Tax Day � 1
2008-04-14, 11:09 a.m.

Day 1332

This might be a record. I will probably be getting a tax return this year, and I�ve yet to file. Guess what�s on my to do list for tonight?

Rugged weekend. Meant to get up early Saturday and do 3 hours of spinning before we attacked the kitchen floor. Ended up sleeping in till seven, (class starts at 7:15), making coffee and started reading floor install instructions.

By the end of the day Saturday (8pm-ish) the kitchen (all 11x27 of it) was done. Sunday I ripped the parquet out of the front hall and coat closet, layed down more underlayment and got new floor put in on all that. Man, were there some funky pieces in that batch! Working around walls, funny little notches for stub walls, cuts around molding and it seemed every piece had to be cut. Lots of measuring, sketching, running out to the garage, laying out the cuts on the flooring, swearing, running back inside to re-measure. Tedious, but I think I only hosed up one piece. Even that found new life as an end filler, or got used to fill in short runs right along a wall or something.

Saturday Cindy was a great help. For most of the kitchen we just had to plop down full sized pieces and adjust the end cuts so we could move right along. Still � all day on ones knees (stop it you pervs) makes for a very good nights sleep.

Sunday, Cindy wasn�t quite so helpful. Ripping out the old flooring isn�t exactly her cup of tea, so she went and got stuff we�d need later � molding, paint, screws for door hardware, that kinda stuff. Later in the day she made a grocery run and must have stopped at a liquor store too. Sunday afternoon/evening she was as bad as I�ve seen her in a while. I spent from 4pm on biting my tongue. Why? Idfk (seekrit kode for I don�t fucking know). Could have cleared the air some then, couldn�t I?

Know what really got me? 10:15pm or so, I collapsed into bed after taking care of putting my clothes away and getting my gym bag ready. Cindy decides she�d like to give me a back massage (wink, wink) For the first time in my entire freakin life, I turned Cindy down when she was being the initiator. I REALLY just wanted to sleep. I also didn�t want to have to deal with her booze breath. Ugh. Besides, my alarm goes off at 4:50am so I can get to spin class on time. If we had gotten going, I�d have only gotten 6:32 of sleep instead of the 6:35 that was available! After a weekend of being stuck on my knees, I needed to sit on my ass and pedal to no where.

Spin class this morning felt really good too. Was able to go at it pretty hard. Being able to exert my legs (other than for lifting big chunks of flooring) rather than my arms was almost a relief. Hill climbs? Extra turns on the resistance. Sprints? Drove hard ALL the way to the finish, with an extra helping of resistance thrown in. I think I�m going to be sore tomorrow.

Sold the old stove too. Somebody ( a guy named Carlo) got a very nice deal on a gently used stainless steel range. But it�s out of my garage and into my bank account. And � in the accounting anomaly of the decade, what we paid for the new door hardware for the new cabinets? Offset by the sale of the old range. More or less.

THAT was the joke of the weekend! While I was doing flooring, Cindy was replacing the hardware on the cabinets we re-used. I kept giving her a hard time about doing knob jobs in the kitchen while I was screwing around on the floor. Bad joke, but we milked it all day.

I�ll have to get a few more pictures now that things are coming to a close. The floor looks really nice. It�ll be better when I have all the trim molding in place, but for now, you can get the overall sense of how it�ll look. We didn�t even end up with the flooring we originally wanted. We wanted a real light maple, but realized it was a tone very similar to the underlayment. Oddly enough, we didn�t care for that.

Now, having hickory cabinets, there is a very wide range of tones available. Hickory runs from very light, like natural oak, to very dark, like a stained cherry � all in a single piece of wood. It�s hard to see in some of the pics, but the variation is pretty big. Anyhow, we ended up getting something called �Golden Butternut� that happens to match the lighter end of the hickory�s range. We wanted something light, to help brighten the room because the walls are pretty dark, but that Thornwood Maple was just too much. Looks nice and we�re happy with it, so it�ll just have to do.

Going to cut this short (for me). Hoping to hear from the countertop place about going in to witness a little of the cutting of our counter tops. This afternoon we get to lay them out on the slabs � pick the graining we�d like to see and where to place it. Won�t make a lot of difference with these particular slabs, but it�d be good to avoid certain imperfections. Time to go play . . .

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