More House quirkiness

Here's an array of photos from random places around the house, some of which exhibit a fair amount of quirkiness, others, the lack of attention this house has had in the last few years, and still others, just flat out weirdness.

The safety board probably wouldn't approve.

Say, "yuk"!

Isn't our pantry lovely?

TV cable sticking out of the wall, with out a box. I'll probably take it out.

This is in the 1/4 bath (It's not a half because it doesn't have a sink) It's another light fixture that he didn't hook up, so the wires (which are hot by the way) are just capped off.

The wall is has a weird board on it that they put up to cover up the wall, probably because it was damaged and they didn't want to bother fixing it.

So THAT's why our phone doesn't work.

The door to our lovely pantry.

That thing on the wall is the old well pump. The house is now on city water, but they didn't bother to take the pump out.

We're still unsure what this area is. Ross dubbed it "The cat burial ground". It's like they forgot to excavate this section of the basement, so they just left it.

"One Beggar", free with your new house.

Getting Started

Before we could doing the major remodels we had to get the house livable. "livable" you ask? Well, we had to get the toilets working, (neither one worked when we got there) there was no water line to the fridge, the range needed a gas line installed, the tub spout wouldn't divert water the shower head, a lot of light fixtures needed bulbs, Etc.

That nut did not want to come off. I had to put just about all my weight on the tank to get it to turn.

After almost an hour of working at it, success!

The old, and the new.

The finished product.

The other toilet didn't need near as much work, just a new flapper and seal ring.

Weird bulbs.

Humble beginnings

Howdy from Michigan!
Just in case I didn't tell all of you (Which I probably didn't, Oops) I'm in Michigan helping my big brother Ross fix up the 'fixer-upper' that he bought on the 18th. It's 1080 sq ft, and is very... quirky, shall we say. It is definitely a good house for "My first Fixer-Upper". it has a basement with a rather low celling, and all the wires, pipes and everything else are easy to get to, so I don't have to go crawling around in a crawlspace!
Here are a few photos:

Notice that beautiful color on the front door. Yep, It's gonna go, along with the door itself, it's fairly hard to open due to the fact that it's coming apart at the seams, and the paint job isn't all that great. Ok, It's TERRIBLE! They dripped paint on the light, the door, and the trim! The side that you can't see is by far the worst.

This photo doesn't do the paint justice.  It is WAY worse then it looks in the photo. He put one coat of a rather dark color on top of white, which means you see white streaks throughout. And, as you can see, there's a little green on the trim that's around it. Definitely going to be repainted.

This is the old fuse box. It's not hooked up anymore, but it was left in the wall. As you can see, it's not very attractive. It's also been painted about 10 times. Oh yeah, and it's in the living room.

This is the stairway down to the basement. It's a little narrow, but manageable.

This is the main room in the basement. it's a little old fashioned, ok, it's just nasty. It's going to get a new floor, new wrapping around the support posts (blue things) and a lot of paint. The celling is also a bit low. Under the ducts, I can almost touch with my head.

Note that I've been making making fun of the house, but Ross said that's okay because these are the "before pictures". You should hear what he has to say about it. Now before you go questioning Ross's judgment, it is very structurally sound, except for the sagging celling in the living room. More on that later.

We're working on a couple of short movies

Maybe 'movie' isn't quite the right word. More like, "Our first attempt at a very short short". That works better.
Anyway, Peter Mixon is on vacation from Georgia right now, so we're working on a short short again. But this time we've learned from our last attempts. Small. Keep it small. Since it's our second or third attempt at actually making something coherent, we're keeping it small so that we can actually finish it. I'll post it on this blog once it's there.
Sir Paul, movie-maker-not-quite-extraordinar

Plodding along

I sit at my computer, with heavy eyelids, but a feeling of accomplishment. Today, or more precisely, the latter part of today, was just one of those days. Those days when all I want to do is go out to the wood shop and work on a project, but have things that need to be done first, things I didn't really want to do. I'd rather just sit there staring at the wall. plop on the couch and just... sit there. But things needed to be done. I new I needed to get up, and get things done. Then I thought of what Bob Shultz would do, he called it "Plodding". Taking large tasks (even ones that just 'seem' large) and deviding them into manageable chunks, and then taking the chunks one at a time. So I started plodding. I needed to do an hour of piano, so I told myself "just do 20 minutes". So I set the timer for 20 minutes and started playing. Once the timer dinged (Which was sooner then I was expecting) I got up and walked around a little, and then sat back down and played some more. Soon I had done more then an hour. By the time I was finished, Dad and the siblings were home with dinner, Pizza! And now I'm writing this post. It's a satisfying feeling, to over come difficulty and be able to move on with the day. Plodding makes things so much easier when things look hard, or you don't feel like working because it's raining outside,  days when nothing seems to be going right.
when the going get's tough, the tough plod!

A Book that is epistemologically accurate

Something I've been thinking about lately is how inconsistent people are when they are trying to prove evolution, or that there is no God. So they write books about it, and make TV shows to show how right they are, and how it's impossible for there to be a God. Because if there was a God, "Then why would he let 'so and so' happen?", or "Why is there sin in the world?" Wait; What did he just say? "Sin"?  Well, if we all are cosmic dust, then what is sin? Who determines what is right and what i wrong? If there is no standard of ethic, then there is no absolute standard.
So, I've been thinking: "What if I wrote a book about a world where there was no God, and made it completely accurate?" What would a book like that look like.
Well, if some one was reading it, and skipped the preface, and jumped straight to chapter one, this is what they'ed see:
Chapter one:
Chapter two:
Chapter three:
Chapter four:
Then End.

And after that maybe they'd read the epilogue, and it'd say something like this:
Epilogue:
When I decided to write this book, I was stumped about how to start it. I couldn't use "In the beginning", or, "Once upon a time", or "Long, long ago" because all of those are referencing time. And time is something invented. This seems foreign to us because we can't imagine life any other way. We've never experienced anything where there was no time. It would be like trying to explain a fourth dimension. We simply cannot comprehend it because it's so unnatural for us. Our brains just don't understand it.  Whether or not there is a forth dimension is not in the scope of this book, the point of this book is to make you think, and ask questions.
(And you can now brag that you read a whole book in under five minutes)

Paul T. Leavitt

Camp Dwight!!! Day Two. Part 2

So After swimming and kayaking in the pond, playing volleyball, and more conversations, the time came!

Slip'n'slide!!

Every Camp Dwight, on Saturday, they roll out a HUGE sheet of plastic all the way down the hill, and then bring out a fire hose (hooked to a pump in the pond) and soak the whole thing and douse it with lots of joy. Both the emotion kind and the type that comes in a bottle. Chad Johnson (thy stud with the hose) has everybody go in wave so that injuries are kept to a minimum. First, the boys, under 15, then the girls, also under 15, then men 15 and up, and the ladies of the same age range.

Go Christopher!!! (Camo swim trunk.)

Clean up on isle four!

My attempt at getting a moving background and a clear person.

All the foam collecting at the bottom

The aftermath

After all the joy was gone (the soap) everybody slowly made there way over to the gazebo for lunch, which, as usual, was very delicious.

Serving once...

Serving twice...

GONE!!!

My brother Ross is the third from the left, eating the noodles.

Yep, That's Ben all right.

Why does food do such weird things to guys?

So now I'm just going to post a bunch of randome pictures from Camp.

Daniel (red shirt) chillen with his sis (sprained ankle)

Slack lining!

Carpetball!