Derecho 2020

So Close, Yet So Far

2025-01-28T06:00:00Z

As much as I hoped to be done with the major repairs from the derecho, we hit a few snags along the way that got in the way. Overall, they aren't major ones and my anxiety has dropped significantly with what they had done.

The contractors finished with one room but it was too cold to finish the repairs on the porch (the derecho blew out windows, tore up wood, and soaked everything in rain). Repairing that is going to need a soffit and we hit some nasty cold weather, so they are going to wait until March to finish up.

The repairs they did were… okay? I mean, after the amazing work they did on the basement, the upstairs felt more like a 80% job in terms of polish and quality. Some of it is that I'm really sensitive to the floor and I can feel it flexing, but in the end, I decided it was good enough for now.

I mean, the entire reason we're getting contractors for this bit was because I didn't have the proper tools for everything and I'm struggling with kneeling and getting up. The bulk of the repairs involved tearing out carpet and putting down planks, so not being able to knee was kind of a big deal. In that regard, I'm as happy as I'm going to be so I'm just telling myself it is okay.

That also means the big stuff is finally done. At least the things I have to get anxious about. All that is left are little things: bringing back tables, hanging pictures, and the like. In March, they'll repair the porch but that should involve me getting some couches off the porch and letting them do their thing.

Of course, “little things” will probably take me another year to finish. It's easier to put “replace an electrical outlet” to the side when it involves shutting down my home lab, or buying new cold air return plates. But I'm okay with that.

That isn't to say that there aren't other big things. Besides the porch, I'm also hoping to get my mother's library that I inherited into the house. That is going to be a trial in itself. If I'm lucky, I'll build some bookcases along the way and get a nice, dense arrangement that doesn't try to take over too much of the house.

I also need to work on my health and see if I can get my dislocated disks fixed.

Despite last post being rather negative, I feel a lot better.

The End of 2024

2024-12-31T06:00:00Z

In a few hours from now, 2024 ends. I don't have a lot of emotional attachment to the new year, mainly because it is just an abstract point of time for a calendar we've created over the centuries. But, it isn't a bad time to look back and see what I have and haven't done.

Overall, 2024 is probably my worst year ever. There was a lot going on, but I'm not going to go into the details of those because it doesn't really help anyone. Needless to say, it was rough for me, mentally and physically, professionally and personally. And a whole bunch of other “-ly” I can't really think about.

Warning: This isn't a happy or positive post.

Mental Health

2024 was the first time I've ever had a panic attack.

That was scary and I had to look at why it was happening. It was just “more of the same” as it were but I'm still trying to figure out what got me there. I think a lot of it is this feeling that I can't solve things anymore (Long Covid maybe) and everything is ten times harder than it used to be.

More importantly, I haven't been writing. I want to write, I want to write so badly. Writing makes me feel good but I've had this writer's block for a few years now and its beginning to dig into my thoughts. I have ideas in my head, but not the focus that isn't interrupted by obligations and deadlines.

This is also the year I've been pushed into the rubicon of being a individual contributor at work and a manager. That means 4-6 hours of Zoom meetings almost every single day. It starts at 08:30 with a 1:1 with my manager, goes into an ninety minute meeting with the developers, an hour of stand up, and then the “when we're done, I need Dylan” that follows. In most cases, I have less than a minute between meetings or I'm five minutes late for the next, so I don't get any break for four hours every day.

Like commuting, that meeting train is grinding me down. I'm struggling to be excited about programming because I'm just stagger from that train to try getting a half hour nap before going into the next set.

Something is going to break in 2025, I only hope it isn't me. More likely, I'm going to transition completely off programming and will no longer have the joy of refactoring code or getting it solved. It isn't going to help that politics are going to be digging into me, watching friends being afraid and hurt, and struggling through… everything.

Physical Health

2024 was when I found out that I had a dislocated disk which was digging into my spinal cord, which is why I've been in pain since March of 2023. The surgeon said it could be fixed, but I need to lose weight to get there. A lot of the tail end was just trying to dig through my backlog of obligations and needs so I could get the home exercise equipment working again. I'm still not there. I'm still trying to do that, the Cortisone shot only gave me a few days of relief, but then a slow slide back to where I want.

The main part is, I can barely pick up anything and have had to leverage Child.0 into picking things up. The good thing, I know what is causing the pain so I can stop. The bad part is that there is no exercise, no stretch, nothing that can prevent it other than losing weight, getting surgery, and hoping it gets better.

And not thinking about the catastrophic failure of my “routine” hernia surgery. Or the severe problems I had from my vasectomy.

Derecho

The 2020 derecho is still in my life, but we're so close to finally closing that chapter of our life. In January, we should be getting the “last” of the repairs done on the house.

Related, I got a letter this week from my insurance company about replacing my roof and needing deposits to register it. How can I provide that went the guy who did it stole twelve thousand dollars from me and walked away? It isn't like I can say “yeah, you know how you owe me a tremendous amount of money? Could I get a receipt? By the way, fuck you.”

I'm hoping between that, getting the final room done, and organizing my workshop (to integrate my late father's shop) will finally let me set everything aside. Thought, at this point, it feels like it has been burrowing in my skull for so long that I don't know how to live without it.

I'm hoping to find out.

Writing

The urge to write is coming back. I think it's finally time to focus on getting the culture library finished, figure out Second-Hand Dresses, and maybe design some covers. Or even finish Nor Curse Be Found, which has been hanging around for a while.

If anything, I want 2025 to be a year of being creative again. I want to write, I want to work on libraries, I want to make things and have that feeling of being satisfied with what comes out.

Plus handle my monthly obligations that never go away.

Coding

I want to polish up some of my libraries, including MfGames.Nitride and maybe put it out into the open. I have other libraries that have been hanging out (MfGames.Culture being one of them) that I need to buckle down and finish up.

Play

I'm hoping to play around more in 2025. Not just games with the children, but drawing, writing, and maybe building a kitchen cabinet.

Goals

I can't really say I have goals for the year though. Instead, I just have hopes that 2025 is going to be better than 2024. Beyond that, I'm not really planning or expecting anything, just a vague hope that it works out in the end and I find my smiles again.

There is only one way to find out.

Just keep swimming.

Dory, Finding Nemo

Basements

2024-08-10T05:00:00Z

I missed blogging in July. That bothers me on a number of fronts.

The biggest was the two year period between 2009 and 2011 where I didn't blog anything because I was overwhelmed with everything else going on in my life, including the birth of our first child.

When I get overwhelmed, I get fixated. I struggle to do more than one task because I have to finish the Thing. Usually along with that comes a bout of depression, which makes me want to leave the house less, to do anything “fun”, or struggle to relax because I should be doing the Thing.

