Laminate!

Posted on by Jordan

I really need to catch up to current events, but I didn’t want to skip this one…

So a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to help a friend from church install laminate flooring. We were helping out because another member of the church was dealing with life-threatening asthma in one of his children, and needed to get all the carpet out of the house ASAP.

None of that really matters, except to set the scene for why I was standing outside a house somewhere in Des Moines at 8AM on a Saturday, getting ready to work with a carpenter to install some flooring. The only detail is that neither myself, the home owner, or the guy who brought the majority of the tools had ever done laminate flooring before.

It turns out it isn’t that hard, although I am sure it helps when you are under the guidance of somebody who does quality woodwork on a daily basis. While not being really hard, it was time consuming. We finished two rooms a hallway and a staircase over the course of a day, but it took roughly thirteen hours to finish.

I would put a picture in here, except the only picture I took was of the miter saw, and I am guessing you have seen one of those before.

A few takeaways from the day:

  • Laminate flooring is surprisingly straight forward to install.
  • There are some specialized tools just for sliding the slats around with that are lifesavers
  • Having a good miter saw, and a good table saw also made a huge difference
  • (Sub note) I don’t work with those kinds of tools every day, but I have enough to be comfortable with them… watching the homeowner operate a saw was at times heart-stoppingly alarming
  • Estimating the needed materials to finish a job is hard
  • And… A final note (because this was written after the fact) It only took four days for my legs and back to loosen up enough so I could walk normally 🙂

Helping out was great for a number of reasons, not the least of which was learning how to install the flooring, but in the end it was fun just to get to swing a hammer and run a saw… Not something I manage too often these days.

-Jordan

Scones

Posted on by Jordan

As you probably heard about somewhere along the way, there was a wedding a few weeks ago involving British royalty.

It wasn’t a significant event in my world,but the office Heather works in had a different take. They claim it was because of the recent addition of a Canadian to their ranks, what with the whole “Canada still recognizes the Queen” bit. I can’t say I completely buy that. I talk to Canadians every day, and while they may have been a tiny bit more aware of the event than I was, they did not demonstrate the boundless enthusiasm for it that my wife did.

Whatever their reason, Heather’s office decided to have a sort of party on the day of (because it happened on a Friday morning for those of us in CST). Outside the world of TV shows about offices, “office party” just means “bring food” and not much else. Normally I should say… Apparently they designated a couple to dress up as the bride and groom…. Suffice to say they went above and beyond with their plans for the royal wedding.

And this is where I come in. I have actually made scones a few times before, but I don’t think they ever made the blog. They fall into that grey area between sweets and bread, and I have periodically tried them as a way to share a desert with Heather. I have even gone so far as to try a savory scone recipe although it wound up being kind of a tough sell.

Heather apparently remembered the first batch of scones I made well enough to think they would be a great addition to an English themed party at work.

Basically I doubled this recipe, except without the raw sugar crystals on top. Using dried cranberries doesn’t add much sugar so the end result is Heather approved.

Doubling the recipe did involve a distressingly large portion of butter, but I can’t complain about the results. The reports that came back from Heather’s office were equally positive, so I don’t think anybody really missed the sugar sprinkles on top. Although, speaking of the butter, because the method I used to cut each scone involved patting out a circle and splitting it into eights, it made calculating the butter per scone distressingly easy. There ended up being three-fourths of a tablespoon of butter in each scone. It’s better when you are just vaguely aware that there is “a lot” of butter in something I suppose.

One last comment about scones, and then I will stop before this gets any more scatter brained… Scones aren’t very hard. If you can make biscuits from scratch using a recipe, you can make scones. Just you know… use a scone recipe.

-Jordan

Softball 2011

Posted on by Jordan

The calendar says it isn’t summer yet. Actually, having written that… the weather out side says it isn’t summer yet ether.

All the same, Heather and I are both on Softball teams. We are already into week two, seems like I was scraping ice off my windows just yesterday.

We aren’t on the same team, both our respective peer-groups at work wanted to put together teams, and the nights picked for each didn’t work for each other.

The team I play on isn’t coed, so Heather wouldn’t have been able to participate anyway. That might be for the best, we renamed the team this year (this being our second season as a team). I snapped this picture when I picked up my team shirt:

Last season we had a perfect 0-13 record.You might think we had nothing left to aspire to this season, but in our first game we surprised even ourselves by loosing by a record 15 points! We look forward to a great season this year!

Heather was unable to attend her first game, but I hear the team won, so clearly they are on a whole different level.

While Heather and I are not star players, being on a city league has become a sort of summer tradition for us.

And if you know anybody who helps organize the Des Moines men’s slow pitch league, tell them they need a less competitive bracket.

-Jordan

Phone Review

Posted on by Jordan

It isn’t like we haven’t done things worthy of blogging about, but I decided I wanted to write down my thoughts on the new phone while it was still kind of new.

First off, what is it: Motorola Droid 2

Touch screen, with a slide-out physical keyboard.

More raw processing power than the computer I so proudly took with me to college 10 years ago. Has more storage space too.

As a phone it works as well as any other phone I have owned.

Beyond being a phone it is little portable computer, complete with internet, GPS and a camera. This let’s it do a lot of things, that don’t seem particularly novel to me right now, but would have been mind-blowing just a few years ago.

Speaking of the GPS and camera… The camera is quite good. Not quite as responsive as my point-and-shoot, making quick snapshots impossible. On the other hand, the quality is more or less on-par, and I always have it with me. Having a camera with you is one of the first steps to actually taking pictures! The GPS is more than functional, but in most applications requires that the screen be lit at the same time you are using it. Running both the screen and the GPS eats the battery in a shockingly short amount of time. This isn’t a limitation when using the phone as an in-car navigation device, as long as I packed a charger, but it means the phone isn’t going to provide constant aid in navigating an all-day hike. To put it bluntly I would guess the phone life when displaying a map and my position is between two and three hours. I did however discover in rare applications when you don’t need the screen on and only want passive monitoring the battery life is much better! Running a tracking tool for recording bike rides only drained about 10% of the battery life in around an hour and a half.

Hmm, so I didn’t even manage to describe all the features without some editorializing… something I have been fighting every time I thought about writing this post.

The problem is, I feel like I need to be using the phone all the time to make it seem like it’s worth it. I know that isn’t really true… but it’s kind of the thought floating around behind anything else I think about the phone. I imagine that will fade, and I can already tell you it would be hard to go back to my old phone (even if it were still working properly)

TL;DR: Great phone, can’t say I *needed* it, but it’s really useful now that I have it.

-Jordan