Crazy Glue…. no. Nexabond 2500. It’s for wood, man.

Used some Nexabond 2500 INSTANT wood glue to fix a problem on the mantle above the fireplace this week.  This stuff really is instant.  And it really does bond well.  I had the whole mess repaired and cleaned up within just a few minutes of applying the glue.  I didn’t want to touch the stuff, so I used the bottle’s applicator and a Qtip and made sure to have a wet rag nearby.  But even with a small spill after knocking the bottle over, it cleaned up instantly.  And when all was said & done, you would never know the mantle was ever broken.  Thanks, Nexabond!

Bosch DareDevil

I got a Bosch DareDevil reciprocating saw blade this week.  I’ve had a reciprocating saw for about four years.  In that time, I’ve gone through probably a dozen blades (remodeling an aging house takes its tole on a saw blade).  After using the DareDevil blade, I have a feeling I’ve been wasting my time until now.  I went through four battery charges before even questioning the stability of the blade.  And after inspection (after a full day of using the saw), I realized that the blade was still going strong.  In fact, the paint was still intact.  I’m impressed.  The blade is still strong, still has a sharp edge, and still cuts just about anything I want.  I don’t know that I’ll ever buy another blade.  I couldn’t believe one blade could do all of my cutting chores prior to this blade, but now…. my tune has changed!!!  If you need one, don’t even question it!!!!!  Just go get the DareDevil by Bosch!

How often do you think about your household glue?

I got a bottle of glue in the mail from the good people at Elmer’s.  It’s some sort of chemically enhanced glue, like the Captain America of the glue world….. without all the American pride stuff.  It’s small but strong, has no questionable fumes, and does exactly what glue is supposed to do….. stick things together that God didn’t make naturally sticky.

It’s strong.  Don’t question it.  I reassembled a ceramic pot that I had clumsily broken months ago with the Elmer’s ProBond glue in just a few minutes and it worked like a charm.  Not only is the stuff strong and not stink, but it didn’t foam up like other glue does.  It took much less time to set up than most glue, left no weird residue on my hands or the table, and was a cinch to wash off after the job was done.  Didn’t even need soap!

I guess if you’re looking for household glue, you should really stop using the regular white stuff and switch to this.  It’s better.  Way better.  Look for it!  Elmer’s ProBond Advanced.

This thing is still here?!?!

I forgot that I had a blog for a while. Actually, every morning as I’d hit my usual ‘sites’ I just tried to ignore this particular place. And here I am writing after a mere three (more like four) months. Here are a few thoughts for the past few months… in absolutely no particular order.

1. Semi trucks have a very big responsibility that they don’t seem to remember some days.
2. Bluetooth sure is great when it works… even if it DOES kill my batteries a couple times a day.
3. Unexpected gifts are the same as expected gifts, you just don’t see them coming.
4. Sometimes anxiety needs to be medicated away because it’s not founded on anything realistic. But other times, anxiety is just nature’s way of telling you to RUN AWAY.
5. Never take the first landscaping bid. Ever.
6. Showing your cards is not always easy, but having a poker face seems to get easier with practice.
7. You can only work from a suitcase or boxes for so long until you end up doing something drastic.

I don’t want to promise that I’ll be back up and blogging regularly in two weeks, because I probably won’t be. However, if it happens, I guess this is sort of a letter of intent.

The Rage

When I was in Idaho for a couple years, I told the teenagers I spent most of my time with that I had “the rage,” which was basically my way of keeping teens from doing truly stupid things.  It kept them afraid of what might happen if they triggered my rage.  It worked for about a year.  After that, one teen called my bluff and I didn’t do anything.  Woops.  I couldn’t keep that fear tactic forever.  Eventually it had to end.

 

Six months ago, a guy down the street was hitting golf balls in his yard on Memorial Day.  The next morning I drove to work with a golf ball sized hole where a passenger-side mirror used to be.  I found a dark place in my soul that smelled like burning and tasted like pennies.  My breathing was deeper and my jaw couldn’t unclench.  I got the rage.  I contemplated shooting golf balls at the guy’s house and car with a water balloon slingshot.  I thought about finding his dumb golf clubs in his garage and wrapping them around the tree in his front yard.  Instead I spent a week shaking my head when I’d see the broken mirror and glare at the guy’s house every time I’d drive by.

 

Tonight my wife came in the door asking if I’d left the glove box open in her car.  I hadn’t.  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in her car.  I couldn’t remember what color it was at the moment, let alone if I’d been in her glove box.  Well, somebody took something out of her glove box at some point within the past two days while her car was parked across the street.  I got the rage.  My first thought was to collect every teenager walking down my street and systematically punch them in the stomach until somebody fessed up.  I wanted to look out the window of my house and see someone breaking into the car.  I wanted to practice dentistry on the person leafing through my wife’s possessions.  Instead I slammed the front door.  I clenched my jaw.  I parked my dirty old van in the spot my wife’s car had been parked in.  I let the car alarm go off for about ten minutes, turned it off, then went inside and slammed the door again.