The Thing

For the last few years, the Thing was the damage to my basement from the derecho and the three years of bad luck from the entanglement. The derecho was four years ago (in a few weeks) but just because it has faded from most popular memory doesn't mean that everyone has been able to move on. Other basement flooding, rotted walls, physical injuries, and losing both parents within a year of each other didn't help in the slightest. Or the three months I was going to Wound Care with a hole in my gut. Or countless other things that I don't want to remember anymore.

All I knew that if I pushed through, it would get better. I was hoping for a few months, not four years, but things are finally getting done.

My current fixation is also why I haven't been able to write anything new for a few years. Every time I sit down to write, I think about what I need to do to work to get the basement fixed.

Bathroom

The biggest problem was losing our basement bathroom when the toilet exploded. I blame much of the previous owner on that; who puts carpet in a basement bathroom? The give was just enough give that the pipe cracked from rocking and eventually it just broke.

What probably wasn't their fault was when the pipe in the slab cracked and flooded the entire area again with the contents of the dish washer.

A few rounds of water damage later and the entire room was gutted for a few years. Which is a bummer since I work in our basement which meant I no longer had an easy bathroom to visit between the mere minutes I have between most of my morning meetings.

But now, we have a new bathroom. We went with professionals on this on, which hurt a lot on the bank account balance, but I'm happy it was done right. I now have a tub I can fit in, another bidet seat (love those things), and generally it's great.

We also had to get an tankless water heater because a tub big enough for me is too large for most water heaters. Its taken a while to get used to, but it was something I've wanted for years and I'm glad to finally not run out of hot water in the house.

I could have done without the silverfish infestation when the plumbers didn't seal up the opening around the new vent and they decided to visit, but we're dealing with that.

Projects Keep Expanding

The bathroom project was only one part, mostly to deal with having stuff I've “inherited” from my parents. We decided to fix the rest of the basement at the same time, mostly repairing the water-damaged drywall and pouring down an epoxy floor so I could handle both my mother's library and my dad's furniture (and workshop).

I also figured since we had everything ripped out, it was a good time to run new networking, get a circuit run for my home lab, and all those little things that have annoyed me in the last decade of living in the house.

Of course, that led to almost a half year of moving stuff around to get space for the service people to do their things. Just my luck, their schedules resulted in me constantly rearranging the basement instead of pushing it in one room, get everything done, and then lugging. No, their schedules meant I was relocating entire rooms every few weeks from April to July.

But, as of earlier this week, the last of the service people have done their thing. All that is left is painting, a ton of cleanup, and them moving furniture into their “forever” location. Which means I also get my basement office back, a bathroom nearby, and things are going to finally settle once again.

Future Projects

This isn't the end, far from it. I still need to get bookshelves for my mother's library, repair the first floor's laundry room floor so it doesn't leak into my freshly repaired basement, and deal with countless little things. But that's part of being a home owner.

It is also something I can do (mostly) later.

A Little Give

2022-06-24T05:00:00Z

One of the things I learned during my late teens was that all things pass, no matter how horrific, no matter how much it feels like there is no chance for hope, it will pass and things will clear up. In a lot of ways, Sand and Blood was a lot about putting those ideas into words, to never give up.

When I'm anxious, the best thing to do is write. But, at the moment, I've been beyond the ability to sit down and really write something, so I'm using less satisfactory methods of relieving pressure, which is to say I'm festering, complaining, and whining a lot.

Looking Back

But “it” gets better. The pressure can't build forever. Fortunately for me, the last few weeks have been things resolving or completing instead of getting worse. The biggest are three major threads that I have seen as part of my entanglement.

Commissions

I finished a commission that I started last year. It was a nasty one, at least in terms of complexity and it was a big one to start with (50k words). It ended up being about 20k words over that, but I basically wrote a short novel. Now, as much as I love getting paid to write (commissions are pretty much my only writing income), there is just too much else going on so I asked the commissioner to hold off on the next request until 2023.

Now, there is another commission still undone but that one is half in limbo and half haunting me. In other words, the commissioner is willing to wait and I'm basically triaging it. They are aware this is happening because I finished the original commission but there was something they weren't happy with, so I'm trying to go back and make them happier but it isn't simple as switching out a Diet Coke for a Diet Pepsi, it was rewriting close to thirty thousand words.

Appliances

The other good news that has come my way is that the dishwasher was finally repaired. That was one of those “please make it simple” when it became something bigger. But, six weeks after we bought it, it works and has worked for a week. And it actually solved the problem that we were having with the old one which was to say it actually cleans dishes instead of just splashing water on them.

Projects

I'm also finally “done” with a big project at work. Not quite, there are a few minor left over and I still need someone to review close to ten thousand files, but I'm able to move to the next thing.

I'm so close to an item I really want to work on because it would benefit the entire application as a whole. That will remain out of reach for a few more months and I'm fighting upper management to keep it.

I only hope it benefits us as much as I hope it will. It's hard to keep the faith when struggling.

Looking Forward

There are still a lot of things left to get done, but most of them are “stable” in that they are pressing but not getting worse. That ends up being a big category.

Derecho Repairs

The last major derecho repair is the gutters. I found a place that I thought would work, but then they turned around with a “we'll show up randomly” things which I'm really not fond of, but getting household repairs has always been very messy and difficult.

I figured I'll give it another month before poking them to do it, or start looking for a new gutter replacement service. I have the money to pay for it but I'm always worried something is going to go horribly wrong and I'll need liquid funds for that.

Related, I need to finish up my mother-in-laws shower stall, remove the carpet from our basement, and start to clean up my office.

Flight of the Scions

I'm waiting for the sensitivity reader for Flight of the Scions. It was supposed to be only a few weeks but things have gotten off track. My hopes is to get it done by ICON this year so I have a book on the table.

And that leads into the other big task for Flight of the Scions: redoing the cover. I wasn't happy so I've been messing around in the last few weeks to try coming up with something new. Not sure if it will work (not sure where to get a good critique on those type of things), but I want something that fits all my books, past and near future. I'm also trying to use LCH/LAB colors so they have the same brightness which was always glaring to me.

Larger Thumbnails

Creating covers is difficult because I'm mostly doing it in a void. I haven't found a good place to ask for critiques. More importantly, ask for iterative critiques. Obviously, I want somethin appealing but I'm also getting closer to my skill as an illustrator with some of these.

The main ones are the Flight of the Scions and Second-Hand Dresses covers. I learned a new technique for doing fires and I really like how the bonfire of Sand and Ash turned out.

If you want to give me feedback, please do.

Nitride

I also want to finish Nitride because I need to convert a couple websites, including https://fedran.com/. This is “blocking” my writing because I'm having trouble getting new stories to wire up properly, so I want to fix it properly but switching to the new static site generator I wrote to solve the problems.

And I need to get Allegro done by September.

