Wars toys.

I followed the men into the toy section and my suspicions proved correct: all three were crowding around the Matchbox Cars, rifling through the cardboard and plastic containers hanging from the display pegs looking for any vehicle they didn't have. A Target clerk was there with them, seeming to enjoy helping in the hunt as well. One of the customers seemed to have found a vehicle to add to his collection.

My only thought as I passed them was how disputes over "rare" cars were settled. They didn't seem to be in competition with each other but surely if they were fanatical enough to get up early to beat all the non-collecting customers, they took this hobby somewhat seriously. Maybe that large male clerk was there for other reasons as well; I'm betting this isn't the first time these men have speed-walked over to the toy section when the store opened.

Today, though, everything appeared peaceful and as far as hobbies go, you could do worse than Matchbox Cars.

Of Showerheads and Garage Door Openers

On Friday Katie purchased two new showersheads for the house. Both the previous units, were, uhmm, unsatisfactory. The shower in the master bathroom had a miserly flow with the water doing little more than trickling out. In contrast, the front bathroom shower gushed water; if only the water would flow through the showerhead rather than around the outside.

Armed with the two new heads, I went to work Saturday morning. The replacement in the master bath was as straightforward and it seemed it should be. The old head came off cleanly and the new one went on smoothly. This is how home improvement should be.

It was in the second bathroom that the Spectre of Simple Things Made Difficult appeared. The shower in this bathroom was a bit unique in that the pipe carrying the water to the showerhead was not inside the wall. Instead, it was screwed into the downspout and clamped to the outside of the wall to hold it in place. This shower pipe was curved at the top to allow the showerhead to face into the tub (rather than up towards the ceiling) making a sort of metal cane shape. In fact, this pipe works very well as a cane.

I know this because I ended up having to remove the whole thing as my attempts to gracefully detach the old showerhead also took nearly all the threading with it. It was in carrying the pipe around many hardware stores that I realized just how nice a cane it made. And from the funny looks I got from the friendly but ultimately unhelpful clerks, I came to understand that pipes such as these are hard to come by these days.

The hunt continues. We can buy conversion kits that contain this funny pipe but they are relatively expensive and come with other parts we don't really need. There are other alternative to replacing the pipe that we might explore if we reach a complete dead end but for now, we will keep looking.

Thankfully, this was the Spectre's only real appearance for the rest of the day. I spent the afternoon and evening installing a new garage door opener for the north garage door. It was my first time to both cut through drywall and spend any time in the attic. (While in the attic I learned we have very little insulation; both Katie and I agree that this needs to change before winter comes.) By that evening, the garage door was up and functioning. There are a few tweaks that still need to be made (like putting a rubber liner on the foot of the door so that it seals against the driveway) but it is more or less done.

It feels good when things work out. I'm thankful that this task didn't end in frustration. In addition, when I go to replace the south garage door opener, I'll have a much better idea what needs to be done and I'll spend less time scrutinizing the instruction manual. (Let the record show, though, that these instructions were pretty darn good.) In the case of both openers, I also need to made a change to the electrical outlets above each opener so that they can plug in easily. I should be an easy fix.

All in all, two for three isn't all that bad for one weekend.

Success!

Thanks to a very helpful hardware store sales assistant and the grace of God, I was able to get the dishwasher up and running last night. It took no more than four hours counting the time in the crawlspace figuring out how our plumbing is done and a trip to the hardware store. Here are the highlights (as much as home improvement can have highlights):

-Ace Hardware saved the day. As I was fumbling around in the plumbing section of the store a sales associate with some knowledge asked if I needed help. I was able to describe the task at hand and in just a few minutes he had talked me through the procedure and showed me the hardware I would need. Not only was this great service that put the competition to shame, but it saved me quite a bit of time and probably an extra trip to the hardware store.

-Pulling out the dishwasher did reveal a severely kinked copper tube. This was what we suspected was the source of our problem.

-I used a propane torch to remove the existing valve. To protect the cabinets from the torch, I got this cool flame-proof "cloth"; I have no idea what it was made of but it worked very well. It looks like a book-sized piece of aluminum foil with thick cotton glued to one side and, oddly, the cotton side faces the flame.

-The new valve is leak free and much easier to turn by hand.

-I need to get a set of drill bits. I was thinking ahead enough to buy one large bit for the hole I would need for the new hose but not so far to realize that drilling a smaller pilot hole first would be a good idea. Oh well, I made it work.

-I know how to shut-off the water to the property from the valve at the meter. There is also a master shut-off in the basement but it doesn't stop the water to our one exterior faucet.