 

I know my anger isn’t coming from a good place.  It’s actually more than likely showing signs of much deeper issues that I’m ignoring.  But it also scratches an itch that I get sometimes.  It feels kind of good to let people see me flare up a little.  Does that make me crazy?  Maybe.  But really, I think this anger I get is probably just a sign of the fact that I’ve got a lot of growing to do.

But for now, I’d rather kick the teeth in of the kid that stole my wife’s stuff.  Not really, but I don’t know that I’d be able to contain myself if I did look out the window and see some varmint knee deep in my vehicle.

Weird Hippies And Their Community Living…

I usually laugh when people tell me they are a part of a ‘community.’  I think that internally, my brain has translated that statement into something like, “I didn’t have a house, so some friends let me live in their crawl space.” or “For six years, I’ve been hiding from the cops by acting as this guy’s housekeeper.” or even “None of us are legally allowed to own a home, so we share this house that somebody’s grandmother left behind.”  Not my idea of a legitimate reason to live with others and share my toothpaste.

The thing is, though, sometimes living in a community is a great thing.  Jesus did it.  Must mean it’s cool.  I didn’t really set out to go to that place, so I’ll get to the point.  When I see start-up companies use terms like ‘community’ and ‘mutual responsibility’ it kind of touches a nerve that makes me uncomfortable.  BUT I found a cellular company today that really does have a very cool take on community.  See for yourself if you’d like.  Read their statements.  See their plans.  And after your 2 year cell contract is over, sell your iPhone 4s and sign with these people… unless their parents kick them out of the basement and sell their equipment.

Smells Like Burning Rubber

I was at a stop light in Spring Arbor this morning (the only stop light in Spring Arbor) waiting for the light to change… as is my custom.  Nobody else was at the intersection when I first got there, and I thought for a split-second about ignoring the light’s requirement and just driving through.  But I stopped and waited.  I looked in my rear-view-mirror while I waited and noticed that a tanker truck was coming up behind me… quickly.  The light was red (and visible for half a mile), but the driver didn’t notice the light or the bright red van stopped at it.  So as he approached, I guess he finally saw the oncoming vehicle (my oncoming vehicle) and put the brakes on.  The truck didn’t squeal, which was surprising, because he fish-tailed and had to swerve into the turn-lane to keep from devouring my van.  His cab was in the turn lane.  His thorax (I have no idea what the big middle part of a semi truck is called) was sprawled across the turn lane, the main lane and the other turn lane, and his tail lights and bumper were in the gravel.  There was significant smoke in the road from his brakes and tires.  I was really upset for about two seconds.  To the point that I wanted to stop him to ask what on earth was more important than the safety of others for him to ignore traffic lights and other vehicles on the road.  But then I realized that me stopping to yet wasn’t going to do anything.  So I drove on and he slowly did the same.  I lost my anger within a few seconds and lost sight of the guy within a minute or two.  Now I have to laugh at the thought of that greasy old trucker cleaning out his shorts at the next truck stop.  Maybe that’s a better encouragement for focus on the road than some angry guy with a mustache pulling him over to yell at him.

Just working out some numbers

In the past thirty days, I would bet I’ve been cut off on the freeway a dozen times.  Of those twelve times, I’d bet that a quarter of them were by semi trucks.  Of those three trucks, only one driver made any visual, audible or psycho-kinetic representation of an apology.  The other five truck drivers are asking for it*.  So there’s half of the people that have cut me off in the last month.  The other half are much smaller than semi trucks.  In every other (six) instance of being cut off on the road, it’s from one of three groups, which I’ll identify now.

1.  The first group (I estimate 1 of the 9 non-semi-trucks) of people that cut me off are freeway stock car drivers.  Though they’re driving the same models of car that everyone else on the road could be driving, they seem to be able to go 120 mph and swerve in and out of traffic without mechanical, legal or psychological issue.  Part of me thinks that’s awesome.  The other part knows that these people will be responsible for (though they would never take responsibility for) taking the lives of others.

2.  The second group (another 1/9) of non-semi-truck cutter-offers are the oblivious.  These people are probably very nice.  I’m assuming these are the people you and I work with or live near or go visit at the retirement home every Saturday.  Something inside these people says that they don’t need to watch their mirrors because mirrors are for beginners**.  They change lanes when they need to and assume others are watching because, after all, we need to share the road.  Most of these people are over the age of sixty, drive very large cars and haven’t always used the new “unleaded” gas.