Leaning Back

Coding projects like Nitride are peaceful for me, as it working on the covers. I'm also playing a lot of Satisfactory despite the fact my laptop can't actually handle anything other than 90s era graphics in the game (I have everything dialed way down).

Tweaking my website's generation is also fun.

Gitea and Gitlab

I also spent my anniversary weekend learning about Digital Ocean and switching to a private Gitea server. I didn't really plan on doing this, but GitLab is switching to a new business model (e.g., reducing the number of hours for the CI/CD servers) but the way I organize things doesn't fit it.

I had this problem earlier when I tried to pay for a higher end a few years ago. I was a major fan of GitLab, including answer questions on Stack Overflow and telling everyone about it. But the fact I organize things into groups (one for accounting, one for Fedran, one for Measured Stars, commissions in one, one for each major OSS project) doesn't work because you have to pay “per user per group.” Well, that would mean I would need to get 6-7 user licenses for just myself. They also don't have a good mechanism for handling commissions, a single user who shows up for a few months and then goes away. They want me to pay for each one.

So, spinning up my own Git server. It's been a fun adventure and I have a while to go, but it was a trade-off of personal time verses having it managed. When I had the CI/CD minutes, it was not really a need to decide but there is little ground for me where I go from “the free tier” to “a few hundred a month.”

I could use the self-hosted GitLab, but with their recent push to limit services, I honestly don't know if they are going to do the same thing for self-hosted, so I decided to look for different pastures entirely.

Trauma

I'm still experiencing a lot of PTSD and trauma with all of this, mainly because I still have a lot broken that I can't fix. It's little things, like expecting the dishwasher to stop working, or the house to fall apart, or “something” to go wrong. I can't just look at a completed project and go “this is done and I am happy.” Even the new siding is still “new” to me.

Eventually, this will also pass. Things will stop being novel and just be the norm. But the scratches and bruises of the last few months make it difficult to look past those.

It just takes time.

Radio Silence

2022-06-06T05:00:00Z

As I was writing up today's post about Nitride, I realized it has been almost three months since I last posted. My goal was to post at least once a month, mainly because some years ago, I realized I didn't have a single post for almost two years (2009-2011) and it upset me. But, when things get overwhelming, something has to give and writing about my life seems to be one of those things that gets triaged.

There were some good things and studies found that ending on a high note is better, so I'll start with the bad.

The Bad

This has a lot to do about my entanglement, which I decided means this:

A series of apparently unrelated crises resulting in cascading failure across my entire life.

In many ways, “unrelated” seems to be the key frustration. COVID and isolation was one thing, but adding the derecho on top of that made it worse. Having my office flooded was one thing, but then having a second flood when I ended up having a cracked pipe in my slab just added to the mix. In the last three months, I had two additional floods: our refrigerator decided to break a seal and dribble water through the walls and into the basement was nothing compared to waking up Mother's Day morning to an inch of water in the laundry room because a toilet decided to crack its seal between the tank and the bottom. The last one (flood four) resulting in water pouring into the basement in one of the few rooms untouched by the previous three which also contained everything I had to move frantically out of way of the previous ones.

Individually, I could have handled each one, but in aggregate, it is very difficult. Work has been remarkably stressful in the last six months and isn't going to get better until the end of the year. Earlier last month, I ended up doing a two week “death march” of 10-15 hour days trying to get something done only to have it kicked into the next release (e.g., this month).

The refrigerator going bad was unexpected, but I happened to get a bonus less than a week later, so that money went into buying a replacement refrigerator and dishwasher instead of trying to get out of the hole that having Iowa Metal Roofs stealing $10k left me in. I may have relatively poor money management skills, but losing $10k is going to make everything worse for almost everyone. I suspect it is going to take a few years to recover from this.

The dishwasher was included because over our nation's pseudo-isolation, it had been failing more and more. Somehow, chunky food particles had gotten into the pipes and I was unable to flush it out with water and a wet/dry vac. I even replaced the spinning blades, but they promptly got jammed in a matter of days. Since the bonus could cover it, we decided to replace that after nine months of seriously trying to fix it.

That ended up being an entirely new crisis. The refrigerator worked beautifully, the dishwasher ran once for the installer, then beeped, then never turned on again. I called Home Depot who promptly kicked me over to Samsung who promised a technician would get to me in 48 hours. Three days later, I had to call back to find out that service company one ghosted me. Service company two was called in and I had to wait a week for them to show up. The nice gentleman who showed up told me it needed a new part that would show up in two weeks and left. A week later, the service company said they needed another week, so my second service call ended up being a month after I got the new dishwasher installed. They took almost a half hour to say the first guy ordered the wrong part and they would order a new one… see me again in ten days.

Right now, Samsung home appliances suck. Their service sucks and I'm really frustrated because I just wanted something to be handled. Instead, its just one more tally of things that I cannot do anything about but needs to be done.

The Triaged

I don't let things go well. I'm very good at my job, but those skills also comes with a rather impressive set of obsessive tendencies. I remember lots of little details and usually keep them in my head so I can do my job. I have a very detailed oriented job with a good-sized code base that is reasonably close to the limits of what I can “grok.”

When there are things wrong, though, they keep poking me. Every time I sat down to try writing to relax, I start thinking about how the carpet needs to be removed, the shower stall has to be gutted, the trampoline has to be put up. Individual tasks for work, to keep the household running, to handle my obligations, all poking me.

The problem is, I can't just let something go. Dishes don't clean themselves. The weeds don't pluck themselves. Tasks don't get done. In my experience, if you ignore them, they get worse. But at the same time, I cannot do all the things at once. I try but only end up running myself ragged: remove carpet here, program here, play Satisfactory with Child.0, put in tiles, watch videos with Child.1, try to spend time with Partner, try not to break down at night.

Forcing something out of my head requires a significant effort. Just letting it go doesn't seem to work. I spent a year writing a year-long Exalted epic, ended right before a major fight, and couldn't finish. Then, year after year after year, I kept wanting to go back and finish it. It took almost twenty years before I could finally accept, I'm not going to finish it.

To get around that, I have to put it behind some other task. In situations like this, where I'm overwhelmed, the ones that seem less critical are the ones that get kicked off first. Sadly, “writing for joy” is one of them. I tucked it behind finishing up Nitride because I'm having trouble with fedran.com not rendering and I don't have the spoons to figure out that fix when I realize there is a bigger, systemic problem with the website that Nitride should address; so to avoid spending days on a problem twice, I pushed Fedran behind Nitride and working on Allegro behind that. Since I'm mostly sticking with a single setting, that means no “fun writing” until I get the website working again which won't happen until I get Nitride finished otherwise I will try to do that while doing everything else.

Sometimes that works. I got the worst of the water-logged carpet out so it isn't moldy, but I still haven't done the edges of the room. It needs to get done but I'm hoping to push it further back until I get my in-laws bathroom tiled or finished the story someone commissioned me to write.

