Whoa.  Kind of a lot happened in the last few days, and lots more coming!

We just booked our tickets to visit my brother in Scotland and Karen’s brother in Ghana!  Going to be a whirlwind two-week trip in January…  Super exciting, I’ve been to England and Ireland but never Scotland, and definitely never Africa.

Early this morning I started a batch of mead that if all goes well will be used for the toast(s) at our wedding.  It uses cranberry honey and I threw in about 4# of frozen cranberries – the hope is the tartness will balance out any residual sweetness, and coupled with high carbonation it should be very champagne-like and delicious.  I didn’t chop or otherwise mess with the cranberries which may end up being a mistake, we’ll see how much flavor comes through in a few weeks and maybe I’ll add some more.  The guidelines I’m following say you can go up to 8#, so I’ve got some wiggle room…  Anyway, I’ve been stressing because time is getting short for aging and especially for all the work involved with the méthode champenoise.  (read here, scroll down a bit)  High hopes for this batch, fingers crossed!

Finally, we’re going to Chicago this weekend to cheer my sister on in her first marathon (and her b/f Freddie).  Whoa, indeed.  My knee is improving, but I’m still nowhere near jogging, let alone a freaking marathon!  So I can’t quite relate to that distance except that it seems really far…  Good luck, kids!

So far I’ve put both a chunk of money and a ton of time into trying to get the paint off the GD basement floor, and I hate to say it but the floor is winning.  Every few days I have a brainstorm and – sure I’ve solved it – hustle off to the hardware store to get the last thing I’ll need to finish this project…  And so far I’ve been wrong.  Here’s a quick list of what I know doesn’t work:

• ReadyStrip paint remover.
• It actually works really well — in the places it works at all.  There are as-yet (wait for it!) unexplained patches of the floor that simply Do Not Yield Their Paint.
• Manual scraping
• Oh, it works ok for a little while, until you realize you spent half an hour and have (maybe) cleared half a square foot.  Again, as with the stripper, there are DNYTP sections.
• A big concrete surface grinder machine
• I feel like this may have done a slightly better job with the diamond cutting blades instead of the carbide ones I got, but in the end it basically amounted to manually scraping the entire floor only much quicker.  Still patches that DNYTP and a few pits in the surface that the blades didn’t get to.
• The machine was like this one but without everything in that feature list that says "new".  Must’ve been the old model.
• 3M Safest Stripper
• Like ReadyStrip but even slower acting.  Does a fantastic job on the paint that will come up at all, but at this point there’s really none left.

So…  That’s discouraging, to say the least.  You may be wondering, as I was, will anything get this paint off?  Well, I’m sure there is some Dimethyl Toxic Whatever horror I could use, but at this point I’m not sure even that would work.  Why?  Well, here’s one thing that works:

• A Makita angle grinder Karen borrowed from work.

Sweet.  But the thing’s so small already and because it’s an angle grinder you can only hit about a centimeter at a time which makes for really slow going.  Also it’s darn near impossible to avoid uneven grinding, leaving little scallops in the floor (tiny, but still)…

The revelation for me while grinding was the depth I had to go down to in certain spots to eliminate the color from the paint.  I had read about it happening in concrete but hadn’t seen it, but apparently somehow the paint had sunk down into the pores of the concrete and bonded itself there instead of on the surface.  I’ve also noticed while scraping that there was in fact a layer beneath the orange, a gray gloss that must have chipped up in places before the orange went down – and the places that took the most grinding showed no evidence of this gray!  So…  Seems like the gray paint bonded nicely to the surface and those are the parts I can scrape and strip, but where orange paint hit concrete directly it made patches that DNYTP.  And that depth and bonding make me think even a crazy chemical stripper wouldn’t work and might even make the paint sink deeper into the concrete.

Whoa.  So now I’m planning to rent one of these and grind the whole floor down.  Or call around and see if I can find a stand-up version of that.  Hell yeah.  You haven’t beaten me yet, floor!!

Cody had to hold the cellphone while Frances took a call.

Katie’s eye fell out and she ate it.

I raked a ton of leaves

Karen’s dad helped us cut down the overgrown tree/bush in our backyard.

We drank a ton of beer.

Early in last night’s soccer game I had a good break on the right wing and was coming in towards the goal.  There was a teammate in the center ready for a pass, but the goaltender came out and I thought I could poke it past him into the goal.  I reached out with my right foot and sure enough got it past him, on-net, but not as hard as I wanted.

… I never got to see what happened, but I’m told it didn’t go in – their defender got there in time.  The goaltender fell/dove for the ball as I was kicking it and landed hard just below my kneecap.  I could feel the whole works buckle backwards, hyperextending pretty badly.  Ow.  Really, really, ow.

