The home office

Three reasons for this post:

1. Finally got pictures hung on the wall behind the computers
   
2. The room is about as picked up and clean as it ever gets
   
3. Might soon be my only office.
   

After a very long time sitting in the closet I finally just hung up the pictures for this wall. Mostly from my travels in 2007.

• Top left is a piece of aboriginal art from Australia purchased on my first trip to Sydney
  
• Top middle is a shot of the Eiffel Tower purchased in a little shop in Monte Martre on my second trip to Paris.
  
• Top right is a triptych of iconic Sydney sights purchased at a street market on my second trip to Sydney
  
• Bottom left is a panorama of the Seattle skyline purchased at a shop in Pike's Market on our Vancouver/Victoria/Seattle vacation trip.
  
• Bottom middle is a photo of the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall of China. Not the section I visited, that was Mutianyu. Purchased from the photographer at a flea market in Beijing.
  
• Bottom right is a Paris skyline with one of the Notre Dame gargoyles in the foreground. Purchased at the same time as the other Paris picture.
  

The room is in decent shape for a change. I tend to pile stuff on the footstool, a bad habit I'm trying to break. My shiny big 26-inch wide screen monitor is paired with the older 19-inch wide screen in a dual-monitor setup. That's where I spend 8 to 10 hours a day. I've taken to using RDP to the laptop so I don't have to change between the two keyboards. The solo monitor to the left is for our home computer, Alice's laptop, which happened to be gone when I shot this.

And finally, the office situation. My employer is going to compress more people into cubicles to save on office rent. Our Houston space has shrunk from occupying our own campus of four buildings to selling the campus and compressing into 3 then 2 and soon to be 1 building. For the moment there are still more employees than can fit even in cubicles. So the solution is to convert some people to office-at-home with a few cubes fitted for "hoteling" (i.e., empty with a phone and network port). Since I work about 9 days out of 10 at home anyway, I've volunteered. The main upshot for me is I'd lose my office phone. I tap into that via some magic software that causes my office extension to ring my work Blackberry and, more importantly, lets me make calls that originate at the office. We'll see how this proceeds.

Another project done: Laundry room tile

(Catching up on past events, however unexciting)

Before and after pics of the laundry room floor. It is so much better. Cruddy, worn vinyl and beat-up rusty drain pan all gone. And all the squeaks removed in the process.

As the long break I had at Christmas wore on, Alice reminded me: "If you let this vacation slide by you'll never have time to do the tile and you'll have to hire someone." When she's right, she's right.

This occupied all my free time from New Year's Eve until January 6th. Not a horrible job but my knees are getting too old for this. Kneepads, of course, but the straps on those damn things irritated the back of my knees almost as much as kneeling on hard floors did the front.

I did a lot better job of working this room so that I wasn't waiting for things to dry. When I did the hall bathroom back last January, I kept sort of tiling myself into a corner. I was able to work this back to front much better. I also planned and cut the "baseboard" tiles for this one at the beginning instead of as an afterthought. So those went in as I went along and not as a separate job after the floor was done. And the layout came out exactly as I intended with whole tiles at the exact planned spot at the doorway.

Anyway, that's three rooms floored upstairs. That leaves the two guest bedrooms, the master bedroom, the master bathroom, the hall, and the stairs still to go. Thinking of wood for the master bedroom, tile for the master bath, and new carpet for all the rest. As the budget allows.

It was odd after I got this done. Put away the tiling tools and leftover tile. I had the pile of tile boxes, morter mix, etc for this project all piled in the garage for barely short of a year.

Snow on the Gulf Coast

(Catching up on past events)

Snow in Pearland. Last time this happened was Christmas Eve, 2004. The picture is of the front of the house at about 11pm. By then the snow had stopped and temps were hovering just over freezing. It was all gone by morning.

Off to the right on the driveway, you can see the material for the new roof.

New furniture for the breakfast area

The new furniture arrived for the breakfast area arrived last night. Since I'm on vacation, I assembled it this morning. Kind of a retro-modern soda fountain set. The size and the angled corner bench fit in the space like they were custom designed for it. I think this puts the proverbial period on Alice's decorating of the breakfast area. Ha! What am I thinking!?

Tucker to the rescue!

Today, we had a rare Saturday without projects to take up our time.

Alice came up with the idea of making the trek to Millie Bush Dog Park out in the far west Houston suburbs. We go to a little dog park about 10 minutes drive from our house several times a week to give the hounds some room to stretch out and run. But Millie Bush is a 40 mile one-way drive so it hasn't been on our regular agenda. The place is huge, 13 acres, with two big dog ponds, one on each end. And doggie showers so you can wash the mud off before the trip home. Seriously.

About five minutes in, we're mosying in the general direction of one of the ponds and Tucker's ears stand up. He goes "on alert" and then takes off at full gallop towards ... what? There's a little white dog, sometimes he flashes back to racing and thinks little white dogs are that dang rabbit he could never catch. But no, he flies past the white dog and literally launches himself out into the pond!

Over the course of the next hour or so he is in and out of the water. And the really odd thing is, he only goes in when he sees another dog in swimming. Lots of labs running in and out fetching balls and doing normal dog things. Every time Tucker sees another dog in the water he goes flying in after it and follows it out. I swear he's acting like a lifeguard! "Hang on, buddy, I'm coming".

Greyhounds swimming are ... interesting to watch. He's got pretty much no body fat to help him float so it's a lot of work for him to swim. After a while he had really exhausted himself. Also, it was a little cool. So he'd come out and be shivering with his teeth chattering. I finally had to put a stop to it and walk him out away from the ponds.

The last picture looks like "Nessie", Tucker, the Loch Millie Monster.

Finished Cornice for breakfast area

Got another project knocked out. I started on this one the weekend before Anna was born. Didn't make any progress the weekend of her birth. One final day on Saturday the 8th got 'er done. Plus some spackle and paint in the corners done on Sunday evening.

This is made from 1x12 with crown molding attached to the top and a small chair-rail like molding along the bottom. The long side (to the left) is about 7 feet, the other two segments are around 4 feet. It stands off from the wall only 2 inches as we don't intend to hang curtains behind it.

Tricky bit was figuring out how to attach it. I did some consulting with my neighbor Paul who used to do finish carpentry. He came up with the method I used. Two-inch deep blocks predrilled and screwed into the wall above the window frame where the studs are doubled up. Then I used the nail gun to attach the cornice to the blocks.

Once again it was handy to have both a table saw and radial arm saw.

At the Greyhound Reunion

On the 9th, we went to the 14th Annual Greyhound Reunion at Gulf Greyhound Park. We were there two years ago, just after we adopted Gert but missed it last year due to my travels.

The first picture is Tucker trying to get the rabbit! They ran some practice races just after we got there. Tucker was very excited! He barked and then jumped up onto the table. When the race was over, he had no clue how to get back down so I had to lift him down.

The previous years the reunion had the run of one floor of the track betting areas. This year the other floor was closed due to damage from Ike so there wasn't much for an open space for the dogs. This made the whole thing less fun. We were in the little spaces usually used for bettors to sit and watch the races with dogs laying in the aisles.

We all got to go out on the track and have the dogs introduced. As part of that we were able to get a good look at those wascally wabbits that the dogs chase.