The Fun

Thankfully, in the last few weeks, I'm starting to relax a little. I have Child.0 to blame for that since they will come up, “I think you should take a break down and play a game with me” and I have established they are one of my big three priorities.

Now that the kids are out of school, they have more time to game and I've tied their screen time to finishing chores to relieve the pressure. I also set up a dedicated server for Satisfactory on our home network and just play a mod-free game. It has been an experience because I'm very structured in my building and I'm trying to learn how to relax about rules. For me, playing the game has a lot in common with Cueball's actions in XKCD: Wisdom Teeth, I structure and rebuild everything just to make it “neat.”

At the same time, Child.0 likes to stab me with a cattle prod and build spaghetti factories while Child.1 just paints everything random colors, deletes hunks of the world, and then stabs me while I'm AFK.

Good times.

I don't have the bandwidth to sit down and do “fun writing” but I'm working on the “obligatory writing” and coding projects like Nitride, which are blocks for solving some of those little pricks that have been plaguing me.

The Writing

Relatively speaking, despite not writing, there is a lot of writing related events going on.

I sent Flight of the Scions to a sensitivity reader as one of the last two major tasks left on that book. There has been a series of crises at that end, so it's taking a few months longer than planned, but I'm hoping to have it in a month or two. I also want to redo the cover but then I should be ready to have it actually published.

There was a fund-raiser for some writers going to Clarion. While I'm having money troubles, I still try to help others, so I kicked in some money and ended up getting an edit for a novel which will be Allegro. Naturally that means, I have to actually finish Allegro before September but I think that's doable. I just need to get through the current writer's block which is highly related to the entanglement. Also, Child.1 was watching Lindsey Sterling's Roundtable Rival which is the inspiration for Allegro so that made me want to write it even more.

I also put money down to show up at ICON. Assuming Flight of the Scions gets done, plus Shannon Ryan has a new book out, Merger of Evil, I won't feel guilty about showing up with the “same old stuff” for years in a row.

I may also throw up some books I had done for the erotic readings on the table for sale. Not sure, just toying with the idea to have “new things” after so many years of not having new things.

The Inspiration

In the end, there is only one thing I can do:

Just keep swimming.

Dory, Finding Nemo

ABC Did a Beautiful Job Siding My House

2022-03-19T05:00:00Z

In the last week, we've hit a major milestone for recovering from the derecho, we finally got siding on our house. This was after Iowa Metal Roofs stole our money and a year of frustration in trying to handle it. I'll probably mention the theft occasionally for a while longer, but I don't really have the personality to hold grudges for long; I just want it to show up in Google results to warn others.

We ended up going with ABC who did a wonderful job. They were fast, cleaned up every night so our dogs (one who is going blind and deaf) wouldn't be stumbling over nails and metal bits (we got steel siding). They also did a great job of keeping me informed of every step, more so knowing that we were ghosted by the other company.

To our surprise, they even went beyond what we expected and fixed some of the soffit that wasn't installed properly.

Not to say that wasn't perfect. They accidentally broke a pipe in the process, but I'm going to let that one go though it was an unexpected $500 repair. I honestly couldn't tell you if the kids would have ended up breaking it in the same way in a year or so.

We went with a “serious blue” (according to our neighbor) which is almost a sapphire color. With the white trim around the windows, brand new LED lights everywhere (motion on the front and back, big lights around the garage), and a new street sign, it now looks like a house that is ours.

I would recommend them for steel siding in a heartbeat.

Debt

A painful step for this was handing over the checks for the payment. Since we had to get a second home equity loan to cover the siding, I watched our personal debt increase to a higher level than it had been in pretty much my entire life (excluding the house).

This is also one of my two biggest triggers. Call it a result of my upbringing, but I really don't like being in debt. It causes me to get anxious in a way that I can't easily handle it. From self-reflection, it seems that my anxiety levels get worse around the 0.3 and 0.7 of my incoming levels. With the HELOC, we are well above the 0.7 point so I find it intruding on my thoughts a lot more than I enjoy.

There is nothing I can do about it though besides just work at paying it down. I'm not going to stop our trip to the cabin over this, but I'm also not going to be getting a new computer unless my catastrophically fails. Or getting a home media server to replace my aging one.

Car

One thing of note, we paid off our car last month. That means no more car payments for a while (that got moved over to the HELOC) and we own the car free and clear.

That also helps.

Trauma

I still have a trauma response to the siding. I keep expecting something to go terribly wrong, like the house burns down or the siding falls off. I know it is just fear from the last two years, but it is slowly feeling like it's “real”.

Like the debt, there is nothing that I can really do to speed up this healing process. It just needs to be worked through before I cease to see it as the “new” siding and then it will just be “the house”.

I'm looking forward to that point, but it takes a while for it to be glossed over.

Gutters

The last repair is the gutters. We've found a place and are getting on their schedule, but it won't be “until summer” before they get to us. There is enough on the HELOC to cover it, so as long as we can avoid spending it on another emergency or overdrafts, there will be some point around the two year anniversary of the derecho that I can finally say we've recovered the storm.

Hopefully then, I'll stop assuming the worse.

Shed and Porch

Technically, we lost a shed in the storm. That will eventually be replaced, but I want to pour a concrete floor for it and get something that matches the house. I also want a fence. But, to be honest, we can live without those things and I'd rather recover funding to get under my trigger threshold first (at least the 0.3 level).

Also, the porch area is pretty trashed. Last year, I put down vegetation clear to prevent weeds from growing up, but I'll have a few challenges this year as I start the transition to gardens or just plain yard.

Publishing

That leads into my plans for writing. Well, I'm still burned out but I'm finding that I'm thinking about writing a lot more. That's good because it means that I'm getting excited.

But, publishing books can be expensive. I run about $2.5k/book for one of my books at the moment. There is no chance I'm going to do that above the 0.7 level. That probably means I'm going to be looking at another 3-5 years before I can “finish” a book.

There are currently two books in the pipeline:

Flight of the Scions is pretty much at the last few steps, getting a sensitivity reader to look at it and creating a cover.

Second-Hand Dresses is “stuck” with one question from the first editor that I want to write a MfGames Culture to solve. This will help with writing.

In both of these cases, I have self-inflicted tasks that block them (cover and library). I also noticed that when I go down to write, I'm finding myself hung up on other tasks, so I'm going to let that part of my recover by focusing on getting Nitride finished and redo https://fedran.com/ before I get back to finishing the projects I've started.

The Future

I feel a lot better now, more so than in a long time. I still feel that there are a lot of things still entangled together, but I'm getting a better understanding of why they were entangled and how to get out of it. But, like everything else, it just takes time.