3.  The remaining seven people that cut me off are texters.  I know it’s really, really “in” right now to be against texting and driving.  But it’s also ‘in’ (to a surprisingly lesser extent) to be alive right now.  The texters are worse than every other group.  I know they’re not driving gigantic, extremely flammable tanker semi-trucks.  I’m 99% sure they’re not AARP members.  And they’re probably not under any impressions that their Dodge Neons and Pontiac Sunfires are stock cars.  The only real danger texters cause that I can think of is the art of being oblivious.  Eyes on the road are better than eyes off the road, even with cataracts.  Texters drive the speed limit (or a little faster) with one hand on the wheel, both eyes on their phones and no brain in their head.  To me, the worst thing about the texter isn’t that their OMG and LOL and TTYL is more important than my life and the lives of countless others.  The worst thing, in my opinion, is that 99% of the time, they don’t have accidents.  Now, they cause more accidents than they’re in, statistically speaking.  But the fact that numbers tell them that they’re 99% safe REALLY sucks.  And I think I’ll have a hard time containing my rage*** if I ever do encounter a texter in an accident.  A REALLY hard time.****

 

 

*What ‘it’ is, I have no idea.  However… at the moment of being cut off, I always seem to come up with something good that these irresponsible drivers must be asking of me.  I also have questions for those drivers in the few moments after being cut off.

**People who don’t know what they’re doing.

***My plan of action is two-fold… First, ask to use their cell phone, then throw it into oncoming traffic.  And second, plaster their name, address and insurance info all over everything I can.  Because nothing says ‘I won’t text and drive again’ like identity theft, public shame and humiliation.

****Just as a brief explanation, I was run off the road this afternoon (in a construction zone, no less) by some dumb teenage girl that had extremely important things to say over text.  Probably telling her boyfriend that she couldn’t text because she was driving.  That’d be responsible, after all.  By the way, I was fine, my van was fine, and I eventually calmed down.  So life moves along.

Just a Quick Thought

I haven’t gotten around to a post in a while, but today I feel like I should get a little something out… more for me than anything.  Honestly, I’ve never had anyone asking why I don’t blog more.  EVER.  Which is probably good.

So today at Panera, there was a really loud conversation going on at the next impossibly small round table.  One guy was old* and quiet.  The other guy was less old.  But he made up for his youth** in volume of voice and length of ponytail*.  I’m not exagerating when I say that his ponytail was three feet long.  A full meter of bad choices***.  The conversation was MUCH less then informational, but was VERY entertaining.  I learned about ‘Google plush’ and ‘Neeshy’ and the politics involved in ‘The Facebook.’  What I learned**** was the following list:

•   ‘Google Plush’ will be the next facebook, but will have all of the good parts of Myspace.
• ‘Neeshy’ was the first person to make sense of religion.
• ‘The Facebook’ was never meant for college students, but there are so many and they’re all so powerful that shareholders had no choice but to let college students on first.

So I feel fairly educated today.  I will most-likely take the rest of the day off just to think through all of that glorious knowledge.

Oh.  Also, the ponytail was also wearing a t-shirt that said “Reason is dead.”  Maybe reason dies when it gets too close to a ponytail that long.

 

*  The old guy was somewhere between  65 – 106.  I’ no good at guessing ages, especially at the high end.  I use those two ages because I’ve been surprised at the old looks of 65 year olds and have met a woman that was 106 and this guy looked similar.

**  The second guy was not young.  He was in his late forties.  I say youth because he was more-than-likely living in the basement of the old guy he was with.

***  A male with a ponytail is a bad choice.  A full-grown man with a ponytail is a really bad choice.  A three foot ponytail is probably making most of the decisions for a grown man.

****  What I REALLY learned was that men with ponytails and really weird T-shirts are usually full of “information” that they’d love to talk to pretty much everybody about.  Oh.  And need showers.

Owha Taday!

Monday started with my wife leaving (VERY, VERY early) for a week of some post-grad work in Anderson, Indiana. That was an hour before my alarm was set to go off, so I thought I’d stay in bed. That was useless. Didn’t sleep much after that. Next, the roof installer that was coming to my house to install a brand new roof on our home called to tell me he was ready to ‘get the job done’ and I told him to do what he needed to do. Half an hour later, the dirty, broken old roof was in a dumpster and a new one was being installed. After a series of heated phone calls, I found out that the small print on a contract shouldn’t be ignored, because it ended up costing us $1000 over our agreed upon price for the roof. Needless to say, I was ready for the roof to be done and people to leave my property. And they did. But not until they had trampled most of my new landscaping and left the back door to my house wide open. And then the cat left the premises. And I walked at least 8 times around our neighborhood looking for the cat, just to find her waiting for me on the porch last night around 10:30. So…. let’s recap.

Woke up too early for human consumption.
Left alone for a week.
Roof cost an extra $1000.
Hansons trampled my plants.
The cat ran away.

I guess what I took away from yesterday was this… Fred Penner was right. The cat really DOES come back. Sometimes even before the very next day. See what I’m talking about here.