-I have a much better understanding of the plumbing and duct-work in our house due to some quality time in the crawlspace.

Special thanks to my wife who acted as the standby fire brigade and valve installation tester/operator.

Lastly, thanks also to Michael who loaned me the propane torch and showed me how difficult it can be to light. I got us a striker so we wouldn't have to deal with all of that mess next time.

Home Improvement and Frustration

I spent all of Sunday afternoon and evening trying to get our new dishwasher installed. Three connections: electrical, drain water, and hot water. Two of the three were simple and straight-forward; it was the hot water that just wouldn't co-operate. For reasons I don't understand, the connector at the end of the line just wouldn't catch on the threads of the dishwasher. Literally hours and hours of laying on my side getting more and more wet as I try to get these two parts to connect. By hour nine I had finally gotten it all together and was ready to test it.

The copper tube behind the washer had kinked as I was pushing the washer in. I would have to take it all apart to replace the kinked line. Sigh.

It is hard for me to express the level of despondency I felt as the day wore on. Just three connections, that's all and it seemed like very little was going my way. I couldn't find the right fitting,I damaged the fitting, the stores were all closed, the joint leaked, my wrench wouldn't fit... By dinner time, I was feeling completely demoralized. It was by the grace of God that I kept at it and was able to "finish" the project that evening. (Only to find that I wasn't finished at all.)

I think I have found the magic formula for personal demotivation: establish simple and achievable expectations and then fail to meet them in every way. Expectations are so key to getting me frustrated and (eventually) in despair. When I feel that I should be able to accomplish something, especially something that I think is simple, I lose hope when I fail to make rapid progress. Ironically, it is much harder to frustrate me with complex, long, or difficult tasks because I expect there to be trials along the way. Simple things made hard are aggravating.

This is one reason I switched positions at work. In my previous position, I would be assigned a simple task, usually a minor engineering change to some part of the aircraft. I would be excited because the technical part of the task was simple and I knew I could complete it quickly. And I would. Then would come the hours of paperwork necessary to get that change approved. Frustration in a bottle.

Ignorance of the details of a task also contribute. I look at the dishwasher and I see three things I need to do. In reality, there are twelve steps but I think the other nine are hardly worth mentioning; they're simple. When these nine tasks end up taking a lot longer than I expect, I get frustrated.

I think this home-ownership thing is going to be character building because I can see "simple" things like this are going to continue to pop-up. And they will probably appear simple until the little details start taking a lot more time than I would have guessed. I think I'm going to praying a lot more now and trying to remember that I'm not the one calling the shots and this is all in God's hands. Maybe I won't even get frustrated.

Smooth Move

Thanks to the efforts of a dozen or so of our friends, our transplant from a rental to our new home went very well. Faster than I would have imagined, actually. We started at 10 am and finished up right as the pizza arrived at 1 pm. Katie and I had done a pretty good job of packing and the gals that showed up make short work of what we hadn't got to. It only took two U-Haul trips (plus about ten car loads from our helpers) to get it all done.

There's actually not much more to say than that. Much thanks to all those who helped; you made a laborious task easy.

The Big Day

My absence here for the past few weeks has a legitimate excuse this time (unlike many other multi-week breaks): my wife and I are closing on a house tomorrow morning.

The process has been very quick by nearly every standard. We will have gone from deciding to look for a house to buy to actually owning one in nearly exactly four weeks time. Two of those weeks have been between having an accepted offer on the house and inking the paperwork tomorrow. We've spent hours looking, inspecting, doing paperwork, arranging financing, and lately, packing.

The house we are purchasing we toured our first night of visits with the realtor; it was the ninth of ten we planned to visit that night. Our realtor is a former home-builder and he was impressed with it (as were we) so we decided to go back the next day to get a better look at it in the daylight. By the end of that visit, we decided to put an offer on the house and found out that evening our offer had been accepted.

The next few weeks were spent working out the details of financing, having the official home inspection done, and getting all the ducks in a row. There have been a few stressful moments, the most recent of which involved trying to get a check to clear quickly so that the necessary funds could be in the correct account, but it looks like all the detail-work is done.

We are thankful that God has provided a house for us and thankful that we are able to afford it. Now we are going to be praying that we are good stewards of the gift we have been given and don't let our lives fixate on home improvement. We want our house to be a tool to bless others and not the penultimate obsession in our lives.

Anyway, as of tomorrow, our little slice of the earth can be found right here. We'll post some pictures and maybe even some video of the new digs.