Just keep swimming. — Dori, Finding Nemo

Jim Murphy and Iowa Metal Roofs Stole $10,915.69

2022-02-16T06:00:00Z

This is a warning post, just a sign sticking in the mud. Why? Because I don't think I can do anything about it and this has cause me an incredible amount of stress in the last year. And it doesn't end a bang or even a remotely satisfying ending, just a whimper of a long rotted wound being stitched over.

Let's start with the first bit, all the information about Iowa Metal Roofs that I reference here is public record, mainly by searching for business number 532648, or “Iowa Metal Roofs” at the Iowa Secretary of State website. Also their website, just do a search for “Iowa Metal Roofs”.

As some of you know, about two years ago, a derecho decided to slam through the town of Cedar Rapids and did a pretty good number on my house. It stripped the roof down to the plywood, punched a hole in the back of my house, and flooded my basement. Like a half million other people, as soon as we got power again, I called around to get someone to help repair the damage and make our house safe again. There was also a lot of cutting down trees that fell on our roof.

One of our thoughts was that we would upgrade to steel roofing and siding. One, because not everyone was going to go there so we hoped the supply chain wouldn't be as impacted but also because we planned on living in the house for at least ten more years and steel made more sense.

As our usual, almost no one called back (see half a million other people calling for the same thing) but we did get a few nibbles. One of them happened to be Iowa Metal Roofs which seemed to be a good business with a track record in Iowa. After a brief quote and discussion with Jim (see their website or the Secretary of State), we signed a contract to get new roof, siding, gutters, and soffit from the place.

Item	Quoted
Interlock Roof	21,988.05
Prism siding	14,992.48
Soffit & fascia	3,956.26
6" Gutters	3,504.50
Screens	1,545.00
Total	45,986.29

This was almost two months after the damage because our insurance company didn't even get an adjuster to us for almost a month. They also didn't even give us remotely this close, so we ended up needing a home equity line of credit (HELOC) to cover the sizable difference to upgrade.

A month later, supplies showed up and about half a month after that the dumpster came and our new roof was going on. A swarm of workers came and scraped off the roof. It was a wonderful time to be excited.

Then, things started to go wrong. At first, it was a mistiming with the roof coming off and repairs. That caused our kitchen light to flood with water and fall off, plus water trickling through the walls and creating a second flooded basement.

Promises were made to hurry up.

Weeks later, the roof started to go on. We were hoping it was a one or two day job, but it ended up taking months because there was only a single person working on it late at night. One person, at night, working steel roofing.

In December, right before the weather went bad, we had another flurry of work where all the soffits were torn out and replaced. Things looked good and there was “only a few minor things left on the roof” so we paid our second check.

Winter was stressful. They left tools and ladders on the ground, not to mention a few hundred pounds of roofing material. I cleaned up the best I could, but it ended up being cringing as our eldest dog (who was going blind and deaf) would stumble over snow-buried crap.

But, I told myself, it would be worked on in the next year and things would be finally done.

I started calling when the snow melted, leaving a message because Jim stopped answering.

“Do you think you could give me a status?”

“Do you have idea when you'll start up?”

“Please call me.”

Nothing. No callback. I have a log of every call and email I made, every request that was never answered.

Then the letter came. My neighbors complained about all the roofing material still on the ground that he didn't clean up. So a letter came around, pick it up or pay almost a thousand dollars for us to do it.

My calls to Iowa Metal Roofs got a bit more frantic.

“Are you going to clean up the mess you said you were?”

“Please call me.”

“Are you still working on this?”

Still nothing.

He did show up without announcing himself, dropped off a trailer, made a token effort to pick up stuff, and left. We suspect he didn't realize how much crap there was and left. Didn't call or anything.

Assuming he shafted us, we ended up loading all the waste on the driveway and in his trailer the night before the city was going to come. I didn't want to get billed and I was so torn up that he would just screw us over.

That night, after we spent hours cleaning up, he said he would bring his worker (the guy on the roof) and clean up. It was pretty easy since we did the bulk of it. We were lucky because we saw the city truck slow down behind him as he was gathering up his mess and then drive off.

After all that, he finally called me. He said he was sorry, he would work on our siding as soon as possible, and he would take a thousand dollars off of his bill.

That was the last time I heard from the man.

I gave him two weeks. Nothing. I left a message.

Two more weeks, nothing. Another message. Maybe two.

Two more weeks, then a week. More calls, more requests to know when he was going to start. Were the parts ordered? What was going on?

Nothing.

I tried… for six months to get him to call me back and finish the job he took money from. April to October. I even went to a lawyer and had a letter drafted up that said I would work with him if he would just contact me and talk.

As a side note, the lawyer told me that I was one of the best organized people she had encountered. Yes, it was probably just ego-ruffling, but I had a log of every call, a copy of every email, every deliverable, photocopies of the checks and his endorsements, and pictures to back up everything. I could show over a year of trying to get it done.

The end result was this:

Item	Amount
Payments made	35,870.00
Services completed	-24,954.31
Difference	10,915.69

The letter got sent certified mail, but Jim didn't pick up. So I had to have the letter served. A hundred bucks just to say “work with me, please.”

It was served and he ignored it.

I was now over $800 in the hole for lawyer fees trying to work with him and still nothing. I couldn't afford to sue him, so I sat on it for a little bit and then started a small claims against him. The maximum was $6,500 but it was something when I didn't think I could get anything at that point.

Now, the page for Small Claims in Iowa has such wonderful documentation on how to start the small claims process. They even had a website where it would fill out most of the initial paperwork for you and I just had to file it.

I also had to have another set of papers served to Jim. This time, I went with the sheriff's department. They took a week because Riverside was so far out of their way, and then a few weeks for apparently the sheriff to actually hand the paperwork into the office but eventually I got it.

And sat and waited.

When the court says there would be a response in twenty days, it isn't true. It took until the end of November before I got anything. This also led into an uncomfortable conversation with the clerk's office who answer to any question was “we can't give legal advice.”

“Did I miss something?”

“We can't give legal advice.”

“Is my claims waiting to be processed?”

“We can't give legal advice.”

“Is it in the queue for a magistrate?”

“We can't give legal advice.”

Eventually, I reached out the to the lawyer for advice. She was on maternity leave but still gave me a few hints. I got some papers notarized and added them to the mess. I was at the point of “just one more step and I'm going to give up.”

That last one was it. I needed a notarized paper summarizing the claim with the tables and everything in a single PDF. The response came asking for a form that I could not find how to fill out. I tried to search Google for it, couldn't find anything. I even posted on Reddit asking for help and got nothing.

Back to the lawyer. I still don't understand what she did differently, but she filled out the one form I couldn't figure out, had me bundled everything into a single PDF, and try again.