I didn’t feel any specific "pop", just a general scrunchy stretch like when you roll your ankle hard, and even this morning it’s not visibly swollen.  I’m sure there is internal swelling since I can’t quite extend or bend it fully, but at rest with a brace on it’s not really hurting.  Very hard to walk, though, since my range is so limited.  Wah.  I’m going to give it a day or two and see how things go before I think about going to a doctor – the fact that I can put weight on it and lack of swelling makes me think it’s just a bad sprain and probably nothing tore.  We’ll see.

And you know how I have a desk job, and 95% of my days are spent totally in front of my computer?  Wouldn’t you know today’s the day we’re moving a T1 line to the new building, which means physically hauling 5 servers up and down stairs and across the street to their new home.  Son of a…

We’ve been picking off bits and pieces of the basement project over the last week – on Friday, Sierra and I moved everything out of the basement and into the laundry room and the storage area.  Pretty tight fit in those areas now, but it left the floor empty and made painting the walls much easier.  We were painting on October 1 so we picked a color called "October Sky", it’s a nice creamy light color that should go well with what I’m hoping for the floor and trim.

I’ve been testing various methods of getting the paint off the floor and having limited success so far…  Manually scraping the hell out of it works sort of, but it’s really a lot of work and very slow.  While at Ace getting the paint I found a product that promises low-odor and great effectiveness – sweet, sign me up!  It worked great on the test patch I tried a few nights ago, so last night I spread it out on about 1/4 of the floor.  I had run the test with a really thin patch of the goop to see how thin I could go, and it seemed that it worked even with a super-thin application.  Awesome.

…only it didn’t work.  I got up this morning to go scrape the paint off and it wasn’t coming – or, it was, but only bits, or what seemed like "half" of the coat of paint, if that’s even possible…  I’m guessing I put it on too thin?  Or the fact that I kept misting it with water last night, thinking keeping it moist would keep it active in such a thin layer?  Anyway, no go, at least at that level of stripper.  So I mopped up the mess I’d made on the section I tried to scrape and went back over the whole thing with a thicker coat.  I’m not going to spray it at all, just leave it until I get back, and hopefully it will have worked its magic on the paint below.  Stupid paint.

Well, it all paid off: we are the proud growers of an enormous "Cinderella" pumpkin!  And at least one good smaller one, and possibly two more if they ripen before we get a frost… 

That’s me trying to get back to the big pumpkin to cut it free – the garden, as you may recall, is incredibly overgrown.  The pumpkin vine basically took over everything, crawling up and over the tomatoes and out into the alley.  After the summer heat broke and we got some more rain, two new pumpkins started growing and they seem to be doing very well.  Just a race against time to get them ripened and picked.

Ta da!  Got the sucker picked and hauled out of there – amazingly, the pantyhose solution worked!  I had no idea how strong that stuff is, but it grew to over twice what I could stretch it by hand and still held the 45 pound pumpkin suspended.  That’s right, I said 45 pounds!!  No state fair winner, but damn big for our little garden…

The little guy is only 15 pounds.  It seems big until you see them together.  Now what are we going to do with them??  Probably cut and peel them and freeze them, either before or after boiling and mashing – I’ll read up and see.  They should keep for a while, it would be great to have home-grown pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving and even Christmas.  Yum…

Announcing duoteam.com as the new and improved online headquarters of DuoTeam.  Please, please, please update your links — a script on the old blog will continue to try to pull people over here, and if you subscribed directly to our old atom feed (not feedburner) please update your link to http://feeds.feedburner.com/DuoTeam.  That one will be permanent, as hopefully everyone on it is getting this post via RSS already.

Whew.  Keep an eye out for bugs and let me know in the comments here, k?

Now maybe we can get back to posting!

It’s been a while… And we’ve been, of course, super busy. Today was the first sunny day all week and it was so nice I ditched the basement and hit some outdoor projects. Not really high on the list but something needing doing was dealing with the compost bin… It had been sort of full when we bought the house, but not really maintained at all, and there was some charcoal and various bits of non-compostible crap in it. Lacking the time last year we just started throwing scraps on top of what was there and turning it occasionally.

Finally it was almost 3/4 full and today I decided to get it cleaned up. I pulled a trash bin out of the garage and shovelled most of the yet-to-be-compost scraps into it. It was more than I planned on, nearly full… Then I grabbed some bits of lumber laying around and some 1/4 screen we had and built a makeshift sifting bin. It ended up being way more labor-intensive than I figured – I’d load up the bin and go shake it all around the lawn, then bring it back to another tub and work the remaining clumps by hand for a while, finally dumping the sticks and roots and debris that wouldn’t go through.

I ended up with two tubs pretty full of fantastic compost and nice small layer on most of the lawn. Sweet. Maybe a little fertilizer on there before winter and we should have a dog-proof lawn next spring… :) The rest of the compost will go on the garden and flower beds before winter, and the good news of the big push today is the compost bin is now reset back to our own scraps – everything we started with is out. Should be easier to keep the nearby plants from sending roots up into it…