My two weeks of another working summer vacation at home is coming to a close.
As usual it was selected to coincide with the yearly Dakota County Fair, but this year happened to also overlap with much of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, so I got the opportunity to watch more Olympics events than ever before.
I’ve never been that big a fan of Summer Olympic events (I prefer the Winter Olympic events) but I enjoyed the opportunity to watch more of the games this year and hope to follow them more closely in the future as well.
Like others, I was disappointed (but not surprised) that NBC chose to filter the prime time events to those most popular for the American audience, but I was able to catch bits of a few events live via the NBC live online streaming on the TV in my shop while coming and going.
Kim would have preferred seeing more of the equestrian events and I would have liked to have seen more of the less publicized sports (i.e. less beach volleyball) and more of some of the other sports though (like the pentathlon - they were shooting laser pistols this year!). Hopefully in the future streaming video will give more choices and options for viewing the events one wants to see, instead of the filtered, carefully edited/prepared and controlled prime time experience the networks give us.
NBC’s online live streaming was a step in the right direction, but web-based streaming isn’t ideal for sports viewing. After all, how many people have a PC connected to their TVs?
And none of it addresses the difficulty of trying to watch live events in other time zones…
There was also a notable editorial on the International Olympic Committee that I’ve seen reprinted in several online newspapers’ opinion pages that in part states:
The IOC will rake in $6 billion from the London Olympics, and its elite governing board couldn’t care less that more than half of the participants have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet.
I had compiled a long list of projects for my time off (most on the new building), but got distracted by a variety of other things, including the broken weather station PC I had to rebuild and my hacked website that I wrote about last entry.
That meant I was behind on much of what I had hoped to accomplish, and since Kim was able to secure other help, I left her to get her animals to and from the Dakota County Fair this year for the first time without me. As usual Kim took several of her miniature horses, goats, and Quentin, the pot-bellied pig, to the Children’s Barnyard area at the Fair.
I only made it out to the Fair this year twice for short periods of time, despite the fact that the weather was the nicest it’s been in years for the week.
On one of those visits I helped Kim tend to one of her miniature horses, Molly, that early in the week somehow managed to bash and cut her head above her eye while in the Children’s Barnyard, as well as cutting one of her front legs. Kim cleaned her wounds a little and gave her antibiotics.
That same night we met up with some old friends (Karen and Bob) that we haven’t gotten together with in ages.
This year Kim’s mom, dad and aunt were also interviewed for an article in the St. Paul newspaper for their yearly work at the Fair in their church’s food stand.
But because the weather was so pleasant I had the opportunity to do some work on the new building comfortably towards the end of the week. At the beginning of my vacation it was still pretty hot so it was then that I chose that time to install two of the three permanent doors.
Although I assumed that it would be simple case of simply removing the temporary doors and installing the new doors, it became a time consuming process because after installing the hinges the new doors didn’t close properly. It was baffling because the temporary doors fit fine.
Since the door was hitting the frame at the top of the opening side, I first tried the easy fix of shimming the bottom hinge. When that didn’t work, I realized I had to cut the mortise on the top hinge deeper. I did that painstakingly the “old fashioned” way with a wood chisel.
Thinking the other door might fit, I tried to simply install that as well, but found the same problem. So a project that I expected to take just a little time ended up taking the better part of an afternoon.
I also finally got around to replacing the ball valve shutoff on the water supply main to the new building. This spring I noticed a small leak on the valve but had been putting off replacing it. Since it’s at the lowest point on our property it was going to require most of the water be drained out of our entire system.
Once I removed the valve I found it had a pretty sizeable crack in it. It was enclosed in the warm space this last winter in the radiant heat panel area and as far as I know didn’t freeze, but I wonder about the cause of the crack.
I also noticed that the fiberglass window screens in my shop I just replaced this spring already had holes in them.
From what I’ve found online it’s probably the work of grasshoppers.
Towards the end of the week I finished the soffits, roof steel and trim on the three entry doorways over the course of a couple of days.
However, I found that we didn’t have the ridge cap pieces that would complete those roofs, so I’ll have to order more. I’m also missing some trim that will cover the front edge of the soffits, which needs to be installed before I can put the shake siding on the gable ends of the roofs.
After I completed the roofs, I found that we had quite a few extra sheets of roof steel that Menards had custom ordered for us. I don’t know why we have so many extra roof panels left, but it’s not the first time Menards ordered us extra materials that we can’t return.
We also have the floor trusses (including a monster floor girder truss) that were specially made for our project that we decided not to use, in large part because they weren’t the right size. We have some blame for that mistake because we didn’t have a complete set of blueprints for the project, but even with the limited blueprints we gave to Menards they should have been able to size the trusses properly.
But I can’t help but think that having building suppliers ordering excess (or incorrect) materials isn’t that uncommon, and in the case of special items that can’t be returned that the contractors simply pass on the cost to the customers and either use the excess on the next project, resell it somewhere else, or simply discard it. In our case we are likely stuck with the extra materials that I suspect will be of little use to someone else.
Kim has also been busy expanding the dog business in Savage. She has expanded the shop into the adjacent space next door in order to offer pet day-care services there.
The time for the expansion isn’t ideal however, as it siphons both her time and our financial resources elsewhere, but it coincides with the lease renewal on the dog grooming shop space.
Also recently added to my to-do list is a way to restore the links to photos in my blog after the site was hacked. In retrospect it’s now clear that I made a bad choice in using the plugin that interfaced my photo gallery with the blog because it used a unique format for the photo links that can’t be ported from one version to the next. Now that I’ve upgraded my photo gallery software, the old plugin no longer works, so all the links are broken.
So far I’ve also yet to find a replacement plugin to interface my photo gallery with the blog that works as well and/or as easily as the old one.
I have a scheme to translate the old links over to new ones, but it’s going to involve writing a computer program to read the old links from the old photo gallery and translate them to the new links.