That was finally accepted. A few days later, I got my judgment and Iowa Metal Roofs owes me $6,500 out of the $10,915.69 Jim stole from me and the $1,117.38 in legal and filing costs it took me to get ask for it.

At the same time, I also tried calling Veritile because Jim said he just had a “few minor things” but never came back. I figured they had a contact form for requests for contractors and they could find someone who would tell me what Jim didn't do so I can get the roof finished. Sadly, after two form entries and multiple phone calls, they declined to return my calls. As far as I'm concerned, they make beautiful steel roofs but they have no interest in helping after that.

The roof Iowa Metal Roofs put in looks beautiful. It isn't finished and they tore off my gutters and never replaced them, but the tiles look great. I just don't know if they are properly installed. I've been struggling with this and everything going on in the last five months.

I also had to get a new HELOC that doubled by debt because I still don't have siding. So, I had to cover the loan from the first around, including the roof, and pay for siding all over again. The color isn't as beautiful (we wanted sapphire, not a weak blue) but at least the contractor is calling me once every few weeks to let me know they haven't forgotten me. Maybe in 2022, I'll actually get the hole in the back of my house repaired and maybe some new gutters?

In the end, I don't think I can ever get the money back. Jim didn't bother answering the court, he didn't care to answer any certified or served letter, and he updated his website to show he's still in business.

On the other hand, I still have a basement gutted from the flood, a hole in the back of my house, a roof that isn't done, and no gutters in Iowa. That isn't including the debt that has been weighing me down and will continue to do so for at least ten more years.

Since I'm unable to recover the money I gave him, I'm creating this post as a warning to others: Don't work with Jim Murphy of Iowa Metal Roofs (also known as Iowa Metal Roofing Supply LLC). You may have a great experience, or he might leave you with a half-finished job and ghost you after taking your money.

Basement Bathrooms

2021-12-18T06:00:00Z

The last almost five months continued to move forward, but this week I've hit a “stopping point” for at least two of them until the next year.

Last post, I mentioned this:

A good example is while I was fixing Partner's toilet that wasn't flushing (just a simple stalk replacement) and our youngest comes up the stairs because the downstairs toilet basically exploded (water pouring out of the bottom, ruptured wax seal, no longer flushing, soaking the carpet). I've been trying to get around to it for almost two months and just removed the carpet today to find out how much drywall damage was done.

I managed to get the carpet done and set some fans on it. I figured once it was dried out, I could get some repairs done, pick up a wet saw for tile, and maybe get it tiled.

Except two days later, the floor was wet again. I was worried it came from the toilet drain (I had a rag in the pipe and a bucket on top). However, I quickly proved that wasn't the problem. After a week of investigating and the wonderful smell of sewage filling my home office, I tracked it down to water from the dishwasher and kitchen was somehow bubbling up underneath the shower and then flooding the basement.

Half a week later, I got a plumber who gave me both good news and bad news. The good news was that he used his large pipe cleaner and found somewhere Roto-Rooter had been missing that was causing it to slow down enough that it was leaking.

The bad news, on the other hand, is why this is still part of the entanglement. It should have backed up through the toilet drain or the shower drain, but it didn't. Instead, it came through a cut out in the concrete which means its a cracked pipe underneath said concrete.

This means I could tile the bathroom but somewhere between now and ten years from now, it's going to flood again. The only way to properly fix it, is to remove the shower and the sink, jackhammer the basement floor to find the cracked pipe, replace it, pour new concrete, and then replace the shower, toilet, and probably the bathroom sink. Then, after all that, I can tile the bathroom and finish.

And with that news, everything got tangled up even more because the bathroom is partially preventing me from cleaning up another room which is preventing me from finishing my office from the derecho damage that happened last year.

Honestly, there is nothing I can do about it this year. I need to budget a couple thousand dollars for the jack hammering to fix it properly and I don't want to half-ass repair it just to damage whatever I do put in the bathroom when it leaks again. So, that gets tossed onto the pile of projects I cannot finish and another room ceases to be useful in our house.

Overall, I've gotten through most of the five phases about this. It's heartbreaking and frustrating, but everything just seems to go wrong and its all tied together into this impressive knot that I can't find the end of. I'm really good at unraveling knots, like good enough that the jewelry store saleswoman would hand me all her tangled necklaces while she sold stuff to my partner (many years ago, there is no JB Robinson in Iowa).

The news also was kind of a relief. The sewage stuff was stressful because I didn't know the source. Now, the immediate danger is resolved and I should hopefully be able to plan to get it repair in a way that won't plunge me too far into debt.

This means, I can still wait until the second round of siding (another post) gets on the house and I can work on that derecho damage because this winter, I'm looking at ice in the bathtub again.

As a side note, my brother pointed out that I have a strange tendency to present things in “that's good news, but it's really bad because, but it's really good because, but it's really bad…”

This week, I realized that he is completely and utterly true.

I'm driven by finishing projects. I'm also not that great as money management (which one reason why Second-Hand Dresses and Flight of the Scions won't be out this year. There is a good chance one of them won't be out for next year either, but it really depends on the next six months and if I can get through this knot without cutting it.

Using Nix

2021-11-30T06:00:00Z

Apparently, it's been a few months since I've blogged about anything. That isn't to say I wasn't thinking about it. I would find myself working on a little bit of code and think “this would be something interesting to talk about” or come up on a post about elitism that I want to respond. But then… it didn't happen.

The last four month have been probably one of the hardest I've had in a long time, even over the struggles of 2020's derecho and pandemic. It started with just a bit of stress at work, but then something got dumped on top of it. And then something on top of that, then on that, and then on that. At one point, for every time I took off my task list, two more were added.

A good example is while I was fixing Partner's toilet that wasn't flushing (just a simple stalk replacement) and our youngest comes up the stairs because the downstairs toilet basically exploded (water pouring out of the bottom, ruptured wax seal, no longer flushing, soaking the carpet). I've been trying to get around to it for almost two months and just removed the carpet today to find out how much drywall damage was done.

There was a lot more, but going through them just turns into a story like Willard (2003) where the main character starts off in the dump, for a brief moment sees hope, and then plunges even further into the hole. Since I try to keep my blog posts positive, let's just go with that.

One of those bright points was getting Merger of Evil published. Shannon has always been a fantastic author and I'm glad I got to see the sequel to Minion of Evil in print. Plus, the cover is fantastic (even if I didn't do it).

My brother says my life is frequently a “that's good, that's bad” game. while I was able to do my part in getting Merger of Evil out, I was unable to finish Second-Hand Dresses or Flight of the Scions out this year, which I wanted to. The reasons are worth of a different post, but basically I had to scoop things off my pile to avoid drowning.

Working on Merger of Evil hit a couple of technical annoyances. A few months ago, I started using asdf to let me switch environments more fluidly. The project for Merger seemed like a great place to use that, but somewhere in that time, there were some updates to Node and various packages that turned a minor maintenance task into something far more complicated simply because I couldn't get into the right head space.

As a side note, when I was forced from my apartment in 2008 because of the flood in Cedar Rapids, I had a few months of high stress that also made things difficult to function. Much like the the last few months, minor problems became complicated when there were dozens of other things competition for my time and attention. When I got back to my apartment, I found that my old life didn't quite fit anymore. My daily ritual of going through 20-30 web comics and sites then seemed pointless so I purged my RSS feed, I stopped playing Kingdom of Loathing, and basically had to review what “sparked joy” in my life.

Those technical annoyances got me to thinking about improvements. Yeah, I had a bunch of other things demanding my attention, but optimizing a process is one of the ways I reduce stress (along with rewriting problems) and I desperately needed that distraction. As things were, someone on my social feed started talking about migrating from asdf to Nix. Nix is a lot like the old GNU Stow but had a much better package management and, more importantly, allowed me to have seamless transitions to different versions. Nix also is more of a holistic approach since one could use flakes to wrap everything including specific Node, Python, and C# packages into a single unified whole.

After a few weeks of using Nix, I can say that it definitely solves the little nits and scratches that asdf had plus handles my need for reproducible/consistent builds. I'm sure there are other problems with it, starting with the complexity of the setup files and the fact the featuers I want are still in beta, but I think I'm going to stay with it and see if it works out.

Things are still in flux and life is still heaping up on my shoulders, which means there is only one thing I can do: break apart the problems as much as I can and then focus on one thing at a time.

Second-Hand Dresses delayed

2021-10-03T05:00:00Z

Last year, I hoped to get Second-Hand Dresses edited and published. It was all part of my hopes to get writing going again after taking a break last December.

Sadly, things haven't really gone my way for most of the year and the last few months have sucked away any energy I have to do just about anything. I've managed to get some code out, but one comment from an editor threw me in a loop and I've struggled for a month to resolve it. Various other obligations got in the way, but mostly it was the two other factors that have made it impossible to make it, mostly my efforts to recover from the derecho and my obligations at work.

Not much to say about it. Well, there is lot to say but none of it is positive.

The end result is that my goal of getting Second-Hand Dresses published on November 16th isn't a possibility now. I'm not sure when, but I'm going to try again for 2022.

Life is somewhat of a spiral right now and I'm not enjoying it, but the only thing I can do is make a list and start knocking items off it, one at a time.

The End After Three Hundred Weeks

2021-03-17T05:00:00Z

Just under two years ago, I posted about how I had been posting weekly chapters for two hundred consecutive weeks. Since then, I've managed to do it for another hundred weeks which puts me up to six years of posting (mostly) consistently. There were two instances where I missed a week but I caught up and returned quickly. Overall, I can say three hundred weeks of posting with a straight face and still feel like I wasn't lying.

I had a lot of hopes in 2019. Things were looking positive and I was writing strong. I found a new community and they were throwing thumbs up at me. Then 2020 hit and things started to get a little less rosy. I don't need to say what happened, but my household has been in relative isolation since March and then we got hit by the derecho in August. They still haven't finished fixing the roof or repairing the hole in the side of my house before the snow came.

(Unlike my normal rule of limiting negative posts, this one talks about depression.)

Skill and Perceptions

Somewhere in September, I started to get a feeling that everything I was writing was “wrong”. I can't tell how it was wrong, only that I wasn't capable of fixing it because I couldn't tell what I was missing. It didn't take long to realized was in a slump probably related to the skill/perception curve (source).

I'm just left of frowning face, a point where I know something is wrong but my skills and abilities aren't enough to identify the problem. I've had this feeling before, where I know there is something wrong, but I've never had a situation where I had no clue how to improve my writing.

This discomfort with my writing continued to grow, sapping my creativity.

Flight of the Scions

In October 2020, I also had Flight of the Scions edited. When I didn't get the enthusiasm I was hoping for the piece, that pretty much sent me down a spiral and the growing sense that I was missing something turned into a full-blown loathing. I haven't integrated the edits for that novel because of it… because I feel like I can never do the piece justice.

Plague

In November, I got sick.

End of the Year

In mid-December, I still wasn't able to identify what was wrong with my writing. I was writing. I was still passionate about Allegro but every word that got down on the page felt alien, twisted and foul.

That was also the point I realized that I can't just push myself past it. There weren't enough words because I just spent months not liking my words but unable to find the epiphany that would help me through the roadblock.

NaNoWriMo

Something has to change if I want to keep getting better at my writing. I've written a lot, I've grown as a writer and as a person. More importantly, I want to graduate from an “okay” writer to a “good” writer. This requires me to figure out what I'm missing.

While I thought about it, I looked at what writing weekly was giving me. At the beginning, much like NaNoWriMo, it was about “can I do it”. Six years of writing says I can. I also will admit, my writing has significantly improved in the six years of steady writing and I'm a much stronger creator than ever.

But I don't think I've improved much in the last year. I think I have reached the top of this mesa with my skill by just forcing out more words. I need something more deliberate, which also means less grinding out words and more of trying things to shuffle things up and expand in a new direction.

I said the same thing about NaNoWriMo. I was able to do it, but the month of writing wasn't really the challenge. For me, it was more about getting the word count, but I already know I can write fifty thousand words in four days. I've done it, more than once. I even published the results of one of those experiences.

NaNoWriMo came down to word count, which is a metric that I love to use but it also a useless one for me. It slides under the Goodhart's Law:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Word counts, including minimum words a day or reaching a certain number, isn't helping me because I just work toward the target. With NaNoWriMo, I find that I can't easily write past 50k words even if the story needs it. A word count in a day becomes a chore.

Same with writing time.

Using likes and reviews is also difficult because I'm an okay writer, not a good one. The volume of what I write means folks stop reading it, or they realize I'm not a good writer. I'm not sure without feedback, so I'm going to say they don't work because I can't measure anything.

Burnout

To be honest, much of this feels like burnout also. I've gone through two major burnouts in my life and I think the weekly chapters are beginning to strip those screws bare again. That just gives more credence to the idea of stopping my weekly chapters.

Burnout also leads to depression and a feeling of worthlessness that never goes away. That's been hanging around me since I was seventeen but it got really bad since August. Every time I stumbled into the “never write out of your lane,” I realized I had created a world that would require me to venture out and I shouldn't have. Every time I got a rejection, I knew I wasn't that good of a writer. Every time I tried to convince someone to read my work and they just… gave up, it just reinforced that.

So the logical response, to avoid upsetting everyone, was to consider giving up. Not because of a “if I can't write that, then I should stop writing” but more of a realization that I'm not really that important and there are far better people out there that need the space more than me.

I've been struggling with this for months. I think one of the reasons I have have only made a single submission in the last four years is because of that. (I was rejected, of course.) There are “own voices” that need to be said more than what I do. I can't do much beyond boosting others, but not trying to draw attention to myself is one of those. This is something I've been considering for months.

Because of that, I'm having trouble wanting to draw attention to myself. My weekly chapters were a single post around six in the morning once a week and I consider that excessive. When I finished my last book, it was a second posting in a week and nothing more. I don't know if I can, or want, to go beyond that. I haven't asked for a table at ICON for the same reason. I haven't paid for advertisement either.

Mr. Tanner

I'm not going to stop writing. I don't think I can stop writing. It brings me so much joy and I love creating stories. I just don't know who I'm writing for anymore. In many ways, the final lyrics of Harry Chaplin's “Mr. Tanner” have been speaking to me.

Music was his life, it was not his livelihood
And it made him feel so happy and it made him feel so good
And he sang from his heart and he sang from his soul
He did not know how well he sang; It just made him whole

Much like James White's Fast Trip, “Mr. Tanner” has become a sign of the last year or so.

What's Next

I don't know.

Right now, I'm focusing on finishing projects and not writing anything new. That includes a side piece, Flight of the Scions (hopefully for August), and Second-Hand Dresses for November.

If I do write something new, I want to finish Allegro because I'm almost near the end. I also had a vague idea of sending it to the inspiration of the novel, but then I made Linsan a demisexual with lesbian tendencies and I probably overstepped my bounds. I will release the chapters for public reading as I go because I started that way and I feel that is a social contract I'm not willing to

I honestly don't know about new stories or novels. I like the occasional up-vote on various channels. To be honest, very few folks are actually reading it. When they do, it's in a surge and then they wander off. I have two fans on Patron but only one speaks up; I can't thank either of them enough for the encouragement.

If this is burnout, then I need time to recover. I need adventures and to work on other things.

There is always a fear that I just started the process of giving up on writing, but I can't honestly tell at this moment. It's possible, but that is life. It changes, it evolves. I've been writing fiction, in some form, for at least forty years. I can't imagine just stopping cold, but then again, I wasn't planning on getting married, having children, and having a hole punched in the side of my house.

Desk Woodworking Project

2020-12-07T06:00:00Z

Back in September, I built the boys two wooden desks. Ever since, I've been telling myself I should do a blog post about it. But then I got involved with wanting to redo my website, obsessed about various projects, and got overwhelmed with obligations in the face of everything that is 2020.

A Pressing Need

My project started when we realized COVID was going to have significant impact on the boy's school. In specific, we were given the choice of having in-school or at-home schooling. Given my vulnerabilities to respiratory illnesses (rightfully so, given my November), we decided to keep the boys at home.

The only problem was that we didn't have anywhere to set up the boy's computers. My office had been destroyed in the derecho that hit in August, the roof still leaked, and I had to move up into one of their bedrooms for my own job. I also stole the dining room table because the desk my father had made was covered in “get it off the floor now!” piles.

The Grand Idea

The grand idea was to build the boy's desks. I had done some woodworking projects when we lived in Illinois, but since we moved to Iowa, I had pretty much stopped. I had no more tools left, only a few boxes of screws, and a decade-old memory of working in wood.

Seemed like a perfect opportunity to me to have a project beyond my current skill level but still possible.

I searched for some designs online, found something that vaguely looked like it would work (sadly, I seem to have lost the link), and then promptly modified it. Because these were going to be desks by two active children, I added cross-beams near the bottom on three sides and shortened the legs by a few inches.

Cleaning Up

Naturally, the first thing I ended up doing was cleaning the garage. You'll see some of the crud along the edges of the pictures below but I was working with a small space, mostly twenty-year old power tools, and vague ideas.

Lumber

The design I started with:

2x2s for the legs
1x4s for the sides and back
1x3 for the top ridge
2'x4'x¾" for the top surface
¾" trim

It didn't look like much piled up on the garage floor:

The Bottom

One of the things about the design I found was that it used pocket screws. I had never used a pocket hole jig, but it looked like it would so what I wanted. I picked up a jig at Lowe's.

After measuring out everything, getting confused a few times, and drilling out the pocket holes, I had a stack of wood ready to assemble. I also had to borrow a friend to clean up the pieces because I made multiple mistakes hand-cutting pieces (hence the next project being a workbench).

The side pieces were the first one to be built up. I started with those because they would produce less stress while I held up everything since I didn't have jigs or even proper clamps.

Somehow, I managed to attach the front and side pieces to the side. This mainly involved stacking up wood and cans to steady things on a pair of plastic sawhorses.

Things looked a lot better once I got the sandpaper out, though I hurt my arm more than once since I really should have gotten out the power sander for some of them. Overall, it is still fun making rough wood smooth.

The Top

Once I got more used to working with the tools and in the cramped quarters (you can see my messy garage), I started to attach the tops to the frames using pocket holes from the bottom.

Getting the top was pretty easy. The trim, however, was a bit harder because I didn't have the right tools. Of all the pieces, I feel this was the less elegant of everything. I ended up having some gaps along the edges which I filled with wood putty; the result was not as pretty as I hoped.

Throughout this entire process, I was doing this during my lunch hours and while the boys were doing their bedtime ritual. Basically sneaked out into the garage to do some work and then come back covered in sawdust.

The Blue

When the spouse and I first talked about this, we planned on going with a cherry finish. The boys, on the other hand, had different ideas and wanted blue. At the last minute, I ran out, got some blue tinted stain and used that instead. It took a few days to get it done, but the results were pretty startling.

Then we got to my second favorite part of woodworking: polyurethane. Like PVC adhesive, the smell of polyurethane brings memories of woodworking with my mother and father (separately, each one had their own styles). Though, I used a rubber glove and sponge instead of old socks.

Deadlines

The entire goal was to get everything done for the first day of class, which was September 21. Sadly, I really needed a third coat of polyurethane because of the abuse these desks would see. I ended up finishing everything on the 22nd.

Documentation

I'm not used to documenting projects. It still feels foreign to stop, take pictures, and try to gather thoughts. A lot of the druge work of drilling and sanding where skipped but I thought they would be somewhat interesting to look at.

Final Thoughts

The desks were a hit and they are still being used pretty heavily. I need to make hutches for them “soon” and I liked them so much I want to build three more for the adults in the household (two for me, one for spouse) that have higher legs. There were also requests for side tables.

In general, I think the result was pretty solid and, unlike most of my projects, I don't hate them three months later. There were a couple chips, but they have survived a lot of abuse and still had that lovely blue shine.

After this, we decided that I should do more woodworking so I'm slowly building up a set of tools. Now that the roof is almost done (in December), my basement should stop flooding with every rain and I can move a workshop downstairs and do some winter projects.